Pivotal Ideas of the Last 30 Years:  Democracy, Society and Markets at the Turn of the Century 

October 19th and 20th, 2018

Staszic Palace, Sala Lustrzana, Warsaw

Organizers: Michał Federowicz, Jan Kubik, and Andrzej Leder

 

This conference reflects the belief that initially political, economic, and social changes in Poland and other countries of the region after 1989 were driven by the leading ideas and visions of the time. There was at first a relatively strong consensus among the political and intellectual elites concerning the kind of political and economic systems that had to be built on the ruins of state socialism. Over the next 30 years a different configuration of ideas influencing people’s aims and actions has emerged and challenged the original hegemony. This change has its origin in evaluations of performance over the last quarter century, but is also connected to significantly wider changes in Europe and the world.

 

The point of departure for the conference is the discourse in Europe and beyond influencing the formation of political, economic, and social institutions in the 1990s. We pose the following question: what ideas were we equipped with while embarking on the path of constructing democracy, and what ideas define us now? What were our assumptions when we started building market economies and how do we regard them now?  Was the imitation model effective and if so, to what extent? What challenges do we face now that its usefulness seems to be exhausted? How do we evaluate the political economic and social changes of the last quarter century in Poland, in Europe, and in the wider world? How and why do our cvaluations differ? How has the context of intellectual reflection changed, and how have ideas evolved? What internal and external factors have influenced the changes in the way we think about democracy and the economy?

 

We would like to begin by re-creating the intellectual map dominant thirty years ago – the prevailing view of democracy, market economy and social change – and then examine today’s ideological disputes, their origins, and their main features. We also want to discuss the cultural changes that have taken place since 1989. Was there a consensus among the intellectual elite, and if so to what extent? What was the relation between the elites and society? How has it evolved and what key events have driven this change? In what way has the system  given voice to societal concerns and what has worked (or has not worked) in the democratic mechanisms? What are the causes of the growth of populist movements?  Does the rise of populism provide an explanation or is it rather a symptom of a crisis and an upcoming critical juncture in the political development of Poland and the region? What is the relation between the reigning contemporary ideas – ways of defining major problems – in Poland, other countries of the region, and in the Western world broadly understood?

 

Registration

Pivotal Ideas of the Last 30 Years: Democracy, Society and Markets at the Turn of the Century

October 19th-20th, 2018

72, Nowy Świat St., Warsaw

Staszic Palace, Sala Lustrzana (Mirror Room), 1st floor

To register click here

The Speakers

THE SPEAKERS

Stanley Bill is Senior Lecturer in Polish Studies and Director of the Polish Studies Programme at the University of Cambridge. He works largely on twentieth-century Polish literature and culture, with particular interests in the poetics of the body and postcolonial interpretations of Polish cultural and political history. He has written on Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz, postcolonial theory in the Polish context, the political legacy of Polish Romanticism, and on religious problems in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is also co-editor of the news and opinion website “Notes from Poland”. He originally hails from Perth, Australia.”

Dorothee Bohle holds a chair in social and political change at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the European University Institute, Florence. Previously, she was a professor at Central European University, Budapest. Her research is at the intersection of comparative politics and political economy with a special focus on East Central Europe. She is the author of Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery (Cornell University Press 2012, together with Béla Greskovits), which won the Stein Rokkan Prize in Comparative Resarch, and of Europe’s New Periphery: Poland’s Transformation and Transnational Integration (in German, Münster 2002). Her publications have also appeared in in Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, West European Politics, Journal of Democracy, European Journal of Sociology, and Review of International Political Economy, among others. Her current work looks at the policy and political responses to the Great Recession in a number of European peripheral countries.

Michał Buchowski is a Professor of Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań and at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. His scientific interest is in postsocialist transformations and social distinctions. He published numerous articles, 11 books, and (co-)edited 14 volumes, and among other, Rethinking Transformation (Humaniora 2001), Purgatory: anthropology of neoliberal postosialism (Poznan UP 2017 – in Polish) and co-edited Poland Beyond Communism (Fribourg UP 2001), Rethinking ethnography in Central Europe (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), and New ethnographies of football in Europe: People, passions, politics (Palgrave Macmillan 2016)

Marek Aleksander Cichocki, since 2004 is the Curriculum Director of the European Centre in Natolin as well as Editor-in-chief of the magazine “New Europe. Natolin Review”. From 2007 to 2010 Advisor to the President of the Republic of Poland and Sherpa for the negotiations of the Lisbon Treaty. Since 2003 he is also publisher and Editor-in-chief of the “Teologia Polityczna” yearly.  He is permanent Professor at the Collegium Civitas in Warsaw and visiting Professor at the College of Europe Natolin. Mr Cichocki is the author of many books, essays, articles and dissertations on international relations.

Grzegorz Ekiert is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Government at Harvard University, Director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His research and teaching interests focus on comparative politics, regime change and democratization, civil society and social movements and East European politics and societies. His current projects explore civil society development in new democracies in Central Europe and East Asia, state mobilized contention in authoritarian and hybrid regimes and patterns of political and economic transformations in the post-communist world. He is the author or editor of several books, edited volumes and special issues of journals. His papers appeared in numerous social science journals in the US, Europe and Asia and in many edited volumes. He is also Member of the Advisory Board of Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung, External Examiner in Politics, Public Administration and Global Studies at the University of Hong Kong and Member of the Club of Madrid Advisory Committee.

Jacek Giedrojć is the founding partner of Warsaw Equity Group, a private investment firm. Initially focused on privatizations, management buy-outs and other restructuring projects he later branched out into early stage technology investments. Prior to founding Warsaw Equity, he worked as auditor, civil servant and management consultant in Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Giedrojć holds a degree in economics from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, MBA from Harvard Business School and PhD from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Polish Academy of Sciences.

Paul Gradvohl is a historian specializing in contemporary Central Europe at the University of Lorraine (Nancy, Centre de recherche sur les cultures et les littératures européennes, France, Europe centrale, Europe orientale). He was responsible for social sciences at the Interuniversitary Center for Hungarian Studies (Université Paris III la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1990-2002) and director of the Center for French Civilization and Francophone Studies at the University of Warsaw (2012-2016). He has written about the recent trends in Hungary and Poland in a historical perspective (Esprit, Politique étrangère, Le Monde), on historiography, and associates Hungary and Poland under the umbrella of obsidional sovereignism, a specific EU practice inspired by non European models (Turkey, Russia, Singapore, …) and by interwar European nationalism. With Violaine Gelly he wrote a biography, Charlotte Delbo, now a pocket book (Fayard, 2013, 2017), about a French résistante who survived Auschwitz and became a major writer. 

Béla Greskovits is University Professor at the Department of International Relations, and Department of Political Science, at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. His research interests are the political economy of East-Central European capitalism, comparative economic development, social movements, and democratization. His articles appeared in Studies in Comparative and International Development, Labor History, Orbis, West European Politics, Competition and Change, Journal of Democracy, European Journal of Sociology, Global Policy, and Transfer: European Review of Labor and Research. His latest book Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery, written together with Dorothee Bohle, was awarded the 2013 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.

Michael D. Kennedy (@Prof_Kennedy) is professor of sociology and international and public affairs at Brown University. Kennedy has addressed East European social movements, national identifications, and systemic change. His Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation addresses those and other themes across the world, with extensions found here. Recent political transformations have moved him toward a more knowledge cultural and public sociology.

Kennedy was the University of Michigan’s first vice provost for international affairs in addition to being director of an institute and five centers and programs at UM; he also served as the Director of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.  Kennedy now serves on the Governing Board of European Humanities University and as chair of the Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundations’ Higher Education Support Program.  He becomes Chair of the Global and Transnational Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association in 2019.

Maciej Kisilowski’s research interests focus on the application of innovation strategy to various nonmarket fields, including public law and regulation. He received his doctorate in law and master’s in law degrees from Yale Law School, M.P.A. in economics and public policy from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and M.B.A. with distinction from INSEAD. He also holds another Ph.D. and M.A. in law from Warsaw University.

Since joining CEU, Prof. Kisilowski has established and directs the Initiative for Regulatory Innovation – a research center focused on finding creative solutions to regulatory problems in Central and Eastern Europe. He also designed and teaches a number of graduate and executive classes, for which he was awarded the CEU Distinguished Teaching including Award in 2016. His recent academic articles appeared in Law and Social Inquiry and International Business Review.

Elżbieta Korolczuk, PhD is a sociologist, commentator, women’s and human rights activist. She works at Södertörn University in Stockholm and at American Studies Center, Warsaw University; her research interests involve: social movements, civil society and gender. Currently, she studies civil society elites in Europe in a project sponsored by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Together with Renata E. Hryciuk she co-edited two books on motherhood and fatherhood in Poland and Russia. Most recent publications include two edited volumes: Civil Society Revisited: Lessons from Poland co-edited with Kerstin Jacobsson (Berghahn Books, 2017) and Rebellious Parents. Parental Movements in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia co-edited with Katalin Fábián (Indiana University Press, 2017).

Jan Kubik is Professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the Department of Political Science, Rutgers University in New Brunswick. His recent work deals with the rise of right-wing populism, culture and politics; civil society, protest politics and social movements; communist and post-communist politics; and interpretive/ethnographic methods in political science. Among his earlier publications are: The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power and Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989-1993 (with Grzegorz Ekiert). He has written on Anthropology and Political Science, with Myron Aronoff; critical analysis of post-communist studies (Postcommunism from Within. Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony, edited with Amy Linch); and the politics of memory (Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration, with Michael Bernhard). He received M.A. (sociology and philosophy) from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland and Ph.D. (anthropology, with distinction) from Columbia University.

Andrzej Leder Ph D., Professor in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Andrzej Leder studied philosophy and medicine in the Warsaw University and prepared his PhD in philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He works on the political philosophy and philosophy of culture, applying phenomenological and psychoanalytical tools, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis. Has published books in Polish: Unconsciousness Seen as the Void (2001) The Teaching of Freud in the Time of Sein und Zeit (2007), The Scratch on the Glass (2016) and two collections of philosophical essays, awarded a literary prize in 2004, available in 2013 in English as The Changing Guise of Myths. His main work in political philosophy Sleepwalking the Revolution. Exercise in Historical Logics (2014) was vastly discussed in Poland. He has also published articles in English and French philosophical reviews.

 

 

Tomasz Mickiewicz works on the impact of institutions on performance, and especially entrepreneurship. He also investigates economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe, and the 3rd edition of his ‘Economics of Institutional Change’ was published by Palgrave in December 2017 (with Elodie Douarin). He is the 50th Anniversary Professor at Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK; honorary research fellow at University College London; member of the editorial review boards of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and of Journal of Business Venturing; associate editor of Regional Studies, and editor of Post-Communist Economies. He publishes in Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of World Business, Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and many more. He completed all his degrees in Poland, including habilitation in economics at UMCS Lublin, but his main place of work is the UK since 1995. A ranking published by ‘Rzeczpospolita’ in 2015 listed him as the fifth most cited Polish economist.

Georges Mink is Emeritus Director of Research at the Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique (CNRS – France). He is a Sociologist and Political Scientist, specialising in Central and Eastern Europe. His research and publications  are dedicated to political systems, the sociopolitical evolution of these regimes, the conversion of ex-communist elites in central and Eastern Europe and the europeanisation of national political systems. His current research focuses on the question of transitional justice in EU countries and memory games. Georges Mink was Visiting Professor at Science Po, Paris (since 1973-2017), Visiting Professor (2000-2010), Director of Studies (2010-2012), Permanent Professer (since 2012-) at the College of Europe, Natolin Campus. Between 2001 and 2003, he worked for the French Foreign Ministry as Director of the Centre Français de Recherches en Sciences Sociales in Prague. He is member of several boards of international journals like New Eastern Europe,  Acta Politologica, Revue d’Etdes Comparatives Est-Ouest.  He is the currunt President of the International Council for Central and Eastern European studies (ICCEES). His last books: “History, Memory and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe, Memory Games”, (co-ed with L; Neumayer), Palgrave, 2013,; “La Pologne au coeur de l’Europe, 1914 à nos jours, Histoire politique et conflits de mémoire”, Buchet Chastel, Paris, 2015, 670 p. Polish updated version was published in 2017 by Wydawnictwo Literackie (Krakow).

Jacques Rupnik was educated at the University of Paris and at Harvard, is currently Director of Research at CERI and Professor at Sciences Po in Paris as well as visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges and Charles University in Prague. Since he joined CERI, Sciences Po in 1982 he has been writing and lecturing about East and Central European history and politics and European integration. He was advisor to president Vaclav Havel in the 1990’s. Executive director of the International Commission for the Balkans, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1995-1996) and drafter of its report Unfinished Peace (1996), member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo (1999-2000) and co-drafter of The Kosovo Report (Oxford UP, 2000). Among the various positions held: advisor to the European Commission (2007 – 2010). Member of the board of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague 2010-2017. Member of the board of directors of the European Partnership for Democracy in Brussels (2008-2013). He has been a visiting Professor in several European universities and Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard.

J.Rupnik has published a number of books and scholarly articles including Histoire du Parti Communiste Tchécoslovaque (1981) The Other Europe (1989), Le Printemps tchécoslovaque 1968 (1999), and, more recently, 1989 as a Political World Event: Democracy, Europe and the new international system, London, Routledge, (2014, with an introduction by V.Havel), Géopolitique de la démocratization, l’Europe et ses voisinages, Presses de Sciences Po (2014), Europe at the Crossraods published by the Vaclav Havel Library, Prague, 2018. Stredni Evropa je jako ptak s ocima vzadu (Central Europe is like a bird with eyes in its back), Prague, Novela Bohemica, 2018.

 

Andrzej Rychard, Professor of sociology,  Corresponding Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences,  Director of the  the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Main areas of research: sociology of political and economic institutions, post-communist transformation. Among last publications: „The Legacy of Polish Solidarity“, co-edited, Peter Lang Edition, Frankfurt am Main, 2015. Lives in Warsaw.

Kaja Skowronska is a post-doctoral researcher in the Citer « L’Europe et les frontières de la citoyenneté » project at the University of Nantes, France. She holds a double PhD in sociology and political science from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Political Studies in Paris (Sciences Po). She is affiliated with Zakład Socjologii Teoretycznej and Zespół Socjologii i Antropologii Kultury of the Institute of Philosophy and

Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and a Research Associate of the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI), Sciences Po. Her research has focused on the issue of migration policies in Europe, with a special focus on the Polish case, and an attention for the everyday, practical incarnations of public policies in this domain. Her current work is centered on the conceptions of citizenship and belonging underlying European approaches to immigration.

Marcin Ślarzyński (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences). Marcin Ślarzyński holds an M.A. in Polish Studies and Italian Studies, both from the University of Warsaw, as well as an M.A. in Sociology from the Lancaster University. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation in 2018 at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research interests include comparative-historical and theoretical studies of nationalism, civil society, social movements and right-wing politics in Europe with a special focus on Poland.

Joanna Wawrzyniak is a part-time Professor of History of 20th-century Central and Eastern Europe, European University Institute and a researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. She is interested in agents of memory, economic nostalgia, and the intellectual history of sociology. Together with Malgorzata Pakier, Joanna Wawrzyniak has conveyed the Genealogies of Memory in Central and Eastern Europe project at the ENRS since its beginnings in  2011. Her recent publications in English include articles in Contemporary European History, Memory Studies, East European Politics and Societies, and books: Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives (co-ed. with M. Pakier, 2016); Veterans, Victims and Memory (2015); and The Enemy on Display (with Z. Bogumil et al. 2015). She has been a visiting fellow at number of institutions including the New School for Social Research, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the Imre Kertesz Kolleg Jena, and the Herder Institute in Marburg.

Anna Wojciuk, Associate Professor of political science at the University of Warsaw (Institute of International Relations). She specialises in international relations theory and in educational policy. Wojciuk was a visiting fellow/scholar at Cornell University, European University Institute, Harvard University, and Columbia University. Her publications include: Empires of Knowledge in International Relations. Education and Science as Sources of Power for the State, Routledge 2018 and co-authored with Jacek Czaputowicz International Relations in Poland. 25 Years After the Transition to Democracy, Palgrave 2017.

Frédéric Zalewski is Maitre de Conférences (Associate professor) of political science in Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique (ISP, CNRS) and University Paris Nanterre. His researches adresses post-communism in Poland and Central Europe, populism and far right. He is the author of books and articles in this feld, among them : Paysannerie et politique en Pologne. La reconversion du parti paysan polonais PSL, 1945-2005, Paris, 2006.