As an American, but one very familiar with Central and Eastern Europe, I believe that integrated Europe is extremely important for several reasons. First of all, it is important for maintaining peace and stability, and thus, for overcoming terrible legacies of the Second World War, so devastating to Europe and the rest of the world. Secondly, European Union plays a crucial role in creating economic opportunities for all of its members. The current crisis should not make us forget how prosperous Europe is and can still be. Thirdly, European integration might be a driving force behind a process of creating broader sense of political identity. Europeans have so many different cultures and nationalities and there is a need to bring them together, so that they have some shared sense of community. Any European project has to take this into account, but at the same time create means for people to cultivate their own national identity at the local level.

The process of European integration has gone through a number of changes since the early 1990s. Some of them were very encouraging, and some problematic. The first dramatic change occurred right after 1989, when the long-lasting Soviet domination over a large part of the continent collapsed and many nations suddenly had to reinvent their states, drawing upon their own democratic traditions. In Poland or Czechoslovakia, as it then was, i.e. countries with some history and strong feelings for democracy, this transformation proceeded quite smoothly. In other states it was less clear on what traditions new institutions should be built. In Hungary, where I now live, there have been strong democratic traditions, but also strong authoritarian traditions, dating back to the Habsburg era. The same is certainly true of Romania, Bulgaria and other countries in the Central and Eastern Europe. These were the initial challenges, later developing in the 1990s.

At that time there were two major steps, Eastern Europeans were eager to take in order to revive and develop their democratic traditions. The first one was the NATO accession. Joining the alliance which has been at the center of the Cold War, but which was really committed to the defense of democracy, was a very important moment for them. Being admitted to the group meant becoming a member of the democratic community. The EU accession – the second of the steps – was more complicated, but perhaps even more important. Undoubtedly it created more excitement among the public, also because of some practical advantages of participating in the common market and being able to travel within the Schengen zone.

Ten years after the accession, we clearly see that at least some expectations of the public have not been met. Why? Firstly, there was a structural problem from the very outset. European Union was designed largely as an economic project and it failed to create effective instruments of political participation for the public. Centralization of the European bureaucracy in Brussels and the development of a highly structured regulatory governance system created a growing frustration among the Central European societies, and indeed among other European peoples as well. A democracy deficit at the highest levels is one of the major problems EU needs to tackle in order to develop. It has been partially addressed by the growing political influence of the European Parliament, which has become a more active player in representing opinions of the European electorate. But I think there is still a lot to be done in order to give people a sense of participation. Otherwise, they will always turn for help only to their national governments, which can sometimes act against Brussels.

The second big factor undermining trust in the European project was obviously the economic meltdown. The way the euro crisis has been managed so far seems to prove that southern and eastern regions of the EU are treated as secondary areas by the central economies of Germany, the Benelux area and to a lesser extent France. Economic instability has also created some further tensions, since people affected by the crisis want to identify the causes of it and punish those, who are allegedly to blame, i.e. immigrants and ethnic minorities. As a result in many European countries xenophobic sentiments are on the rise. The anti-immigrant, anti-Roma perspective that you see in Europe today is very disturbing. These are pan-European phenomena, not specific to the Central and Eastern Europe. Naturally, different politicians in different countries are using these processes to foster their own interests. This is particularly true in Hungary, but in other countries as well.

Will these two factors undermine the whole process of European integration? We should do all we can to prevent it. European integration is of crucial importance for the reasons of peace, stability, economic prosperity and democratic rule across the whole continent. This is even more true today than ever. That is why I was pleased to see Croatia becoming a member, and I think it is of crucial importance to bring in other Balkan countries. Dynamic European integration, even if it has serious problems today, should continue and must not be reversed.

* John Shattuk is an American legal scholar and diplomat. He was the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 1993 to 1998, under President Bill Clinton. From 1998 to 2000 he served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. Since 2009 he has been the President and Rector of Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. This article originally appeared in Kultura Liberalna.

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. The effect of such impossible standards is twofold: on the one hand, the person’s supporters hide information that could tarnish the perfect image. On the other, the opponents do everything to demonize the person. What is lost is the actual human being. A vivid example of how destructive this approach can be both for the idolized figure, and for people who conceal his less-than-perfect deeds, is the scandal that broke out in the Gazeta Wyborcza after a posthumous biography of Ryszard Kapuściński by a journalist from the daily revealed that some of Kapuściński’s documentaries were, in fact, fiction. The messenger was accused of slandering a dead hero.

Another question is how are people to remember a person brilliant in one particular field, but questionable in others? Given the popular Polish black-and-white approach, this is an intolerable conflict that has to be either ignored or erased, by turning the person either into a saint or a demon. Particularly the latter has been visible in the recent years, largely thanks the Institute of National Remembrance, founded in 1999. It is most famous for housing Communist archives and conducting biased investigations on Communist-era “secret collaborators,” which turned into witch-hunts against political dissidents, such as the symbol of “Solidarity,” Lech Wałęsa, critical of the right-wing PiS (Law and Justice) party. The institute’s investigations set the tone of public debate: “us” vs. “them,” and the atmosphere has not changed much in over a decade.

Bauman’s position in popular Polish imagination was unfavorable from the beginning: he was a Communist and he is Jewish, which are the two worst insults one can hear in Poland. What’s more, the fact that he is a world-famous scholar appears to be more trouble than reason to be proud, because only some believe he should be honored as an academic. It is far easier to claim that he should be condemned as a person. In the popular debate, the two aspects are impossible to separate, and refraining from judgment is beyond thinkable. Thus, while the dominant belief is that the Polish Hall of Fame should be filled with saint-like figures, instead it is a proverbial “Polish hell” of accusations thrown against the potential candidates.

If one looks at this particular conflict over moral purity from a pragmatic point of view, it is Poland, not Bauman, which loses on the international scale. But in the Polish imagination the nation’s assets are not based on sound judgment, but on superficial moralism. This delusional hypocrisy fosters extremisms based on groundless beliefs, making actual discussion increasingly difficult. In this sense, the case of Bauman is another vivid illustration of the growing impossibility of shaping nuanced opinions in key debates in Poland, a society divided into simplistic “us” and “them,” dissidents and Communists, patriots and traitors. And this is to be found not only at the extreme margin, but more tragically at the very center of public life, as the dishonoring of Zygmunt Bauman reveals.

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.

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 ex difinitione aims at conserving and not at changing.

Certainly, the collapse of communism had a considerable impact on the left potential. For decades “the day order” for the rest of the world was prescribed by the simple fact of the existence of communism propagating the social alternative programme. That rest regardless whether being enthusiastic or not, led by self-preservation instinct, embarked on initiatives described in that programme, such as combating misery, humiliation and human disability, appropriate compensation for the role of working class in the process of accumulating wealth, fighting off inequalities and fighting for social justice, education and health care accessible by all, secure old age, or the security against life misfortune experienced by an individual. Hence, for the social democracy paradoxically having a powerful ally as its fierce enemy, was easier to force a social programme. It shall also be admitted that “the rest of the world” fulfilled the tasks enforced by the communist threat much more successfully than the communism itself! Today there is no communist “scare crow”, so the programmes for improving the quality of human life are in retreat…

Gerhard Schroeder put it straight to the point though laconically, saying: “There isn’t anything like capitalist economy, or socialist economy. There exists either good, or bad economy”. In this sense the rulings of the central right and the central left compete for dignity of the most faithful congregation in GDP Church. Both sides of the political fan when being at the helm are compatible on the status of economic growth as a remedy for all social ailings as well as on the growth of the consumption as a determinant of good ruling. The rest is an election propaganda. In other words, the left practically speaking, does not have a programme in addition to bidding against the right to determine who will speed up the process of withdrawing from life improvement programmes and who will win the coming elections. It is not mentioned at all about the creation of an alternative to the social instruments which are sick and unfriendly to people.

So, we lay the left in the grave?

No way. The left has not lost its capability of preserving and strengthening its identity. Let’s quote just two rules, inseparable with the “left” approach related to human cohabitation. The first is the responsibility of the community for all its members and specifically, securing each member against life misfortune, refusal of dignity and humiliation. The social model which complied with that rule was, at least in its intentions and original form, a model of “welfare state”, which stipulated not that much of income
bringing, but more basing on solid pillars and documenting the co-dependence of the community members, the commonality of the law for social recognition, decent life and resulting from that social solidarity. So, it will be more reasonable to call it a “social state”. The second rule is the valuation of the quality of the society not by the average income, but by the well-being of the weakest of its branches (similarly to the chain loops, of which the resistance is not measured by the average resistance of the loops, but by the resistance of the weakest loop).

Who will be able to implement such programme? The left-wing parties which in previous years referred to the working class interests, practically speaking disappeared from the political scene. On the other hand the new left-wing party attaches bigger importance to culture and custom rather than to economy and redistribution. As for now, an attempt to link a sort of moral liberalism with the economy regulation has not been successful. The old working class seems to be too conservative and backward orientated for the aristocratic left and the left orientated to individual rights is afraid of the collectivism of working classes, nationalism, reluctance to anything what is different and shares other similar worries. How can the Left find its way out from this clinch?

The roots of the phenomenon, as you describe, reach even deeper. These are not the mutual relations between “the left” and “the working class” that have changed, but the subjects of those relations. The number has changed, the social importance and the “morphology” of the basic electorate for the left that was the working class. At the Marx’s times the most brilliant individuals expected that the world is heading for the split into workers and their superiors and for the third category there will be no place in that world. But, the industrial working class is undergoing the same process now as the farm workers in the 19^th century came through, who at the beginning of the century constituted 90 per cent of the population and at the end of the century only 9 per cent. At present it is visible that the class of industrial workers is more of a past. If it still exists anywhere, then it is far from Europe, in so-called developing countries and even there it is for the time being because at the moment when the preliminary accumulation of capital comes to an end and the cheap labour force stops being discouraging for investments into machinery, the working class would shrink quickly. It is said today half humorously, but perhaps more half seriously that in the future industrial plant a man and a dog will be employed. A man will be employed for feeding a dog and the dog will guard the man not to touch anything.

In Jacques Julliard’s opinion one of the first steps on the way out from that situation is the change of the way of thinking about the shape of the societies, advancing from their perception as a number of groups which have their interests to perceiving them as consisting of a few individuals who have not only economic, but also religious and cultural needs. In other words, the left would be supposed to make a bridge between the community requirements and the aspirations of the individuals.

At present such society seems to be purely a dream… The morphological basis for collective, hence, solidarity acting disappeared in the course of individualisation process. Once the workplaces no matter what they were producing, were also a solidarity plants as Ford plant, or Gdańsk Shipyard. Conversely, at present, they are the factories of competitiveness and mutual distrust. Some observers transferred too jumpily the hopes for solidarity political actions to public squares in line with the rule “one for all, all for one”, once located in big industrial plants, but today being homeless. Those gatherings on public squares, or in public parks taking place often recently, putting up tents there for several days, or weeks to stay in them as long as the goal had been reached, demonstrated attempts to find, or to conjure the alternative ways for effective acting in the situation when the trust to state is withering and the doubts arise about whether it can do a good job. Hope vanishes that the salvation will flow from the top, the salvation may come if we ourselves without any intermediaries would contribute to its fulfilment? Those, however, were the expressions of solidarity, so as to say “explosive”, or “channel” aiming at the burst-out of the accumulated resentment and protest against unbearable course of matters, only for the purpose of sinking into the everyday life which remained unchanged and was as unbearable as before.

But, do such initiatives serve the purpose of building the intrageneration solidarity? Will they not be a prelude to further and better organised movements?

I would warn against drawing as optimistic as too hasty and too premature conclusions from such experiments. As for now the alternative movements only proved that they may lead to (but not always!) removing any one object which all the participants regardless the interests and views which divide them, consider consensually as unacceptable, or unbearable. If they succeed, they will at most clear the site for other construction… But what other construction? No movement has made itself famous of putting up a building on the site that they managed to empty. In fact, very few of them managed to clear the site itself. The New York Stock Exchange occupied only in the minds of the occupants, was the first stock exchange which reached profit exceeding the pre-crisis quotations, not changing the policy condemned by the protesters at all. Probably, it was the only one as opposed the journalists thirsty of sensations and sociologists hungry of historic discoveries, which did not notice that it was under occupation.

So, there is not any group, or institution today which could initiate some serious changes. Additionally, we face a deep crisis of the idea of representation since large number of people do not take part in politics at all.

You see yourself that you describe society and politics which is an absolute opposite of what was before. These days the society gets closer to atomisation, internal discord and dispute rather than to solidarity. Something disintegrates for what our grand and great-grandparents fought for a long time. They were struggling for decades to complete the tasks of stretching the social integration and human solidarity and hence, the co-operation from the local community, parish, commune, or ancestral wealth to considerable bigger fields of “the imaginable whole” state/nation. To do so the conflicts were unavoidable which were not less horrible or painful for the generations exposed to them than the challenges that we face. It took the entire 19 ^th century for the modern state growing in power and ambitions to curb the uncontrollable freedom of business which got out of the family, or local community guardianship and settle down on politically and also ethically undeveloped territory.

Today we live in the epoch of “deregulation”. This neutral word by appearance, of which more expressive (and fairer) equivalent would be “disorganisation”, hide dispersion of responsibility and the replacement of relatively foreseeable and hence structuralized situations by unforeseeable situations, filled with uncertainty, fear of the unknown tomorrow and others alike. “Deregulation” is conducted under the label of making each individual, or coalition of individuals masters of their own fate, but in practice, it made only a few chosen individuals masters of their own fate (and in the same time masters of others’ fate), leaving the rest to the caprices of fortune which none knows how to overcome. Leaving the individuals to themselves makes them be competitors, instead of promoting solidarity, their position gives rise to mutual distrust and competition. In such a situation “closing ranks”, standing shoulder to shoulder ceases to make sense. It is not clear how a bigger chance might emerge for the fulfilment of interests if the individual interests have been merged.

What is the lesson to be learnt by the left?

In the environment unfavourable forcollective work and uninspiring with hope, the left faces a big challenge: to ascend the politics having so far only a local dimension to the level of global issues which our contemporaries are to wrestle with. So, it is not surprising that the left does not dare to say openly to its co-citizens, including its own electors, that they challenge, as the rest of the human race does, a task of remaking the big accomplishment of our ancestors from national and construction era; however, with such difference, that they will have to make it on incomparably bigger scale, a universal human scale. It does not mean that the left should be absolved due to the lack of brevity (and sense of responsibility!). It lacks in virtues of brevity, perseverance and ever-lasting hope, which its ancestors, luckily for them and for the rest of the human kind, had in abundance.

* Zygmunt Bauman, sociologist, philosopher, postmodernism theorist, retired professor of the University of Leeds and University of Warsaw. He is an author of over 40 books. He was awarded the European Amalfi Prize for his work “Modernity and the Holocaust” (1989) in the field of social sciences. In the year 1998 he was awarded the Theodor W. Adorno prize and two years later received the Prince of Asturias Award, called the “Spanish Noble Prize”.

** Adam Puchejda – historian of ideas. His interests range from the sociology of intellectuals to public sphere studies and political philosophy; most recently, he worked at Sciences Po in Paris with Daniel Dayan. Regular contributor at „Kultura Liberalna”.

*** Original text in Polish. Translated by EUROTRAD Wojciech Gilewski.

“Kultura Liberalna” no. 241 (34/2013) of August 20, 2013

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 the monument of the first king of Poland, Bolesław Chrobry, Bolesław The Great, 967-1025.

Chmielewski sees a rather dark future of Polish academic life: a situation where those with different opinions and identities will feel threatened, where the unconventional will be under siege and protecting the unconventional will become a persistent expenditure. And ironically it will be a lose – lose situation, if the expenditure is made, Chmielewski worries the quality of scholarship under siege is not likely to be very good, while if the expenditure is not made, there will be no scholarship. The new treason of the intellectuals, we see here, has significant social and political supports.

Chmielewski ends on a very pessimistic note, perhaps too pessimistic. After all Bauman gave his lecture and many heard and appreciated it. The University of Wroclaw has not yet closed down, far from it. And Chmielewski has reported on the event. There is resistance to the lessons of the Academies of Hatred. A serious battle rages, and as with the Dreyfus affair, a nation’s future is on the line.

To read Adam Chmielewski’s In-Depth Analysis “Academies of Hatred – Part 2,” click here.

Prior to Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture, the event commemorating the 150^th 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 back the philosopher Peter Singer from Princeton University was prevented by Catholic activists from speaking at an ethical congress in Warsaw, because of his stance on euthanasia. Desiderio Navarro, a Cuban intellectual, publisher and translator of Polish literature into Spanish, recently fell a victim of a racist attack in Kraków; no such thing happened to him during his frequent visits to Poland over the past 35 years.

The opinion that nationalist xenophobia is only beginning to enter the universities is misleading. If any ideology is nowadays prominent at the otherwise de-politicised academies, it is the xenophobic. In fact, it has been present at Polish universities for a very long time now, and seems to be quite at home there.

Shortly after the disruption Bauman’s lecture, a professor of the University of Wrocław, a representative of the xenophobic, spoke, symbolically, under the monument of the king of Poland, Bolesław Chrobry, Bolesław The Great, 967-1025, the first crowned king of Poland, who waged successful wars against Germany and Russia. The professor described the organizers of Bauman’s lecture as neo-Stalinists [which would include Chmielewski, J.G.] and accordingly called for the de-Stalinisation of the University. Two weeks after the disturbance, this call, eagerly seized on by the NOP, became a pretext and a slogan of a yet another of its demonstration in the public space of Wrocław. The NOP, now charged with a great momentum after its repeated “successes,” and staged it, once again, with impunity.

The call to de-Stalinise the University of Wrocław, formulated by this particular professor, was ironic. First, because he is a convert, having been a member of the Polish communist party who changed his denomination into “nationalist” and is now apparently seeking a place on an electoral list of PiS (the Law and Justice Party, and second, because there are no Stalinists at the university anymore. Most have died out, while those who somehow managed to survive, like this particular professor, changed their views radically because some time ago Stalinism ceased to be profitable. They have adopted the xenophobic outlook as nowadays it has become profitable.

Professors, like priests, are only human. No wonder, then, that some of them are doing and thinking what is expedient. Some members of the Polish professoriate, frustrated by humiliating salaries, are seeking substitute satisfactions in the sphere of historical politics, expertly served to them by PiS. Being unable to enjoy recognition for their work, they are finding a vicarious yet unfailing satisfaction in the public denunciation games against their academic comrades who happen to hold different political views.

Academic Image

Immediately after the incident the Rector of the University of Wrocław was asked the question whether he intends to take any action defending academic integrity of the institution, leading to: (i) bringing to justice the perpetrators of the disruption which violated scholarly discourse and academic customs; (ii) investigation of the behavior of academics of the University who formulated abusive opinions about the invited guest and the organizers of the lecture; (iii) protection of freedom of scholarly investigations and openness of academic discourse through the prevention of similar disruptions taking place in the future; (iv) salvaging the image of the University of Wrocław as a place of scientific work, open toward differing views; and (v) the protection of academic workers undertaking to organize extra-curricular scholarly events. Such steps would seem to be necessary for very practical as well as principled reasons. For, one may now expect that as a result of such incidents, scholars and public figures, as well as student of diverse backgrounds, may in the future decline invitations to take part in events organised by the University of Wrocław, or to enroll in it.

The Rector’s response has been a demonstration of helplessness. He has no legal means at his disposal to do any of these things. Shortly after this exchange, an assembly of rectors of the higher education institutions in Wrocław adopted a resolution against xenophobia, which was both an expression of their determination and of their powerlessness.

On the day of the incident at the University of Wrocław, the Minister of Higher Education, Barbara Kudrycka, called the organizers asking for a private address of Bauman in order to send him a letter of apology. Sending such a letter is certainly a proper thing to do. The question remains whether Minister Kudrycka, before she leaves her office, will take any other action regarding the problem at hand. And if so, what kind of action? Will she bother herself to respond to the same questions, which have been addressed to the Rector of the University of Wrocław?

The present and the future minister of higher education will have to respond to a more general question as well. Suppose anyone within the academia attempts to invite an eminent scholar who, apart from being a recognized professional, happens also to be a Jew, Arab, German, Russian, feminist, gay, lesbian, Muslim, Protestant, Pentecostal, atheist, of a different colour, a social democrat, or a cosmopolitan. Will such a person have to take into account a possible threat from local xenophobes who may happen to perceive the invited guest as persona non grata? Will it be necessary from now on to ask for the police protection of any academic event, of which local racists happen to disapprove? Will the Minister of the Interior place his troops at the rectors’ disposal? Given the present circumstances, will the Ministry be ready to pick up the tab of the increased security costs of deliberations in the humanities and social sciences?

The politics of the present regime towards higher education, which has generated an attitude of extreme asceticism while imposing a demand of innovation, in this context a rather absurd one, suggesting that it will not be willing to cover the increased costs of scholarly research and higher education. This means that the space of free academic discourse, much reduced already by inadequate funding of research and academies, will rapidly shrink even further.

On the other hand, one is justified in suspecting that the present regime will be more willing to cover the cost of police protection of the universities rather than that of their adequate funding. Yet if the regime decides to protect the academies by police, itself heavily under-subsidized, it will have to acquiesce to the fact that scientific deliberations conducted in the shadow of police sticks and their smoothbore rifles may not be able to bring forth particularly bold or innovative results. Democracy and academic freedom are challenged, not only from the ultra-nationalists, but also from the politicians who tolerate and encourage them, and the educational officials with no apparent means for effective response.

German Responsibility

During deafening nationalist protests against Bauman, some demonstrators raised their hands in the Nazi salute. For the Germans present this unashamed public emulation of the Nazi symbolism by the Polish extremists was a shock; the Consul General sat in the first row of the audience with his face ashen from fear.

The spirit of Nazism has not been irrevocably buried in Germany. Symbols of the political culture concocted by Hitler’s spin-doctors turn out to be more lively than anyone expected. With their own neo-Nazism reborn, Germans must now feel as if the package, sent by their grandparents, has been again delivered with several decades delay. Most of them dump this package into the trash bin; some of them bury it, ashamed, in a cellar; some store its contents with nostalgia. But some of them, among them the youngest, open the package with curiosity and set free the noxious elements contained in it. But this Nazi package, against the intention of its sender, is now being received also by descendants of a nation which particularly suffered from Nazis cruelties. In this way the Polish-German reconciliation, usually perceived through the gestures of political correctness, turns out to possess an another surprising dimension, an “incorrect” one, and, as a rule, hidden from the public view.

Bauman is a sharp critic of the present economic and social order. He believes that the present social and economic regime in Poland and in the world is deeply unjust, leads to exclusions, and grows within itself seeds of its own demise. In the lecture, he said that political parties which now pretend to represent the ideals of the Left, like the German SPD and the Polish SLD, should be held accountable for the emergence of this order, for they have betrayed the leftist values and became instead societies of mutual admiration with business bosses. He meant especially what Gerhard Schröder, known as Genosse der Bosse [Comrade of the Bosses], had done to the SPD, of which he was a leader. Bauman expressed this judgement in the same University room in which, precisely ten years earlier, Chancellor Schröder represented Germany during a meeting of the so-called Weimar Triangle, a consultation forum for political leaders of France, Germany and Poland.

The Poles are entitled to expect that Germans, especially from the present SPD, should take a clear stance concerning what is going on in their own country. They should also be aware that the Polish brand of Nazism is today not only an internal problem of Poland; it is also a problem of Germany, as well as of Europe as a whole, a sad outcome of the neo-liberal European political-economic order with Germany at its helm.

Party of Order and the status quo

When I insisted that the authorities of the University of Wrocław summon the police in order to protect an academic event, and then insisted that the commander of the police troops remove the troublemakers, I suddenly remembered Arthur Schopenhauer who pointed out to the police the most convenient place for them to shoot at the revolutionary masses during the Spring of Peoples in 1848. I also remembered Karl Marx’s ironic remarks from his 18th Brumaire: yes, I acted as a representative of the Party of Order who called the police to protect the status quo.

The point is, however, that I am not really convinced that the present political and economic order in Poland deserves to be protected. Bauman ingeniously and critically diagnoses the system whose products and symptoms are precisely those people who came to vilify him. And he seeks for ways to reform it. That is why he was invited to speak.

It may appear that extremist groupings in Poland also demand a change of the social order, as Bauman does; and that the difference between them lies only in the methods advocated. But this is not so. The present Polish radicalism is nationalistic, patriotic, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-feminist, anti-communist, anti-Semitic, anti-German, anti-European, anti-intellectual, etc. In a word, it stands for everything that is officially suppressed by the liberal and tolerant elites, striving to impose upon society their own version of constraints of decency. In this sense the Polish radicalism, in its exhibitionism and pornographic obscenity, may be perceived as a symptom of social revolt.

The question of a more just distribution of wealth is not addressed by its members. In this sense, Polish radicalism is thoroughly conservative. It does not strive towards a change of the political system, because it draws from it all its strength, and moves within it unperturbed. The whole raison d’être of the Polish radical movements is to excite disorders during which their members can demonstrate their own strength, and subsequently to use it as a bargaining argument, and a political commodity. This is the whole point of politics understood as a spectacle within which to be is to be perceived. The present system is needed by them as a venue or a scene upon which to perform their rituals of brutality and hatred. They will not find any better one. For this reason precisely they need the cosmopolitans, Jews, Arabs, Blacks, agents, communist, Stalinists, Germans, Russians, Europeans and egg-heads in order to stage their rituals of hate. They are employing their inconsistent ideological conglomerate because it guarantees to them an inexhaustible supply of objects for their hatred. Should the objects, per impossible, become in short supply, they would create them without much effort. For the time being their strength is basically the strength of a spectacle; for this reason it is only an appearance of strength. They will become really dangerous when they understand this. And they are just one step from it. One has only to wait to see whether they will summon the courage to make this step.

It has become nowadays a commonplace of political criticism that the contemporary political system has been transformed into a pathetic caricature of democracy. The slogan of democratic participation is only a smokescreen for the growing oligarchisation of societies and despotisation of politics at all its levels. In sphere of the economy, the Civic Platform excels in cultivating this art and elevated it to new levels of sophistication through managing the assets of the country in order to create further inequalities and without bothering about their social costs. The situation of a deep imbalance of social structure thus created cannot be remedied overnight; it has gone way too far. For this reason, the Finance Minister Vincent Rostowski will now have to find a place for a new rubric on the expenditure side of his budget: “the costs of social peace.” The longer he delays this, the more hefty sums he will have to put in this rubric in the future. Such a rubric will have to be filled also by the Minister of Finance in any Law and Justice government.

Cracked Crust

The six post-war decades in Poland have brought disenchantment with the leftist utopia. The past two decades of the transformation have brought disenchantment with conservative liberalism. Radicalism in Poland destroys politics and dispels the hope for social peace. It overwhelms the churches and universities, the last enclaves of relative decency. What, then, has the future in store for us? Bertrand Russell compared civilized life to a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava, which at any moment may break and let the unwary sink into its fiery depths. John Gray has argued that the best that flawed and potentially wicked human creatures can hope for is a commitment to civilized constraints that will prevent the very worst from happening: a politics of the least worst.

The problem is that in Poland the crust of constraints of decency turned out to be very thin, and has cracked again. The lava flowing from below refuses to cool down by itself. Nor will it cool off any time soon, or easily.

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. In many ways, things have never been better. Yet the ghosts of the past: populism, xenophobia and anti-communist paranoia, added to new demons, homophobia front and center, are on the rise. The political system is now shaky, cultural accomplishment is compromised, and the dark side of nationalism threatens social solidarity and Poland’s relationships with its neighbors, both to the east and the west. In the best of times, the worst of times are on the horizon, a tragedy in the making.

To read Adam Chmielewski’s In-Depth Analysis “Academies of Hatred – Part 1,” click here.

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 of academic and public appearances by the author of Postmodern Ethics. There were also no incidents when Bauman spoke in Wrocław to the European Congress of Culture in September 2011, soon after our city had been awarded the title of European Capital of Culture 2016.

The changes that have occurred in the meantime, in both the Wroclaw’s and Polish public space, that made possible the disruption of Bauman’s lecture and many other similar disturbances, cast a sinister, dark brown shadow upon the image of Poland in the world. But there is one benefit to be drawn from the protests: they demand attention.

A “Set-Up”

The Bauman – Lassalle event was a fusion of Polish, Jewish, German and Leftist culture. Since it was also open to the public, it was perceived by the local xenophobes as an invitation for incitement, a set-up. (This seems to be the closest possible translation of the Polish soccer hooligans’ term “ustawka,” which refers to a collective fight taking place in an agreed place and time between two antagonized group of supporters of different soccer teams, resulting usually in many injuries on both sides, and often in fatalities.)

For Bauman is not only a Polish scholar of great stature in the world and an author quoted in many disciplines. He was also, during the Stalinist period, a military officer of the Polish army, and a Jew, just as Ferdinand Lassalle was. And for the past two decades the ideals of the Left have been misconstrued in Poland as an ideological foundation of the violent communist regime, which murdered patriots, and has been presented as a source of a extreme evil and of the enslavement of the nation.

Just before the commencement of the meeting, quite unexpectedly, the mayor of Wrocław arrived. The organizers of the event invited him to welcome the guest as the host of the city. He managed to say only: “I am Rafał Dutkiewicz. To those who do not yet know it, I would like to say that I am the mayor of this city.”

In response, about a hundred members of the NOP rose from their seats, unfolded a huge banner saying “NOP/Śląsk Wrocław” (Śląsk Wrocław is the name of the local soccer club, currently the champions of the Polish National Soccer League), and started howling, yelling, chanting and vilifying the guest speaker, the organizers, and the mayor alike.

It needs to be said that the soccer club of Śląsk Wrocław is being generously supported by the local municipality under this mayor. Among the chants which were thrown into mayor’s face by the extremist soccer hooligans was a slogan about the memory of the “excommunicated soldiers.” Those soldiers were members of the Polish underground who did not become reconciled with the communist take-over of the post-war Poland, were persecuted by the communist regime, and were banned from the collective memory until 1989. They symbolize a moral and political attitude which is rather close to the mayor’s political views: the municipality ruled by him for the past 11 years has recently erected a monument to one of them, a cavalry officer Witold Pilecki. This material expression of the aesthetic politics of the city aligns well with the political aesthetics dominant in the whole country. Despite the official rhetoric of pluralism, the canons of this aesthetics dictate political tastes in Poland in a way which it is rather impossible, and unwise, to ignore. During the Bauman – Lassalle event, the extreme right confronted not only the left, but also the right.

Canonisation and Escalation

The development of radicalism in Wrocław has been documented carefully for some time now. It has been the subject of a disturbing report by the local Nomada Foundation; everyday xenophobic attitudes have been provocatively revealed in an experiment conducted by the pupils of one of the high schools in the city. There is no doubt that radical groupings in the city act ever more boldly and brazenly. About two months ago, on April 24, they achieved a significant success in preventing Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a member of the European Parliament, from lecturing at the University of Wrocław. They have exerted a pressure on the organizers of that event, and Cohn-Bendit himself, by wildly calling upon everyone to protect their children from the paedophile. At the last moment, Cohn-Bendit cancelled his journey to Wrocław.

The so-called nationalists in Wrocław and in Poland have been encouraged especially since the moment of the canonisation of their activities by Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the main opposition party in Poland, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice). After a group of soccer supporters staged a violent brawl following a soccer match in Warsaw and after they were prosecuted by the police as well as criticised by the government officials, Kaczyński extended to them ideological and political protection by calling them genuine patriots. Ever since, undisturbed by law, they have engaged in a series of provocations: picked fights at soccer stadiums, disrupted lectures and political meetings, lit fires at the doors of people whom they consider alien, etc.

More than that: thanks to Kaczyński, they have appointed themselves as both the judges of history, and its executioners. The sentences are being carried out summarily, according to their own interpretation of the dominant canons of the political aesthetics. The leader of Law and Justice has strengthened them in their “truth.” The strength of their conviction and the political protection has given them a power, which cannot be matched by any other political movement in present-day Poland.

Interestingly, however, they are being supported not only by Law and Justice, “the patriotic right.” They have also received very strong material support from the present government of Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform), the neo-liberal centre right. The “patriotic right” and the “neo-liberal right” are supporting the extreme neo- fascist right, and this is oddly being facilitated by futbol, soccer.

Soccer and Politics

The rules of ancient democracy are said to have been modeled upon the principles of the Olympic Games. Just as warring Greek tribes temporarily suspended their mutual animosities at the time of the Olympic Games and sent their representatives to Olympic arenas in order to continue their wars in a vicarious form in various sport disciplines, so in democratic Athens each local community sent their representatives to the Assembly to haggle for local interests on their behalf.

In present-day Poland the ties between sports and politics are much more intimate than that. For after one peels off the empty rhetoric and political imagery, it becomes rather difficult to dispel the impression that the Civic Platform’s project of modernization of the country, and the promotion of its interests, exhausted itself, literally, in the organization of the European soccer championship in 2012. Setting subjective impressions aside, however, no one can deny that the Civic Platform, which has been ruling the country for the past seven years, displayed the greatest political energy as long as it was preparing the whole country for this spectacle, and lost it, immediately and completely, after the show was over.

Accordingly, Poland owes to this party more than two thousand (!) small sports playgrounds, located in almost every local community. They are known as Little Eagles and cost 1,233,477 Polish zloty each [373,781 USD]. Their aim is to train the young soccer talents, but also to fill the leisure of the young who now have the opportunity to enjoy it more than ever, as 30 per cent of them have no jobs. We owe to this party also four large cutting-edge stadiums in Gdańsk, Poznań, Warsaw and Wrocław, as well as barely passable roads built in order for us to be able to drive to them, even though, as yet, two years after their near-completion, there is really no good reason to do so.

It is difficult to dispel the impression that Civic Platform never intended to govern the country in a democratic manner, through some kind of a covenant with society. It just wanted to manage and administer society by means of sports. Conceiving politics as a spectacle, the party fused politics with sports in an unprecedented way. Apparently the leadership of the party assumed that the Little Eagles and the stadiums would become centers of sporting rivalry, entertainment and cultural events, venues to excite positive passions, and to discharge them. They seem to have assumed also, apparently judging after themselves (the leadership of the Civic Platform, most especially the prime minister Donald Tusk, are well-known and devout soccer players themselves.), that through holding the EURO 2012 in Poland, they would receive a powerful means of promotion of the country in Europe and in the world. They seem to have thought, too, that in this way they would acquire a powerful instrument to manage human masses, their leisure, emotions, and thoughts.

On all these accounts the Civic Platform suffered major defeats, because their assumptions turned out to be erroneous. It is, moreover, rather surprising to see a conservative party working upon such assumptions for they are reeking with optimism untypical of the conservative attitude, which is an important strand within its ideology. The soccer infrastructure, by far the most important contribution of this party to the growth of Poland, has now become a symbol of the failure of its modernization project.

Managing human masses by means of stadiums, a political technique employed prominently in the ancient Rome, has its known limitations. One of them is that sport creates strong divisions between “us” and “them.” The divisions thus fashioned are focused upon sports rivals and are symbolized by differing colors marking the armies of such substitute wars. Sport as a vicarious war enables the discharge of the passions aroused by rivalries in a controlled manner. This, however, works well only in countries in which their populations, as well as their authorities, are still capable of grasping the difference between sports and politics, not everywhere.

The leaders of Civic Platform have been apparently using outdated textbooks for political marketing. For despite the perfection of the instruments designed to manipulate public passions, they remain unpredictable. Civic Platform has been acting as if they have forgotten about this critical fact. They have apparently forgotten also about the unparalleled wisdom of the great Polish philosopher and the most successful soccer coach ever, Kazimierz Górski, who famously said that in the game of soccer “the ball is round and there are two goals in it.”

As a result of these astounding oversights on the part of the Civic Platform, the passions of the soccer supporters, for whom this party has laboriously built the stadiums, have been effortlessly hijacked by Law and Justice and are now being informed according to a xenophobic ideology rather than the conservative-liberal one. In other words, the political soccer match arranged by the Civic Platform for the whole nation has been easily won by opposition leader Jarosław Kaczyński. An unequaled champion of political acrobatics, Kaczyński has shot a penalty goal against Prime Minister Tusk without even going onto the pitch. It is a wholly different matter, though, whether he will be able to benefit from his victory. Something truly pernicious has been unleashed.

By undertaking the modernization project by means of soccer, Civic Platform has transformed a huge stream of taxpayers’ money into an expensive concrete infrastructure, instead of devoting themselves to building instruments of inclusion of broad segments of the population, which for the past two decades have suffered economic and social exclusion. This project has enriched the bosses – though not the workers – of the Polish construction industry; for, this was in fact one of the main reasons for the Civil Platform to undertake it in the first place. After Civic Platform loses the upcoming elections, the bosses, ever hungry for more, will support the Law and Justice without any qualms.

As a result, the stadiums have become venues of concentration and recruitment of new members of extreme right-wing groupings, and into training areas of the soccer hooliganism. Instead of becoming centers of family entertainment and popularization of culture, Polish stadiums are now functioning as academies of hatred for the young who are just beginning their adult life, but have already lost their hopes for a decent place for themselves in their own country.

The xenophobic radicals, fed from both political hands, are gradually ceasing to be a marginal eccentricity of Polish political aesthetics, and a minor symptom of the psychopathology of Polish political life; they are now becoming an independent and vigorous political power. We do not yet have Budapest in Warsaw (These words have been used by Jarosław Kaczyński to express his admiration for Victor Orban and his authoritarian transformation of Hungary), but we will not have to wait too long for it. The incident at the University of Wrocław and many similar ones demonstrate that Poland is dotted by various local infections of virulent nationalism.

That the promotion of Poland through soccer did not work was due not only to the desperate weakness of the Polish national team. However hard we work in order to organize efficiently the spectacles of the politicized sport, several incidents like the one during Bauman’s lecture, will suffice to annihilate the whole effort to dispel the centuries’ long stereotype of Polnische Wirtschaft.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that even though in antiquity sport was the beginning of Greek democracy, in post-modernity sport has become a beginning of the end of Polish democracy.

On June 22^nd 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 co-sponsors of the Bauman lecture.

All were concerned about the Bauman affair, and understood that at issue was not only the talk of a challenging professor. Adam and I had a particularly interesting exchange. I present my side of this discussion today (with which Chmielewski told me he broadly agreed). In our next posts, I will publish his two-part in depth analysis.

My concern is rather straightforward. It has less to do with the quality of the extreme right, reprehensible as it is, more to do with its relationship with the less extremist mainstream. While extremists are indeed at the margins of Polish public opinion, they are becoming more and more effective in making themselves visible to the general public and becoming more acceptable. Politicians are coming to accept the extremists’ definition of controversies and trying to take advantage of their impact, and the media, many public intellectuals and academics are following their framing of events, or at least not forcefully opposing these frames.

Thus, Bauman’s lecture was framed as a scandalous talk by a Stalinist, rather than as a presentation by a distinguished, highly creative social theorist. The disruption was considered as a problem of the legacies of communism and not as a problem concerning the fate of academic freedom in an open society.

Should a Stalinist speak became the question. The quality of Bauman’s work, the importance of his diagnoses of the problems of our times, was put aside. The debate became how the politics of a young man, of a Jewish communist, should be judged, and whether its purported influence needed to be controlled. The fact that Bauman was hounded out of Poland in the wake of an anti-Zionist wave (in that case purported anti-Zionism was really a thin guise for anti-Semitism) was not discussed. The problem of the attempt to silence a critical opinion was not the issue. Rather, the occasion of Bauman’s lecture and its disruption was used to call for the long delayed lustration, a cleansing of communist influence from Polish public life.

There was a smell of anti-Semitism in the air. It seemed that at issue is as well to rid Polish public life of Jewish influence. But perhaps that is my paranoia.

The major opposition party, PiS (Law and Justice) seems to be supportive of the actions of the extreme right, while the ruling party, PO (Civic Platform), seems to be reluctant to too forcefully denounce the right. And intellectuals and professors, even those who privately find the attacks on academic freedom repugnant, are reluctant to speak up. PiS accepts the extremists definition of the situation. PO is reluctant to oppose it, as are many others.

Indeed, PiS seriously entertains wild conspiracy theories concerning the plane crash in Smolensk, in which Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, along with 94 others, including major public figures and civic leaders, were killed. The political paranoia that animates the extreme right is shared by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the PiS leader, the former president’s identical twin brother, and former prime minister, who demonizes the current government as somehow implicated in “the assassination,” purportedly orchestrated by the Russians. Kaczynski has supported the “patriotic protests,” such as the one directed against Bauman, as Chmielewski reveals in his post.

My judgment: PiS seems to me to be quite extremist, though more polite than those who violently chanted against Bauman. Perhaps, Polish fascism with a human face? Probably too strong, but not by much.

Elsewhere, there is not much active direct support of neo-fascists, I trust even among many in PiS. Yet, indirect support and the absence of strong opposition is a serious problem. Thus, Chmielewski’s critique of PO in his post is especially important. He shows how the ruling party unintentionally has supported its far right critics through an apparently benign politics of bread and circuses, and how and why it is not forcefully counterattacking.

I have a playful unprofessional theory about extremism in contemporary politics. Somewhere around 20% of the citizens of just about all contemporary democracies support extreme anti-democratic, xenophobic and racist politics. If these people had their way, democracy would be fundamentally challenged. (Close to home I think of the Tea Party or at least the birthers and the clear Obama haters) The fate of democracy lies in what is done with this margin of the population. Encourage, tolerate or collaborate with this fringe, and a decent democratic politics is undermined or even lost. This is now happening in Hungary. It may happen in Poland.

A major party is in bed with the extremists. The ruling party is not forcefully opposing them. And there does not seem to be a broad civic response against this situation. It is the silence of the centrists, of the “moderates” that I find deafening. I believe, but I may be mistaken, that those on the left are speaking up, but I am not sure that they are being heard, isolated, as they are.

To end on an oblique note of deep concern: I think I see a kind of post-communist treason of intellectuals. It is particularly disturbing, and uncharacteristic of what I have long admired in Polish cultural life. While in Poland, I heard about the calculations of academics surrounding the Bauman affair. There is ambivalence about one of the most distinguished men of Polish letters, supporting him may be dangerous: to do so might compromise one’s career or lead to a weakening institutional support.  Suffice it to say that I admire and support my Polish friends who invited, listened and critically and deliberately considered Bauman’s talk, whether or not they agree with him (as by the way, I don’t on many issues of form and substance). I am disturbed by the problems my friends and colleagues face. There is a clear and present danger, and it is not the specter of communism.

Last week, Adam Michnik returned to The New School and gave a provocative lecture, “After the Election of Pope Francis: What Paths for the Catholic Church?” In his talk, more about the Church and democracy in Poland than about events in Rome and the Catholic Church as a whole, the renowned Polish intellectual highlighted the two different paths taken by the Church in current public debates: the increasingly popular fundamentalist approach, termed “Integralism,” resistant to the recommendations of openness formulated at the Second Vatican Council, and the marginalized liberal approach, termed “Progressivist,” adopted by the liberal-oriented Catholics. Michnik worried that Pope Francis would be on the wrong side of this debate, or on the sidelines, given his ambiguous at best relationship with dictatorship in Argentina. The talk addressed pressing issues in Poland. Michnik, as usual, was bold in his presentation. It has broad implications beyond Polish borders, which I appreciate. Yet, I also have a question. For, I think Michnik misses a crucial point, concerning Poland, and also concerning the Pope and the Catholic Church and the need to address religious fundamentalism.

Michnik pointed out that the integralist and the progressivist paths emerged as part of the Catholic Church’s struggle for power to shape public debate in post-1989 democratic Poland. To his great dismay, instead of strengthening the Church’s liberal voice, open to the new issues that the newly democratic country had to face as it opened to the outside world, the Church has become dominated by simplistic conservative and nationalistic arguments, which reinforce hostile attitudes toward all that is unfamiliar or strange. As a consequence, the church has fostered a destructive divide between “us” and “them,” which cuts across Polish society. According to Michnik, a significant role in disseminating the fundamentalist message is played by “Radio Maryja” and “TV Trwam.” These media outlets, owned by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, a controversial Catholic priest often accused of promoting xenophobia and anti-Semitism, are widely popular in small towns in Poland.

Michnik did not have a simple answer to his question, “What Paths for the Catholic Church?“ His overall argument centered around the Polish Church’s reluctance to accept any form of criticism, and he expressed concern that Pope Francis, with his beautiful gestures towards the poor will not address the threat of Catholic fundamentalism in Poland and beyond.

I did not have a chance to push Michnik a bit on the role Pope Francis may play in the continuing conflict between the liberal and fundamentalist factions in the Church. It relates to a topic I am studying, popular Catholic practices in post-1989 Poland. It seems to me that Francis’s gestures towards the poor have greater potential power than Michnik recognizes. They could build a bridge between the radical claims of the Polish “integralists” and the “progressivists” in the ongoing Polish Catholic debate by crossing the divide between popular and elite opinion. The integralists present radical, one-sided and often simplistic visions of reality in which Catholicism should prevail, while the  progressivists take into account the numerous competing values found in earthly life, but the sophisticated arguments they formulate are incomprehensible to many. In other words, I would have liked to have asked Michnik if he felt that Pope Francis could create a bridge through his message of radicalism in humility.

Michnik presented the conflict as a stark clash between the liberal, open-minded intellectuals, on the one hand, and  on the other, the fundamentalists: defenders of pre-Vatican II traditions who want to see the Church as the ultimate institution, founded by God, superior to secular life. In this context, the opinions and gestures of the new pope which emphasize humility instead of rapacity—including the desire of the Church to monopolize the discussion on values—seem particularly important, as they fall in right in the middle of the conflict in the Catholic Church in Poland.

The increasingly marginalized Polish “progressivists” described by Michnik, are intellectuals. I believe this very fact alienates them from popular debate dominated by the “integralist” approach. For many Catholics progressivists’ discussions are not intelligible, too subtle and too boring. The intellectuals speak over the heads of many. Yet many Catholics turn to the Church to give them clear definitions of the meaning of the surrounding world. The “integralists,” on the other hand, present a clear, one-sided vision of an age-old Polish-Catholic unity, which has to be protected in a dangerous, secularizing reality that lacks moral values. Michnik hinted that this propagated, imagined vision not only is a tool of maintaining power in the Polish political debate; what is more, this particular vision seems better suited to an authoritarian, rather than a democratic, regime.

Pope Francis does not look like a “progressivist,” but his call for a poor Church may hurt the Polish fundamentalist vision of the Church, whose opulence and unquestionable power in society is presented as justified by tradition (and God). The Pope’s simple message may be heard by the many traditionalist Polish Catholics uninterested in intellectual discussions, but who nonetheless are troubled by the Polish Church’s increasingly visible deadly sins of pride and greed. “Let us never forget that authentic power is service,” the Pope said in his homily. But will this message come through? And does this “service” include open discussion on the contemporary role of the Church, not limited to the hermetic debates of intellectuals and one-sided claims of the traditionalists?