I have been developing DC for the last 6 months or so, at first, mostly, just thinking about it, but more recently, intensively working on it, trying to figure out exactly what the project will be, working with Lauren Denigan, managing editor, to give the blog precise shape, and writing posts that respond to the events of the day, trying to utilize my full intellectual range, establishing a pattern of what I hope DeliberatelyConsidered.com will become.
This Tuesday, we went a step further. I introduced the project to some dear friends and colleagues at the annual opening party of the New School’s Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. The party was a pleasure, as it always is. I was especially pleased by the response to my developing blog, and the prospect that this will be the beginning of a beautiful relationship between TCDS and DC, a variation on an old theme.
TCDS and Me
The story of TCDS and my story are intimately connected. It’s an example of the politics of small things, in which I am one of the central actors. There is a long version and a short version. I’ll start the long by highlighting the short with some quick headlines, and hope that we can continue the story’s themes in this new setting.
Elzbieta Matynia (who is the TCDS director) and I each worked on the sociology of theater in Poland, meeting there. More details about this time later, for now just note that a deep friendship between Elzbieta and my wife, Naomi, and me developed and has endured, through major international and personal crises, martial law in Poland, changes in our social and political circumstances. We developed parallel careers which met at the New School. When martial law was declared in Poland in 1981, Elzbieta’s one-year scholarship to study at our university became a lifetime relationship: first as a visiting scholar, then as an adjunct instructor, now as the Director of the Transregional Center and senior member of our Department of Sociology and Committee on Liberal Studies.
The seeds of TCDS were planted when she and I met in Poland. It was firmly rooted in the mid 80s, when, with her help, I established an unofficial, and in Central Europe clandestine, Democracy Seminar, chaired by Adam Michnik in Warsaw, and Gyorgy Bence in Budapest and me in New York. Vaclav Havel was to chair a section in Prague, but political conditions made this impossible.
In 1989, the clandestine met the open air and bloomed, and the small seminar that I chaired expanded beyond the three countries and beyond my administrative competence and imagination, and became first the East Central Europe Program, directed by Elzbieta. Later, as our scope broadened to include South Africa, and most of the new states emerging from the former Soviet Union, including the Republics of Central Asia, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies was instituted and flourished due to her passionate and visionary leadership.
Chris Hani, left, with Nelson Mandela
All sorts of scholarly exchanges, incredible summer institutes in Krakow and now Wroclaw, Poland, in Cape Town and soon to be Johannesburg, South Africa; seminars, lectures, films, performances and conferences were developed, presented and flourished. Tuesday, we were opening this year’s activities, but there was an unusual strained, though hopeful, note. Elzbieta was off to South Africa the next day, as a Fulbright Research Fellow to conduct a study of the difficult case of the assassination of Chris Hani by the exiled, anti-communist Pole, Janusz Waluś, an assassination that almost derailed the peaceful dismantling of the Apartheid regime. She hopes her study will include interviews with the incarcerated assassin. How could someone who was associated with a liberation movement kill a hero of a similar movement?
As we wished her good bye and good luck, students and faculty who were returning from this year’s Institute in Wroclaw caught up with each, as did veterans of the Institutes past and other TCDS activities. Ann Snitow, the co-editor of the important, Feminist Memoir Project and author of the brilliant “A Gender Diary,” and the leading force behind the Network of East West Women, gave a quick and unfortunately dark account of how the commemoration of the Gdansk agreements went. The commemoration of the great achievement of independent workers and their supporters against the Communist regime, she sadly reported, made little sense, was confused and poorly organized. Ann, my beloved interlocutor in many past Institutes in Krakow, settled in conclusion on a colorful Yiddish term meaning all mixed up and without meaning, kitschy, overly ornate, “ungapotchka,” to summarize the event.
And I introduced DC, on a more hopeful note, inviting everyone to take a look and think of how they might add their voices, their insights, their deliberate considerations about the pressing issues of the day with meaning and to the point. I was pleased by the excitement and anticipate that my many friends and colleagues who were at the New York party will join us, but also that the great number of TCDS alumni and participants from around the world will join in.
I look forward to hearing from you and hope that we can continue to discuss together serious problems, as we have done in Poland and South Africa, and in the many countries of East and Central Europe, and in New York. Please do make a comment, ask a question, or just say hello. I hope this venue will help us to continue the ongoing discussions that for me started so many years ago in Poland, and are now centered in New York, but can become active here. I await Elzbieta’s first report about how things are going on her new adventure. And I will further explain in future posts what I have done at TCDS and earlier in the Democracy Seminar, as it informs what I hope we will do at DC.
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