Res Publica - Mobilizing for the commons special edition

10th Conference On Solidarity 27th European Meeting of Cultural Journals

special edition

The world is governed by ideas.

We are concerned with those that determine the shape of tomorrow.

Everybody is welcome in the discussion, regardless of differences in opinion. Ideas have practical consequences. An informed debate about them is the foundation of inclusive laws, and simplifications are inherently excluding. This is why for three generations we have been the predominant voice in the debate about the republic.

Organizers:

Miasto Wolności

Partners:

Co-financed by:

Ministry of Foreign Aairs Republic of Poland

Media partners:

MOBILIZING FOR THE COMMONS 6 Do Europeans think European? wojciech przybylski 10 Opening remarks franz karl prüller, senior advisor of the board of erste foundation 11 Mobilizing law for solidarity shalini randeria, rector of the institute for human sciences (iwm) in vienna, speaks to anna wójcik 15 Solidarity and responsibility. The difficult path of common commitment marek a. cichocki, professor of international relations at collegium civitas in warsaw, speaks to ariadna lewańska 20 A Europe of genuine solidarity daniel leisegang, editor of the german journal blätter für deutsche und internationale politik, speaks to samanta stecko 26 Solidarity in post-Machiavellian times ira katznelson, president of the social sciences research council (ssrc) and ruggles professor of political science and history at columbia university, speaks to agnieszka rosner 32 Solidarity as fraternité claus offe, professor emeritus of political sociology at the hertie school of governance, speaks to spasimir domaradzki 37 The future of an emancipatory process u lrike guérot, founder and director of the european democracy lab at the european school of governance in berlin, speaks to maciej kuziemski

T H E G D A Ń S K D E B AT E S 42 Solidarity is the way to avoid catastrophe eynote speech by ugo mattei, professor of international and comparative law at the university of california, hastings college of the law, k in san francisco

44 How do social movements change politics? How do politics transform social movements? i van krastev, permanent fellow at the institute of human sciences (iwm) in vienna, and aleksander smolar, president of the batory foundation, talk about the origins and role of mass movements in contemporary politics. chaired by paweł marczewski of the iwm 46 Liberalism, populism and the challenges of post-transformation in eastern Europe and beyond avid abraham, professor of law at the university of miami school of law, and professor claus offe, discuss the rise of populism in central d europe, as well as throughout the western world. chaired by sławomir sierakowski of krytyka polityczna 51 New social movements: Fight for citizens’ autonomy or resentment mobilizations? jacek kołtan of the european solidarity center in gdańsk, in conversation with michel wieviorka, director of studies at école de hautes études en sciences sociales, and david ost, professor of political science at hobart and williamsmith colleges in geneva 54 European Culture Fundation – Connected Action for the Commons

olga alexeeva

Solidarity and the commons

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n the second decade of the twenty-first century, issues of solidarity have once again dominated political debates on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, questions of inequality and solidarity have become intertwined – especially in countries that have implemented severe austerity measures. Over the past year, however, questions of both national and international solidarity have also been central when it comes to the treatment of refugees and migrants. These “crises” have led to polarization, but also to an increase in grass-roots mobilization expressing discontent with national governments or EU policies, and seeking to create alternative forms of community within European societies and beyond.

Solidarity requires a notion of the commons which was at the heart of the debates staged at the conference Mobilizing for the Commons in Gdańsk from 4 to 6 November 2016. The conference was jointly organized

by Eurozine, the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, Res Publica and the European Solidarity Centre as the 27th Meeting of European Cultural Journals and the

10th Solidarity Conference. Preparations for the event were made in partnership with Erste Foundation and the Mayor of Gdańsk. Finally, more than 100 editors and intellectuals from Europe’s leading cultural journals participated in the event.

The organizers wish to extend special thanks to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation, and Connected Action for the Commons network, co-founded by the European Cultural Foundation (ECF).

Special thanks also go to the media partners, including Gazeta Wyborcza Trójmiasto, Tygodnik Powszechny, radio TOK.fm and Trojmiasto.pl.

This publication presents essays and interviews authored by conference speakers and panelists, as well as reports from the debates. It was co-funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland and Connected Action for the Commons (European Cultural Foundation). Views expressed in the publication are not to be attributed to the official position of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. red

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DO EUROPEANS THINK EUROPEAN? In theory, European public opinion exists, stimulated by anxiety. But a true European public space, a res publica Europeana has never existed.

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uropeans, although not all of them and not everywhere to the same extent, already discuss the same issues in public debate. In order of significance, starting with the most significant, these include the threat from ISIS, global climate change, economic stagnation, cyberattacks, and – to a certain degree – the influx of refugees from Syria. Moreover, “European public opinion” would like to see the European Union play a more active role in solving such global problems.

According to a report from the Pew Research Center last June,1 most of us believe the EU should play a more active role in the world – on average, 74% of Europeans are of this opinion, with the percentage being highest in Spain at 90% and lowest in the United Kingdom at 55%, while in Poland it is 61%. The study also shows that at least half of us consider the threats listed above to be the most serious threats of all in our own countries. For example, ISIS is viewed this way by 93% of respondents in Spain (the highest percentage), 69% of respondents in Sweden (the lowest percentage), and 73% in Poland; climate change notched up 89% among respondents from Spain, and 54% among respondents 6

from Poland – the lowest percentage among the ten EU countries studied.

As regards the rest of the problems listed, there is not always a majority agreement. Less than half of respondents consider the following to be serious threats: the economic situation – 35% in Sweden, 38% in Germany, 48% in the UK and the Netherlands; cyberattacks – 41% in Greece, 48% in Hungary; the large number of refugees from Syria and Iraq – 24% in Sweden, 31% in Germany, 36% in the Netherlands, 42% in Spain, 45% in France, as compared to 69% in Hungary and 73% in Poland, where this issue appears to be the most vexing.

So much for polls. They indicate problems far beyond the influence of individual countries. How is it possible then that separatist sentiments are on the rise in Europe, the Brits have decided to leave the community, and countries on which the success of the idea of solidarity used to depend have ostentatiously deserted this very idea?

The explanation is simple. “European public opinion” exists only in theory. On paper Europeans may share the same fears, but in reality they experience each of these fears separately, side by side.

This can be illustrated with reference to Polish fears. Research shows that the Poles’ fear of respublica

outsiders is the highest in Europe. There are multiple reasons for this fear – one of them being that many Poles have hardly any experience of contact with other cultures.

Thus, completely in line with the will of most of its citizens, Poland decided to sacrifice the idea upon which it had been building its position for years – the idea of solidarity. The government stated that Poland does not intend to take in as many refugees as Sweden or Germany (the two host countries admitting the most refugees and where, at the same time, citizens are least scared of those fleeing the Middle East).

The strategic mistake of the PO (Civic Platform) government was exasperated by the PiS (Law and Justice) government.

In effect, the image of greedy Poles who do not know how to behave, reciprocate, or adhere to European standards started to emerge in western European media. This image is nothing new – it took years of effort to change the stereotype, and now less than a year was enough for it to return – and it was of our own making. Today, it is in vain to reprimand that it would have sufficed to help the refugees in the name of Christian charity, and to support in the name of solidarity countries that were having difficulties managing the influx. In reality, refugees would not want to come to Poland anyway, just as they do not want to go to Lithuania. Of an agreed quota of 1100 people, Vilnius has so far registered 11 newcomers, among whom one family has already fled to Sweden. Immigrants do not want to stay in the much richer, culturally diverse France either, but get to Germany and the United Kingdom instead.

Yet Poland is still scolded for its lack of solidarity – the horse has bolted.

There is no European public space for real debate where opposing arguments could be heard and responded to, where the debate could transcend national boundaries and shed light on various rationales and different viewpoints, depending on ideological hue but also on geographic location on the continent.

The ideal of a European public space in which political decisions remain tightly connected to public debate conducted alongside political institutions by a multinational and increasingly interconnected community of Europeans who share encounters through trade and exchange within the common market, and studying together at university, or conversations during increasingly frequent and affordable travels – this ideal was never realized.

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Attempts were made. The most important debate in which the problem of a European public space was posed – which also had the character of a postmodern experiment – was initiated over a decade ago

by Jürgen Habermas, who tried to assess the potential for putting his theory into practice.

On 31 May 2003, in response to the American invasion of Iraq and the split that was starting to grow between the countries of “new” and “old” Europe, Habermas together with Jacques Derrida and a number of other intellectuals published articles in several daily newspapers. Umberto Eco presented his stance in the Italian La Repubblica, Gianni Vattimo in La Stampa, Adolf Muschg in the Swiss Neue Züricher Zeitung, Richard Rorty in the German Süddeutsche Zeitung, Ferenando Savater in the Spanish El Pais. The initiators of the campaign also wrote one common text that was published in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zaitung and in the French La Libération. The aim – apart from reminding Europeans of their Enlightenment heritage and warning them against the fatal path of militarism – was to give an impulse to transnational debate.

The goal was to take the next step towards some kind of European public space. To paraphrase the title of Jerzy Szacki’s book,2 Europe had to remember that Europe could be something more than a platform for economic exchange between merchants, as well as a community more profound than one of princes dividing it up among themselves. It is impossible to overestimate the meaning and symbolism of the initiative. Successive generations of Europeans need to be increasingly frequently reminded of the experience of the Second World War, upon which the most durable project of peaceful coexistence among nations was founded – this memory is especially important in the face of rising nationalisms. Alas, it is difficult to speak of success.

Habermas’ intervention did indeed spur debates across the continent. But it also failed all along the line. The exchange did not have the character of a transnational debate. Polemical texts published in Spanish referred only to the article by Savatero, the ones in Italian commented only on the texts by Eco and Vattimo, German articles almost completely brushed over these debates, and the British press did not acknowledge the discussion at all. Such was the intellectual condition of the European Union at that time. A decade later, in the face of even greater tensions, we are no closer to

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achieving such debate – and this despite the spread of new technologies.

Facebook was launched only a year after Habermas’ project. Indeed, in the beginning it was possible to invest hopes in social media and online blogs.

But, yet again, there came disappointment.

Neither blogs, nor Facebook, fulfilled those hopes. A narcissist, one-sided monologue repeated by millions of voices quickly came to characterize this form of communication – no matter that it touched upon the same subjects, it was for the most part fragmentary, without deeper thought, and increasingly sectarian, leading to a state of affairs where, in response to today’s problems, the space of blogs and social media do not provide a platform for communication but one for voicing individual and social frustrations.

In parallel, the “old” media were undergoing (and still are) rapid transformation, increasing spending on technology and marketing, and reducing editorial staff and foreign correspondents. Ergo: they were all the more unfit to create a European platform for discussion.

In these new conditions, even repeating the humble results of Habermas’ campaign seems much more difficult, not so much due to technological limitations as to the dispersal of attention.

Along with the effects of technological change, which transform the space of media, another important challenge is the very human selectiveness of memory. Human brains cannot process at the speed of computer algorithms. What we need, at the very least, are in-depth debates and symbolic manifestations in public space, linking emotions to texts that explain complicated historical factors, which are sometimes difficult to accept because facts often become intermixed with socially shaped perceptions. For instance, the attitude of distrust towards Russia, which is obvious in Poland, is perceived with complete lack of comprehension in countries like Greece or Italy, which never experienced the same tragedies as Poland. Or, in another example, Greece’s wariness of solutions imposed by Germany, while understandable in Poland, is difficult to explain in Germany itself. In July 2015, in the midst of the eurozone crisis, Politico published an article by David Patrikarakos about Crete, in which he illustrated the deeply rooted antipathy of the island’s inhabitants towards Germans that originates in the brutal history of the last war.

This provided the possibility to see the reactions of the Athenian government to Angela Merkel’s 8

decisions in a completely different light and created an opportunity to weave a thread of understanding between Greece and Germany, which was becoming increasingly disinclined towards the former due to economic costs; and, on the other hand, it provided grounds for trying to understand how the legacy of Nazism forced Germany to incorporate into its political culture the imperative of economic growth, without which the fear of repeating the country’s tragic history would have grown. If only someone in the German and Greek press had taken up this topic, presenting different histories and perspectives in both national languages. But there was no room for this and the formidable article in Politico merely reached, for the most part, a limited group of the American magazine’s Bruxellois readers.

The need for a common European public sphere should grow in the face of the crises plaguing Europe, for which a common European answer is expected.

In other words, the greater the anxiety becomes about the situation in Europe, the greater we can expect the awakening of the common European public sphere to be.

Unfortunately such debates are virtually nonexistent in mass media. Projects created with this goal in mind remain on the margin of national debates and do not break through if they are not created in national languages and contexts. The English language, common in business and academic circles, as well in political ones to a certain extent, is often superficial, because it does not express emotions and symbols that can be conveyed in one’s mother tongue. Great initiatives like Euronews TV have modest results in terms of viewership, and slightly more ambitious attempts – like PressEurop, a portal that translated the most important texts from the European press – go bankrupt without permanent financing from the EU. Independent initiatives devoted to creating this common space like Eurozine – the journal of European cultural and political magazines – or Visegrad Insight, on which the Res Publica Nowa team collaborates with other editors from Europe, enjoy some success: for instance, texts such as those on the memory of totalitarianisms by Timothy Snyder do break through into media in various national languages – but the aim here is rather to raise awareness among elites than directly reach a greater mass audience. Only through the mass media does change occur and this is why, for such elite-oriented projects, what counts more than the race to rule the mass imagination is the attention respublica

of the editors-in-chief of newspapers and electronic media, who then use these sources in their publications.

The incessant efforts of Russian campaigns aimed at fueling national animosities in Europe may be seen as proof of the importance of this underestimated task. A mass campaign of disinformation, executed using the newest technologies, or the annual congress of separatists organized by the Kremlin, underline the threat to Europe, which Poland should understand the best of all. Putin’s Russia is not only a challenge and the source of major problems but, as a competing power, it tries to counter all attempts at fostering mutual understanding in a common European public space. It rejoices both in walls and borders and rising tensions due to a growing lack of comprehension in the face of awakened national egoisms.

Let us say it frankly – a theoretical “European public opinion” will not replace a common public space, and that space in turn will not exist without conscious political leadership. Europeans, and especially Poles, require all three more now than appeared

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to be the case a decade ago – even if only for building effective policies with democratic legitimacy. Without advancing public space, taking down physical barriers, but also genuinely profound and honest debate between nations, there will be neither understanding, nor peace in Europe – war will come, just as it did previously.

Indeed, an information war is already underway. If we lose it, another one will come, one in which we actually start killing.

1. Bruce Stokers, Richard Wike, Jacob Poushter, Europeans Face the World Divided, BRUCE, Pew Research Center, 13 June 2016, http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/06/13/europeans-face-the-world-divided/ 2. Ani książę, ani kupiec: obywatel [“Neither prince, nor merchant: citizen”], ed. Jerzy Szacki, Wydawnictwo Znak, 1997.

First published in Polish in ‘Instytut Idei', issue No 11, 2016

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I want to start my opening remarks by thanking Shalini Randeria of the Institute for Human Sciences, Basil Kerski of the European Solidarity Centre, Wojciech Przybylski of Eurozine and some of those already present ten years ago, at the inception of this series of conferences on solidarity, for this fruitful cooperation. It was exciting to put our heads together and discuss how we can take the “On Solidarity” meetings to the next level.

I believe that the situation in Europe and elsewhere in the world demands that the discussions here today among experts of such caliber are broadcast as widely as possible so that others may take note and be inspired and encouraged to act. This is why it was so important for us to bring an organization like Eurozine, and many other media partners, into these discussions on solidarity. I’m also very happy to see those who have sustained and shaped “On Solidarity” throughout the last ten years are here today; Claus Offe and Ira Katznelson, thank you for being here and for supporting this new beginning.

Here in Gdańsk, where the word “solidarity” acquired a resonance and meaning that signaled the death-knell for communism in Europe (communism itself being an interesting but disastrous experiment in reestablishing the commons by the way), I found this simple and beautiful definition of solidarity in the exhibition that we had the privilege to see this afternoon: “An attitude of joint responsibility coupled with the preparedness to make sacrifices for the common good – these make up the very essence of solidarity.”

And as a representative of a banking foundation that has, throughout its long history, always shown a strong commitment to social development and inclusion, I am also happy to be able to quote Adam Smith tonight. In his theory of moral sentiment he states: “All the members of human society stand in need of each other’s assistance and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. When the necessary assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, friendship and esteem, the society flourishes and is happy. All the different members [...] are [...] drawn to one common centre of mutual good office.”

I believe we are all aware that in our societies today there are increasingly large groups of people who no longer have the feeling that anyone, neither individual nor state, affords them anything out of love, gratitude, friendship or – least of all – esteem!

I very much look forward to inspiring, instructive and sincere discussions during the next two days and hope that in our discourse we will be able to reflect on what sharing in this “common centre of mutual good office” might mean for those who believe they now have no stake in, or nothing in common with, our liberal, open societies. I also hope that we will reflect on how much each one of us is prepared to make sacrifices in living up to our responsibility to create inclusive institutions and to make our societies cohesive and participative again.

Franz Karl Prüller

Gdańsk, 4 November 2016

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MOBILIZING LAW FOR SOLIDARITY Shalini R anderia, R ector of the Institute

for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, speaks to A nna Wรณjcik.

Shalini Randeria

Anna Wรณjcik

lncreased border controls have become one of the most important political demands in European politics. But is it possible to eliminate the porousness of borders?

Borders are ambivalent institutions. They are designed to control the movement of people and goods, but fail to do so, or do so only partially and selectively. Under growing public demand for greater security and state control of borders, we see higher walls, larger fences and more expensive surveillance technology being installed on the US-Mexico border, the India-Bangladesh border or the Italian coast. But these remain for the most part cosmetic, populist measures designed primarily to influence public perception. They are unable to prevent people fleeing destitution, civil war and hopelessness from moving across transnational borders in search of a better, more secure existence.

The legal distinction between migrants and refugees has long been rendered obsolete. The porousness of borders also reflects the demand for cheap labour in the economy, be it for domestic work, in the care sector, for low paid agricultural work or stigmatized sex-work. So while the state strives to maintain the illusion of sovereign border control, the demand in all western European countries not only for unskilled labour but also for skilled workers, be they plumbers and electricians, doctors and engineers, top managers and academics, or in the IT or banking sectors, draws these workers from within and outside the European Union on very different terms. In general one could say that those who are better insured are the ones who face the least risk when crossing borders, while those whose lives are at most risk at home and in transit lack any insurance whatsoever.

Why do goods and people not move equally freely?

Borders today control the movement of peoples and goods in highly asymmetrical ways. The entire legal and economic architecture of neo-liberal governance has been established to facilitate the free transnational movement of goods, certain services and capital. Liberalization of trade

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and capital flows is largely to the advantage of powerful multinational corporations, who are even able to sue states for the violation or undermining of their rights as investors. The rights of citizens, let alone those of migrants or refugees, are not afforded similar protection. Both states and corporations have rendered themselves increasingly unaccountable to citizens.

Do processes of transnationalization of law further or hinder the prospect of achieving global solidarity?

The transnationalization of law proceeds very differently in different areas, involves different actors and has different effects. Various fields of law are transnationalized at different speeds and in different ways. For example, the contrast between the field of trade law and those of human rights or humanitarian law could not be greater. The transnationalization of human rights law is a bottom-up process involving non-state actors, NGOs and social movement activists, who are the drivers of changes and use the existing architecture of international conventions to which states are signatories, in order to hold them accountable to their commitments.

Activists translate and domesticate fundamental rights protection standards in the national or regional context but also enable transnational solidarity. This complex process involves translating international human rights norms and anchoring them in local settings within nation-states.

However, those rights may be endangered by the transnationalization of trade or intellectual property protection law, which involves international organizations like the WTO but is also driven by large multinational corporations and governments concluding bilateral agreements. The lobbying interests and the lack of transparency surrounding current negotiations around CETA and TTIP are a case in point.

Visegrad countries have recently come up with the idea of “flexible solidarity” in response to the refugee crisis, which is meant as an alternative to relocation or migrant quotas. On a practical level this would involve more humanitarian aid and support for refugees in camps located in countries close to conflict zones. Can solidarity be flexible, or is this a contradiction in terms?

“Flexible solidarity” is an oxymoron. There can be no solidarity of convenience. Amidst the politics of fear, resentment, hostility, which govern futile attempts at building walls to fence ourselves into narrow national territories and cultures, Father Tischner’s resounding call to solidarity in his Ethics of Solidarity is more relevant than ever. His ethic of solidarity is a universalistic one, though deeply Christian in its roots, and arising from the very particularistic circumstances in Poland. He asks: to whom should solidarity be directed? His answer is: we owe especially deep and strong solidarity to those who have been hurt, wounded by other human beings, and who as a result have suffered avoidable, unnecessary and arbitrarily inflicted suffering.

It would be a travesty of his idea of solidarity if it were turned into a matter of geopolitics and instrumentalized for domestic or international political purposes. There is no contradiction between the EU pro12

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viding support to the camps in conflict zones and also taking in a certain number of refugees directly from the regions most severely affected by civil war. This would obviate the need for refugees to take recourse to the services of unscrupulous traffickers. And the EU would not have to outsource its human rights obligations to the Erdogan government. Greater humanitarian and development aid for refugees in camps for educational, health and economic purposes is an excellent idea that should be urgently put into practice. For it is the poorer countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, which bear the burden of the world’s refugees.

Why are these discussions taking place in Europe now? Why is there a demand for setting limits to solidarity?

Integrating migrants and refugees is proving to be a problem in Europe despite the relatively small numbers who reach our shores, in comparison with those who are in camps in the region, as has been the case for decades. Paradoxically, it is two of Europe’s great achievements that are the obstacles to integration, namely liberal democracy and the welfare state. Why do migrants and refugees integrate into working life in the US but into welfare in western Europe? European welfare states grant these newcomers relatively generous welfare benefits, albeit increasingly less so. And complicated legal regulations, language barriers and the need for formal qualifications even for low wage jobs, makes it very difficult for foreigners to enter the labour market.

Compared to the United States, the naturalization of immigrants in most European countries is a cumbersome and long drawn out process. Nevertheless, as Donald Trump’s electoral triumph shows, xenophobic sentiments can be successfully whipped up even in a country of immigrants. This is especially easy in a situation where political parties and elites have long neglected the plight of the many losers of neo-liberal economic globalization. But anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe also points to the alarming separation of “liberalism” and “democracy”.

Liberal principles demand adherence to the rule of law and to freedom of movement. Electoral politics in illiberal democracies, however, dictate disrespect for the rule of law and international treaty obligations. Populist parties, who represent themselves as the guardians of European values and Christian civilization, are advocating all over Europe a turn away from liberal principles. Democracy in many European, as in African, countries is simply being reduced to multi-party elections.

Can legal instruments be used to counteract the rise of ethno-centric solidarity that diminishes a more universalistic understanding of solidarity?

The rise of ethno-nationalism with its narrow xenophobic understanding of the political community is a political phenomenon that requires a political, not a legal solution. One cannot ban such parties or such propaganda in a democratic system, even though the spread of untruths in election campaigns, as seen during the Brexit campaign, pose a grave danger for democracy. The law can help to strengthen the rights of refugees and migrants. By conferring citizenship rights, they could be MOBILIZING FOR THE COMMONS

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included in the political community, thus giving them a chance to be involved in processes of collective deliberation. Today European societies also suffer from a democratic deficit because large numbers of migrants are disenfranchised, they have no political rights though they pay taxes.

Moreover, populist policies are whittling away at their social and economic rights as well.

Why does the law fail to adapt to economic and social realities?

The law is Janus-faced; it can be repressive or emancipatory. It can either lag behind or be far ahead of societal norms. It can reflect changes in society, or can work as a catalyst for social change. And often there is a gap between law on the books, i.e. norms as enshrined in the law, and law in practice. In many countries, labour law and anti-discrimination law affords women much stronger rights than they really enjoy in practice.

Despite the legal requirement of equal pay for equal work, this has hardly been achieved in practice anywhere in the world. Or take the opposite case, in many countries the law does not permit gay unions but gay and lesbian couples manage to live together nevertheless. The law defines the minimum that needs to be maintained, not the maximum to be achieved, or aspired to.

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SOLIDARITY AND RESPONSIBILITY THE DIFFICULT PATH OF COMMON COMMITMENT

M arek A. Cichocki, Professor of International R elations at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, Polish philosopher and political analyst, speaks to A riadna Lewańska.

Marek A. Cichocki

Ariadna Lewańska

You defend the concept of solidarity between states. To the call to deconstruct Europe, you responded with an appeal to find a balance. How do you justify your position?

The most important thing today is to define our position towards the cultural and civilizational changes occurring in the western world. I am thinking about the Internet Revolution. Our task is to adapt to the way the public sphere functions in accordance with the use of the newest means of communication. These new means of communication determine the reach of the public sphere and the scope of the transformation of democratic societies. We can observe this in protests, social movements and especially referenda, which have various causes, but point to one thing in common: it is increasingly difficult to maintain rationality in public debate, despite the fact the we use more developed methods and tools of communication. This phenomenon resembles the Gutenberg revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It resulted in 150 years of war.

Only modern states were able to reorganize public life and restore peace to Europe.

Did these changes lead to the deconstruction or reconstruction of Europe?

Rather to chaos. This is why new forms of organizing public life should come into being based on existing states and not through their dismantling. Europeans should not cultivate the naive perception that the external world has no impact on how we function. Instead, we should create

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new forms of organizing public space, and do so with an awareness of these changed conditions.

The theme of the conference was mobilization, a term from the military lexicon. How do you understand the term with reference to today’s reality?

This mobilization constitutes a very important change. Mobilization is a term far removed from everything that post-war liberalism considered desirable. It was believed that to keep things in order it is better for people not to become politically mobilized, because then stability is ensured. Due to the crises today, we witness a change of approach. Mobilization has started to manifest itself through various forms of protest, populist and anti-establishment movements, but above all, through referenda. Contemporary Europe was forced to accept mobilization as being justified in societies that were understood to function politically.

We also have to get accustomed to the fact that some of these forms of mobilization are troublesome, as exemplified by the British referendum. We are learning to live with the fact that societies in Europe are more eager to mobilize than before. This is also an effect of the lack of trust in political representatives, in elites. A loss of faith in figures of authority.

And would you invoke some authority to support your position?

Does Europe have intellectual patrons today? I am not sure. I was impressed by an interview recently given by Giorgio Agamben in Germany. He openly said that we must relinquish progressivist views of the development of Europe as a process of integration leading us to the future through the gradual breaking down of barriers and limitations. This revolutionary way of thinking proves to be inadequate to the reality in which we live. Ralf Dahrendorf also indicated similar problems. He considered thinking in linear categories – we can advance, recede or stand still – to be misguided. History and events do not occur this way. Reality is much more complex and multidimensional, and our experience is better illustrated by the movement of the knight in chess than a straight line. This is why I believe that, today, it is worth appealing to prudence. It frees us from thinking bound by the linear progressive perspective. Our task is to reinvent balance in the European Union, a Union enlarged by new political, historical and cultural experiences. In this new formula for balance, the EU would integrate these different experiences as common European experiences. As we act, we have to reinterpret our experience, rethink how to deal with what divides us.

Europe as an imagined community?

Europe is not an imagined community today. Making it one is a task that lies before us. I am not certain that we will succeed: in the face of threats, there is a strong temptation to return to old narratives. In my opinion, there is no return to them. Europe has to reimagine itself, and it has to do so in two ways. Internally, we must consolidate the enlarge16

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ment of the union, because things that remain unprocessed and unnamed lead to misunderstandings. And the other thing is that Europe has to redefine itself in relation to the external world, which is undergoing rapid transformations.

Will this be a Europe worth dying for? To paraphrase Benedict Anderson, can you imagine a Tomb of the Unknown European?

Anderson argued that nationalism, the national idea paired with state and democracy, proved to be an attractive and strong integrating model, unlike Marxism and liberalism. There was an important reason for this, which he tries to define: nationalism provided an integrated vision of man and world. The problem with European forms of integration is that they are weak in this respect. The sacrifice of life only takes place where there is a pertinent image of man and world. This cannot be forced or ordained.

Just like solidarity cannot be forced?

People are only solidary when making sacrifices makes sense. Unless there is a feeling that involvement makes sense, involvement per se is impossible. This is especially visible in the case of the immigration crisis.

It resulted from an attempt to force solidarity.

You mentioned both an understanding and a feeling of sense. Feeling is easier than understanding, why is making the effort to understand worthwhile?

In culture and science, understanding is necessary when searching for a new formula for describing the European experience. But in politics and in democratic societies, this may occur through the formula of the states that comprise Europe. The state is still the most legitimate way that we have of organizing societies politically. It is also the most rational mode of organization. Other forms – even if effectively mobilizing for the commons, even if they do have a tinge of internationality and cross state boundaries – lead in the end to spheres of particularism. This is called the identity bubble.

Today this formula faces several challenges, including various anxieties. What do Europeans fear today, what do they strive to achieve, and what do they feel responsible for?

Today we witness widespread fear of poverty, of unemployment, of insolvency, of war and conflict. European societies appear traumatized, and anxiety has become the leitmotif of political debates. Behind this lies a profound mental defence. One source of this trauma is that for a long time citizens were demobilized and assured they need not worry about the future, because the future is already decided. Progress gave the feeling of stability and predictability. And suddenly people in Europe realized that the future was not obvious and carried many threats. The financial crisis and the new geopolitical situation provoked a paralyzing fear in society. There also emerged the sentiment that the status quo should be preserved at all costs.

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The state as a tool for cognitive behavioural therapy, or just a brave state?

The state must be capable of creating alternative scenarios. The state is the structure that enables us to objectivize the future, to think with the perspective of future generations in mind. The state should create a space for rationalizing fears, it should be the instrument that allows society to surpass the horizon of its fears. There is no such thing today. The state is on the defensive. What is more, the political elites are more willing to cater to society’s anxieties than to try to deal with them.

And the aims?

Two basic ones: development and security. However, these should involve concrete actions, not slogans.

You have observed that responsibility is a separate issue.

Yes. And a very important one. When we talked earlier about the solidarity that is expressed through European’s policies towards other parts of the world, I said that solidarity should not come at the expense of responsibility. We should help there where bloody conflicts occur, where people cannot cope. But we should not take away people’s responsibility for their fate through our solidary actions. The discussion about migration policies is burdened with one-sided thinking: what can Europe do for these people? This way of thinking leads a loss of perspective as concerns independent development in the regions we help. One-sided solidarity can have dangerous consequences.

You see solidarity as a case of primum non nocere?

I see solidarity as mutual commitment. While building our own society and caring for our development we should contribute to the development and security of our partners in the European Union. Because we are part of one system that obliges us to engage in reciprocity. I find the overuse of the term solidarity problematic. I associate it with high ethical expectations. Meanwhile, the EU is a structure of interests. The added value of European integration is the fact that, in pursuing particular interests, a minimum of social responsibility is taken into account.

What is your assessment of the summit in Bratislava?

I think now is not the time to set ourselves ambitious goals for further integration. It would be better to honestly assess the way the EU functions. The time has come to restore internal balance to the EU, to regain the trust of the societies of member countries. To reinforce faith in the European project.

And what is in Poland’s interest?

Preventing the disintegration of the Union.

In your book Problem politycznej jedności w Europie [“The problem of political unity in Europe”], you use the expression “the slow crystallization of unity”. Could you describe this process?

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From the 1990s until now, our region functioned within an order that crystallized due to the collapse of communism. It was expressed through institutionalized forms of solidarity, aid policies, transfers of funds, etc.

This order was asymmetrical, it was subject to the logic of stabilization and the development of peripheries. This was how second-hand modernization occurred. The change we observe today has its roots it the fact that Poland and other countries in the region wanted to constitute a centre of their own. What we observe is an attempt at gaining a larger field of influence. This is called empowerment. By making our own choices we can commit painful mistakes. But we do it on our own.

Where does this leave mutual commitment to Europe and solidarity?

I expect journalists, publicists and politicians who shape public opinion to make the same effort in trying to understand the motives of Poles, Bulgarians or Latvians as I do in order to understand the motives of the British or the Germans. I know this is very difficult. It is very easy to forsake mutual commitment in exchange for clichés and prejudice. The migration crisis demonstrated how easy it is to create a situation where the cliché of the divide between East and West is used, how easy it is to revive old narratives. It is much more difficult to follow the path of mutual commitment.

Will this path lead to the crystallization of our unity?

I do not know if it will happen, but I hope so. We have still not completed the enlargement in a cultural and political sense. We still don’t constitute an equal subject in building the new vision of what enlarged Europe is. We are striving to change this status. We do so in different ways. Sometimes good ones, sometimes bad ones. The tools we use are sometimes subtle and effective, and sometimes they are crude, and cause crude responses. There is no escaping this. Thus we will either stabilize the new situation, creating a common and balanced vision of a new Europe, or we will not consolidate upon the enlargement process. If Europe falls apart, we will probably still be able to live divided, but the momentum of enlargement will be squandered. And no one in central Europe would want that. There is an expectation that this change will work out for us. And that the status of our region will change. That we will become fully-fledged contributors to the European Commons.

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A EUROPE OF GENUINE SOLIDARITY Daniel Leisegang, editor of the German journal Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, speaks to Samanta Stecko.

Daniel Leisegang

Samanta Stecko

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The idea of solidarity is known to be a Janus-faced concept. On the one hand, solidarity means a sense of belonging to a group that is based on common values and a common identity. On the other hand, solidarity takes a universalistic form, where it is based on an ideal vision of human relations and is future-oriented. How have these two concepts of solidarity been reflected in recent German political debate?

I agree that there are at least two types of solidarity. The first is this inwardly directed solidarity that we know mostly from the history of the working class or the workers’ party, and which basically means solidarity among workers. The second type of solidarity is outwardly directed and you could observe it in the way the refugees were welcomed in Germany at the beginning of the crisis. The borders were open and we opened our arms, cheerfully welcoming them. This was a solidarity with the weak, outside of the community. But there is also a third type of solidarity that serves to create a community by defining an outsider in a hostile way. This shift from the second understanding of solidarity to the third describes what happened in Germany during the past year.

In the beginning, this Willkommenskultur or “welcoming culture” was reminiscent of the Sommermärchen atmosphere at the time of the 2006 football World Cup; it was equally colourful, cheerful, bringing with it a specific lightness of patriotism very much akin to the other, bright side of German history, as distinct from the dark side of war. This happened a year ago, and I think it was fed by the misery that could be observed among the refugees, which made it necessary to open the borders at any cost. What happened then was Angela Merkel’s famous slogan “Wir schaffen das” or “We can manage that”, as a response to the refugee crisis. I think that this may well have expressed a genuine humanistic approach and that Merkel may well have meant it at the time. It was one of those very rare moments when she showed something like a sense of morality in her political approach, which is otherwise very pragmatic. respublica

But Merkel was unable to achieve two things: firstly, her claim was quite vague and she did not manage to fill it with content or explain what she meant. Maybe she did not want to and deliberately left it that way. Secondly, she did not manage in practical terms.

Things got increasingly out of control. The refugees were just placed somewhere and not taken care of in a responsible way. This led to growing scepticism in German society and consequently to hostility and even instances of violence towards refugees in Germany. There was a radical shift in the understanding of solidarity, away from the universal approach saying “Let’s welcome these war refugees”, to “Let’s push them out as soon as possible”. This is more or less what forced Merkel to make the deal with Turkey. But it also shows that beside the humanistic approach expressed in Merkel’s slogan “Wir schaffen das”, there was another, pragmatic dimension to it: she simply wanted to buy time and keep things quiet for as long as possible in order to get the political deal with Turkey, so that the political problem would be solved by others, and not by us.

Could this mean that the initial culture of welcome was not very firmly rooted socially and ethically? Does it mean that the other culture that has since prevailed, which you have called “the culture of hate” in one of your texts, will be a long-term trend?

I think that the Germans have lost the sense of solidarity concerned with the question of society or Gemeinschaft: what do we have in common, what is the common ground, what do we share? If Merkel had defined what she meant by “we can manage that”, there would have been a huge but necessary debate on what this “we” means as a community, as well as what it is that we can manage. Which can mean different things, it might mean: “we can get over these obstacles”, that is, an expression of pragmatic enforcement; on the other hand, it could also mean: “together with you, refugees, we will build something new”. But it was never clear what Merkel meant. If she had explained it or if she had opened a debate on it, then it would have been very interesting finally to reflect on what holds this society together and what we are able to share and to give away, but also what we might receive from new arrivals.

Unfortunately this never took place, and I think the reason for this was that the core meaning of this society had been systematically hollowed out during previous decades. This was done by turning the welfare state into a punitive system, where the idea of solidarity was turned upside down, as the beneficiaries were forced to adjust to those who were helping them and not the other way around. The relationship between the weak and the strong has also been turned upside down. The weak no longer have the right to receive help, they have to ask for it and to justify and prove this right on the labour market, otherwise their social benefits will be partially restricted or denied completely.

Do you think it was the same with the Greek crisis? How would you interpret this case in terms of solidarity?

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During the Greek crisis it was exactly the same approach: the Greeks are lazy and hence they do not deserve our help. We are not willing to share with those who work less and do not manage to fulfil our conditions. This austerity programme that we have all over Europe has also undermined the concept of solidarity within Europe. As a result, everybody shuts their borders down and we are witnessing a renationalization of solidarity, which is not defined by the question “what can we do for each other?” – reciprocity is the key to solidarity – but rather “how can we keep what we have for ourselves?” Merkel recently stopped saying “we can manage that” with regard to the refugee crisis. She switched to “we haven’t taken anything from anybody”, insisting that everything will stay as it is. She wanted to convince the citizens, especially the sceptics and those with right-wing views, that there is no danger of their situation worsening.

Countries of the Visegrad Group have turned out to be even more reluctant to show solidarity with refugees. During this year’s summit in Bratislava in September, V4 leaders put forward the idea of so-called “flexible solidarity”, such that each country is supposed to help in the form, and to the degree, that is most comfortable to them. Have you noticed any significant reaction to this idea in Germany, or to the whole process of the Visegrad Group rejecting solidarity claims?

This is very dangerous, as contemporary Europe is marked by a deepening, double divide. On the one hand, as a result of the financial crisis and the austerity measures imposed, we have the divide between southern and northern Europe – between those who receive funding under very strict conditions and those in the North, especially Germany, who benefit from the European economy the most but at the same time are not willing to share much. On the other hand, there is the divide between East and West, as revealed by the refugee crisis.

France has not taken in many refugees either. But the way eastern European countries rejected their responsibility, and discharged themselves of their moral and political obligations, shows very clearly that the concept of European solidarity has come to an end here. Of course, you cannot force solidarity onto people or states, you cannot demand that they show solidarity, you can only ask for it. But it certainly needs consensus and a mechanism of reciprocity. So this divide is something that you cannot fix institutionally, because consensus has broken down and is missing at this point.

A few years ago, the Polish ex-foreign minister Radosław Sikorski formulated a call for more action on the part of Germany in terms of European leadership. Do you think Germany has a kind of obligation to be the leading force in Europe with respect to European solidarity?

This would mean that Germany would have to turn its policy around 180 degrees and forget austerity measures. It may be forced to do so, if it wants to solve the multiple European crises and reunite Europe. In fact, Germany could play an important role in building a coalition of the founding member states together with Poland and other countries that 22

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are willing to reform and democratize European institutions with a focus on the European parliament – in order to finally settle the economic imbalances within Europe and build a Europe of genuine solidarity, one that is not only based on economic values and free trade.

The participation of Poland in this group is unlikely nowadays. What status does the idea of a multi-speed Europe or of differentiated integration have in Germany at the moment?

This idea of Kerneuropa or “core Europe” used to be quite popular a few years ago, Karl Lamers and Wolfgang Schäuble advocated it in the mid-1990s. It was then off the radar for a long time, but I am afraid it is one of the few options left to us – to build a coalition that is willing to step forward and bring in new ideas. One major problem that we have in the European Union, however, is the consensus system, which makes it very easy for countries to reject solidarity. They can always say: “This does not lie in our interest and we are not doing this.” We have seen this form of a renationalized approach clearly in Britain, in the result of the Brexit referendum. At the same time, majority rule could crack Germany’s hegemony within the EU. Maybe if you want to have an efficient but also a democratic, progressive Union, you need this core of European countries to define a vision of a future for Europe and to show more solidarity among themselves than others are willing to show. The danger would nevertheless be that it could split Europe in half, or maybe even in more parts. But I do not see any other way right now for Europe to solve its multiple crises.

Is neoliberalism to blame for the current decline of solidarity in Europe?

I think it played a major role. Neoliberalism with all its forms of deregulation, budget cuts, lower salaries and the enforcement of a punitive welfare system has undermined solidarity in society, as well as the dignity of workaday people. For decades now, their experience has shown that they cannot climb up the ladder anymore; that their kids will not have the same promise of prosperity that they or at least the older generations used to have. My parents, for example, were brought up to believe in a prosperous future. The result is that you can observe much stronger social competition in the education system, on the job market, in the pension system. The concept of society or Gemeinschaft, of being responsible for each other is being substituted by a system of competition, of being against each other.

For a long time, the ethical foundation of this European house was the remembrance of the horrors of war. This was what drove the European project forward. Do you think the migration crisis, or any other crisis, could lead to a new, ethical foundation for European solidarity in the future?

I wish it could, but I doubt it. Maybe for a core group of countries.

But looking around Europe, which country is willing to fulfil its moral responsibilities? Even Germany does not do so anymore. People are still dying on the Mediterranean Sea, by November this year the numbers of drowned refugees are already higher than last year. Both America and MOBILIZING FOR THE COMMONS

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Russia are either unable or unwilling to solve the conflict in Syria within the framework of the United Nations, so the only thing we can do for the refugees is to give them shelter and I do not see this happening right now. And obviously, we have yet to reach the climax of the anti-humanitarian attitude.

The EU was built on the promise of peace, something that is now forgotten but needs to be remembered now more than ever, looking at the conflict in Ukraine and at Russia’s threat to eastern European countries. But at the same time, Europe was also built on the promise of prosperity. So if you want to convince people that the EU is a project with a future, you need to give them a realistic utopia, which should also mean redistribution among European countries and some hope for this nearly lost generation of young, unemployed people. It is only by giving them hope that in the end you can have them fighting for something and no longer only against something.

Is this a task for the European Left? We can more or less imagine what the right-wing or populist parties propose in terms of solidarity – it is this closed, exclusive form of solidarity. But what about the Left? Is there any sign of a project emerging?

I am not sure, because the big problem we have today is that the political agenda of the Left seems to be written for them by those on the Right.

What I can observe in Germany is that there is no clear confrontation with those right-wing movements and that the mainstream parties are at least undecided as to whether or not they should address their claims.

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in particular are trying to enforce a security debate instead of a social debate, so it turns out that one year before the elections we are talking about security and not about equality! But security also means first and foremost social security and we are not dealing with this at all. The Left makes the same mistake. Die Linke (the Left Party) is also following this authoritarian impulse to some extent. A high number of former left voters and non-voters have voted for the Right, some of them turning to Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD), which makes populist-authoritarian claims.

So if the Left wants to respond to the European crisis, it has to return to solidarity and redistribution. It is mostly economic decline and demotion that made people feel they are no longer represented economically and culturally by the mainstream political parties. What we need is a revival of genuine social democratic ideas in Europe and this is not only a task for the Left, because in the past it was also the CDU for example that expressed some authentic social democratic sensitivity. We must return to the question of how the economy is to work for all Europeans.

Either we go back to nation-states, which is in a way against this European peace project and endangers Europe even more, or we accept not only the need to work together, but also the benefits of doing so, in order to have a strong Europe and a new European way of dealing with equality, justice and democracy. If you make the right proposal in that direction, nobody in Europe will refuse it. The only problem I see here is that no24

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wadays, it is the idea of leaving the Union that is debated all over Europe.

There is a real danger of a Frexit and a Nexit, Italy might be next, Greece might step out of the eurozone. Time is a factor here and I think Merkel cannot buy any more of it.

We need to revive social democracy in Europe. We need a trustworthy social democratic party to make people believe that there is still something like a real social democratic alternative in policy terms.

But I do not see anybody who could achieve this. If you look at Germany, the next election will probably not bring a red-green alliance [of the Social Democratic Party and the Greens]. This is because hardly anyone trusts the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to initiate a new turn and a new social policy programme, and because the party also embraced neoliberal policy about 15 years ago. In Germany, France or Italy, I do not see anybody who could represent a vision for a social democratic Europe.

Yet this is not much to ask for. In recent years we had more than enough wake up calls in terms of crises in Europe. It is our future that is at stake right now. Still, it is mostly the political Right that profits from the crises.

And I simply cannot see enough solidarity within Europe to oppose their policy of fear, resentment and hate.

Populist parties offer an alternative identity to those citizens who are no longer represented in the political system. It is a substitute dignity that is fed by resentment and racism. The right-wing populists say: “globalization has given you nothing, just fear, we can give you something better, something more than that – a nationalist, superior identity, directed against other groups, so that you can at least be proud of being white and French (or German)”. However, if you look at the political programmes of these parties, you will not find much social or economic solidarity there. The AfD in Germany is more or less a neoliberal party and in that sense not much different from most mainstream parties, but people vote for them because they seem to respond to their needs, which are mostly cultural rather than social or economic.

Can you see any resources for a revival of the sense of solidarity in Europe? Where should we look for them?

In civil society. I think that any attempt at democratizing European institutions or improving social or migration policies can only come from the bottom up. Europe has always been – and maybe this is the main problem – a top-to-bottom driven project. Its institutions were mostly implemented from above and there was usually an acceptance of this – but nothing more – within European societies. But if today’s Europe is to have a future, it must be rebuilt from the bottom up. If people are to live in this house of Europe, they must build it by themselves in such a way that they will be willing to move in and live together, united.

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SOLIDARITY IN POST-MACHIAVELLIAN TIMES Ira K atznelson, President of the Social Sciences R esearch Council (SSRC) and Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History Columbia University, speaks to Agnieszka Rosner.

Ira Katznelson

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Let me start with a kind of thought experiment. If Niccolò Machiavelli came to Europe today, what advice would he give to the European Union?

What a wonderful question. The challenge for the prince, the authorities, begins even before the EU’s current problems concerning social integration, the refugee crisis, minorities and so on. Firstly, Machiavelli would probably be shocked to witness that almost all of Europe belongs today to organizations, whether to the EU itself or to NATO, organizations that in principle take popular sovereignty as the basis of authority and of legitimacy. The democratic revolution that obsessed de Tocqueville is, in fact, taken for granted. There is no Ancien RÊgime. There is no Prince. There is no sovereignty that can fail to recognize the limits on governments, limits that stem from their chance to rule being only provisional, not because of weapons or war or revolution but because of the simple, accepted mechanism of going into a booth, selecting a name on a piece of paper, counting the votes and then, tomorrow, you are no longer the prince.

So first, when you ask what Machiavelli would advise, he would probably take some time though since he was a genius, he would probably figure it out: what kind of rule this is, what kind of rulers these are. But he would have been surprised in a different dimension. He would have been surprised to discover that these provisional, apparently weak, rulers were ruling institutions with capacities he never could have imagined. Not only do they have control over physical force and a quality of potential violence that could never have been imagined previously, whether from the air or otherwise, but they represent states that are much larger territorially than those of his princes, and that have three characteristics that did not exist during his lifetime.

The first characteristic is a claim to have indivisible rule over fairly large amounts of territory, and control over the people who live there.

A world of sovereign, national states of a kind that did not previously exist.

Second, he would have been shocked to discover the scope of institutions that belong to this state, that is, an ensemble of institutions specific to respublica

the state itself and not to any personal authority of a ruler – these are the institutions of a more abstract, sovereign entity. And third, he would have discovered that in today’s Europe, all these states have legitimating stories that are grounded in a very strong notion of equality among citizens.

Even regimes like those of Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin, which most of us would not consider as the most desirable of liberal democracies: they legitimate their rule through the notion of popular sovereignty and popular approval. And they win elections.

I think the first thing that Machiavelli would do is probably take a sabbatical, he was after all an academic, and think about what he had discovered. Then he would come back and say: “under these conditions, how would it be possible to ensure the territorial and population-based sovereignty of the state? How would it be possible to render the institutions of the state capable and, through the story of popular sovereignty, legitimate? And he would observe that today there’s a crisis at multiple levels, certainly in Europe, of capacity and legitimacy. This is a crisis that manifests itself on at least two levels: the level of each nation-state, and the level of “integrated Europe”. So his advice would be oriented toward asking how, under these conditions, is it possible to simultaneously strengthen the sovereignty of institutions and of legitimate normative stories? Both those of the nation-states and of the Überstruktur of the European Union.

He might offer two kinds of different advice, and neither would be appealing from the liberal democratic perspective: firstly, to create much higher walls and stronger borders. No non-European should enter Europe.

And no European should have free movement to cross national lines. And having guaranteed that, Machiavelli might say, legitimacy, capacity and sovereignty might be strengthened. But then he might be told that, under contemporary social and economic conditions, this is impossible. The economy requires that, even for every minute of the day, millions, billions of euros, dollars, zlotys, whatever, float across these borders, through a technology that states do not control. Second, he would learn that there has been a communications revolution that makes it impossible to shut out ideas from other places. Third, he would discover that even if people face high walls, they find ways to climb over them or dig under them. So what is the alternative to high walls? The alternative might be to advise that all of the walls be dissolved. To substitute networks for the modern state and its institutions. Substitute fluidity, flexibility: a genuine revolution in forms of governance, as great as that as the formation of original nation-states. But of course that would open up the question of identity: who are we without borders? Which institutions survive and which don’t? How would collective decision-making be conducted and who would make the decisions? What would happen to the concept of sovereignty, which might well dissolve? My sense is, and of course this is purely hypothetical, that first, Machiavelli would advise raising the borders and then, when he discovers why that is not possible, he might be radical enough to want to dissolve all borders.

If Machiavelli recognized that we have to drop walls and borders, he would probably think about some new idea of citizenship. Maybe the idea of solidarity would be something that could help build this new MOBILIZING FOR THE COMMONS

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citizenship. My second question is about the phenomenon of solidarity and cultural conditions. What is your opinion – is the idea of solidarity something universal or are there specific cultural conditions surrounding this phenomenon?

There might be a third option, which is that, while solidarity is a universal impulse, there are variations in both content, degree of intensity and the nature of the relations between culture and institutions that sustain it, which may vary a lot from place to place. There may also be very different dimensions that undergird solidarity. In the United States, of course there are sub-groups or group solidarities – Irish Americans, Polish Americans – cultural forms of solidarity, but these are not civic forms of solidarity in the sense of a common citizenship. The American form of political solidarity is one that might be called solidarity in a liberal tradition of civic citizenship; republican as well as liberal. It’s a bit like in a work of John Rawls’s, near the end of his life, where in his book Political Liberalism, he asked the question: how can people, who have different values, perhaps incommensurable values, share a common public space? And that common public space will require, not in his language but in the language of your question, a degree of solidarity in the sense that people believe themselves to be sharing a common fate, a common political fate, and therefore they join together in institutions, where everyone can participate according to the rules of the game, even though their value systems, their languages, their faiths may differ, even dramatically.

This is Rawls’s famous curtain experiment…

His curtain, his veil of ignorance experiment, he rejected late in life. He then said: Look, I made a mistake because the veil of experience denies any particularity. We are just humans. Pick any group of people, put them behind this curtain of ignorance and then they will create rules of justice, which I believe will look like this. But in his late work he says: That’s naive. Especially in the western world, ever since the Reformation, even among Christians, people killed each other for differences in values and beliefs, you can’t just put them behind the curtain. They know who they are. The question is: can we create the circumstances in which they can live together in common, solidaristic citizenship, of civic solidarity, what he calls “a world of reasonable plurals”. What makes it reasonable is that there are institutions that join them together civically.

Now, there are other ways to create solidarity. There can be solidarity based on faith, there can be solidarity based on the colour of one’s skin, there can be solidarity based on country of origin or the country in which you live. There are even smaller units of solidarity, based on villages or on ethnic tribes. The propensity to live not just as an individual or in a couple or even a family, but to live in solidarity with others is I think a deep human relational desire. But there are enormous variations as regards the manner in which it is expressed. Some forms of solidarity are so strong and cohesive that anyone beyond that boundary has no hope, is excluded, can never be a member.

Other forms of solidarity may be so weak as to be meaningless, and then there are some forms of solidarity that may have a different basis but are nonetheless sufficiently open and tolerant as to allow new members.

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Or, if they don’t quite fully allow new members, they recognize that there is no one single given legitimate basis of solidarity and that the community next door is much like them but they happen to have a different history.

I think it’s a case of discovering that kind of zone, a kind of middle zone, of solidarity which would always have particularities of time and place but satisfy a jointly and widely held human interest.

And what about this specific kind of solidarity that was mentioned today? David Ost said that there could also be solidarity within fascist groups. I was a bit shocked about this, because for me, mixing solidarity and evil is simply not possible. Is it nonetheless still solidarity that we observe in fascist movements?

I think that we would not like to call it solidarity. There’s a complicated English word that I had never heard, but read in a book by the political scientist David Truman. Writing about America, he remarks that even a healthy political system can become what he calls morbific, which really means sick. I think of fascist “solidarity” as morbific solidarity. It has a family resemblance to healthy solidarity, just like a diseased cell has a relationship to a healthy cell. If you think about, let’s say, Mussolini’s fascism: I read the diaries of his minister of aviation Italo Balbo and what they say is: “We represent the Italian nation, the whole Italian nation as one” – solidarity. They say: “We are better democrats.” Why? Because liberal democracy has divided parties, has people with money influencing politics, has a weak sense of the public interest and common good. They say: “We, proudly, are totalitarian democrats.” They use the word “totalitarian” positively, not critically, but happily. “We, totalitarians, use the state, to express and shape the solidarity of the Italian nation.”

It’s a claim about solidarity and it can only work if the people agree to it, because it was based on consent, not just force, there was force, there was repression, but there was also a lot of consent. Why did people consent? Because they believed that that form of solidarity was more pure, more cohesive, more effective than other forms of less strong solidarity.

So would we call it solidarity? I prefer not to. I prefer to call it fascism. But I think of it as morbific solidarity.

What about the cultural conditions for liberal democracy? We now observe in some European countries that democracy doesn’t work in the way we want it to. Do you think the reason for this is to be found in cultural conditions or elsewhere?

I’m sceptical of the argument that you must have strong cultural preconditions before you can have democracy. But I also think that in most of modern history, during the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we’ve learned that democracy is not the norm, or that healthy democracy is not the norm, and many democracies suffer either anxieties or fragility. So the question that really challenges us is a fundamental question of social science: under what conditions can democracy thrive? And you’re asking whether one of those conditions is cultural. Perhaps. But what we see, or at least what I think we see, is that we’ve had relatively established and stable democracies in the last half-century under very different cultuMOBILIZING FOR THE COMMONS

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ral conditions. Examples: postwar Japan, postwar or post-independence India, post-Peron Argentina, post-military dictatorship Brazil and perhaps various post-communist regimes. When you add that they are not exactly democracies as we would like them, then we have to say much more about what we would like.

But if we ask the following question: today, are there democracies in the world that we would at least be confident enough to call established democracies that have two characteristics? One: they have regular elections and the people who get voted out, leave. Historically, it is not true that rulers allowed themselves to be voted out of office. Second: these regimes have institutions, especially parliaments, that are law-making institutions, and the laws they pass are policy outcomes that are provisional, because the next election can deliver a majority for a different party, which might have a different view about how to regulate energy or the economy, or have rules for migration or whatever. And I guess we can ask third, whether or not these established democracies, or democracies that have these traits and do not seem to be so fragile that they run the risk of a military coup or a dictatorship tomorrow, can also guarantee some basic level of rights to their citizens? The rights to express themselves, to publish, to meet, to contest and so on.

If you look at these countries today, you would say yes, they’re not perfect, they may currently have governments that we don’t like at all, that have authoritarian tendencies and so on, but if you ask: are these, by historical standards, reasonably durable democracies? ... then you will find that the cultural basis for these democracies are enormously varied. That makes me sceptical as to whether we can find the right cultural basis.

I asked about cultural conditions with institutions in modern democracies in mind that are working toward a better society, like, for example the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna or other institutions or museums like the European Solidarity Centre here in Gdańsk. These are of course part of culture, part of building society. As a rule, do such institutions work toward a better democracy?

So what I was answering was a question about culture in a different sense, culture in terms of beliefs, values, the practices of religious faith... there are some that would argue that unless a country has a common basis in religion, it’s unlikely to have enough social integration to have democracy.

I am sceptical about those arguments.

However, now you’re asking me about culture in the sense of robust, strong institutions of civil society. And there I think it’s crucially important that there are zones of autonomous self-organization among members of the citizenry in order to be able to thoughtfully exercise the capacities of democratic politics. Yes, that I think is deeply important. We’re sitting here in Poland, in Gdańsk, where a political theory of the opposition emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that was very civil society based. But what they, and some of our friends, discovered was that once they were in power, the civil society model alone was not sufficient. They also had to think about state-building and democratic institutions and political parties and pluralistic parties, you couldn’t just have Civic Forum rule Czechoslovakia forever.

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I was in Prague when they were having their first election campaign after the change and there was a dominant force, which was Civic Forum, but then there were 40 or so small parties, some of them crazy, one a free love party. In this party, there was a woman, I’m afraid I might sound like Donald Trump, but she was very large and square, to me she looked like a caricature of a member of the Albanian communist party, dressed in dark brown clothes, looking very stern and, frankly, not very attractive. And behind her were pornographic pictures on television, explaining the values of free love. That was crazy. There was also a vegetarian party. What people soon discovered was: you could not have a functioning democracy with just Civic Forum, because underneath the civic emblem were ideologies. Some people were more to the right, some were more to the left. There wasn’t just a natural civic consensus.

Healthy civil society has disagreements, so then you need parties, but there can’t be 40 parties representing every little interest, from what you eat to how you make love to whether you stand on your head and wiggle your ears. What you have to do is create a small number of parties and what they also discovered is that the names of the most likely parties were the ones that democracies have used for the long time: social democrats, Christian democrat, liberal, etc. Because politics is about organized and somewhat predictable contestation between views on how the state and the market and how the state and civil society should transact with each other. And that’s what democratic politics is about.

Not about the right answer but about answers and then a competition among them.

Would you say that solidarity is also some kind of contract?

Yes and no. When I hear the word “contract”, I think of a rather unemotional transaction. I buy milk, I pay you four zloty. It’s got nothing to do with affection or commitment or values. And it’s a very efficient way to conduct an economy. We have contracts about property. But it is true that even in zones of life like marriage, which are not just money exchanges, there is affection involved.

We need some rules.

Yes, we need limits. There is a contractual element to it. In that sense, it’s the same with solidarity, but a solidarity that is simply contractual is never enough, you wouldn’t call it solidarity. People who speak about economic contracts, say, of a postwar world, which is now under stress, because there is too much inequality, traditional manufacturing jobs have disappeared, low-skilled people may not see any place for themselves in the new economy. If there is a genuine societal solidarity, their plight is also the plight of the persons who have not suffered in the same way. So there has to be a human and emotional connection across society. Economic solidarity may have failed. But if a solidarity of a broader kind never existed, it won’t magically appear. And I think there are places that are more caring, collectively, than other places, in part because they experience either civic, or religious, or ethnic, or civil society dynamics of solidarity. But pure contract is too cold for me.

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SOLIDARITY AS FRATERNITÉ Claus Offe, Professor Emeritus of Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance, speaks to Spasimir Domaradzki, Chair of the Department of Government Studies at L azarski University, Warsaw.

Claus Offe

Spasimir Domaradzki

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Professor, it is an enormous pleasure to have this opportunity to talk to you. We are meeting at the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk, during the 10th Conference On Solidarity. It is hard to imagine a better place in which to discuss how we might define “solidarity” today. I have the feeling that we observe alternative notions of solidarity that politicians quite often skilfully use as a cover for their own political agendas. But if we are to rely on the notion of solidarity as a cornerstone of European integration, we need to know what that notion contains.

Yes, it is all-important for intellectual purposes, for clear analysis, as well as for political purposes, to have a precise concept of what we mean by it. Solidarity, to begin with, is something good, desirable and virtuous.

Solidarity was been translated, rightly I think, by one of the speakers this morning, using the French term “fraternité”. “Fraternité” is a concept, a metaphor, which refers to a family, to brothers. Brothers are people who have the same parents and therefore belong to the same family. So the implication is that there is a reference unit of community, the members of which practice solidarity in relation to each other, but not with the outside world. That is transferred from the family to the nation. These two sociological entities are special in that they are permanent, they are thought to reach both back into the past, and forward into the future, for an unlimited period of time. That is the commonality between the family and the nation.

The second aspect of solidarity that is important to remember is that it is an attitude and a position for action, such that implies that if you are happy, I am happy. Your well-being is something that improves my well-being. There is a common pool of resources that both of us enjoy and I do my best to improve that pool so that you can also participate. For instance, to switch the frame for a moment: an economist may write, in an introductory chapter to a textbook, about the definition of income. Normally we measure income in terms of the money paid into our accounts every month. But you can have a wider concept of income, namely one that embraces the availability of a park, or a good education system. Then it is not about money: these are respublica

services and amenities that make our life better. And they are common resources. Everyone has access to them.

But the willingness to accept these common resources as something that benefits all of us is very, very limited in an individualistic society. People are unwilling to consider clean air, parks, a good healthcare system, police, schools, streets as “income”. They want to buy such things for themselves. So you do not want to invest in climate change prevention or the amelioration of the climate; but you do buy air conditioning for your home! Also the idea of a gated community: you buy into a housing project, hire a policeman and station him at the door, you buy your own security rather than investing in a public system.

As far as the first aspect – the family, the community – is concerned, it is not so easy for people in modern societies to say which community they belong to. There are many choices. Each one of us is not one person, in fact, we are at least four persons. We are workers, we are consumers, we are savers or debtors (we have a bank account) and we are citizens. And these identities conflict with one other. Also, we are Europeans, we are Germans and we are Berliners, in my case. So there are territorial reference points. Also we may be of a certain generation and a certain gender, and we are parents or we are not parents. We have a huge portfolio of identities that we can refer to; we may also be Borussia Dortmund supporters or stamp collectors or trombone players in our spare time. Many, many identities overlap and intersect and bring us into a relationship with other people. In terms of consumer classes, whether you rent an apartment or you own an apartment makes a big difference, also to voting behaviour outcomes. It may make a more important difference than whether or not you are a blue-collar or white-collar worker.

This enormous quantity of different identities makes it very hard to answer the question: who are our brothers to whom we owe solidarity?

This is actually how I would like to contextualize our discussion of solidarity – with regard to this fraternity aspect, this family aspect that you raised, and within the realm of European integration. Bearing in mind all those different layers of solidarity, we recognize that there was once a political project, a certain idea, that aimed to create a new European reality, in which there are bonds that make us a family.

My first question in this respect is related to the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and 2007. The dominant view is, that this is a story of the past, that this process is over. However, today, within our enlarged European family, we observe numerous alternative interpretations of what solidarity means. What impact does that have on the process of integration?

The original six had a historical commonality that meant they were somehow connected to each other through Charlemagne, and that is the ninth century. For a long time they are Christian and they have all kinds of commonalities. That is no longer the case, we do not have language, religion or history as a common background. Within the European Union we do however now have three major religious affiliations plus three varieties of Christianity plus a major element of Islam, particularly in the MOBILIZING FOR THE COMMONS

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Balkans, but also among our societies of migrants. I think that one way out of the dilemma is functional interdependencies that have evolved in the Union.

We are all tied together through commercial relations to chains of production. Some people naively believe that Audis are German cars. Not true, component parts are manufactured and assembled in 15 countries. The real interdependencies of the financial system, the communication system, the media system and of the education system – think of Erasmus programmes – are enormous. Whatever we do, we either improve or negatively affect conditions in other countries. This changes objective interdependencies of an economic but also a cultural, commercial and technological sort. Europe is a structure that has all these flows of long distance causations. But we have not reflected that in our perception of Europe. We are still fixed to a parochial, localist, regionalist conception.

There is a cultural lag of consciousness.

We should also see that this is not as innocent as I have just described it. Europe is a system of market-making without a corresponding system of market-constraining. Europe has been described, rightly to a large extend, as liberalization, as a market-making machinery. The euro is an apparently universalist, monetary regime, that in fact has built-in advantages for some, and major disadvantages for others, whose hands are literally tied. We have this curious and highly problematic structure of 19 states without a central bank and one central bank without a state.

This is unheard of, unprecedented. To quote Polanyi, that is a Satanic mill for some countries, who can only lose.

The euro and the “market-making Europe” creates a playing field that is strongly tilted in favour of some and to the disadvantage of others. However, this has an overall advantage: productivity gains resulting from unification are estimated at 6%, so it is better to have large markets. But in the European context, solidarity requires that the winners compensate the losers. And that is not the case. Defenders of the present state of Europe will say, after all we have all the agricultural and structural funds and you benefit from them and we pay for them – that is nonsense, it is simply not enough.

There are now two deep divides in Europe; one is between the euro winners and the euro losers, and that is the North-South divide, the Mediterranean vs the North West of continental Europe. The other is the East-West divide, which has come up again. I mean the Visegrad syndrome, where we had a situation throughout the 1990s, in which the slogans were: “we want to return to Europe”, “we want to join Europe again”. Now, in this region, there’s been a U-turn: “we want to get away from Brussels” or the “dictatorship of Brussels” or the “foreign rule of Brussels and Berlin”. Both divides have to be bridged and no one knows how to do that. We are in a situation where monetary compensation is no longer enough.

Some of the governments in Central Europe argue today that their identity is not for sale.

Neither the withdrawal of transfers as a negative sanction nor the increase of payments – as a positive sanction – is likely to do anything about this East-West division. It is identity questions that are now put on 34

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the table in accordance with the new populism that has affected both western and central-eastern Europe. That is a disastrous situation for the East-West division, but the North-South division cannot be cured by monetary transfers anymore either. This is simply because the willingness of people in the North to pay them is simply not there. There is an anti-European reaction in the North too. These rightist, populist, nationalist, renationalization movements are characteristic of the winners of the euro regime, which now include Germany with the new Alternative für Deutschland party. At the same time, there is a need for transfers. If you look at the Italian banking system and the need to invest in recapitalization, you see there are non-performing loans worth 340 billion euros in Italy alone. The amount of money that is needed in order to balance the system is beyond imagination. We are in very precarious situation in Europe.

You have emphasized the functional idea of integration. Where are the limits of this functional family that we are creating in Europe?

The four freedoms and the substantial differences in GDP per capita have created a dynamic of movement: movement of capital, of workers, of tourism, of services. This is developing very dynamically and often at the expense of the loser countries because they lose not just market position, but they lose human capital. The human capital robbery going on in Europe means that there are two thousand Greek doctors working in Germany. They were trained by the Greek state to the tune of 40 thousand euros for each doctor’s training. And they are missing in the place where they have been trained, in their country of origin. They work in Germany and other countries. Those doctors are a windfall for Germany and a catastrophe for the Greek healthcare system. This free flow of resources and factors within Europe that was so heavily advertized as one of its virtues has a dark underside and there are losers.

In terms of capital flow, 40 billion euros have left Greece per year for safe havens in Europe – terrible – and that needs to be controlled. The question is, what are the limits of this interdependency? These limits need to be resurrected. Borders need to be raised for capital flows, perhaps also for some kinds of worker flows – not in order to protect German workers, but to protect Greek patients in this case. The market, like every market, needs to be restrained. Freedom of movement is not a straightforward blessing; it is a satanic one.

The title of your book, Europe Entrapped, describes the situation as it stands. Further, we see that the euro itself, as you have already pointed out, is one of the main problems that we face and the big question is where to go next. You propose politicizing the European Union, to have a more political dynamic. We see in the current political discourse in Europe that we have two debates: one is about the concept of “ever closer union”, included in the Lisbon Treaty; the other alternative, very soundly expressed by most of the V4 countries, is to return to the roots of economic integration. In your book you make a very sound argument that going back is not a solution. Can we think about the politicization of the European Union, bearing in mind how flawed the EU’s institutioMOBILIZING FOR THE COMMONS

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nal structures are? The supranational mechanisms are mainly criticized for their democratic deficit. It is repeatedly underlined that people simply do not understand EU institutions. They do not understand why the European Commission proposes solutions that are inapplicable at the national level. How can you reconcile the politicization of the European Union going forward with the need to heal the institutional framework?

I am afraid I do not have a very inspiring answer to that question. The paradox that I have pointed out in various places in the book is that the more urgently you need institutional innovations, the more unlikely they are to come about. The consensus in favour of change is much less than what is needed. We need to rewrite the Treaties and also to establish something that is not just a Minister of Finance or a Treasury at the European level but also something that is an Economic Ministry and a Ministry for Social Affairs and Social Security. That would all be desirable and if the euro and Europe is to survive, it can only do so in combination with a politicization of Europe, which would have its input side in a European democracy, a transnational democracy, something that has never been tried anywhere before. I am not sure that this will work, no one knows.

But if it works at all and Europe manages to pull itself up by the bootstraps from out of the present situation, then it will only be able to do so from the two policy perspectives that I try to develop: one is to create a level playing field through a Europeanization of social security, starting with unemployment insurance. There are very original plans on the table, they need to be taken up. The other is politicization and democraticization, where you need to strengthen the European Parliament and make the Commission a government of a federal Europe. The parliament should be elected in open, European elections and then authorize the government to govern. The government should have taxing, lending and spending powers, which is very controversial. The entire European ruling class is opposed to that. Yet, contrary to nationalists’ arguments, this would be something that contains and constrains the market, rather than letting it loose, which is what has been happening so far.

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THE FUTURE OF AN EMANCIPATORY PROCESS Ulrike Guérot, Founder and Director of the European Democracy L ab at the European School of Governance in Berlin, speaks to M aciej Kuziemski.

Ulrike Guérot

Maciej Kuziemski

Democracy is not only failing within nation-states, but also on regional and global levels. The disconnection between ordinary citizens and elites is a saddening fact, confirmed every now and then by “surprising” elections results. Is there a solution that has not been tried before, which could remedy this situation?

There is a saying that you can always lose money, but you must never lose trust, as trust is the currency of the political system. There is no doubt that there is a reason for the citizens no longer trusting the system, because their interests have been betrayed. The public good has been betrayed in the way we handle economic crises. We socialized bank debts, we made them public and that was a betrayal of the common good and the people’s interests. The elites who shape the system completely lost sight of common decency and fooled people. I think that the key dividing line in the discussion is between legality and legitimacy. We had a system that was in one respect perfectly legal, many of the bailouts were legal, but were they legitimate? That leads us to question who is shaping the system. And it is obviously those elites who are multilingual, well-travelled and agenda-setting, which makes for a clear asymmetry of power.

Let’s take a step back. Do you think that the financial crisis of 2008 was the defining moment in which the elites betrayed the populace, or had this betrayal already taken place beforehand? A few instances come to mind, of when it might have occurred – such as the failure of the process to ratify an EU constitution, and the repeated referendums on EU accession. In each case, the elites generally tended to think they knew better than the people.

Obviously it is hard to say when exactly the crunch came. It is surely more a matter of a process. Still, I would argue that the dynamics of this banking crisis was the trigger, something that the data makes very clear.

For instance, between 2012 and today, Marine Le Pen gained fifteen percentage points in the French polls. There is a clear correlation between

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the rise of populism and the moment during the June 2012 European Council meeting – which I consider the trigger for what ensued – in which decision-makers gave up on seeking a solution to the banking crisis.

We could have had a European Hamiltonian moment, that is, a common redemption scheme,1 which would have meant saying “united we stand behind our banks”. Instead we disentangled the banking system country by country, and every state signed up for being responsible for its own banks. This bought us time, but we didn’t use it well. That was the moment when people lost trust in the political class. In a Marxist analysis, money matters more, so the moment people notice the crisis hit their own pockets constitutes yet another level of awareness, as distinct, for instance, from the issue of Turkey’s potential EU accession.

Was communication between the elites and EU citizens as honest as it could have been? How did the rise of populism really begin?

Before everything turned sour, and long before right-wing, proto-fascist, identitarian populism started to emerge, it was the Left who cared for the classes populaires 150 years ago. The classes populaires was the backbone of the Left and of social democracy. Today, social democracy no longer cares for its backbone. People of the Left can no longer form a class identity, and that fuels the current populist mood. As Didier Eribon describes very clearly in Retour à Reims, the moment you lack class identity, the only identity that you can be provided with is national identity. So national identity becomes a substitute for a class identity that is no longer possible. Richard Rorty already wrote in the 1970s that the structural problem of the Left is that it needs to combine value liberalism with economic liberalism. The Left always wanted to have a cosmopolitan, humanist agenda, but liberalism always comes as part of a package. You cannot choose only value liberalism as opposed to economic liberalism, and vice versa. Yet the Right always wants economic liberalism without value liberalism, and the Left only wants value liberalism and not economic liberalism. The problem, Rorty claims, is that the intellectual cosmopolitan Left can no longer cater to the identitarian needs of the workers. So the Left betrays its own backbone and the Right does the same, because it cannot cater to economic liberalism without telling its electorate: OK, you want the cheap labour? Then you need to take in the refugees!

You have recently written that creating the European Republic involves the creation of European identity.2 What incentive is there for European citizens to care for one another? Because, as long as we continue to operate within national echo chambers, I don’t see any incentive for change.

There are no obvious solutions to this mess, no quick solutions; we are in for the long haul. In my book, I don’t really defend European identity in the sense of one identity that is a cultural identity. I distinguish emphatically between normative unity and the cultural identity part provided by regions, languages, foods or whatever. I think that the European motto that says we want “unity in diversity” is precisely this: we want normative unity, offering cultural identity. And it is very important to note that this 38

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cultural identity does not come from the nation-state. For instance, if you look at the nation-building process in France, it was an anti-cultural and anti-regional movement. La Fête de la Fédération of 1790 basically organized the central state against the French regions, against the many French languages like Norman, Alsatian, Basque and so on. The real question for today is: can we extend the frame of normative unity and culture diversity so that it is no longer the French frame or the Spanish frame or the German frame or the Polish frame, and make it European? Once again, this is an open question today. You are right to say that we are organized into national constituencies, and I am not against nation-states, because I can see that the nation-state is a predecessor of the emancipatory movement that I want now – and which is just a case of extending the normative frame. And the nation-state was, for the last 300 years, good enough in terms of providing social equality. However, today, we need to organize an emancipatory process in which we extend the boundaries of the normative framework and create a republic of European citizens who are equal in front of the law. We would extend the normative, the legal borders such that we remain culturally diverse and at the same time introduce, for instance, common European unemployment insurance. Such proposals are not utopian, they are on the table and they would have served us in the banking crisis.

What drives these dynamics of change, and who would be in charge of the process? And if the process is not designed in a democratic way, would it be legitimate and would European citizens accept it?

I am often told that I am a radical or a revolutionary, but both the French Revolution and the Revolution of 1989 brought good things, we do not want to put this into question. The Latin word revolvere means “returning to the origins” and in that sense I always argue that I am not radical.

I am just talking about the commonplace: first, if you want to construct political unity, citizens need to be equal in front of the law. Second, if you want to organize democracy, you need a division of powers. We have achieved neither. In the current context, the EU keeps us within national containers. Therefore, firstly, we are not equal in front of the law, and we cannot organize a political system in which we as citizens are the sovereign. We are systematically torpedoed by the European Council playing national cards, one against the other. That is the core argument.

In many respects, the digital revolution diverts citizens’ interest away from the state. Should mandatory voting be introduced?

Mandatory voting might be useful in reminding people that we have a duty toward the collective and that this duty might be expressed through voting in elections. But is it the appropriate tool? I would say no.

This year, David Van Reybrouck published a brilliant book entitled Against Elections: he tracks the last 300 years of democracy, asking the question: what was democracy after the French and American Revolutions? It consisted mostly of local and regional town-hall meetings, it was sort of similar to the Swiss model. One has to distinguish between participation and plebiscite though. The higher the level of abstraction in a plebiscite, MOBILIZING FOR THE COMMONS

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the more likely it is to turn sour. But participation always takes place in local or regional contexts, where one can maintain an overview, where matters remain manageable and transparent.

And then it gets interesting. Reybrouck reminds us what ballots actually meant historically: ballots were a system of randomly choosing citizens who were for a period of time responsible for the collective good. In the republic of Naples or Venice, people were selected to leave their homes and live in the town hall for the three months, where they were bound by duty to arbitrate the public good. In three hundred years of the history of modern democracy, democracy was never understood to be merely the act of voting. Yet we now formally understand democracy as a matter of voting every four years. Today, as Colin Crouch would put it, you can always vote, but you have no choice. And now we see the people standing in the streets, who without understanding political theory understand that they have a right to be in control of the situation.

From ancient times onward, democracy was always more about participation. The only thing we have to do is to think how to organize new forms of collective participation and decision-making in the digital age.

There are some very interesting concepts on the table – if you look for example at Podemos, they have a proposal that instead of voting in the local constituency, citizens are granted the right to actively take part in e.g. four legislative procedures of their choice. That’s basically one way of reconstructing Rose Valland’s and David von Reybrouck’s understanding of town-hall meetings for the digital age!

Do you perceive a way forward for a Europe facing Brexit, as the major elections of 2017 approach? Given the current state of affairs, what is the next concrete step and who should it take?

I think we always overestimate the degree to which we drive history cognitively: as if we knew what we wanted and we plan accordingly, and take history in a particular direction. But as John Lennon said, life is what happens while you are thinking about it; well, history happens while we are thinking about how to manage it. If you look at the way people sleepwalked into World War I, and how the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo was just a little headline on the last page of Vienna’s newspapers in June 1914 – nobody saw what was coming but then it triggered World War I. On 8 November 1989, nobody would have said that the Berlin Wall will come down, I was promised for 40 years that it would happen, but I stopped thinking that it ever would, and then it did happen. Sometimes history has its own momentum and its own dynamics. We need to be ready for the moment in which history triggers an opening. And I think that history is somehow opening as we speak and that the paradigms we once had no longer work. Am I saying that we control the door of history that is opening? No. My European Republic will not be established at the next EU council. And Merkel and Hollande will not sign it off.

Is the digital revolution an asset for proponents of a new order? That which is online is not very compatible with the offline, in the sense that the virtual distorts the value of the real.

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Yes, and it links back to thinking that politics is rational choice! However, politics is always about knowledge orders in the Foucaultian sense, and we have no real logical evidence that intuition and emotions preclude rational decisions. Still there are answers of common decency: first, make people sovereign in the Kantian sense by educating them to distinguish between what is true and what is false. Somehow, in the process of education, we lost the heritage of basically ... thinking. In the system we are in, thinking per se no longer has any value. We have already entered the new era of cyber-wars, and we have to make sure that our value agenda, that is European humanism, is defended in the digital space. More importantly, we have to ensure that our agenda doesn’t slip into the “security first” category, since in times of change it is easy to delve into militarisation and surveillance. As Hannah Arendt said – politics is about freedom and the guarantee of freedom and nothing else. You can be very secure in prison, but that is not the goal of politics.

The battle will be tough, as it undermines many corporate interests and the state monopoly too.

I agree, there is for instance the question about property rights and who owns the internet. Is the internet free? These are battles that are fought by the likes of Jacob Applebaum, who have the same goals on their agenda as us. We are fighting for democracy, they are fighting for the internet. It is a battle about property and ownership. Who owns the Earth?

Who owns an idea? If you read all the ancient texts from Gilgamesh, through the Bible to Yoga Sutras, whatever you read in the history of ideas, everyone agrees that you can possess anything but only during the time you are on Earth and no longer. Even Goethe claims that what you inherit, you must first earn in order to possess. However to possess something, do you need to own it? It is a very different thing.

The deconstruction of parties, the deconstruction of states and the discovery of new decision-making processes needs to be forged together with the deconstruction of the notion of property. We are certainly in a new loop. Innovation drives humankind, but the moral question is, are able to use the things we invent for our own good? As long as we are able to grasp the process and analyse it, we will figure it out, just as we are figuring out now how to close nuclear power plants.

1. A reference to the scheme originally proposed in detail by Alexander Hamilton, shortly after he became the first United States Secretary of the Treasury in 1789.

The scheme offered a federal solution for dealing with otherwise unsustainable debts left over from the American revolutionary wars. Cf., for example, Ronald McKinnon, “Oh, for an Alexander Hamilton to save Europe!”, Financial Times, 18 December 2011 [ed.].

2. See Ulrike Guérot, Warum Europa eine Republik werden muss! Eine politische Utopie [“Why Europe needs to become a republic. A political utopia], Dietz, 2016

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THE GDAŃSK DEBATES

SOLIDARITY IS THE WAY TO AVOID CATASTROPHE With a lively opening session, the 10th Conference on Solidarity and the 27th European Meeting of Cultural Journals commenced under the shared title “Mobilizing for the Commons”, an event organized by the European Solidarity Centre, Eurozine, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and Res Publica Foundation.

The keynote speech was delivered by Ugo M attei, Professor of International and Comparative Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco, and full Professor of Civil Law at the University of Turin. His most recent book is a manifesto for the commons and provides a theoretical basis for resistance against neoliberalism. Here are the key points from his speech:

1.

2.

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How to achieve solidarity: is law part of the problem or part of the solution? The short answer would be that law is much more part of the problem today.

Studying the commons as a legal notion requires a historical understanding of how the institutions of modernity developed, and how legal institutions became very powerful instruments for transforming commons into capital.

In accordance with traditions of modern thought, we tend to think of sovereignty and property in opposition to one another. We can discern this opposition in the narrative of the Left, and its demands for more state sovereignty and less private property; whereas the Right wants more private property and less state sovereignty. This opposition is ideological, because both private property and state sovereignty are the products of the same intellectual currents at the same historical moment. Both developed in the early modern period, along with ways of imagining

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the state as a legal person capable of deciding over its territory in the way that a private owner makes decisions about his property. With these two concepts comes the possibility of transforming commons into capital.

The commons are institutions of inclusion and of solidarity; they diffuse power and embrace collective intelligence. What we now see everywhere however, is that most political reform tends to concentrate power exclusively in the hands of executives.

Migration from the Global South poses the biggest challenge to solidarity today. However, it is not possible to talk about migration without due consideration of an ecological perspective. The West consumes much more resources then the Global South. It is simply not possible for the entire world population to live as people do in California, for example. The current ecological balance can only be maintained because there are places in the world where people respublica

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consume a much smaller share of global resources.

The law provides artificial strategies for ensuring that the global situation remains this way. There are no borders to capital, yet people who come to Europe for their fair share of global resources cannot move freely or legally across national borders. The legal form of capital is the modern corporation, which can go everywhere and leave whenever it seems expedient to do so. In this sense, it is more powerful than the state.

The rule of law is considered a sign of civilization.

But the law does not exist somewhere “out there” as such, it exists only if people are willing to obey it. An ecological understanding of the law has to break completely with so many received ideas about legality, which are deployed in the very notion of the rule of law that supposedly distinguishes us as being “developed”. The fact is however, that human beings will not survive on this planet outside of solidarity.

If you go to the mountains and you ignore the law of gravity, you die. If we, as a society, ignore the laws

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of ecology, which are as strict as the law of gravity, the consequence is also death. The only difference is that we do not see it right away, as when falling from a mountain. If we realize now where we are heading, we still have time to use all our resources, technology and our sense of solidarity to avoid catastrophe.

Ugo Mattei insists that if the problem of the overconsumption of resources is not dealt with, it will lead to ecological catastrophe. The exploitation of the Global South by the West is one of the key causes of this situation. Yet while capital flows, embodied in global corporations, cross national borders unimpeded and without limit, vast swathes of humanity cannot legally and freely cross the same borders. Law creates an unjust situation that has to be overcome by a paradigm shift in legal thought, something that would require a great sense of human solidarity and that may just help us avoid ecological catastrophe.

Summary by Jakub Szymczak

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HOW DO SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CHANGE POLITICS? HOW DO POLITICS TRANSFORM SOCIAL MOVEMENTS? New social movements have dominated the political discourse of the last decade, at least since the economic crisis of 2008. They are extra-partisan, loosely organized, and unsure about their impact. So do social movements matter in politics?

Ivan K rastev, permanent fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and associate editor of Europe’s World, met A leksander Smolar, president of the Batory Foundation and deputy chairman of the IWM, to talk about the origins and role of mass movements in contemporary politics. The discussion was chaired by Paweł M arczewski of the IWM.

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he way in which scholars define social movements is not so useful for thinking about the commons, Ivan Krastev notes. The question is why people engaging in such endeavours call them social movements at all, rather than parties, unions or political initiatives. The answer is deeply conceptual: people have become more reluctant to engage in partisanship. Participants in social movements wish to represent some kind of totality – Donald Trump calls his supporters a movement too.

This tendency should not, however, be understood as a penchant for the totality of an idea or belief, 44

for it primarily concerns the intensity of the sentiment at work. Despite the many virtues of a political system based on equality, one thing that elections do not do is differentiate between practical and emotional levels of engagement. Everyone, whether they are interested in politics or not, has a single vote that carries an identical weight. Of paramount importance to protesters however, is the acuteness of opposition. Thus, the success of a social movement cannot be reduced to an electoral victory; its main purpose is emotional, not practical.

This emotional focus of mass manifestations simultaneously provides for both their best, and worst, aspects. They can effectively articulate new messages in the public sphere and produce new social energy. respublica

However, this energy can later be hijacked by anyone and used for any purpose whatsoever. Occupy Wall Street is a stark example of this phenomenon. Opposition to unlimited free trade inspired the inclusive and liberal campaign of senator Bernie Sanders as well as Donald Trump’s isolationist agenda.

The unpredictability of social movements is accelerating today, as the energy they generate is no longer channelled towards achieving discernible goals. Twenty years ago, revolutions used to have political names – fascist, communist, etc. – now they are named after companies instead, usually the ones that own the social medium where the driving idea was first propagated. Thus the outcome of the mobilization and the desire of the people remain unclear, beyond the urge to protest itself.

The volatility of mass movements shapes the political institutions that they produce, though in a rather ironic fashion. Although contemporary social movements usually claim to be inclusive, respectful of minorities and based on equality, the political parties that (rarely) ensue tend to be the most conservative and hierarchical in structure, like for example Podemos.

One explanation for this paradox might stem from the fact that the legitimacy of such protests disappears the moment they leave the streets.

Finally, the difficulty that democratic systems run into when trying to cope with social movements has its roots in the tendency of these systems to at once overdramatize and trivialize the political process – as de Tocqueville noticed well over two hundred years ago. During the campaign season, every election is the most important election and the very survival of our world is at stake. But once the votes are cast, trivialization kicks in – you can live with the outcome until the ballots open again. This is not how protests work.

For social movements, what matters is what happens now, the next election does not matter. They are not demobilized like democratic oppositions.

Aleksander Smolar doubts whether mass protests keep their supporters mobilized in contrast, as it were, to the routine of conventional democratic opposition. Smolar quotes Zygmunt Bauman, who sees social movements as a modern equivalent of medieval carnival.

Not only do they offer very little opportunity for lasting change, they might even help stabilize the status quo.

Nonetheless, counters Krastev, we see well-documented movements that seem at first to have little effect on the world and then, with the benefit of several decades’ hindsight, turn out to have been THE GDAŃSK DEBATES

decisive moments in history, like the 1968 revolution, among more recent examples.

This will probably prove to be the case with contemporary protests too. They can be seen as reactions to the ultimate paradox of the globalized liberal order: how come we are freer than ever before and yet still have so little control over our societies? We can change the government but not policies, and especially not economic policy.

This paradox prompts authoritarian tendencies. Why are people who despise the elites willing to allow so much power to be concentrated in a populist government? The idea behind such a scenario is simple: the only way to ensure that the government remains responsible is to give it a lot of power. Sure, there is a risk that they will not give it back. But people got tired of liberal democracy’s diffusion of power, which makes effective control impossible. When this diffusion is so advanced that no one is in fact fully responsible for anything, then no one can be blamed for failures or wrongdoings. And knowing whom to blame is necessary in order to control political power. This is why Jarosław Kaczyński touches upon the real problem when he talks about fighting the rhetoric of impossibility.

However, a situation in which there is no real choice in terms of policy is not at all new, retorts Smolar. It was already a reality in Gaullist France, where election results were not the subject of heated debate because the economic effects of government policies were favourable. The difference between then and now is that people no longer believe in the efficacy of policies, hence all the frustration.

Krastev agrees, albeit on a somewhat metaphysical level. Perceptions of time have changed, he says. Liberal democracies must be at least moderately optimistic about the future – whatever happens, it will be alright. But if enough people refuse to share this hope, the system cannot work properly.

Also, we now know – both in theory and in practice – that social inequalities are not resolved by the poor simply getting richer. There must also be a relative decline in the conditions enjoyed by the rich too. This is the message of all populists out there, Donald Trump as well as eastern European authoritarians like Viktor Orbán or Kaczyński, but also of books like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century – which, nota bene, Kaczyński used to recommend.

Summary by Borys Jastrzębski 45

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LIBERALISM, POPULISM AND THE CHALLENGES OF POST-TRANSFORMATION IN EASTERN EUROPE AND BEYOND In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of right-wing populism across the western world. Examples include Brexit, Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, or the rising popularity of Marie LePen in France and the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) in Germany.

David Abraham, Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, and Claus Offe, longtime Professor of Sociology at Hertie School of Governance, discuss the rise of populism in central Europe, as well as throughout the western world. What are the sources of right-wing populism? Can we fight these with solidarity? And is there just one kind of populism in the West today? The discussion was chaired by Sławomir Sierakowski of Krytyka Polityczna.

David Abraham: During the months since Angela Merkel became Time magazine’s person of the year in 2015, we saw a shift on her part and among the German political class to the ethic of responsibility, which acknowledges some international legal responsibility to support refugees but considers first the impact on the society receiving a million strangers, the impact on the sending societies and on the transit countries, and the incentive effects for future refugees and migrants.

These sorts of calculations are without doubt going to narrow the circle of the “we”, and move us away from 46

the concerns of global justice that were at the centre of liberal thinking for the previous generation, back to a more historic conception of the “we”, “historic” being one of the nicer ways of putting it.

Such are the concerns of the political centre. On the Right, we have seen a much less appealing situation. Frauke Petry of the AfD party celebrated her election victory by saying that it is time to revalidate the word völkisch, a word driven into complete disrepute by Nazism and which everyone knows carries a very ethno-nationalist conception of the people. respublica

We have seen the return of other words that were long banished to the relative margins – Leitkultur as an obvious norm instead of a conservative agenda, Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl, or a feeling of belonging together, a concept that Weber developed in a deeply constructivist context but that has since been more closely associated with the kind of nationalism that leads to war. And liberal thinkers were recently unable to answer a question about someone born in Mexico ten miles from the US border, and what possible justification there could be for prohibiting him from enjoying the benefits that the United States offers. The notion of the nation-state as a vehicle of social justice had receded. Now it is coming back with a vengeance.

The immigration crisis has highlighted the difficult topic of historical communities. When we try to take apart what this term means, we come across conceptions that make us less comfortable as liberals. Namely, pre-political things like ethnicity, like Leitkultur, like the intense shared experiences that have slowly disappeared from society along with the mass industrial workplace, which was itself a kind of melting pot. Instead we have developed societies in which difference has been valued as a liberal principle.

But now it is coming back in some ways to haunt us as the levels of social solidarity that have helped sustain the welfare state seem to be suffering. The bonds of citizenship seem to weaken in diverse multicultural societies. There seems to be a lot of evidence coming from right, centre and left sociologists, who have made the argument fairly convincingly that the willingness to share declines where there is immigration but intensive integration remains absent. In some ways the United States has it easier since we have a much weaker welfare state regime. The European experience of demanding more sharing makes for greater vulnerability to such developments. We have seen populist hostility based on an “ethnic privilege” that people in titular nations are unwilling to surrender. This other aspect that the immigration crisis has highlighted is one that we need to take seriously if we are to combat the disaggregation of social solidarity that the welfare state lived from and helped to reinforce. The liberal Left attitude toward integration and immigration needs some revisions.

Claus Offe: I will start with the question of solidarity; that is solidarity as fraternité, the translation that Ulrike Guérot provided during the current conference, THE GDAŃSK DEBATES

or a normative mandate to share. Share with who?

With the members of your own family – this is the metaphor –, to share with your brothers and sisters.

The nation is analogous to the family, both institutions are the only ones that last forever. This is the model of community members who are committed to sharing among themselves.

However, we live in a society where collectivity is not given, it is contested. Whom are we supposed to share with? In our societies, we have a whole portfolio of identities or reference groups that we might want to, or refuse to, share with. Membership is optional and, in accordance with the reference unit that we choose to rely upon and to follow, the interests that we pursue change. We are in a way all multiple personalities. Each of us consists of at least the four persons that Robert Reich once distinguished. Namely, we are workers, consumers, savers or investors, and citizens. Depending on the reference unit we chose for the moment, our interests can be very different and there is no clear hierarchy of what comes first and what is less important. We can also say we belong to a certain generation, we are parents or not parents, we have many other identities to choose from and to practice solidarity for.

This uncertainty concerning relevant collectivities is something that causes confusion and often panic. The liberal model of the individual is self-responsibility, everything that I become is due to my own effort, my strength or weakness. I have to be responsible and I will be held responsible for myself. Yet if we ask, what is the strongest predictor of a person’s life income, the answer is his or her place of birth. That is obviously a variable in human existence that no one can be held responsible for. Similarly, the concept of wellbeing or welfare has been rightly de-individualized.

It used to be the case that the welfare of a person was considered a dependent variable of his or her income.

It is not so. Many aspects of our welfare are created as a result of conditions for which we are not responsible – these include social security, civic security, infrastructure. The misleading practice of measuring a person’s welfare in terms of their income needs to be overcome. Our wellbeing is at a minimum co-produced. There are many conditions which we have not created ourselves, but which we benefit from, such as the welfare state.

So given this portfolio of identities and reference units, there is a dominant quest for certainty: 47

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who are we? The most primitive and elementary answer to that, the smallest common denominator that has become so prominent in today’s politics and movements, is our ethnic belonging. The disorganization of identities leads to the only apparently certain fall back position being ethnic identity, which fuels today’s rightist populist movements and politics. And these movements and politics are highly exclusivist. Solidarity is practiced among people who belong to the same ethnic identity and is denied to everyone else.

The problem is, what is the right collectivity? And one tentative answer that I want to briefly discuss here is that we should forget about traditional identities. To answer the question in a quasi-functionalist way, I say that the reference community that we all share and owe solidarity to comprises all those who depend on us and all those on whom we depend. It’s about interdependency rather than a given identity. The principle that applies to those communities is that your wellbeing makes me better off, therefore, I have rational reasons to contribute to your wellbeing as well.

What used to be accomplished through the social democratic and, in a broad sense, also Christian democratic welfare state is now, according to the propaganda and proposals of the populist Right, to be accomplished not through state power, but through state borders. State borders are perceived as a protective device against the inflow of various things: foreign goods, foreign Gods, foreign people, foreign investment, foreign authority and foreign information. All these things are to be kept out through the strengthening of borders, through the building of fences, the establishment of a collective identity and solidarity that is fenced in and protected from outsiders. It feels good perhaps for a while, but we are beyond the point where the retreat to ethnic national identity is not in any way promising in the long-term, because nations within the EU and far beyond are not independent.

They are interdependent.

Sławomir Sierakowski: What is so sustainable about nationalism that means it hasn’t gone through a post-ideological turn like all the other ideologies did? Any other ideology, any other concept exists only in a post-ideological form; a postmodern distance prevails. It is not really easy to be a fanatic in the West at the moment.

Look at Trump. Trump is not motivated by ideology and 48

this is why he may well create a media concern rather than a radical social movement to begin with. But nationalism still exists in this old-school form. Assuming you agree with me, why is it so?

David Abraham: I think that it is probably true that ethnic nationalism is a kind of atavistic fall back that is always available. Identity is not something that I can randomly choose as I wish. I can’t choose to be a male, an American or an investor on a random basis. There are social conditions that make some things possible and other things not possible. The fact is that we do live in ethnic-historical communities, they are not pure inventions, they were created as political entities but the ethnic-historical reality is there and it seems to me that we can’t ignore this. And that is why immigrants will shape the future of a country, but they are getting on board a boat that has already come from somewhere and has been sailing for a long time. They can help determine where it will sale in the future. It is a contingent and open historical formulation, but we cannot ignore that it is a historical formulation. Class was a very useful universalist formulation as was constitutional patriotism, and they were compatible with the universal worker who increasingly represented the overwhelming majority of society. But if we acknowledge the twilight of social democracy, we also have to take into account the twilight of those universalist identities that accompanied it and work with things that are not just atavistic but were there all along.

Claus Offe: We need to explain why ethnicity is so dominant as a category of collective action and negative collective action. That is, collective action against or to the disadvantage of the non-belonging. We have a choice.

We can act as citizens rather than as members of an ethnically defined community. We can act as workers, although we heard this morning that only 15 per cent of people in Britain count themselves as members of the working class. So there is a deep confusion and often panic about what we mean by “we”. Nothing is given here.

In the United States, people like us describe ourselves as Europeans rather than as members of a nation-state within the European Union. Also, being a migrant is a transitory phenomenon and it is only a matter of time before you and the host society start feeling that you are already part of the host society. We have to find an explanation as to why the category of migrant, which is so exclusivist, dangerous and conflictual, has become respublica

so dominant and what we can do against it becoming even more dominant.

Sławomir Sierakowski: People elect politicians like Trump because they are loosing the feeling of being at home, of being part of a homogenous society that once provided people with some sense of certainty.

David Abraham: Crisis leads people to want to sharpen the line between inside and outside. Crisis leads us to push someone or more people outside. And it is not just Europe, the United States certainly has a cyclical record of anti-immigrant sentiment, despite being an immigration country. I wouldn’t put the emphasis here so much on immigration as on integration. Previously, we put immigrants to work in mines and steel mills and the integration process took place around the labour movement, around the homogenizing process that turns them into citizens. Today it is much more difficult.

Merkel soon realized that the new arrivals are mostly uprooted peasants who can’t solve Germany’s workforce problems any more. In the United States, the “market” itself resolves such issues.

Sławomir Sierakowski: Brexit began when immigrants came and didn’t create enclaves like Pakistanis or Indians used to. Poles came and they are everywhere. Maybe it is a question of homogeneity. Maybe we made a mistake in thinking that something like an immigrant society existed before.

Claus Offe: We can overcome the dangerous and destructive movements based on ethnic identity by building the right institutions. The nation-state is all-important to the willingness of people to pay taxes. In Germany, we are quite willing to subsidize Bavarian dairy farmers through our taxes or higher prices. We know that these farmers are more or less part of our community, we have visited them. But when it comes to Spanish olive growers, the sense of solidarity or the willingness to share is much reduced. However, if we had a European minister of finance with legitimate powers of taxation, then the cognitive horizon of people who benefit from funds created through this taxation and pay taxes would be quite different. So it all depends on the institutional setup, rather than history and an ingrained sense of fellowship and belonging together. This setup is flexible and the reference unit can also extend beyond the European Union. Yet this can be ignored in the absence THE GDAŃSK DEBATES

of institutions that regulate our consumption from the perspective of its long-term and long-distance effects (when it comes to, for example, the relation between western consumption of cotton goods and soil erosion in Uzbekistan). This is what allows us to fail in our duties of solidarity vis-a-vis the people affected by our negative externalities. So it’s all a matter of building institutions, rather than traditional identities.

David Abraham: It is also a matter of obtaining democratic legitimacy for those institutions and that has so far proven to be a rather a significant problem.

Sławomir Sierakowski: In Poland we used to have two schools when it came to explaining populism. On the Left, we used to think that the rise of populism was linked to the costs of neoliberal policies. Closer to the centre, right-wing populism was explained by a certain number of Poles simply being nationalist, in accordance with what was considered something of a “genetic” nationalism. Many people are now less convinced by arguments based on structural economic reasons alone.

But even if the West is not about to collapse right away, those structural reasons will stay with us. We have known perfectly well for years about rising inequality and other such problems, but we do nothing about them. So how to explain the rise of populism in 2016 in the West?

Claus Offe: There is a big debate as to whether it is a residue of cultural wars or an outcome of economic precariousness and the consequences of globalization.

Are the right-wing populists globalization losers? The evidence that I have seen over the last year is negative.

It is a mix of cultural wars and precariousness and losing in the process of globalization. We can also say that it is the consequence of the disappearance of a welfare state and social democracy. We don’t yet have a full analysis of the phenomenon, but what we do know is that it is changing not just societies and their party systems and their modes of representation and public culture and the realization of liberal rights, but it is also changing international relations in a very serious sense, with dangerous and destructive implications.

Conclusion Not long ago, it might have been difficult to find a solid argument with which to back the current system of the global distribution of wealth, and the 49

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existence of borders preventing people from enjoying the global wealth concentrated in only a select number of countries. Just one year on since the migration crisis triggered the contestation of the previous generation’s global justice approach, politics has shifted away from the ethics of ultimate ends to the ethic of responsibility. The question of who the “we” are to whom we owe solidarity reappeared in the context of historical communities and pre-political concepts like ethnicity, Leitkultur or intense shared experience. The universal identity of the labour-class has faded out, leaving an

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empty space for national identity that fuels today’s right-wing populist movements and politics. Nowadays, we lack the labour movement that served as an instrument of integration in the past. One way out might be to establish new global institutions which base solidarity on interdependency – we share with and owe solidarity to all those who depend on us and all those on whom we depend. Yet, the problem of the democratic legitimacy of such institutions still requires further discussion.

Summary by Vojtěch Boháč

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NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: FIGHT FOR CITIZENS’ AUTONOMY OR RESENTMENT MOBILIZATIONS? It is difficult to confront a world in crisis, and even more difficult to predict the consequences of the crisis in which we are currently bound up. A discussion with Michel Wieviorka, Director of Studies at École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and David Ost, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, frequently a visiting professor in eastern Europe.

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he economic crisis of 2008 sparked a difficult confrontation between the global economy and national economies, threatening the stability of both. Two years later – in December 2010 – the self-immolation of the young Tunisian street merchant Mohamed Bouazizi, intended as a sign of protest against a corrupt political system that denied people basic freedoms, initiated a chain of rapid and profound changes. The changes were profound, because they undermined the certainties that constituted the foundation of political culture at the time.

Therefore, the term “social change” used in sociology was not adequate in this case. What we witnessed was rather a metamorphosis, as Ulrich Beck described it, occurring before our eyes – a profound paradigmatic change affecting the image of the world in its entirety. Those who consider this diagnosis an exaggeration THE GDAŃSK DEBATES

should be reminded of the wave of social mobilizations that swept through the world since the 2008 crisis, and of their key symbols, which reimagined the mosaic of contemporary political culture.

First, the Jasmine Revolution that began in Tunisia spread throughout the whole of North Africa, then there was Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Movimiento 15M on Puerta del Sol in Madrid, which contributed to the birth of the Indignados movement, then Occupy Wall Street with the slogan “We are the 99%”, there were student revolts in Chile, protests against ACTA in Europe, with their symbolic masks of smiling Guy Fawkes, anti-government demonstrations on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow, mobilizations against violence against women in India, demonstrations on Taksim Square in Istanbul, in Brazil, on the Maidan in Kyiv, waves of indignation on Syntagma Square in Athens, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. These are some of the most important, but not all of, the social mobilizations that 51

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we experienced in the last few years. They did not always evolve into organized social movements – often, these demonstrations were just expressions of outrage and disappeared as fast as they came into being. However, in just a few years, they managed to profoundly touch the social nerve, and gave expression to the difficult position in which societies found themselves. Some of these mobilizations did become political movements or transformed themselves into political parties.

This is how mobilizations became a social barometer – they showed how strongly the power of global capital, including the world of new technologies, dominated societies, taking away their autonomy and subjugating them. This is also how we should understand Alain Touraine, the French researcher of social movements, when he speaks of a post-social situation.

He argues that hitherto important social actors like state governments, unions or public institutions have lost their power and are unable to effectively take part in shaping the contemporary social and political situation. These actors are unable to define the new conflicts around which social change occurs. On the symbolic level, an important symptom of the situation was expressed in the use of Guy Fawkes masks, first by the hacker collective Anonymous, and later by several different groups of protesters. These masks clearly indicate the paradox of today’s mobilizations. In fact, they simultaneously conceal and reveal two things – both the deficit and the weakness displayed by the mobilizations that we witness. They signify weakness, in that the protesters have been deprived of empowerment, and their forms of protests express the power of the powerless of the twenty-first century. They also express deficit, because the protesters did not know who they were, and protest did not help them define themselves.

Indeed, they were not working class, like those who shaped the protest culture of the industrial era; they belonged to increasingly diverse social groups of the post-industrial era, a collectivity of individuals acting in a world of global interconnections, within the globalized frames of intermingled dependencies.

It is worth noting that the common characteristics of these new forms of protest, which are so varied in terms of political conflict and cultural context.

Nonetheless, these mobilizations were born in very similar, if not the same, (1) global forms that incorporated the local specificities of problems. They were also characterized by 2) the use of multimodal social networks and a combination of online and offline modes; (3) they 52

started in cyberspace and then expanded to the urban space of city squares and streets; (4) they were leaderless, because of the dominant mistrust that people felt regarding all forms of institutionalized representation; (5) they developed a culture of self-reflection, though discussions of the protesters’ situation did not lead to the formulation of a programme for the movement.

The mobilizations were (6) almost non-programmatic, which made it difficult to maintain them in the longer term. This trait is also related to the special role of emotions that is characteristic of times of protest. However, in this case, (7) political emotions became the main tool for prompting action, very often replacing what the mobilizations lacked in programmes; mobilization politics became psychopolitics. Finally, the fight of the protesters became, as underlined by Manuel Castells, (8) a fight for autonomy, because it constituted an attempt to wrestle away these few areas of social resistance from the clutches of totalizing political and economic power.

These characteristics of the waves of indignation on city streets and online clearly display some affinity with the Enlightenment tradition of emancipation movements, which freed society from painful restrictions on basic freedoms and the domination of political and economic powers. But what should we do if social movements activate mechanisms that counteract this liberating function? Michel Wieviorka described such phenomena as anti-social movements, pointing to the fact that they often present themselves as acting on behalf of excluded or marginalized social groups (the invisible poor and abandoned) at the same time as activating profound layers of resentment. They call themselves anti-establishment movements, but many of them aim to become part of the political system and play a significant role in it. They make violence one of their key tools, thus breaking with the Enlightenment tradition of social movements – a radicalized example of this approach is terrorism. What is important, however, is that these traits are not necessarily indicators of these anti-social movements, which are enormously diversified – some of them renounce violence, some of them hijack different strategies of political participation. The institutionalization of conflicts enables the shaping of the future in a safer and more aware manner.

Conflicts that are beyond institutional frames become sources of disaster.

David Ost underlined the importance of the social changes at the roots of the contemporary situation (the definitive end of an industrial society, in respublica

which workers were the main actors in the industrial world, and of the relatively homogeneous structure of social reality at that time). Globalization processes resulted in a profound diversification of the forms of organization of work. The problem of debt experienced by the younger generations became one of the catalysts for the birth of new movements, especially Occupy Wall Street. The now historic figure of the worker was replaced by many groups that were difficult to define. An important element among them today consists of the middle class, members of which – especially students and academics – seem to be fighting increasingly fiercely to regain the position they have lost. The paradox pointed out by Ivan Krastev lies in

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the reformulation of the figure of protest: the generation of students who fought in the 1960s against the lifestyle of the preceding generation has been replaced by today’s generation of students who dream of maintaining the comforts of life that their parents enjoyed. The notion of solidarity is also being reformulated, especially in the context of radical right-wing mobilizations. Here, an inclusive solidarity is replaced by the idea of an excluding solidarity, which rejects individuals and groups that do not represent a strongly defined identity core.

Summary by Jacek Kołtan, European Solidarity Centre

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EUROPEAN CULTURAL FOUNDATION

B

ased in Amsterdam and operating across Europe since 1954, the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) strives towards an open, democratic and inclusive Europe in which culture is a valued and key contributor. ECF supports civil society through grants, awards and partnerships, and advocates for the role of culture in community development on national and European levels. ECF engages in cross-sectoral networks, research and publications, as well as on- and offline dialogue. We convene cultural change-makers from across Europe, seeding and supporting local change and social innovation with a particular focus on commoning and participatory practices.

Connected Action for the Commons ECF’s focus from 2013 to 2016 is Connecting Culture, Communities and Democracy. Under this theme, we brought together six organizations from across Europe, which we consider key change-making agents, and which work with culture and creativity in order to breathe new life into democracy: Culture 2 Commons, which is comprised of Alliance Operation City, Clubture Network and Right to the City (Croatia); Les Tetes de l’Art (France); Krytyka Polityczna (Poland); Oberliht (Moldova); Platoniq – Goteo (Spain); and Subtopia (Sweden). The resulting “Connected Action for the Commons” network explores innovative methodologies to empower citizens and create a durable public infrastructure that nurtures the commons.

Culture and the Commons The network has now become part of a bigger commoning movement. Shortly after the “Mobilizing for the Commons” conference in Gdańsk, the Connected Action for the Commons network took part in the first 54

European Commons Assembly, held in Brussels from 15 to 17 November 2016. On 16 November, in a meeting in the European Parliament organized in cooperation with the EP intergroup on “Common Goods and Public Services”, the network presented the “Culture and the Commons” statement. This urges European decision-makers to embed culture, as an important perspective and practice contributing to the commons, in their policy deliberations.

The network argues that the emergence of “commoning” practices across Europe and beyond – as collective ventures of co-development and co-government – is dramatically affecting the way we look at our societies by challenging the duopoly of state and market.

In these inclusive, collaborative and co-creating practices, culture is a key factor in terms of encouraging equality and experience, as well as accepting diversity and negotiating participation: • Culture functions as a language to describe reality and to express feelings and opinions. It is a tool for narrating and debating our societies and for creating a space to establish meaningful relationships beyond socio-economic or cultural reality.

• Culture offers the much-needed imagination to change mind-sets and break out of existing frameworks.

• Culture is a testing ground for commoning and a space where we can negotiate ways of living together. Cultural and artistic processes create spaces where working together creates opportunities for both individual and societal development. *** ECF is delighted to have been able to contribute to the “Mobilizing for the Commons” conference by supporting the participation of two panelists representing the Connected Action for the Commons network: Miljenka respublica

Buljevic (President of Clubture – part of Culture 2 Commons, Croatia) and Slawomir Sierakowski (founder of Krytyka Polityczna, Poland). ECF director Katherine Watson also took part.

Moreover, we were happy to have had an opportunity to support and embed in the conference’s programme two initiatives that emerged from networks and people close to us: “Common Visions”, a series of videos on the theme of the commons, curated by Charlie Tims (Doc Next Network, www.docnextnetwork.org/ – a project initiated by ECF in 2009), and “Commonspoly”

www.commonspoly.cc – a hacked version of Monopoly, facilitated by Felipe González Gil (of ZEMOS98 in Seville, and a member of Doc Next Network), and Vassilis Chryssos (of Sarantaporo, Greece, and a participant at the ECF’S 2014 Idea Camp in Marseille).

By Olga Alexeeva, European Cultural Foundation

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES David Abraham Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law; teaches property, immigration and citizenship law, citizenship and identity, law and the transition to capitalism, and law and social theory. Publishes widely in these areas and serves as a commentator for American, German, and Israeli newspapers and television. Has been visiting professor at Tübingen University in Germany, Deakin University in Australia, the École des Hautes Études in Paris, the Transitional Justice Institute in Belfast, and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Olga Alexeeva Works at the European Cultural Foundation on, among other things, the Connected Action for the Commons programme and action research network. Previously worked as project manager and editor at the Montesquieu Institute for research and education on European parliamentary history and constitutional development in The Hague.

Marek A. Cichocki Research director and editor-in-chief of the periodical New Europe. Natolin Review; editor-in-chief of the annual Teologia Polityczna.

Professor of International Relations at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw and visiting Professor in the College of Europe Natolin.

Spasimir Domaradzki Lectures on politics and international relations at Lazarski University, Warsaw, where he chairs the Department of Government Studies. Served as an OSCE election observer in Ukraine. Currently a member of Team Europe Poland, a program of the European Commission.

Ulrike Guérot Professor at the Danube University, Krems; head of department for European Policy and the Study of Democracy. Founder and director of the Berlin-based European Democracy Lab at the European School of Governance. An advocate for a more democratic vision of Europe, her new book is Warum Europa eine Republik werden muss! Eine politische Utopie (‘Why Europe Needs to Become a Republic! A Political Utopia’, 2016).

Ira Katznelson Americanist whose work straddles comparative politics and political theory as well as political and social history. President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University.

Previously taught at the University of Chicago and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he was Dean from 1983 to 1989. Served as President of the American Political Science Association and of its Politics and History Section, President of the Social Science History Association, and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation. Member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Publications include: Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (with Andreas Kalyvas, 2008) and When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (2005).

Basil Kerski German-Polish cultural manager, editor, publicist, and political scientist. Director of the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk and an editor-in-chief of the bilingual Polish-German journal DIALOG; also contributor to the journal Przeglad Polityczny. Previously worked as an expert in international politics for the Aspen Institute Berlin, the German Council on Foreign Relations, the Social Science Research Centre in Berlin, and the Bundestag. From 2001 to 2005 lecturer at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin, in 2011 at the Institute of History at Humboldt University, Berlin. Member of the Polish PEN Club. Awarded the Gold Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland; Knight of the Order of the 56

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Lion of Finland; the Silver Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis (Poland). Author of more than twenty books in German, Polish and Ukrainian on history and politics; has published widely in the German and Polish press.

Jacek Koltan Philosopher and political scientist, PhD. Deputy Director in the Department for Social Thought at the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk. Fellow of the KAAD scholarship fund, and a visiting scholar at the Catholic University of America. Research interests include social and political theory, new social movements and social design, the history of the idea of solidarity, hermeneutics and anthropology.

Ivan Krastev Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

Founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, member of the advisory board of the ERSTE Foundation, member of the global advisory board of Open Society Foundations, New York, and member of the advisory council of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF). Associate editor of Europe’s World and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and Transit. Europäische Revue.

Maciej Kuziemski Atlantic Council Millennium Fellow, CEO of the Coalition for Polish Innovations, and board member of the Res Publica Foundation. Currently working for a Masters of Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

Daniel Leisegang Political scientist, editor of the German journal Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik.

Ariadna Lewanska Works on problems of the open society and modern philosophy. Graduate of the Centre de recherche Politiques et Sociologiques Raymond Aron in Paris and the University of Warsaw; has managed projects in education, editing, television production and politics.

Paweł Marczewski Head of Publications at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, and editor of Transit. Europäische Revue and Tr@nsit online.

Obtained his doctoral degree from Warsaw University in 2011; appointed assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology.

Member of the editorial board of Przegląd Polityczny and contributor to Tygodnik Powszechny. 2007–2010 staff writer at the magazine Europa and co-founder of the online weekly Kultura Liberalna. A book based on his doctoral dissertation To Make Liberty Inevitable: Republican Concepts in the Writings of Alexis de Tocqueville was published in 2012. Has translated three books by Tony Judt into Polish, including Thinking the Twentieth Century.

Ugo Mattei Distinguished Professor of Law and Alfred and Hanna Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco; full Professor of Civil Law at the University of Turin, Italy. Full member of the International Academy of Comparative Law; Fellow at the European Law Institute; former member of the Executive Editorial Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law; founding editor of Global Jurist; general editor of the Common Core of European Private Law; Academic Coordinator of the International University College of Turin. Led a campaign in Italy against the privatization of water, which in 2011 resulted in a national referendum in which more than 27 million Italians voted to recognize water as a common good. His most recent book is a manifesto for the commons and provides a theoretical basis for resistance against neoliberalism. Co-authored with Fritjof Capra, the book is entitled The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community (2015).

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Claus Offe Professor Emeritus of Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, where he is also a Non-Resident Permanent Fellow. Held chairs of political science and political sociology at the Universities of Bielefeld, Bremen and Berlin (Humboldt). Former fellow and visiting professor at the Institutes for Advanced Study in Stanford and Princeton; the Australian National University; Harvard University; the University of California at Berkeley and the New School University, New York. Founding member of the German Green party and more recently the Basic Income Earth Network – Germany. Publications include ‘The shared society: A model for a new welfare state’ (Die Teilhabegesellschaft. Modell eines neuen Wohlfahrtsstaates, with Gerd Grözinger and Michael Maschke, 2006) and Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States (2005).

David Ost Joseph DiGangi Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and frequent visiting professor in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland. Specializes in Eastern European labour, political economy, and democratization. Books include Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics (1990), Workers After Workers’ States (2001), and The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Society (2005). Currently on the editorial boards of Politics and Society, East European Politics and Societies, Polish Sociological Review, Studie Socjologiczne; founding member of the Warsaw Forum of Economic Sociology. His edited collection, Class After Communism, was published in 2015 as a special issue of East European Politics and Societies.

Franz Karl Prüller Senior Advisor of the board of ERSTE Foundation. Previously served as director of the Foundation’s Social Development Programme and as a Member of the Board of ERSTE Foundation; was chairman of the board until his recent appointment as Senior Advisor. Before joining ERSTE Foundation, was with Caritas Austria, where he served as Secretary General in charge of international programmes and the project department. Represented Caritas Austria on the executive boards of Caritas International and, for three years, was chairman of the charitable foundation Neighbour in Need. Before 1996, in charge of Caritas’ Central and Eastern European programme and disaster relief programme, involved in re-building the national Caritas organizations in the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria.

Wojciech Przybylski Editor-in-chief of Eurozine, chairman of Res Publica (Warsaw), publisher of Visegrad Insight – a magazine on Central Europe.

Political commentator, lecturer and social entrepreneur. Previously junior research fellow at the Warsaw University, the Political Academy in Vienna, and research fellow at CEFRES in Prague. Expertise includes European and Central European affairs. Initiated the ‘City DNA’ program, empowering local communities and researching cultural policies. In 2014, launched the New Europe 100 project highlighting innovators from the region, run by Res Publica in partnership with the Financial Times, Google and the Visegrad Fund.

Shalini Randeria Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, and Research Director and Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Visiting Professor at the Social Science Research Centre, Berlin and the Free University, Berlin. Previously Member of the Senate of the German Research Council, President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Berlin. Before joining the Graduate Institute in Geneva, she was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Zurich, as well as Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, Budapest.

Currently member of the Editorial Board of the American Ethnologist; serves on the Board of Trustees of the Central European University, the Academic Advisory Board of the Wien Museum, and the Advisory Board of the Higher Education Support Program of the Open Society Foundations. Has published widely on the anthropology of globalization, law, the state and social movements. Her empirical research on India addresses issues of post-coloniality and multiple modernities.

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Agnieszka Rosner Assistant editor at Res Publica Nowa. Political scientist, philosopher and PhD student at the Department of Political Science at the Pedagogical University of Krakow. Focuses on contemporary discourse of political philosophy. Reviewer and journalist.

Slavomir Sierakowski Sociologist and political commentator. Founder and leader of Krytyka Polityczna, a Polish movement of liberal intellectuals, artists and activists, with branches in Ukraine and Russia. Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw and president of the Stanislaw Brzozowski Association, overseeing its publishing house, website and cultural centres in Warsaw, Gdańsk, Lodz and Cieszyn and Kyiv. Graduate of the University of Warsaw; previously fellow at Yale, Princeton, Harvard and the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. Columnist for The International New York Times and now for Project Syndicate; has published articles in The Guardian, El País, Haaretz, Die Tageszeitung and Gazeta Wyborcza.

Aleksander Smolar President of the Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw, an independent private Polish foundation established by American financier and philanthropist George Soros; Vice President and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna; co-founder and member of the board of the European Council on Foreign Relations; Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Has published widely in European and US journals. 1971–1989 active member of the Polish diaspora on behalf of opposition movements in his native Poland and other Eastern European countries. In 1974 founded the political quarterly Aneks, editor-in-chief until its closure in 1990. 1989–1990 advisor to the first democratically elected prime minister of Poland, Tadeusz Mazowiecki; 1992–1993 foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka.

Samanta Stecko Editor at Res Publica Nowa; historian of ideas, translator.

Ben Tendler Eurozine editor from 2013 to summer 2016, before departing to become a freelance translator, writer and editor; continues at Eurozine as contributing editor. Before joining Eurozine, coordinated an online Multimedia Library for environmental humanities at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, a partnership between LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum.

Michel Wieviorka Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and President of the Fondation de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. 1993–2009 Director of the Centre d’analyse et d’intervention sociologiques; 2006–2010 President of the International Sociological Association; since 2014 member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. From 1991 to 2011 co-director of the Magazine of International Sociology; in 2013 founded the journal SOCIO, which he currently co-directs. After heading the “Voix et Regards” series of Editions Balland, he is now in charge of “Le monde comme il va” at Editions Robert Laffont. Also edits “Interventions”, a series published by Editions de la MSH. Anna Wójcik Assistant editor at Visegrad Insight. Studied law and social sciences at University of Warsaw and Central European University.

Currently PhD researcher at the Human Rights Centre, Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences.

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Conference proceedings Mobilizing for the Commons 10th Conference on Solidarity

27th Meeting of Cultural Journals organizers: Eurozine, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk and Res Publica Foundation in partnership with: Erste Foundation and Mayor of Gdańsk co-funded by: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Poland Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation Connected action for the Commons, European Cultural Foundation publisher: Fundacja Res Publica im. Henryka Krzeczkowskiego ul. Gałczyńskiego 5, 00-362 Warszawa www.publica.pl graphic design:

Project co-financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland

Ministry of Foreign Affairs Republic of Poland

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as reflecting the official position of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.

The collection of texts in this publication is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Poland license. Some rights reserved for Res Publica Nowa and Eurozine. The work was created within a Cooperation in the field of public diplomacy in 2016 grant. It is permitted to use the work in any way, under the condition that the above. information, including information about used license, holders of rights and the grant competition Cooperation in the field of public diplomacy in 2016, is provided. isbn: 978-83-945261-0-8