In response to threats made by right-wing “patriot” hooligans to interrupt the grand ceremony, Zygmunt Bauman has recently rejected the honoris causa degree he was to be awarded by the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw. He said he did not want to cause any more trouble after his lecture had been interrupted in June by a crowd of young aggressive men, shouting out nationalist and xenophobic slogans. They are becoming a disturbingly familiar sight in large Polish cities. In their eyes, Bauman is not a famous scholar, but a Jewish Communist collaborator, a disgrace to the Polish nation. He is probably the biggest Polish name in the social sciences since Florian Znaniecki, and far more popular than are the hooligans. His books can be found in most trendy bookstores around the world. The university decided to grant him the degree against the “patriotic storm,” but given the swirling controversy, to cancel the customary lecture. The decision was cheered by some commentators, while others accused the institution of exploiting the scholar’s name for its own benefit.
Indeed, Bauman’s past as an officer of the Polish Communist army in the Stalinist period, a time remembered for painful repressions and murders of anti-Communist war heroes, raises questions. In fact, one of the major Polish universities initially wanted to grant Bauman an honorary degree in the mid-2000s, only to ax it when a number of scholars voiced their disapproval. The simple explanation is envy, but Bauman’s past is deeply troubling. His interview, conducted still in 2010, but published in the main Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza a week after the interrupted lecture, explained his involvement in Communist structures as a young man’s infatuation with ideology, but given his close ties to the apparatus of violence, the answers felt to many to be too easy.
The question is, how do you judge outstanding scholars (or artists, or politicians, etc.) who have complicated pasts? According to popular Polish imagination, the nation’s famous figures should be flawless. They are to be “monuments more durable than bronze,” as Horace once described poets. . . .
Read more: (Dis)Honoring Zygmunt Bauman in Poland
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 26th, 2013 
To skip this introduction and go directly to read Alexander Mirescu’s In-Depth Analysis “Civil Society in Tunisia: The Arab Spring Comes Home to Roost,” click here.
The Arab Spring is now commonly understood as a tragedy, if not a colossal failure. Those who “knew” that Islam and democracy are fundamentally incompatible feel vindicated. Those critical of American foreign policy find their criticisms confirmed, whether the object of their criticism is that of realpolik – the U.S. should have never supported the purported democratic uprising – or more idealistic – the U.S. should have supported such forces sooner and more thoroughly. I believe these common understandings and criticisms are fundamentally mistaken, based as they are on lazy comparative analysis, not paying attention to the details of political and cultural struggles, and by ethnocentric obsessions and superpower fantasy, not realizing how much the fate of nations is based on local and not global struggles.
In today’s post on Tunisia, a very different understanding is suggested, as I as the author of The Politics of Small Things, see it. The uprising in the Middle East of 2011, sparked by protests in Tunisia, opened up possibilities for fundamental transformation. The possibilities were opened by ordinary people, when they spoke to each other, in their differences, about their common concerns, and developed a capacity to act upon their concerns. In most countries in the region, one way or another, the power these people created together faced other powers and has been overwhelmed. But the game isn’t over, as this report on civic associations in Tunisia shows. The report suggests a corollary to the old adage: those who live by the sword, die by the sword. The persistence of civic action in Tunisia suggests a continued opening: those who manage to speak and act in the presence of others, in their differences, with common principled commitment to their public interaction, open the possibility of an alternative to tragedy.
The promise of the Arab Spring may yet live in . . .
Read more: Civil Society in Tunisia: The Arab Spring Comes Home to Roost (Introduction)
By Alexander Mirescu, August 26th, 2013
Since the ouster of authoritarian leader, Ben Ali, in January 2011, Tunisia, with its vibrant landscape of civil society organizations (CSOs), continues to distinguish itself from other MENA states affected by the Arab Spring. Indeed, since its independence from France in 1956, Tunisia has long been an exception in the region.
The first decades of independence under the stable, albeit single-party leadership of Habib Bourghiba brought profound levels of modernization in public healthcare, education and, for the Arab world, the most far-reaching set of women’s rights. Praised by the World Bank, IMF and UNDP for its rapid, yet sustained development, Tunisia stabilized its future through an expanded tourism and a more diversified economy, coupled with a more efficient and increasingly export-oriented agricultural sector. Bourghiba wisely transitioned economic output, as Tunisia’s limited petroleum resources decreased. After a quiet change of power in 1987, former interior minister, Ben Ali, continued his predecessor’s development legacy and stayed loyal to the country’s secular political culture, which allowed for private expression of religious life, but guaranteed governance that was markedly non-Islamic in its day-to-day business.
Micro-level civil society before the revolution
While more extensive inspection is required, recent field research reveal a small, but unexpectedly vibrant CSO sector before the beginning of the Arab Spring in December 2010. While regimes will often tolerate, contain, control and even co-opt CSOs for their own purposes, exceptions will arise. Pre-Arab Spring Tunisia challenges this assumption: by the mid-2000s, neighborhood-level associations with modest financial development aid from foreign embassies successfully negotiated pockets of “free spaces” outside of the regime-approved, corporatist CSOs. Under Ben Ali, CSO activity and development projects were centralized under the Ministry of the Interior, representative of the “police state” Tunisia had become.
Chema Gargouri, president of the Tunisian Association for Management and Social Stability (TAMSS), was among the first pioneers of civil society. Initially working through standard channels of application, she directly engaged the much-feared Ministry of the Interior to allow for neighborhood-based educational programs for children and gender-based training programs that were not officially sanctioned by the government. Despite regular police surveillance and occasional raids by intelligence officers, Gargouri carved out a space, as she explained to me in an interview this month: “that . . .
Read more: Civil Society in Tunisia: The Arab Spring Comes Home to Roost
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 22nd, 2013 
To skip this introduction and go directly to read Adam Puchejda’s interview of Zygmunt Bauman, click here.
As ominous neo-fascist clouds threaten Poland, there are also those who seek alternatives. While their intellectual voices are more clearly heard than their political actions are seen, their voices matter. Two political-cultural reviews have been outstanding Krytyka Polityczna and Kultura Liberalna. The most recent issue of the latter explores the theme of the fate of the left in contemporary politics. It is part of an ongoing exchange between French and Polish public intellectuals. Appearing in the issue are contributions by Zygmunt Bauman, Marcel Gauchet, Michael Kazin and Krzysztof Pomian. The complete issue in English can be found here.
The first piece in the symposium is of special interest to Deliberately Considered readers: an in depth interview by Adam Puchejda of Zygmunt Bauman on the future of the left. Here Bauman’s position can be heard, the one that the neo-fascists attempted to silence, as I earlier reported and analyzed.
To read Adam Puchejda’s interview of Zygmunt Bauman, click here.
By Adam Puchejda, August 22nd, 2013 What will, in your opinion, the future left look like? Conservative in terms of social manners, placing emphasis on redistribution of wealth, disinclined to Europe, or maybe avant-garde, ecologically radical, fighting for the human rights?
None of these. The characteristics mentioned by you do not encompass all the complexity of the concept of the contemporary left. For a long time we have had two approaches to building the left, each of which is unfortunately wrong. Still the influential idea is the idea to create the left by making it similar to the right, of course, adding the promise that we will do the same what the right is doing, but simply better and more efficiently. Let’s have regard to the fact that the most drastic moves to disassemble the social state were taken under social democratic ruling. Although the prophet and the missionary of the neo-liberal religion was Margaret Thatcher, it was Tony Blair, a member of the Labour Party, who made that religion a state religion.
The second method of constructing the left was based upon the concept of so-called “rainbow coalition”. This concept assumes that if all the dissatisfied can get together under one umbrella, no matter what troubles them, a strong political power will emerge. But, among the disappointed and the frustrated there are violent conflicts of interest and postulates. To imagine the left as, for example, consisting on one hand of the discriminated promoters of single-sex marriages and on the other hand, of the persecuted Pakistani minority, is a solution for disintegration and powerlessness and not for integration and power for effective acting. The concept of ‘rainbow coalition” must result in dilution of the left identity, dilution of its programme and the disabling of the postulated “political power” as early as at the moment of its birth.
What can the left base its programme on? Jacques Julliard who in his latest book Les gauches françaises 1762-2012,) critically analysed the heritage of the French left, claims that the left can refer only to the idea of fairness. It cannot even talk about progress since it gives a worried look at technology which the progress is identified with, but exhibits friendly attitude towards ecology, which . . .
Read more: An Interview of Zygmunt Bauman
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 17th, 2013 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to read Adam Chmielewski’s In-Depth Analysis “Academies of Hatred – Part 2,” click here.
Part 2 of Academies of Hatred takes off where Part 1 ended, concluding with a critical account of the present cultural and political dangers facing Poland. Chmielewski links the disruption of Bauman’s lecture to the argument of the lecture. Bauman presented a critique of Poland, and Europe’s more generally, neo-liberal path, and specifically the Social Democrats’ complicity in this. The rise of the xenophobic right is materially a consequence of such policies, Chmielewski maintains. I am not as sure as he is that there is a direct connection between neo-liberalism and the politics of hatred, such politics seems to have a life of its own, but no doubt the production of extreme inequality and the absence of decent life chances for many young people are factors. And as Chmielewski shows here, those who would fight for norms and values that stand as alternatives to the blind workings of the market, those who would work for, to take a key example, the value of free intellectual exchange and the autonomy of the university, do not have the means to fight against direct political assaults and systematic underfunding.
In my piece on the Bauman affair, I warned of a new treason of intellectuals, intellectuals who worried about their security and personal interests and didn’t defend the ideals of free inquiry. Here we see the difficulties: authorities who don’t understand their legal responsibilities to include the integrity of the university, rectors who don’t have the material means to defend their institutions, a minister of higher education who writes a letter against the interference by neo-fascists of the Bauman lecture, but doesn’t formulate policies to address the problem. All of this pushed forward by real intellectual treason, by professors who abandon their role as scholars, who become populist propagandists, such as the one described by Chmielewski, calling for the purge of Stalinists from the university, in full bad faith at . . .
Read more: Academies of Hatred – Part 2: Introduction
By Adam Chmielewski, August 17th, 2013 A Systemic Helplessness
Prior to Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture, the event commemorating the 150th anniversary of German Social Democracy, described in part 1, members of the National Rebirth of Poland had summoned each other via Facebook in order to stage its disruption and formulated negative judgments concerning Zygmunt Bauman’s past. Informed about the imminent danger, Leszek Miller, former prime minister and the chairman of the Polish Social Democratic Party, sent a letter to the Minister of Interior Affairs, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, requesting the protection of the event. The German ambassador to Poland, in an analogous move intervened at the Foreign Ministry. Consequentially, the event was secured by the police, and Bauman and his companion were assigned personal bodyguards at the University’s expense.
Shortly before the meeting, the police officer in charge of the action at the University of Wrocław said that he was obliged to stay within the limits of law and that accordingly, he could not intervene unless there was an immediate danger to life, health and property. To the argument that people who came to the lecture with an evident and announced intention to disrupt it are about to violate academic customs and rules of scholarly debate, he responded that the law does not protect these values. One of the main sources of the audacity of the Polish xenophobic groupings is the helplessness of law and of its execution. Polish law protects all sorts of irrational beliefs and religious feelings, which incidentally are in Poland extremely easily hurt, but it does not protect the principles of free scholarly discourse.
Radicalism at the Academia
After the disruption of Bauman’s lecture, some commentators said that xenophobic graduates of the academies of hatred have now decided to enter the universities. Disruptions of the lectures of the philosophy professor Magdalena Środa and editor Adam Michnik have been invoked in support of such opinions. Attempting to restore some symmetry into the debate, Ryszard Legutko, a professor of philosophy and a current member of the European Parliament, has recalled an event at the University of Warsaw in which he took part together with Norman Podhoretz. It was disrupted by a leftist group, and the police intervened there as well. One may also add that several years . . .
Read more: Academies of Hatred – Part 2
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 14th, 2013 
To skip this introduction and go directly to read Adam Chmielewski’s In-Depth Analysis “Academies of Hatred – Part 1,” click here.
I tried to highlight in my post on Monday how the “Bauman Affair” challenges Polish democracy. The extreme right is working to turn public debate, to give priority to the politics of retribution for “repressions past,” as it enacts “repressions present.” The comment to the post clearly illustrates this.
But to understand this development, to understand the depth of the challenge to democracy in the recent upsurge of extreme right agitation in Poland, requires a close analysis of its social and political setting, which Adam Chmielewski, the Chair of the Department of Social and Political Philosophy of the University of Wrocław, one of the sponsors of Bauman’s lecture, explores in his two part post. He provides an informed insider’s analysis of the clear and present danger to democracy and academic freedom in Poland. Part 1 today. Part 2 on Friday.
In today’s post, Chmielewski explains the deep symbolic significance of the lecture in Wroclaw and shows how the right of center mainstream is supporting neo-fascism, both intentionally and unintentionally. While the leader of the main opposition party PiS (Law and Justice), Jaroslaw Kaczynski, openly applauds the “patriotic protesters,” the governing party PO (Civic Platform), a pro-Europe, normal, conservative, neo-liberal party, has supported what Chmielewski depicts as academies for hatred in the extensive development of Poland’s soccer infrastructure. Chmielewski shows how politicized soccer hooligans are the storm troopers of Poland’s far right. In his next post, he deepens his analysis, addressing: the support the new right is receiving on the university, Poland’s relationship with the Nazi legacy, and the ineffectiveness of cultural programs beyond soccer.
I find all this surprising, upsetting and bewildering. I have difficulty in discerning how profound the threat is. I see an unsolved puzzle. The people of Poland have experienced in the last twenty years unprecedented affluence, a well-institutionalized democratic system, and close and creative integration into the European system. . . .
Read more: Academies of Hatred – Part 1: Introduction
By Adam Chmielewski, August 14th, 2013 The Event
The disruption of Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture at the University of Wrocław on June 22, 2013 by the National Rebirth of Poland (Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski or NOP), has been one of many similar events recently to have taken place across Poland, including the case of Adam Michnik earlier this year, reported here.
The Bauman lecture was rich in symbolic meaning, organized by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, an intellectual branch of the present day German Social Democratic Party, the independent Ferdinand Lasalle Centre of Social Thought, and the Department of Social and Political Philosophy of the University of Wrocław, which I chair. Bauman is the most renowned Polish scholar in the world, a great critical social theorist with a long and creative record of scholarly accomplishment. The other hero of the event, in a sense, was Ferdinand Lassalle, a “Breslauer,” a student of the university in Wrocław in its German times, Karl Marx’s collaborator and the founder of the German Social Democratic Party. His remains rest at the Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław. The occasion was to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the first social democratic party in the world, established by Lassalle. The topic of the meeting was the ideals of the left, old and new, and the challenges the leftist movement faces nowadays, in the period of a new stage of capitalism and its crisis.
Through organizing Bauman’s lecture at the University of Wrocław, I was hoping for a scholarly and critical debate about the future of Poland, and the world: a scholarly one, because the debate was to be inspired by an eminent thinker; a critical one, as an opportunity for a renewal of egalitarian thinking about economy and politic. While such combination of critique and scholarship is now eagerly seized upon in many parts of the world, in Poland it is met with disdain from political parties which duplicitously present themselves as leftist, and with ridicule or repression from the remaining political parties.
It was the second visit by Bauman to the Polish city of Wrocław that I had organized. The first one took place in 1996. On that earlier occasion, no one expected any disturbances to occur during a series . . .
Read more: Academies of Hatred – Part 1
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 12th, 2013 
On June 22nd of this year, in the city of Wroclaw, a lecture by Zygmunt Bauman was aggressively disrupted by a group of neo-fascists. When I first read about this, I was concerned, but not overly so. The extreme right has a persistent, visible, but ultimately, marginal presence on the Polish political scene, I assured myself. As a video of the event reveals, there is the other, apparently more significant, Poland that invited and wanted to listen to the distinguished social theorist speak, and cheered when the motley crew of ultra-nationalists and soccer hooligans were escorted from the lecture hall. While xenophobia and neo-fascism are threats in Eastern and Central Europe, I was pretty confident that in Poland, they were being held at bay.
But, after a recent visit to Wroclaw, I realize that I may have been wrong. While there last month, I had the occasion to talk about the “Bauman Affair” with some friends and colleagues. A highlight was around a dinner, though not a kitchen table. I am now deeply concerned not only about the event itself, but also about the political and cultural direction of Poland.
We had a lovely dinner at Hana Cervinkova and Lotar Rasinki’s home. Among the other quests were my colleagues at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute, Elzbieta Matynia, Susan Yelavich, Dick Bernstein and Carol Bernstein, and Juliet Golden, a Wroclaw resident and superb observer of the material life of the city, and her husband, a distinguished craftsman, restorer of among other things of the Jewish cemetery in Wroclaw. The Wroclaw Solidarność hero, Władysław Frasyniuk, and his wife joined us, as did Sylvie Kauffmann, the former editor of Le Monde, who reported extensively around the old Soviet bloc in the 80s and 90s, and now returns as the wife of the French ambassador. The dinner followed a public discussion between him and her. Also joining us was Adam Chmielewski, who as the Chair of the Department of Social and Political Philosophy of the University of Wrocław, was one of the . . .
Read more: The Bauman Affair: A Clear and Present Danger to Democracy and Academic Freedom in Poland
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