I feel as if I am following President Obama’s itinerary through Europe. For me, it started with a quick stopover in Dublin on my way to Paris. My wife and I will spend more time in Dublin next week, where she will explore her father’s hometown for the first time. Naomi is one of a rare breed, an Irish Jew. Her family spent a generation there between Latvia and Canada. We are even going to be looking for a long lost elderly cousin. Later this summer, I will be off to Poland, on my annual teaching stint in The New School’s summer Democracy and Diversity Institute. These coincidences (I was also in London a few months ago) and returns come to mind because, as with Obama, my stay in Europe this time is stimulating me to think not only about European matters, but also about North Africa and the Middle East from the point of view of European experience.

During his stay in Poland, the President met with former leaders of the democratic opposition and Solidarity movement, and noted that what Poland went through twenty-five years ago proves that the move from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one is quite possible, though also quite difficult. He spoke as a political leader wanting to position America and its allies together in support of the Arab Spring. He emphasized institution building, the rights of minorities and a free press. I don’t disagree with him, and I should add as an old Polish hand, it warms my heart to see my friends being used as an example of political success.

Yet, democratic consolidation is not completely achieved in Poland and among its neighbors, and there is always a threat, as has been observed here in Andras Bozoki’s report on the situation in Hungary, that a transition to democracy may be followed by a transition from democracy. This depends upon attitudes and shared beliefs of the citizenry.

Mourners in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw after Smolensk plane crash. Sign says "What a President. What a Patriot." © Sebk | Wikimedia Commons

In Poland, the demonstrators who were outside President Obama’s appearances represent an anti-democratic threat. They are sure that the Russians are complicit in the murder of the former President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, who died in airplane crash, and many of them are pretty sure that the present President, Bronislaw Komorowski, is somehow involved. Such conspiracy theories, in which political opponents are perceived as murderous enemies, undermine democratic life. These demonstrators resemble the more outrageous members of the Tea Party and are kissing cousins of the birthers.  Such agents are more dangerous in new democracies than old, more dangerous still in the nations of the Middle East and North Africa trying to form democracies. Even in well-established countries such as the US, people who approach politics in this way present serious problems. No big deal, if they remain on the margins, but when they enter or even define the mainstream, they pose a significant threat.

Thus, when I think about Poland, Egypt, Tunisia and their neighbors, I am concerned not only about democracy as a political system, with a democratic constitution and institutions. It seems to me that just as important is democracy as a matter of ongoing political practice and beliefs. This is one of the great achievements in Poland, which changed its political culture in the course of the making of a democratic opposition, the Solidarity movement, and a democratic state, helping it weather anti-democratic currents. This suggests possibilities among the perils now present in the Middle East and North Africa.

In Poland, during the Solidarity period (and even before), the oppositionists acted as if they lived in a free society, and in the process, freedom actually became a part of the life of the people involved. They showed how the sociological theorem of the definition of a situation, as first developed by W. I. Thomas, constitutes a crucial dimension of political power. “If men [and women] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

The demonstrators in Tahrir Square revealed this power as well. When Muslims and Coptics openly supported each other during the transformational events, they constituted Egyptian democratic pluralism. Their common action created a political reality, which I will analyze in my next post.

I am thinking about such things, as I follow the path of Obama. The world looks differently from the summit and from the ground. A major end of his trip here this time was to help galvanize support for his approach to the great potentially democratic transformations in North Africa and the Middle East, while also attempting to get the European powers to support the U.S. in its opposition to the UN resolution recognizing Palestinian statehood. In his words and actions in Poland, he attempted to underline the possibility of fundamental democratic change and its persistence. From my point of view, looking at democracy in everyday practice, I see that his high-flown rhetoric can and has been sustained, but also that it depends on the definition and redefinition of democratic realities as social practices. Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, and in Central Europe, confirms fundamental insights of Tocqueville, as he was looking at democracy in America.

Because the demands of the academic cycle, because of the challenge of term papers, dissertations and dissertation proposals, I am late this week in this review. But now that I have a few moments this Sunday evening, I can make a few points, noting that all week we have been concerned about the difficult relationship between words and deeds.

If there were any deed which would be clearly and unambiguously a candidate for automatic verbal condemnation, it would seem to be slavery, but this is not the case. Narvaez shows, choosing the extreme case to make his very important point, judging the unacceptable requires a capacity for moral indignation. He worries that with the noise of infotainment, of cable television, web surfing and social networking, the capacity to express indignation is waning. On the other hand, Gary Alan Fine, in his reply to Narvaez, seems to be as concerned with the direction of such indignation as its presence or absence. Condemnations of Israel, for example, sometimes come too easily from the left and the Arab world, and they can be manufactured, as Daniel Dayan shows in his post this week.

This was an exciting and provocative exchange. I think Narvaez in his response to Fine revealed how sound public debate yields results when it is specific. Small things, details, make all the difference. Not moral indignation about Israeli atrocities, but a specific atrocity, the complicity in the massacre in Sabra and Shatila, for example. And Narvaez is surely right, democracy requires such indignation. The jaded society is a clear and present danger to democracy, explaining for example broad American acceptance of torture of political prisoners as long as it goes by the Orwellian name of “enhanced interrogation.”

And paying close attention to the relationship between words and deeds applies as well to the persistent problem of fictoids in our public life, as we discussed last year. Little tales that confirm preconceived notions of the truth, blissfully without regard to their facticity: Obama the Kenyan post-colonial non citizen, Newt Gingrich, the man who divorced his first wife while she was hospitalized on her death bed. Gary Alan Fine explains why such stories are too good to not be believed. I, influenced by Hannah Arendt, add that to base our politics on such fabrications is extremely dangerous, reminiscent of the horrors of totalitarian practice, perhaps now as a joke, but serious nonetheless.

Daniel Dayan’s post this week demonstrates that he is a student of his great teacher Roland Barthes. In a compressed mediation, he compares the power of two recent radical events in North Africa and the Middle East. Without explicitly supporting or condemning either, the terrorist attack on a café in Marrakesh and the flotilla directed against the Israeli blockade in Gaza, he shows what each could and could not accomplish. He shows how, through theater, deeds speak. In my terms, he shows why “the politics of small things” is more powerful than terrorism. I was blown away by Dayan’s contribution. It would be great if we could further explore this in the coming weeks.

And then there was the power of words that President Obama unleashed in his speech on North Africa and the Middle East. I was impressed. The speech was better than I thought it would be. It actually got the serious potential consequential debate going again. Tomorrow, Gershon Shafir will present his careful commentary on how he thinks the speech moves the Israelis and Palestinians forward.

An additional note from me for now: I wrote my piece concerned that Obama would give an attractive speech that would be presented artfully and be pleasant to hear, but would prove to be inconsequential, like the speeches of a President of a Central European new democracy, not getting involved in the nitty-gritty of tough politics. But that is not what happened, evident in two ways. Netanyahu was given the opportunity to be a historic figure, to actually move toward peace now, and he angrily refused. And Republican candidates and office holders abdicated their responsibilities and played foolish politics.

Obama gave a careful speech on the American relationship to the promise of the Arab Spring, and he quite diplomatically tried to nudge Israelis and Palestinians forward to serious negotiations by saying publicly what has been the first commitment of all parties of the peace process for decades: “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” The practical consequence of this is yet to be seen.

But an important theoretical point was revealed, a mirror image of what Dayan shows in his post. Dayan’s analysis showed that deeds speak. Obama politics revealed that speech acts.

President Barack Obama gave a powerful speech today, one of his best. The president was again eloquent, but there is concern here in the U.S. and also abroad in the Arab world, that eloquence is not enough, that it may in fact be more of the problem than the solution. The fine words don’t seem to have substance in Egypt, according to a report in The Washington Post. There appears to be a global concern that Obama’s talk is cheap. Obama’s “Cairo Speech” all over again, one Egyptian declared. Now is the time for decisive action. Now is the time for the President of the United States to put up or shut up. (Of course, what exactly is to be put up is another matter.)

This reminds me of another powerful writer-speaker, President Vaclav Havel. Havel is the other president in my lifetime that I have deeply admired. Both he and Obama are wonderful writers and principled politicians, both have been criticized for the distance between their rhetorical talents and their effectiveness in realizing their principles.

Agreeing with the criticisms of Havel, I sometimes joke about my developing assessment of him. I first knew about Vaclav Havel as a bohemian, as a very interesting absurdist playwright. I wrote my dissertation about Polish theater when this was still his primary occupation, and I avidly read his work then as I tried to understand why theater played such an important role in the opposition to Communism in Central Europe.

I then came to know him as one of the greatest political essayists and dissidents of the twentieth century. At the theoretical core of two of my books, Beyond Glasnost: The Post Totalitarian Mind and The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times are the ideas to be found in Havel’s greatest essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”

However, as president, Havel was not so accomplished. He presided over the breakup of Czechoslovakia, a development he opposed passionately, but ineffectually. He sometimes seemed to think that he could right a political problem by writing a telling essay, often translated and published in The New York Review of Books. He expressed a moral high ground in these essays, but he did not address the tough and messy side of politics. This is a real weakness of the intellectual as politician, the temptation to think if one can put a solution into words, one has solved a problem.

Does this problem apply to Obama, specifically to his speech today? Many on both the left and the right have heard enough of his speeches. They want action.

I watched a PBS News Hour discussion last night in anticipation of the speech today, and this was the consensus of the expert observers. Therefore, I think it is significant how much of this speech pointed in the direction of specific policy developments. Yet, they were placed in a broader historical and moral context. And the words were important. They did politics. They acted. They were speech acts in Austin’s sense.

I was particularly moved by the way the president told the story of the Arab Spring. He gave it great significance. He alluded to the killing of bin Laden, but didn’t dwell on it. He started with the politics of small things and pointed to civilizational transformation.

“On December 17th, a young vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi was devastated when a police officer confiscated his cart. This was not unique. It’s the same kind of humiliation that takes place every day in many parts of the world -– the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity. Only this time, something different happened. After local officials refused to hear his complaints, this young man, who had never been particularly active in politics, went to the headquarters of the provincial government, doused himself in fuel, and lit himself on fire.

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia, as that vendor’s act of desperation tapped into the frustration felt throughout the country. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets, then thousands. And in the face of batons and sometimes bullets, they refused to go home –- day after day, week after week — until a dictator of more than two decades finally left power.

The story of this revolution, and the ones that followed, should not have come as a surprise. The nations of the Middle East and North Africa won their independence long ago, but in too many places their people did not. In too many countries, power has been concentrated in the hands of a few. In too many countries, a citizen like that young vendor had nowhere to turn -– no honest judiciary to hear his case; no independent media to give him voice; no credible political party to represent his views; no free and fair election where he could choose his leader.”

The president maintained that this power as it spread throughout the Arab world can no longer be easily repressed, and he expressed a conviction that given the media world we now live in the protestors’ “voices tell us that change cannot be denied.”

But that was it for the moving rhetoric. Obama then turned sober and practical. “The question before us is what role America will play as this story unfolds.” And he described what might very well become known as the Obama Doctrine.

“The United States opposes the use of violence and repression against the people of the region. (Applause.)

The U.S. supports a set of universal rights. These rights include free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law, and the right to choose your own leaders – whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus, Sanaa or Tehran.

And we support political and economic reform in the Middle East and North Africa that can meet the legitimate aspirations of ordinary people throughout the region.”

This all sounds quite good, but perhaps empty, as some have maintained. However, the substance of the matter is in the details. It is noteworthy that when the president referred to the importance of universal rights he mentioned not only easy targets, but also Sanaa, increasing the pressure on Ali Abdullah Saleh, our ally in “the war on terrorism” to resign. And later when he criticized regimes that violently repress their citizenry for engaging in peaceful protests, he included not only Libya, Syria and Iran, but also the important American ally Bahrain.

“Bahrain is a longstanding partner, and we are committed to its security. We recognize that Iran has tried to take advantage of the turmoil there, and that the Bahraini government has a legitimate interest in the rule of law.

Nevertheless, we have insisted both publicly and privately that mass arrests and brute force are at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens, and we will – and such steps will not make legitimate calls for reform go away. The only way forward is for the government and opposition to engage in a dialogue, and you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail.”

He spoke to the people and not only to the rulers of the region. He understood that the problem was not only political, but also economic, offering assistance and engagement in economic development as it addresses the needs of ordinary people. Moreover, he promised to listen to diverse voices coming from the region.

“We will continue to make good on the commitments that I made in Cairo – to build networks of entrepreneurs and expand exchanges in education, to foster cooperation in science and technology, and combat disease. Across the region, we intend to provide assistance to civil society, including those that may not be officially sanctioned, and who speak uncomfortable truths. And we will use the technology to connect with – and listen to – the voices of the people.”

He gave a forceful commitment to support religious minorities and strong support to the centrality of women’s rights.

“History shows that countries are more prosperous and more peaceful when women are empowered. And that’s why we will continue to insist that universal rights apply to women as well as men – by focusing assistance on child and maternal health; by helping women to teach, or start a business; by standing up for the right of women to have their voices heard, and to run for office. The region will never reach its full potential when more than half of its population is prevented from achieving their full potential.”

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama was careful but took a strong position. There was a little to warm the heart of those on both sides, but also much that would concern both.

Obama made news and earned the wrath of his domestic opposition by declaring, “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” This earned him an immediate protest by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But he also expressed concerns about the recent Hamas – Fatah agreement and about “symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state.” Thus, the Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri denounced the speech completely.

To my mind, Obama was not tough enough on Netanyahu, but he did move forward. Clearly, something other than complete support for the Israeli right’s position is necessary, contrary to Obama’s hysterical Republican critics. Obama advanced the U.S. position a bit. He said the obvious. The future border between Palestine and Israel will be based on the ’67 borders with negotiated adjustments. That has been the implicit assumption of the peace process for decades. Saying it bluntly, as President Obama did, provides some grounds for progress, suggesting a real response to the Arab Spring.

In his speech this morning, the president gave an account of a rapidly changing political landscape, showing an appreciation of the dynamics driving it and presenting a role for the U.S. to play. It was a broad and impressive depiction of our changing political world. He revealed an understanding of the role of the U.S. in this changing world, and he started playing the role when he turned to the all-important details. He staked out a position.

We will get a sense of how full or empty his rhetoric was today, when he meets Prime Minister Netanyahu tomorrow.