Thank you very much for visiting us today,
even though it's so hot outside
and there is definitely a lot of
more pleasurable places,
but this one really
is the most important one today.
Maybe not the most pleasurable one,
but the most important,
since in a way we'll be summarizing
the first part of our project.
At first we called it
"The Lost Treasure of Solidarity",
but later we decided we
can't write this way.
It's a treasure of Solidarity
that should be recovered,
and we've been recovering it along with
the participants of our seminar,
the members of this project,
the "12 Apostles of Solidarity",
first through participating in seminars,
and then through meetings with witnesses.
Every such meeting convinced me
that it's a treasure
that is not lost,
but a treasure
 that should be recovered
and should be
 shown to the whole world.
Today we've invited this "world" here.
We'll be joined by the most renowned
professors and experts
on Solidarity,
truth and reconciliation.
We're honored they will
stay for a few days,
to get a sense
of this treasure of Solidarity,
not as something that has been lost,
but that should be
recovered and shown to the world.
I'd like to thank Emilia Klepacka
for preparing this meeting.
She's the one who arranged everything.
And Monika Bartoszewicz.
I've actually forgotten
you've been with us
 only for one month,
but it feels as if you have
been with us forever.
That's the real solidarity we've created
within our project.
And finally, a personal recollection:
As I said, we've
been discovering
this Solidarity continuously.
A few days ago we met here
with witnesses of Solidarnosc,
those who are at the
margins of today's public life,
who have not been
recompensated after 1989.
One of those persons called me
after the meeting
and told me that he's forgotten
that he couldn't walk and
he had back problems,
that he regained his forces.
So this "solidarity"
is not just something abstract,
but it penetrates our bodies,
enabling us to walk again,
or maybe even to fly.
Monika, thank you very much. Please
introduce our wonderful guests.
Ok, good evening, once again,
I do have the pleasure and honor to
moderate tonight's meeting
and to introduce our fantastic experts.
First is Prof. Jan Kubik,
Prof. and Chair of the Department of
Political Science at Rutgers University.
A specialist on protest
politics and social movements,
post-Communist politics and
the politics of memory.
He is going to be our first speaker.
Professor, would you like
to take your seat, please.
Our second guest is Prof. Andrea Bartoli,
the Dean of the School
of Diplomacy and International Relations
from Seton Hall University
in New York.
He is a world-class expert in
the field of international conflict resolution.
He has a vast experience in
religion and foreign policy issues
resolved at the UN, he also worked
with the World Bank and the
US. State Department. Welcome.
And last, but not least,
Daniel Philpott, Prof. of Political
Science and Peace Studies
and Director of the Center
for Civil and Human Rights
at the University of Notre Dame.
A world renown authority in
religion and global politics,
reconciliation, international
relations, transitional justice,
and I could probably go on and on. Welcome.
The way we thought we'd
organize this meeting tonight,
is the first part of the seminar
is going to consist of three presentations,
each of the experts will present a paper
approximately 20 minutes long,
and then a discussion will follow.
We do hope you will engage with the experts
and ask many interesting
and difficult questions,
that together we'll be able to discover
new things about truth and
reconciliation after "Solidarity".
Without further ado I'd like to ask
Prof. Kubik to start.
Thank you very much
for this wonderful introduction.
It's a great honor to be here,
I'm absolutely delighted
to be able to talk to you
and present my ideas.
This is a part of a larger work,
it's a long paper, and
I'll try to summarize it
in 20 minutes
in the simplest possible way,
so please stay with me.
I looked at Solidarity, I've been
working on Solidarity for many years,
and I looked at it somewhat  analytically,
trying to name various parts, elements
and achievements,
and see how many things
really constitute this very
large and complex phenomenon of Solidarity.
But I also work on social movements
and protest politics, and I know
this literature relatively well.
What is quite striking is that basically
Solidarity doesn't exist
in this literature,
for reasons that escape me.
I know some of those people.
From time to time it is mentioned,
but you could easily
demonstrate that Solidarity
was, I believe, the biggest movement
that ever happened in history,
because at the pick
about one third of the society
was involved in it.
So I started thinking:
What is left? Why is it that
if you look at a number of
large movements, famous movements,
and you think about Gandhi
and the Indian movement
for self-determination,
you think about Martin Luther King
or about Dalailama.
Each of those movements
left some words,
or phrase or principle,
that encapsulates its philosophy.
Gandhi's "satyagraha",
Martin Luther King basically
rejuvenated the language of civil rights.
The concept of "Ubuntu" that comes from
the African National Congress,
about which my colleague Drucilla Cornell
at Rutgers wrote thick volumes now,
about the significance
of this concept
also for the constitution of the new legal
system in South Africa
after the fall of Apartheid.
Solidarity in my mind without
any question belongs
to the same class of movements,
that changed the course of history.
The very word "Solidarity"
carries an enormous
potential power and hope,
and yet somehow it was not
enshrined or embedded
in Polish culture.
Certainly not to the same level,
the same degree as
those other concepts I mentioned
became important in their
respective countries.
That was the initial impulse
to write this piece.
And the second was an observation
which I've had for a long time,
that in the country that
really slain the dragon...
This is the country that was able to drive
the biggest nail to the Communist's coffin.
Everything at the last stage started
happening here, in the early part of 1989.
Most people in the West think that
the fall of Communism has
something to do with
the fall of the Berlin Wall,
which was late in 1989.
So the Round Table negotiations,
the Polish elections of June 4th
and then the formation of the
first non-Communist government,
the Mazowiecki government,
this is somehow forgotten,
so something went wrong.
The third idea is that
I've been working for a while
on the concept of legacies,
particularly cultural legacies,
and legacies are something which
sometimes seems hard to define,
and figure out what it is,
but it is something
that people today,
acting today, doing things today,
are using from the past.
It is the memory, constructed
in one way or another,
about something
that happened in the past,
but it is really
the phenomenon of "now".
A legacy is something that
drives our actions
or doesn't drive them NOW.
Legacies constructed out of...
let's call it "raw historical material".
The first question for me was:
What was that raw historical material
that we can collectively call
the "Solidarity"?
I'm not going to go through all of this,
but I identified
22 elements of "Solidarity",
and to give you the sense
of how I was doing it:
I divided the whole thing
into the first Solidarity,
which is until the
imposition of martial law,
and then the underground
Solidarity, all the way to 1989,
which can be called
"the Second Solidarity".
Each of those separate periods
contributes something different.
Just to give you a sense of it:
Both periods actually contributed
to something that is
one part of what I think was
the genius of "Solidarity".
First of all the main vehicle of
Solidarity was the Labor Union.
Many of us were members
of the Labor Union.
But when trouble emerged, particularly
after the imposition of marshal law,
a switch occurred, which I still
think not to many people observed:
The organizational device
was no longer the factories
and places of work, but territorial units.
Of course, very importantly,
the Catholic Church provided
all kinds of support, including
physical spaces and Parishes.
Now the principle of organization was
switched from the place of
work to the place of living.
That was very instrumental later
in the creation of Citizens' Committees.
I'm not talking about the
big, official one in Warsaw,
around Walesa, but about
2400 or however many there were.
Every single place, every single commune,
every single municipality in Poland
had a Civic Committee, which eventually
managed during those 63 days
between the end of the negotiations
and the elections,
which I have no doubt
the Communists
designed deliberately
to give that little time,
 assuming that
"Solidarity" will never
manage to mobilize in 63 days.
If you remember, it was
actually a miracle of organization,
but it was possible because those
organizational vehicles
were there, in every
single commune,
and what happened next,
which is particularly the only thing that
happened only in Poland,
was perhaps more important than
the first semi-free elections.
It was the local elections,
which immediately produced the effect
of transferring enormous amount of power
and prerogatives from the central level
to the local level.
So that's just one example of
a rather unusual invention,
you change in the middle of the
game the organizational formula
from Labor Union to the
organization based on the territory,
and then you are able to organize
all kinds of things, for example
prepare for those elections,
both the first ones and the
second local elections.
If you asked a few years ago,
maybe more,
but a few years
 after all of this happened...
I was teaching at the Jagiellonian
University in Krakow,
and I asked students
to do some interviews for me,
about the memory of Citizens' Committees.
People either didn't remember
anymore what it was,
or didn't want to talk about it.
It had acquired, which I
never completely understood,
some kind of negative connotations,
whereas to me it was obviously
an enormously creative device.
So going this way
I created a whole list of
those various kinds of
achievements of Solidarity,
or maybe of even some possible problems.
One thing I wrote initially
in my first book
about Solidarity was that
the success of Solidarity was possible
because of this massive what
I call "symbolic mobilization"
around the Church and the Pope,
that gave this movement
this enormous power,
and the whole movement
stayed behind the leader
despite of all kinds of
possible and real tensions
in the movement, somehow
it stayed
united behind Walesa,
around that enormously
elaborate symbolic sphere.
But my fear as a sociologist was
that the society is sort of overheated,
kind of symbolically overheated,
and how will it deal
with pragmatic issues of
the new system, which had
to be built very quickly.
And again, there was pragmatism,
which also belongs to the
legacy of Solidarity.
When you think about it,
sitting with your enemy
and negotiating
 takes a doze of pragmatism,
that's the first thing that is pragmatic.
Instead of killing each other
let's sit down and let's debate,
and let's figure out the
way out of this problem.
I understand all kinds of issues
that are behind that choice:
Who is at the Round Table and so on,
but nonetheless that device worked.
In the world literature this is
regarded as a great success of Poland.
Nobody has that many doubts
that you hear sometimes in Poland.
So pragmatism was there.
Again, I don't have time
to go through all of this.
But what happens if you look
at those 20-some elements,
22 attributes of the movement,
only a few end up in the legacy,
in the way we remember that movement.
I will read you a few questions
that are driving the
debate around the elements
of Solidarity that we remember.
The first question:
Was Solidarity a pure, clear-cut
challenge to Communism?
Or was it at least partially
tainted by collaboration?
In the context of
this general question
Walesa's role is
scrutinized, as we all know:
Was he an un-wavering hero,
or possibly a collaborator,
even if for a short period of time?
Second question:
Was a deep, independent counter-elite
formed coming out of Solidarity,
or did the old elite, the Communist,
and at least part of the new one,
Solidarity, collude
and constitute this new kind of formation,
that sometimes was referred
to as the
"Unholy Allianceof the Reds and Pinks".
What answer are
we giving to this question?
The third question:
Was the era of powerful polarization
of politics over in 1989,
or it continues in some way,
and the split is constantly being revived.
Therefore, 25 years after
the fall of Communism,
the country that
by many acounts is
the most successful
post-Communist country,
and the one
that started that revolution,
can't agree on what it was that
really brought the Communists down.
Because we cannot agree
 what Solidarity is.
If Poles can't figure
out what Solidarity is,
then nobody else can.
This is my biggest puzzle:
We could go to the world
and tell them:
Look, we have this fantastic movement,
we achieved this enormous success.
This is how it was, this is what it was.
We want you, the world, to honor us for it.
To be proud about this with us.
It's not happening, because the
country is not selling itself well.
The message that Poland generates,
that goes to the world,
is really muddled, it's polarized.
So, there is no common answer to those
3 questions I read to you.
There are answers that are
divisive, to each of them.
Now, let's move to the
other 3 questions asked,
the ones about the second
period of Solidarity:
Was the Round Table the best
method of ending Communism?
Or would Communism have
collapsed on its own?
The assumption behind this is
that it would have been healthier.
I actually heard people telling me:
We should have had a bloodshed.
Because a bloodshed
purifies the nation,
and then a pure
nation would have
emerged from the tragedy of Communism.
Well, it ended with the Round
Table negotiations,
and the question is: Maybe
it wasn't the right method?
A second question from this group is:
Was the pragmatism
of Walesa's group
a smart and necessary strategy,
or a calculated treason?
That's the debate we're having, right?
To much of the world this debate
is incomprehensible.
But that's what's being debated
here, and obviously,
with all respect, it must be
important, if it's being debated here.
And finally the question:
Was the selection of the
Solidarity representatives
and of the strategy of the Round
Table negotiations optimal,
or were they calculated to preserve
as much of the outgoing
regime's influence as possible?
Did this choice of strategy
protect the interests
of the negotiating group rather
than those of Solidarity
and the society at large?
That's a big question,
no doubt about it.
But one thing we know for sure,
and we really
have to think about it:
No other country
emerging from Communism
generated a counter-elite.
We complain that we
have corruption,
that we have former apparatchiks in
the position of power, and we do,
they have undue influence
 here and there.
But look at other countries --
in each of them it's simply worse.
For one simple reason -- that here, because
 Solidarity was there,
Poland ended up with actual
political competition.
To my mind, it's a
tragic irony of history
that eventually ex-Communists,
at least in official politics,
collapsed under the weight
of their own incompetence,
but particularly corruption:
the Miller's government.
It's mind-boggling that
he is still at the front
of politics for his
formation, to me at least.
But the struggle now,
the political tension now is within
former Solidarity, within ex-Solidarity,
and that's really interesting, certainly,
but it's maybe also rather unfortunate
for the politics of the country.
So that's the essence
of the most important things
that are in this paper.
Everything is of course
developed in more detail.
But these are the big questions
and the main observation:
That for reasons that I don't
completely understand
the politics and culture of
the country remain divided.
I end the paper with
the idea that Poland
is doing really well, when you
look at a number of indicators,
but there is this nagging
thought that maybe
it could be doing even better,
if so much energy
wasn't spent on
what I call "the symbolic war".
Thank you.
So, if I understood well,
the puzzle is the following:
We had a massive,
unique and very powerful
social movement,
and we didn't really manage
to use its potential.
That's the biggest problem
that we are dealing with now.
Prof. Bartoli, that will be
a great opportunity for you
to look at the Solidarity phenomenon
from a comparative perspective,
from the outside vantage point.
I hope you can offer
some reflections
on these questions and puzzles
that Prof. Kubik introduced.
Thank you. I'm definitely very
grateful for the opportunity.
I think this paper is fantastic,
it's very good,
I really suggest that
everyone should get a
copy of it soon
and really digest it. I think
it's a wonderful introduction
for us to these reflections.
I also would like to take advantage
of speaking for a moment
about the Fetzer framework.
Why the Fetzer Institute got
into this conversation about Solidarnosc?
Because both
Emilia and I belong to this
Fetzer Institute Advisory Board that works
at the intersection of
love, forgiveness and governance,
concepts that usually don't go together,
that you don't necessarily see together.
We were curious about
the actual moment in history where
this connection was actually effective.
And Emilia suggested
this analysis of Solidarnosc
as a way for us to encounter something
that was historically constructed.
I think that
the invitation is very interesting
and in many ways goes to the heart of
the argument or the puzzle:
What is the meaning of Solidarnosc,
because, as we know very well,
anything that is done,
anything that is performed in history,
is actually never owned
only by those who do it.
There is an authorship of interpretation
that actually gives meaning to the action.
So we can say that we are witnesses
of something of relevance.
But we have a responsibility
of understanding, especially
when the action is so transformative,
as in the Solidarnosc case:
To bring about the
transformation
of the magnitude of
the dismissal of Communism
as a state-centered human project.
It's a phenomenal moment
of transformation,
it's a pivotal moment,
so in this sense I'd really like
to salute the John Paul II Center
for having this conversation.
I think that
to bring witnesses like us,
you know, we're not Poles,
we're not necessarily
students of Solidarnosc,
we are not necessarily
witnesses of that moment,
but we do feel the
responsibility of learning,
of understanding better
what did happen then
and what is the interpretation that
makes sense for us as a whole.
I really appreciate the context
of this large social movement,
that did change history
by just being there,
by just existing.
Actually, one piece of the paper
that you didn't speak about,
and maybe I will take advantage of
making a point or two,
about the failure, if you want,
of the Polish elite to really think about
or to present the content
in such a way
that could be
sellable, presentable
or sharable in universal terms
 and so on.
I think that there is a
historical responsibility
of this generation, of saying:
Ok, we have this treasure,
how do we welcome this treasure?
Again, I wish to salute and welcome
and stress the importance
of the John Paul II Center choice of words,
I really resonated with
this notion of treasure.
I really did, when I was
invited to speak about this
I really felt that there was
something... I am a devout Catholic,
I really like Gospel language,
and the treasure is a very specific image.
Something that is hidden and found.
Something that is shared and
it's clearly something that is
of a different magnitude than
what I can own on my own.
It's clearly something that
belonged to someone else,
but actually has to be used for something.
So I really find this image of
Solidarnosc and treasure very
intriguing, very welcoming,
and as a devout Catholic
and observer of the
larger pattern,
I can't help linking Solidarnosc itself
and the first visit of
John Paul II to Poland,
and the relocation of
Poland to its own history.
So Solidarnosc appears as
a response of the Poles
to an invitation to understand
better who they are over time.
Looking at the present time not just
as something that is
fundamentally constraining them
to a present that cannot be changed,
but rather as a possibility
that needs to be uncovered.
And I think that it's a
fascinating expression that
we see in the emerging testimonies
of a sort of exuberance or liveliness,
of something that suddenly is possible.
Of a constraint that is
suddenly not relevant anymore.
Of things that were previously
just impossible, unthinkable,
not doable, that suddenly
became very reasonable.
Suddenly you have
a third of the population
joined together outside the scope of
the control of the Communist party.
That was just totally
unthinkable, it was just
in the realm of the impossible,
if somebody was in a
culture that was so obsessed with planning,
where everything had to be planned,
and plans never worked.
There was this discovery that something
that was not planned at all
was actually working in
this Solidarity movement,
that was so creative. So I'd really like to
stress at the beginning of my remarks
the joy of being invited to
talk about an exuberant moment,
that in the midst of a failing constraint
allowed millions of people to
re-engage with their own creativity,
trusting each other and
conversationally inventing
something that didn't exist before.
I really think that concentrating
on the first Solidarity
is very healthy. There is an exuberance,
there is a surprise of what is possible
that I think is really needed today.
If I look at Pope Francis'
response
to the American sort
of self-righteous
commitment to bomb Syria
because of the use
of chemical weapons,
when he said: Well, why don't we
have a moment of silence
and everybody prays for a moment.
I have the impression of a similar
moment, in which possibilities that
were not really possible
become possible because
of this encountering,
with this invitational element
that is otherwise not present.
Thank you for the occasion,
thank you for the use
of the word "treasure".
Thank you for encountering
this problem of what I'd describe
using terminology elaborated in the context
of theological post-colonial South-Africa:
"Liberating inter-dependance".
There is a notion of liberation
that comes from within.
We are liberating ourselves, but actually
I find in Solidarnosc this
very dynamic dimension
that I hope will encourage us
 to understand
this dynamics even further.
Once again, it's the
invitation to the possible
that is not actualized, that was
at the beginning of Solidarnosc,
this invitation of thinking
as actors having power
and agency
beyond the limits of what was
allowed politically.
Therefore, not knowing
what the limitations were,
there was this capacity for inventing.
So I was asked to speak
about comparative process
and I must admit that
I do encounter the problem of
what we could describe as
the uniqueness dilemma,
the fact that every single historical act
is in itself unique, it's irreplaceable.
Is not replicable.
Even this conference today.
I'm sure that you speak of Solidarnosc
fairly often, but this particular
context is not replicable.
So we could say that nothing
is comparable,
but then we cannot compare anything.
Instead, I think that we can see how
instances and individualities
play a role in the process
of collective learning.
That involves us as a human family.
So, think for a moment about
the fact that in the last century
millions of people were killed,
but very few of the
victims that were killed
were able to speak, were able to talk,
there was no capacity for
victimhood to be elaborated.
As a human family we understood
the importance of listening
to the victims through
the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission in South Africa
and in many other places,
more than 20 actually.
South Africa was not the
first in which this happened.
After Solidarnosc
we see the Philippines,
and we can definitely say
that John Paul II
himself would not have had an
understanding of what was possible
in the anti-Marcos process without
having Solidarnosc before.
We can see that the Arab Spring
and the occasions that we
see in Serbia and so on,
would not have been possible
not just in terms of
actual conditions,
but in terms of a reference point,
if Solidarnosc had not actually been
present in the collective understanding.
So I'd like to
counter the idea that
in terms of social movements
Solidarnosc is not there,
because in many ways
I think you're right, but
I think that in many other
ways it's really the beginning
of a human collective learning experience
that I think is extremely
precious and important.
What I find fascinating is
that the responsibility
is not only on those
that made those changes,
but is also on us in understanding
what those changes were,
how those changes can be told,
and how new generations can
understand those changes
in the context of the challenges
that they are facing today.
So in a way it's an invitation
to understand history
as much more malleable,
not just in terms of
what we are saying about it,
but also in terms of what we
are committing ourselves to,
in terms of the history
that we are creating.
What I find fascinating
about the Solidarnosc experience
is probably one of the
most striking examples of
the dynamism of the human project as such.
Totally located, totally
constructed and unique,
but at the same time open
to this universal dynamism
of human responsibility that goes beyond
the limitations of my own space.
Or: You can't do this
because you are not a Pole,
or: You can't do this because
you were not in Solidarnosc,
or: You can't replicate this because
this was not a part of that.
So I think that in a way this reflection
brings about the centrality of learning,
as a project that
doesn't only include
specialists or intellectuals,
but actually could include
the many millions of Poles that
were involved in that movement.
I think that it's very interesting about
the project that you are doing here,
the project that is part
of this effort, to say:
How that memory carries
in families, in communities,
at the level of the daily
discourse rather than
at the national level.
And I understand that you
convincingly demonstrated the importance
of the state level discourse,
but I do want to re-gain,
or re-invite or re-engage
the quality of a large, popular
civil society creative moment
in remembering and actually
doing a creative act.
So my simple point is that in
all these processes that we see:
Poland, Philippines, Serbia,
the Arab Spring and so on,
you have this moment of realization
that something is not working.
That there is a dissatisfaction, a dissent,
a "no", a wrong,
something that needs to be faced.
There is a choice of truth seeking
that is curiously tentative.
So the difference that you see
with what happened
during the French Revolution
is that answers were actually
not ideologically definitive,
you didn't have the clarity of saying:
Of course, we need to
kill all the Communists.
It's true that in some
quarters the bloodshed
was tempting.
But in the large majority
of the Solidarity movement,
what was actually operative
was this very curious opening
up to the inquiry process:
Why is this not working?
What could I do to make it work?
What could we do to make this better?
If you look at the initial point of Gdansk,
they were not an ideological opposition
or a hostile proposition,
they were opening up,
there were opportunities
for opening up inquiry
and learning.
And I think that exactly in that tone
we find an enormous promise.
Because what happens when
you face wrong is that
very often you must tend to become
curiously convinced of their own answer,
so in a strange way there is no questions,
there is immediately an answer
before the question is asked.
What you find fascinating
in the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission in South Africa,
in the Gandhi experience,
even in [Martin Luther] King in many ways,
is that you don't have
an answer immediately,
you have the openness to ask questions:
Why is this not working?
I think it's important
for us to remember
that Mr. Gandhi was not
allowed to finish his days
as a retired president,
but was actually killed, because
his inquiring was troubling.
So I understand that for the Poles
the struggling about the memory
and the contestation may be frustrating.
But for us, looking from the outside,
that is actually very healthy.
It's very good that Mr. Walesa
was not killed by
somebody who is
thinking that his positions
are so off-the-wall
that he actually should be killed
 because he should not
be allowed to be alive.
Because that kind of zealotry
is very much alive in the world.
But you don't see that
in the Polish context
and it's an interesting observation,
so I must counter the heaviness
of saying: Oh my God,
we didn't sort it out,
we didn't solve the problem.
You're not killing each other,
so it's a very good point,
because it's happening
in many other cultural contexts.
There are many cultural contexts in which
you can't even ask the questions.
You cannot open the inquiry.
You are not allowed to have
these kind of moments in which
truth is actually sought after.
So I think that the genius of Solidarnosc
that we see operating
over and over again is
the genius of
allowing millions of people,
tortured by this relentless propaganda,
to ask questions
 to one another trustingly.
Believing in their capacity to
ask questions and find answers.
In a time in which nobody knows
how we're going to solve
global, very urgent problems,
I think that the attitude of Solidarnosc
is going to be prophetic.
That in many ways if we
don't acquire collectively
that attitude of a collective inquiry
in the presence of an overreaching,
controlling apparatus,
where everybody knew perfectly
well that everyone was spied on,
and everyone was reported to the police.
Yet nonetheless people were able to
engage with one another truthfully,
inquiring into something that
could become and could happen.
So I say to ourselves: Let's
not throw away the treasure
or do not put the treasure
back into the ground,
because the treasure has been uncovered
and the treasure is this capacity
of the human spirit to inquire
millions of times over, interactively,
in such a way that new
policies, new systems
and new possibilities are uncovered.
I believe that as a human family
we will need more of that spirit
as we go forward, thank you.
Thank you Andrea.
So we've heard that the
truth can be liberating
and nevertheless doesn't make the
task of reconciliation any easier.
Daniel, I hope you can share
your reflections with us,
concerning the ethics of reconciliation
and the many tricky paths
that this process entails.
First of all thank you so
much for having me here.
To speak in Poland as
part of an initiative
on John Paul II is a great honor.
And to be here with Prof. Kubik and my old
friend Andrea Bartoli is a great honor.
I have long admired Poland very intensely,
a nation of a great spirit, that has stayed
alive even under decades of conquests.
The first country to stand
up to the Soviet Empire
and set off the chain reaction that
resulted in the collapse of that Empire.
And John Paul II, the Saint JPII,
is a great hero of mine.
I've watched videos of him
leading the outdoor
masses as Pope
under Communism in Poland many times.
Like so many other countries which
have emerged from dictatorship
over the past generation
all over the world,
Poland has been confronted
with the problem of its past.
How shall we deal with the
injustices of the Communists period?
And, in a broader sense -- how do we
address the wounds of the past?
I'm not an expert on Poland,
and won't pretend to be one.
But I've done some thinking
on how political orders
confront the past injustice.
I've done some thinking on what
JPII had to say about this.
So I'd like to share
with you a few thoughts.
Come with me from Poland to the
country of Uganda in Africa.
Another country that has had to deal
with its past in recent years.
There the past arises in
the form of a civil war
of 25 years, fought in the
north of the country
between the members of the
Lord's Resistance Army
and the government of Uganda.
The Lord's Resistance Army is a bizarre
cultist organization led by Joseph Kony.
He and his group promise a Uganda
ruled by the 10 commandments,
but he seems to have overlooked one:
"Do not kill".
His recruitment strategy
was the forcible abduction
of teenage boys as well as girls
to serve as their wifes, really sex-slaves.
His military strategy was
to force the boy-soldiers
to raid villages, killing
their inhabitants
and burning their dwellings.
At the peak of the movement
some 20 to 30 thousand
abductees were in his army.
The war which began in the late 1980's
killed tens of thousands of people
and forced some 2 million into camps
for internally displaced peoples.
Proposals for peace have come
from different directions.
One has come from the International
Criminal Court, the ICC.
The ICC was created by an
international coalition of lawyers
and human rights activist,
who wanted to revive the
tradition of the Nuremberg trials,
which famously tried Nazi
war-criminals after WWII.
The court was established through
an international treaty in 1998
and began operations in 2002.
For their first indictments,
the ICC turned to Uganda's
Lord's Resistance Army,
five of whose leaders
they chose to indite,
hoping that they could be arrested
and brought to the Hague for trial.
A separate approach to peace
comes from inside Uganda,
from a woman named Angelina Atyam
from a town in Uganda called Lira.
Angelina's daughter, Charlotte,
was abducted by the Lord's
Resistance Army in 1996
along with some 130 other girls
from her Catholic boarding school.
Distressed, helpless and angry,
Atyam and other parents
of the abducted girls
met regularly at the
local Catholic Cathedral
to pray for the release of the girls.
Prayer did not come easily though,
and was hindered by their anger.
Finally, one day, when
they came to the phrase:
"As we forgive those..."
in the Lord's Prayer,
Angelina and other parents
came to the realization,
that God was calling them
 to forgive the
abductors of their daughters.
Angelina followed the
call that she had heard.
She even found the mother
of a solider who
held her daughter in captivity,
and through her forgave him,
his family and his clan.
Later, when this soldier was
killed in the conflict,
she wept
and offered her condolences.
She came to speak regularly
to other parents
of abducted children
and urged forgiveness.
Angelina's activities were
not confined to forgiveness.
She and other parents formed the
"Concerned Parents Association",
which advocated for the girls' release
and began to bring
international attention
to their abduction.
Then Kony himself became worried
about this international publicity
and had one of his minions
approach Angelina
and offer to release her daughter,
if the parents would cease
their international advocacy.
Angelina refused,
saying that she would
only cease the publicity
if the IRA released all of the girls.
Eventually Charlotte was released
after spending 7,5 years in captivity.
Angelina's approach to
violence and injustice
echoed that of a group
of religious leaders,
who amount to one of the
world's greatest examples
of religious leaders
 who have exercised
leadership for peace and reconciliation,
known as the Acholi Religious Leaders
Peace Initiative, or ARLPI.
These leaders bounded
together in the mid 1990's
to advocate for an end to the war.
Their leader was Catholic
Archbishop John Baptist Odama,
who teamed up with Anglican Bishops
as well as the leading Muslim
sheik in northern Uganda.
The ARLPI was a leading force
behind the Amnesty Act of 2000,
passed by the Uganda Parliament,
a cornerstone in the peace process
that enabled thousands of child soldiers
to leave the IRA and return home.
The ARLPI is a strong opponent of
the ICC indictments,
which, as it says, have only
prevented the IRA leaders
from making peace.
Several of the ARLPI leaders
ventured through the bush
on several occasions
to meet with Kony.
These meetings paved the way
for peace negotiations.
Towards their people these leaders
were tireless advocates
of forgiveness and reconciliation
of the kind that Angelina practiced.
To ease the return of child
soldiers and of displaced peoples
they advocated the use of rituals found in
the tradition of the Acholies,
ones that combine
forgiveness, truth-telling,
reparations, apologies
and a community meal that would
mark the end of hostilities
and the restoration of the community.
Of course, they also appeal to
the teachings of their fate.
Now, what we see in the ICC on one hand,
and the approach of Angelina
and the religious
leaders on the other,
are two very different
answers to the question
of what justice means
in the aftermath of massive injustice.
Questions that may have
well relevance to Poland.
This question
of what justice means
finds its setting
in what amounts to one of the
most interesting global trends
of the past generation:
A proliferation of
activities and institutions
to address injustices of the past
in the interest of peace-building.
The criminal court and a host of
tribunals for trying war criminals
are one example,
lustration practices like Poland has had
are another example.
We've seen over 40 truth commissions,
reparation schemes, apologies,
forgiveness, the building
of monuments and memorials
and efforts to build reconciliation
at the level of civil society.
It is in this setting that
the question is asked:
What is the meaning of justice
in the wake of massive injustice?
The dominant answer to this question
is what might be called
"the liberal peace".
It is dominant, because it prevails
in the leading global institutions:
The UN, the ICC,
the Human Rights Community and so on.
By liberal I mean that it
is based on the ideas of
the Enlightenment:
Individual rights, human
rights and the rule of law,
and it places a very central role on
judicial prosecution.
One could think of the
Cathedral of liberal peace
as the two towers in the Hague,
where the International Court is located.
However, an alternative, challenger
point of view has also arisen,
one that has shaped the
approach in South Africa
and that Andrea Bartoli spoke about:
Timor Leste, Guatemala, Chile, Sierra
Leon, Uganda and elsewhere.
This approach goes by
the name of reconciliation.
It's the approach of the
Ugandan religious leaders.
The central idea here is the restoration
of right relationships.
The restoration is meant to be holistic
and might include human rights.
It does not reject human rights,
but it's much wider in addressing
the wide range of wounds
that war and dictatorship
inflict on people.
It addresses these wounds
both because it's intrinsically just,
but also because it helps to build
qualities like trust, legitimacy
for democratic governance
and the stability of peace.
Unless people's emotions of
hatred and revenge are addressed,
peace and democracy are not
likely to be sustainable.
This way of thinking about justice,
I argue, comes to us from
religious traditions.
In my own work I've look at Judaism,
Christianity and Islam.
In the Scriptures of all of these faiths
restoration of right relationships
characterizes the actions of God,
but it's also prescribed
for horizontal relationships
among human communities.
As I need not tell you here in Poland,
John Paul II also had much
to say about reconciliation.
His second Encyclical was called
"Dives in Misericordia",
or "Rich in Mercy".
It was about mercy, which is perhaps
a surprising development
when we think of it in the political realm.
It's probably not surprising that a
Pope would write something about mercy,
which is very important in the Christian
tradition, in the Catholic tradition,
but at the very end of the
Encyclical, he said that
mercy, as well as reconciliation and
forgiveness which go with mercy,
are to be virtues for the
social and political realm.
At least in the US., when I hear
politicians arguing with each other,
the concept of mercy doesn't
come up very often.
In most political settings mercy and
forgiveness are not the stuff of politics,
but for John Paul II they
were very close to his heart.
His history of living through
Communism and Nazism in Poland,
as well as his devotion to sister Faustina,
meant that mercy was
very close to his heart,
something that he cared about very much.
At many points in his pontificate
he spoke about mercy and forgiveness
in the political realm.
Even after the attacks of
September 11th, in 2002,
he devoted his message on the
World Day for Peace
to forgiveness.
I can tell you as an American,
forgiveness was not what
people were talking about
in those first few months
after September 11th.
But nevertheless he thought
that this was the time
when reconciliation and forgiveness
needed to be something
that the world meditated upon.
So, inspired by this idea,
I've set forth to try to think about
what reconciliation and mercy
mean in the political realm.
What I have in mind is in
fact political reconciliation,
where people come to respect one
another's rights as citizens.
But even political reconciliation
requires more than just rights, laws,
and prosecuting war-criminals.
I think that it involves
addressing a range of wounds
that political injustices inflict,
and that each in their own way,
through a set of practices
that address this wounds,
seek to bring about
the restoration of persons
and relationships.
To me that's what reconciliation
is in the political realm.
So what are some of these practices?
First there is the building of
socially just institutions.
You have to have an
anti-Communism or anti-Apartheid etc.,
If you don't have that,
reconciliation is cheap.
But it also involves acknowledgment,
which is the work of truth-commissions.
It involves reparations,
financial transfers to
those who have suffered
from violence and other great injustices.
I believe that it also involves
restorative punishment
or accountability,
that is done in a way that serves to
reintegrate people and communities.
I don't oppose the ICC
I just think that
 much more is needed.
It involves apology,
the confession and the taking of
responsibility
on the part of perpetrators.
Finally, it also involves forgiveness.
The will of victims to forgo
resentment and retribution
and construct right relationships again.
In fact, each of these practices
has taken place all over the world
in scores of countries
over the past generations.
It's also worth saying
that they're complex and
partially achieved,
they're far from perfect,
and always humbled by power, complexity
and just the sheer magnitude
of the injustices
they're trying to deal with.
Sometimes the talk of reconciliation
might sound a little bit utopian.
But if we remember that reconciliation
is always something partially
achieved and very complex,
I think that we can then see
that all of these practices
have taken place
and that reconciliation has taken place
in many countries from around the world.
Forgiveness is perhaps the most
controversial of those practices,
and the one that most
challenges the liberal peace.
It's the only practice that
is not based on rights,
it's rather based on the
good will of the victim,
and, as many would say,
on the grace of God:
It's the practice of mercy.
It has a dramatic, surprising quality,
one that interrupts what is expected
in terms of what is
deserved and of entitlements.
Many people have criticized it,
saying that it forgoes justice,
or that it re-victimized the victim.
But I think that these criticisms
 can be answered,
especially if we see forgiveness
as part of the constructive
justice of reconciliation,
to be complemented
 by other practices
like accountability, reparations,
truth commissions and so forth.
Forgiveness in this constructive way
is what Angelina Atyam practiced
in a very inspirational way.
Through leaders like John Paul II
forgiveness has come on to the scene
of global politics in the past generation.
I think that Prof. Kubik
and Professor -- Dean Bartoli, I should say,
have raised the question
of whether perhaps in Poland
there is some unfinished work
in dealing with the past.
Again, I'm not an expert on Poland,
but it's a question that I would
like to raise for our conversation.
Might some of these
practices of reconciliation,
like truth-telling,
accountability,
reparations, apology
and even forgiveness,
might these continue to have a role
in the political conversation,
in the conversation about
justice in Poland,
as you continue to look at your own past.
The Solidarity movement was a great
example for all of the world.
I think Prof. Kubik is right:
It belongs up there with the movements
of Gandhi and Martin Luther King
as an example and inspiration for
so many in the rest of the world to follow.
I might ask: If you dig deep
into some of the values
that underlie Solidarity,
if you look into the
messages of John Paul II,
his message of reconciliation,
forgiveness and mercy,
might this message have
a potential for Poland
in the era after Solidarity
and after Communism?
What potential might these ideas have
for the ongoing conversation in Poland
about addressing the wounds of the past?
Just as we can ask
 what potential they have
for any society, including
my own, America,
for addressing the wounds of our past.
Thank you.
Thank you. You offered us a
very broad range of suggestions
of what can we do to resolve the
unresolved disputes here in Poland.
The list is very comprehensive,
but before I open the floor to questions,
I have my own question,
If you don't mind:
Don't you think that
what we need in order to
reach truth and
reconciliation here in Poland
is simply solidarity,
which is the one missing thing that we
kind of lost somewhere along the way?
Or perhaps not?
Just to make few disclaimers:
The solidarity that I'm thinking of
is also the solidarity
that John Paul II was referring to,
something that is more akin to praxis,
not just an empty political theory.
Something that is a lived reality,
that we were discussing here.
Something that is the ontological category
that you were talking about.
When we understand solidarity this way,
it really dictates the way
life is lived and it makes
ethical actions a derivative.
The reason I'm talking this way is
just because John Paul II was
referring to similar things,
and, if you don't mind,
I will quote. This is
what he said in Gdansk Zaspa,
on June 12th 1987:
"It is all too easy for the
others to become the enemies,
those whom it's necessary to
 fight and annihilate
instead of those with whom
it's necessary to seek common ground.
Those with whom
 it's necessary to concede
how the burdens should be shouldered...".
And we're talking about the burdens,
the burdens of the unresolved past,
the present burdens as well.
So what about the treasure
of Solidarity, perhaps
it's also the answer?
Anyone of you would perhaps
like to offer their thoughts?
I'll start.
We are in many ways the words we say.
Solidarity was the moment
in which the world said:
"Follow the praxis".
There was a burst of doing things
that were then explained,
there was an experience of freedom
that I think we are still
compelled to understand,
because the workers that were fired
in Gdansk,
they were not
the first to be fired,
so why then? What happened then?
And this is an extraordinary question
for anything of the
magnitude of Solidarity.
There is a turning point
in which something that is
ordinary becomes suddenly
very, very significant.
I think that there is certainly
an important dimension
about taking our own words seriously enough
to live by them
and to make sure that's the case.
But what I find fascinating
about Solidarity,
it was the openness of it,
that in many ways it's counter-intuitive.
Because there was this trust
that things could be done
in a system that was
actually quite controlling,
and whatever you were saying
was reported,
somebody else would check what you
were doing and what you were saying.
I think that there is much less
fear about retaliation today,
and yet solidarity is not as relevant.
I do think that there are many words
that we should take seriously,
that we should be many
words to one another.
The historical challenge
that we are facing today
is in many ways the
challenge of solidarity,
that is to hear the suffering of others,
meaningful enough
 for us to take actions
in a way that is politically relevant.
I think that the temptation is...,
the cacophony of people talking
and nobody listening, a system
in which everybody speaks
and tries to speak even more, but nobody is
able to listen to what somebody else needs.
So I think that solidarity
is an interesting case
of stopping to
respond to someone else,
not just to promote your own.
And that frame of mind I
think is very creative
and very hopeful, so in
a way I would say yes,
I think you're right, we
should live more by solidarity,
I think we should live
more by many other words.
I think what you
quoted from John Paul II
was very profound.
There is one dimension of
the Solidarity movement
we in the West sometimes have
a kind of caricature, where
it's just about opposition:
So you had John Paul II, the good guy,
bringing down the Communists, the bad guys,
and then everything was done with.
Of course a great part
of it was oppositional
to this regime and
bringing down the regime.
But I think the quote suggests
that there is something more
which is not just oppositional, but
there is something
restorative about Solidarity,
that it's about restoring the
fabric of relationships
in the society, in the way
that actually would include
restoration with the enemy.
Because it really does smash through the
binary thinking "us and them", doesn't it?
Yes. What I might suggest
is that restorative work
is something that must
 go on for many years
after victory seems to be won.
And I would also argue, that if
there is no set of practices
through which a society
seeks to address the wounds of the past,
that eventually they will resurface.
An example is Spain, which had a
terrible civil war in the 1930's,
then you had a dictatorship
for 30 years under Franco,
there were no efforts to look back
and deal with the wounds of the war,
then you had democracy in
1975 and they decided well,
we're not going to do anything,
we're going to draw a line
and not look at the past now.
But, lo and behold, in the 2000's these
groups started emerging, saying:
"We've got to dig up the
bones of my grandfather",
and the whole society ends up
in a debate 70 years later
about the events of the 1930's.
That's why I think it's
important to have a healthy
conversation about the wounds of the past.
I was sort of in my sociological shoes,
presenting a picture that
was maybe a little bit dark,
so let me put on more philosophical shoes
and look for hope in all of this,
and yet remain on some practical ground.
I think it's absolutely true,
and all of us
who lived through Solidarity,
without any doubt we knew,
and we still know I suppose,
that we experienced something
phenomenally transformative.
It was about solidarity.
It was about discovering people
with whom you would never
meet under normal circumstances,
and create something with them
and care for each other. Absolutely.
So the question is: Given my darker picture
of what happens next, after 1989.
What happened? There is a
polarization, there is a split
in the culture of this country.
So what can be done,
what are the concrete things?
I think that the word "forgiveness"
gives one key.
It was a very complex movement
with a lot of tensions in it.
Various tendencies somehow stayed together
and that's I think the main
reason of its success.
Because of this complexity, because
of this trial and error method of
doing things, since
nobody has done
anything like that before,
many mistakes were committed.
No doubt about it. There were mistakes.
Like always.
We're only human and we make mistakes.
Particularly in a situation
like that, when you improvise.
So maybe we need to go back
and just forgive each
other for those mistakes
and say: "Well, you know,
it's in the past, we tried".
In many cases I believe people
were trying their best.
Even on the Communist side.
This is not easy for me to say,
but there were people there...,
I participated in the project
in which we were interviewing
many of the participants
of the Round Table talks,
and you could see that
eventually there was a moment,
maybe it was cynical, but I
think it was more than that,
that they new it cannot
go on like that any more,
there must be a change.
Of course many on the
Communist side tried to
somehow land safely
 on the other side,
but you hear voices that are
kind of contributing to this
larger solidarity massive voice.
The second thought that occurres
to me when I think about it:
What are the practicalities,
what can we dwell on?
Is just to realize that
we didn't want Communism to
continue, we didn't want
command economy to continue,
so one way or another
we all pushed for capitalism
in some form,
maybe we didn't get
the form of capitalism
that we were dreaming about,
but again, it was trial and error.
Maybe Balcerowicz did it the wrong way,
but on the other hand, Balcerowicz produced
the best economy of all
post-Communist countries.
No doubt with suffering.
No doubt with people who lost,
with those who didn't find themselves
in this new reality.
But in addition to capitalism,
what emerged from Solidarity
was democracy.
For better or worse, it's a democracy.
It's actually not that bad, by
standards of what you see
in the post-Communist world.
Maybe what we need to do
 is to focus
systematically, without malice,
with no bad energy, on how to fix
the problems of capitalism
with the tools of democracy,
which is also our creation of solidarity.
I think that in those
things that have happened,
this transformation, this new system,
we can still find positives.
It would be about forgiving,
about the mistakes,
and about finding ways of fixing things
within the system
that we should be proud of.
Can I add, in a way you
sparked this connection.
One other thing that
really struck me in the conversation
in this encounter
with Solidarity,
and now the legacy of Solidarity,
is the fact that hundreds
and thousands of workers
who were in Solidarity lost their job,
because the transition actually
moved them to the margins.
So I think there is
 something very profound
in taking solidarity seriously,
because everybody benefited.
I think those who were
involved in Solidarity,
that are now cherishing
those moments of freedom,
those moments of exuberance
in which you are
discovering possibilities
that were not there before,
they actually payed the price in the
most absurd of the irony of history!
Of everybody, those are the ones who
paid the highest price!
At the level of this society
this could be extremely healthy,
it could be really transformative
in living the solidarity
at the social level
and recognizing this,
even just naming it,
even just saying it,
 and then say:
"Thank you for what you gave us",
there is almost a collective
responsibility in saying it properly,
and I don't know how
that could be done,
but there is certainly
something beautiful
about even thinking in those terms.
Thank you. I'm happy to
say that we do our share
by discovering the treasure of Solidarity
and bringing it to you,
so that's our small part.
I know that there are many questions,
so I'll open the floor to questions now.
I'd be very happy if you could
just pass the microphone around.
You can ask the questions
in Polish or in English,
whatever is more comfortable for you.
The first question from over there.
I'd like to point out
that you didn't mention
one achievement of Solidarity,
which is its greatest achievement.
Solidarity has prevented the
outbreak of World War III,
which, if it had started,
it would have been be a
thermonuclear war, during which
several millions of people
would lose their life.
Without Solidarity that
war would have started.
Thanks to the existence of Solidarity
the life of
several millions of people was saved.
I'm just stating this now in a
raw, abbreviated way,
but I described this in a larger text,
that I'd like you to publish.
If you're interested, I shall
send it to you by e-mail.
You asked: What should we do
to achieve reconciliation?
I will reply:
I already answered your question before,
I wrote a book entitled:
"Hard time for agents".
This book describes
what should be done to
achieve reconciliation.
The book has been published only
electronically in the Internet.
I recommend you read it. Thank you.
This was a very rich discussion.
There are many questions I could ask,
I just want to push back on two points:
I'm very curious on what you'd
all have to say to them:
The first has to do with... This isn't the
forum to go into a whole discussion
on ethics of memory and reconciliation
and forgetting in a broader sense,
there is a notion of amnesty versus amnesia
that comes up quite
frequently in literature.
So for example, if we're talking
about the issue of agency,
I didn't really get a sense
from your discussion
of who should be doing the reconciling
and the forgiving,
in the sense: Is it
everybody with everybody?
There are many different
dimensions of reconciliation
in recent Polish history,
some played out during Communist times,
some played out since 1989,
Polish-German, Christian-Jewish, etc.
Some are international, some are domestic.
If I could simply push back and say:
Is the imperative for you that
this should be playing out
continuously, as opposed to let's say
across generations? Let's keep in mind that
I'm asking this several days
after the death of Jaruzelski.
Is there a historically
contingent moment here
where we passed through a certain window
and it becomes easier?
Because, by the same token,
for restoring rightful relations
that also suggests that we remember:
A. What those relations were,
but B.: Are able to push that memory aside
in order to act out
as though we'd never really
departed from the initial path.
The second, very quick question:
This is a bit of a provocation,
but Prof. Philpott, I think
you opened the door by
using the term "liberal"
to describe the
alternative framework
to the one that you
derive from JPII.
And I think that's very provocative
and it makes a lot of sense,
whether we call it "natural law", Thomism,
Catholic social teaching etc,
to think about the practical
political consequences
of John Paul II's advocacy.
After 1989, this is what
Prof. Kubik was describing,
we get liberalism, we get capitalism,
we get a free market, before 1989 JPII
was inspiring precisely
because of the kind of order
into which his ideas were penetrating.
My question here is:
It seems as though through
the sixteen years
of his pontificate, that post 1989
things actually went in reverse.
In terms of the influence that his
thought had on society at large.
Is this a case of liberal and Catholic social teaching,
or natural law, whatever you want to call it, values
simply being structurally
unamicable to each other,
or is there a kind of
solution that we can seek
that's internal to the
Polish solidarity framework?
Why do you think they went in reverse?
I've been having discussions...
I'm writing a lot on this right now,
basically the Catholic Church in Poland
has become more and more fragmented
or in some sense the fragmentation
that existed prior to 1989
has become more and
more visible since 1989,
and this is connected to the
divisions that Prof. Kubik
was talking about
in his presentation at the beginning.
In the sense that: If even the Catholics
can't get together,
than how do we expect a dialogue,
a reconciliation that transcends
different axiological and
religious identities?
I can say a couple of things.
One on liberalism:
I didn't mean to reject
some of the core values
of liberalism, like human
rights, the rule of law or
a market economy in a general sense.
Of course, I don't think JPII
rejected those things either,
but I think he proposed
something much broader,
and I think that societies
dealing with the past
need to have standards of justice,
like human rights and the rule of law,
those things are essential,
but I think if we just leave it at that
there are many wounds that are unattended.
So it's something broader and more holistic
that I think he was calling for.
He himself lived out things like apology,
in the sense of
preparing for the Jubilee year,
he issued many "mea culpas" for actions
the Church had committed
before in its history.
So an example of how within
the Catholic Church
he sought to bring about
some reconciliation
between the Catholic Church
and other groups as well.
So I think the Catholic
Church is certainly
one of the places where
reconciliation needs to happen.
Maybe that leads to your first question.
I think that reconciliation
is an ongoing project
and maybe something that societies
need to do with respect to
many layers of episodes in their past.
I think it's never to
late to do reconciliation,
either for the immediate
past, or for other things.
There are many different
agents which participated
in practices of reconciliation
in different ways.
Forgiveness could be individuals
forgiving other individuals,
it could be individuals
forgiving the society
or the political leaders,
like Nelson Mandela
sometimes forgiving on
behalf of collectives,
so we can also have this
collective dimension as well.
Holism points to those many
different textures and postures.
We can exchange e-mails,
I'd be happy to read your materials,
thank you for the suggestion.
My impression is that
we are confronting,
we're facing an extraordinary
creative moment of human history.
It's very difficult for
us to be normative about
who needs to remember what
and what is the way to do these things.
We just know, just one by one,
that many, many countries
have been going through very
significant transformations
because they took their past seriously.
Argentina today is unrecognizable.
It's just a different country.
Australia is a very different country.
The past is not dead,
it's very much alive,
and the way we remember
 collectively has to
do enormously with what kind of
future we're creating for ourselves,
our children, the children
of our children and so on.
So my reaction to you is:
In a way John Paul II
looked at history as a
source of inspiration
for this almost crazy exuberant moment
of thinking what is possible,
because we don't know,
we don't know how to purify the memory
as he was inviting us to do.
And even talking, I'm not sure
that we must go necessarily
through telling.
I honestly tend to believe that
victims have the right not to tell anybody.
I think a person that is traumatized,
in my view, has all the
rights to be silent,
to cope in whatever way
coping makes sense to them.
Because we are really
encountering a mistery of
evil made by humans to humans,
that I can't address, normatively saying:
"Now you need to go to a
television, you need to tell your story"
and somebody is going to record it,
it's going to be what?
What is the answer to that?
Re-living the trauma again?
Who is helping who?
In many ways we are a mess,
the big difference is that we are
starting to understand
 how messy we are,
so my hope is that we'll
be slightly more humble
about touching each other,
and looking into each other, and all that.
In terms of liberalism and its limits,
I'd say that there are many
observers that do share concerns
about the limits of our current system
both in economic and political terms.
So again, I'd say that
if anything what I hear from Solidarnosc,
is this curious mix of humility, somber
acknowledgment that
something is not working,
and this excitement about
the inquiry process:
"Maybe we can make it better".
I hope that in a way we can
acquire that kind of attitude,
in which we are humble enough
to say: This is not working,
but at the same time bold enough
to say: Maybe we can figure it out.
So in that sense I think it's
good to liberate liberalism.
I think it's a good challenge.
Is it getting easier
one way or another, of
dealing with the past?
I just finished a book about that.
I think it's getting worse.
The Spanish example is a great example:
There is a whole bunch of stuff coming out
and it's already been written about.
Now, this new generation,
often young people,
they're saying: We don't know
amnesty, we don't know amnesia,
we want to reopen the wounds in some sense.
But maybe that will eventually
push the whole debate to a higher level
and then produce a more
permanent resolution.
But I always think, I guess it
was in your remarks already,
that it's a different thing if I forget
and it's a sort of spontaneous forgetting,
and maybe forgive,
and it's a different thing
that one way or another
I am made to forget and forgive,
and someone pushes me around
 and says...
So it's very difficult
to locate the agency.
But once I thought that
it's not going well
on the level of families
and the civil society,
in various organizations,
if the state, particularly
a democratic state,
which one way or another,
at least to a point
we should respect,
because it's our state,
if the state doesn't do it,
if the state's authorities
 do not commit to
the process of healing
and reviving the
values we're interested in in this case.
If the state is not engaged
in the act of forgetting
at least on some level,
there is some kind of
cacophony in the system,
and it's hard to achieve it at
other levels, it seems to me,
and therefore we're looking at Poland
and I wish, I just realized
when we're talking about it,
that the sides of the political conflict
maybe should take a deep breath.
All is in intention,
I either want to encounter
the other in the mode of combat
or in the mode of possible reconciliation.
It's a decision. There is
nothing in the history,
nothing in the past that tells you:
You should go this way or that way.
You have to sit down
and maybe think
about JPII and his teachings.
I have a sense sometimes that
people often talk about him
and like to display him on posters,
but I'm not sure they read him.
If this is truly his message,
then he is sort of
important for this culture,
not only this culture.
When I encountered his thought,
I'm not a Catholic, I'm a Protestant,
so I'm sort of a fan of the
Polish Pope from the outside,
and it was extremely important in my life
when I started working on
Solidarity and all of this...
I read very carefully his Encyclical,
which was central to the
whole Solidarity movement,
the Encyclical on human labor.
This is the text in which he introduces
the concept that was the
driving concept of Solidarity,
I wish we'd remember it better,
which was dignity.
Dignity of the human person,
which is based on his
earlier philosophical work,
on personalism, and that was honestly...
Many of us must remember
that during that time,
during the first Solidarity in particular,
this was a living concept,
and then we lost it,
let's face it: We lost it,
we're trying, you now,
it's wonderful what's happening here,
because it's the first time after
all those years, twenty-some years,
this is the first time I'm
participating in something
that is really hopeful,
we're talking, we're thinking,
we're returning to those concepts,
which seemed to be already
kind of pushed under the rug,
and kind of not relevant.
And they are relevant,
so this is wonderful,
but this is intention.
We have to be willing
to talk to each other, and
maybe then we can learn
how to forgive. We shouldn't be forgetting.
Piotr Czekierda from
Wroclaw, the West of Poland.
Forgiveness and reconciliation
is a very demanding program
for both sides, we can say,
and it needs a strong
source of power and courage.
And my question:
I am a partner of this project,
I'm an entrepreneur,
and the biggest question I have:
From where should we or
can we have the source
for forgiveness and for this courage?
Come on, that's an easy one. Right?
The travel from Wroclaw
to Warsaw takes 6 hours,
so it's a really important question.
I think that the human spirit is
extraordinarily powerful.
I think that we tend to
underestimate the capacity of
humans to be human.
Solidarnosc is a moment in which
there is this mutual
invitation of being more than
the system seems to be expecting.
Identifying the sources,
the ontology of your life,
is thinking: What is driving us?
What is giving us life? And so on.
So I leave it to each one on their
own to respond to these questions.
I certainly know that what we
are discovering in general
is that we live in each other's presence.
That when we are not looking
at each other, we die.
When we're not listening
to each other, we die.
When we're not paying attention
to each other, we die.
This is what we discovered
in social psychology,
this is what we see
 happening with kids,
I'm speaking of "we" as a human family,
not as Poles, Italians or Americans,
this is just a universal experience.
What I found fascinating about Solidarnosc
is that it's not just a source that is
external to us, but it's a source
that is renewable, in so far as it is
mutually invited.
So one of the reasons why I heard
the applause after your observation,
it's the first time in 20 years
that you hear something hopeful
about Solidarnosc and so on.
It's because for some
strange reason tonight
we are inviting each other
to a different place.
We're speaking in a
slightly different place.
We're clearly not just a bunch
of academics teaching somebody.
We're not just somebody who is
speaking about someone else.
We're putting ourselves into
the conversation and so on.
We're actually resonating
with one another in a way that
prompted your question about the source.
What I find fascinating is that
when you hear a story like Angelina,
and I heard this story being told
to many different audiences,
it resonates with people.
The idea that someone, somewhere,
who had her daughter kidnapped
is able to come by herself
into a moment of awareness,
in which she can liberate
herself, her daughter,
the family of the soldier who is now
the husband...and so on.
I find it fascinating.
When he told that story, he
reinvigorated in me the source
that brought me here in the first place.
In many ways he is
inviting me to be better,
to be a little bit more human.
Or a little bit more puzzled.
So my response to you is:
The source is already there, in each of us,
you can call it conscience,
you can call it spirit,
you can call it "person", you can
call it names that we are able to use
to speak about the self that
is not closed in itself.
But in that spirit, I think
that we are very lazy.
I don't think that we take
each other seriously,
I don't think we listen to
each other seriously enough.
We don't challenge each other.
I think that Solidarnosc was that moment
when people really took
each other seriously.
The risk they took, whatever
was said was taken very seriously,
and became involved in
making their own life,
their own history and country.
And there was an incredible
repositioning of agency,
of what I can do, what is possible
and what can be done and all that.
My hope is that we will
re-ignite the source.
The source is there, is just
that we usually don't use it.
We usually don't engage with
the source, the source is just
sort of lost into this busy life in
which everybody is just looking at...,
and nobody is looking anywhere,
we're not listening anymore.
But the source is ready
to give us what we need.
It's a very good question. One thing
that needs to be acknowledged
is that forgiveness is difficult,
it can be very difficult. It's not
only looking at evil injustice,
but at evil and injustice
that was done to one's self.
And forgiveness is choosing
a restorative route,
when one might be well
justified in choosing
a much more retributive route,
and in some sense absorbing the
wrong that was done to one,
even while choosing to act in a way
that is potentially very constructive.
So where do you get the
source, the power to do that?
Of course John Paul II was
thinking about that in
the light of the Christian fate.
He said: We look to God,
somebody even argued
that it's only with God,
it's only with the Holy Spirit
that one could forgive.
It requires that kind
of a measure of grace,
that if one tried to
 do that by oneself,
it would be very difficult to do.
In his letter in 2002, in
his message for the World
Day of Peace, when he
meditated on forgiveness,
John Paul II actually posed this question.
He looks at forgiveness as
a deeply Christian thing,
but then he poses the question:
Could forgiveness make sense to somebody,
if they were not looking at it
in the Christian framework?
His answer was perhaps surprising:
He answered that yes, he thought
that there was a human sense
In which forgiveness could
make sense as well.
I read very powerful stories
of people forgiving, who were
doing that from a secular
perspective as well.
Even though I'm a Christian,
I think that the role of
grace is quite important.
Perhaps it's something analogous to
natural law, which you mentioned.
Perhaps JPII thought that there
was a kind of natural law center,
a human level, from which
one could grasp forgiveness.
So it's a challenging thing
 to think about.
I think that the grace dimension is
a pretty great advantage though.
Prof. Kubik.
I'm not sure I have much to add to this.
One thing occurred to me when
you were speaking about it.
I recently listened to Dalailama.
Of course, in Buddhism you have that
very powerful idea of forgiveness also.
And he was talking about his relationship
with the Chinese government.
We know what is happening in Tibet.
And he was speaking very
powerfully about the need
not to hate the Chinese, he was trying to,
as the leader of the Tibetans,
he was telling them
basically the same lesson,
and I think that 25 years after
the fall of Communism
it should become somewhat easier maybe.
I don't know where to start,
in our personal life. Maybe I can find
that Party Secretary who was
making my life miserable
and go to him and say: Well, whatever,
25 years have passed, let's
move forward together.
It's not easy, there is a
lot of things in me that
truly make it difficult,
but this conversation
is very helpful, I'm beginning to think
maybe I should do that. Just do it.
Maybe at first you just perform it.
But performance may become
our essence after a while.
You try it, so it's a very practical thing.
As I mentioned earlier, the process that
I understand better than others,
in South Africa, it was
well set up at the top.
Problems were actually emerging locally.
There were some who really
didn't like the fact
that Mandela was speaking
the language of forgiveness
and moving forward,
but he was very committed to it.
I'm not sure if Walesa is involved
in some issues of politics now.
He is capable of speaking
that language, I don't know
if he is willing to, but
it could come from him.
I don't suppose that A. Michnik is a
very popular person in this place.
Maybe he is, I don't know.
I was once talking about him bothered by
the fact that he was reported
"fraternizing", as it was put,
with Kiszczak -- one of the
Generals, and Jaruzelski himself.
And he said something that
really made me think.
He said: I learned.... After spending
10 years or so in prison
I have some decent
anti-Communist credentials.
I said: Well, yeah.
"So, I didn't like Communists, obviously,
but I was always able
to make a distinction
between Communism
and Communists,
and those are people, and
I believe that people can change".
That's a thought, right.
We always have doubts whether those
people whom we see as enemies
are actually changing, or
if they're pretending.
But if we don't make a risky move
of accepting the fact that they may
be changing genuinely, we are stuck.
That much is true --  we are stuck.
So maybe it's a risk worth taking.
Make that first gesture.
I don't know if you agree,
but I have the feeling
that we've just started the conversation
and we've just touched up on
the surface of so many issues,
that we could easily continue for hours.
Unfortunately this is precisely the time
when I'm forced to actually
conclude our meeting.
Not for long though, because
refreshments are served.
Is there another question?
There are many questions.
Unfortunately, Emilia,
I would love to hear them all,
but my proposition is:
Let's go outside, have some refreshments
and continue our discussions informally.
Before we do so, I'd like to
thank our organizers and our guests
once again, so please put your hands
together for them. Thank you so much.
Our gratitude extends also to our sponsors,
the Fetzi Institute and our partners.
Also, I'd like to thank you for coming
and being with us. And I'd like to
invite you to our future events
within the framework of the
"treasure of Solidarity" project.
The next one is going to take place on
the 4th of June on Hoover's square.
So please do come along.
Once again, thank you very much
and I hope to see you soon.
