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Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia (Washington D.C., November 6-7, 2008) Conference participants, titles, abstracts and bios |
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CHARLES S. MAIER (keynote speaker) · 1968 in Context: ‘East”-‘West’ and ‘North’-‘South’ Abstract: How should we understand 1968 in long-term historical context? As a failed moment of emancipation in Eastern Europe? As the acting out of a collective Bildungsroman in Western Europe and the United States? As a contagious radical euphoria on the part of powerful protest movements throughout the globe? This paper will review the many interpretations and place the upheavals in the context of the close of the postwar era and the weakening of its ideological and socioeconomic structures. Biography: Charles Maier received his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard, where he is currently the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History. From 1994 to 2001 he served as director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He was a Humboldt Prize Winner in Berlin in 2004 and taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in spring 2007. He has written extensively on twentieth century European history and international relations, including most recently Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (1997), and Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (2006). Martin Palouš - (keynote speaker) - · On Revolutions and Revolutionaries: the Lessons of the Years of Crisis Biography: Martin Palouš was appointed Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United States in 2001. Dr. Palouš was one of the first signatories of Charter 77 and served as spokesman for this dissident human rights group in 1986. He has held a number of teaching positions at Charles University since 1990. He has been active in various non-governmental organizations, including serving as Chairman of the Czech Helsinki Committee and Co-Chairman of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly. Ambassador Palouš is the author of numerous publications, including the chapter on the Czech Republic in the European Commission publication Democratization in Central and Eastern Europe; “Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism,” in the Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict; and “Between Idealism and Realism: Reflections on the Political Landscape of Postcommunism,” in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and their Aftermath. VLADIMIR TISMANEANU (keynote speaker) - · Betrayed Promises: Ceausescu, the Romanian Communist Party, and the Crisis of World Communism in 1968
Abstract:
The attitude of the Romanian Communist Party and of its leader,
Nicolae Ceauşescu, during the Prague Spring has generated
extensive analysis in the field. The literature, however, has
more often than not unilaterally approached the Romanian
reactions
Biography:
Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics and Director of the
Center for the Study of Post-communist Societies at University
of Maryland (College Park). Chairman of the Presidential
Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in
Romania (April 2006 – April 2007). Since April 2007, Chairman of
the Presidential Advisory for the Analysis of the Communist
Dictatorship in Romania. He left communist Romania in 1981. In
1982 he settled in the US, where, in 1983, joined the Foreign
Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia as a research
associate and a contributing editor to ORBIS. Between
1985 and 1990, he taught at University of Pennsylvania. Since
1990 he has been teaching at University of Maryland, Department
of Government and Politics. In 2003, he received University of
Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award. In 2007, the
university granted him the Distinguished International Service
Award. Prof. Tismaneanu received from the American Association AGNES HELLER - · East European Left before and after 1968 Abstract: The year of 1968 was characterized by an even more than usual de-synchronization among the so called socialist countries. In each of them the domestic concerns occupied the central political position. The forceful populist, anti-Semitic wave in Poland, the Ceausescu national totalitarianism in Romania, the student movements in Yugoslavia, finally the new economic politics in Hungary, and the beginning of the freedom movement during the Prague Spring. All of them characterized the year. The impact and influence of the movement of 68, beginning with the “May of Paris” was everywhere combined with domestic issues. Yet, it was omnipresent, especially among the youth, which was lingering under the domination of a fraudulent ideology, while being barred access to alternative ideas. Slowly, the „New Left” began to provide such ideas and practices. The paper discusses the movements which picked up, in various ways, the messages of the “New Left”, .e.g. in music, political ideas and illusions, forms of life, theater and cinema, of „youth culture” in general. In philosophy the thinking the „Easterners” differed from that of the „Westerners” of the seventies and eighties only at the point that they were entirely disillusioned by „real existing socialism,” in all its variants. My presentation will discussed this long overlooked parallelism between East and West developed in the seventies and the eighties and the essential differences 68 made in the vision of European intellectuals in general. Biography: Agnes Heller is Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the New School –A University in New York. Agnes Heller was a student and co-worker of Lukács's during the 1950s. She was one of a group of prominent members of the `Budapest School' who left Hungary for Australia in the early 1970s and taught sociology in Melbourne, at La Trobe University. In 1986, she moved to New York. Agnes Heller has written widely on the philosophy of history and morals, or the theory of modernity: The Time Is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (2002); A Theory of Modernity (1999); An Ethics of Personality (1996); General Ethics (1988); Beyond Justice (1987); The Power of Shame (1986); Radical Philosophy (1984); Everyday Life (1984); Lukács Revalued (editor, 1983); A Theory of History (1982); A Theory of Feelings (1979); Renaissance Man (1978); The Theory of Needs in Marx (1976). She is presently working on two books: Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life and The Concept of the Beautiful. Agnes Heller received The Sonning Prize, Denmark’s most important cultural award. She is also a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. DICK HOWARD · Experiencing 1968 in Prague and Paris Abstract: The question that I want to introduce is the same one that led me to Paris and to Prague in 1967 and 1968: What is a “new” Left? As I will be among the first speakers, I will begin with some autobiographical experiences as a young American leftist in Paris and (briefly) in Prague during the years 1967-68. The Left in the US at the time was the civil rights movement, as well as the movement against the war in Vietnam. It also called itself “new” although it knew little about what was the old left and, while distinguishing itself from its ancestor, it felt a need to learn from it. That was why Paris, the home of leftism, was attractive. But in Paris and, to my surprise, in Prague, a mutation was taking place, bringing the old left closer to the mentality of the new one to which I belonged. After recounting this experience, I’ll try to draw some general conclusions about the nature of the left, then and now. Biography: Dick Howard is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook, associate with the Center for European Politics (N.Y.U.) since 1993, and director of the monthly seminar "Thinking about Politics." He taught in the past at New School for Social Research, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Columbia University. He was awarded in 1995 the rank of “Chevalier” in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. He authored, among many other titles: The Marxian Legacy (Macmillan, 1978), La naissance de la pensée politique américaine (Paris; Editions Ramsay, l987; English translation Macmillan, 1989; German translation, Edition Suhrkamp, 2001), and The Specter of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2002). He edited four other volumes and wrote over 150 articles in various academic journals. He is also author of political commentary for Esprit, Dissent, Liberation, Constellations, etc. He participated in numerous radio and TV shows on political issues of the day. PAUL BERMAN · Beyond Ideology: the Politics of Utopia and the Utopia of Politics Biography: Paul Berman is a writer on politics and literature whose articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the New Republic (where he is a contributing editor), the New Yorker, Slate, the Village Voice, Dissent, and various other American, European and Latin American journals. He has reported at length from Europe and Latin America. He has written or edited eight books, including, most recently, Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath, with a new preface by Richard Holbrooke for the 2007 paperback edition; Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction, published in 2006 by the American Poets Project of the Library of America; and Terror and Liberalism, a New York Times best-seller in 2003. His writings have been translated into fifteen languages. Berman received a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Columbia University and has been awarded a MacArthur, a Guggenheim, the Bosch Berlin Prize, a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Center for Writers & Scholars, and other honors. CHARLES GATI · Discussant for the panel Marxist Revisionism, Dissent and the Struggle for Civil Society Biography: Adjunct Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies, School of Advanced International Studies/Johns Hopkins University. Formerly a senior advisor with the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State and professor at Union College and Columbia University. He is the author of Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (1986), for which he received his first Marshall Shulman Book Award in 1987, The Bloc that Failed (1990), and several other books as well as numerous articles in publications including Foreign Affairs and The New York Times. A study titled "If not Democracy, What?" was published in 1997. His latest book -- Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian revolt -- appeared in 2006 in English, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, and Russian and was awarded Dr. Gati's second Marshall Shulman Book Award in 2007. MARK KRAMER · The Kremlin and the Prague Spring Abstract: This paper draws on recently declassified materials and memoirs to provide a reassessment of the Soviet Union's response to the Prague Spring, showing how the confrontation with Czechoslovakia fit into Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe. The paper begins by discussing the context of the 1968 crisis, highlighting trends in Soviet policy in the late 1950s and 1960s. It then turns to the Prague Spring itself, explaining why the bold changes in Czechoslovakia provoked such a harsh reaction in Moscow. Finally, the paper explores the consequences of the invasion, focusing in particular on the promulgation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which set the tone for Soviet-East European relations for the next 21 years. Biography: Mark Kramer is Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard's Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University . Professor Kramer is the author of Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1968: The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion; Soldier and State in Poland: Civil-Military Relations and Institutional Change After Communism; The Collapse of the Soviet Union; and Crisis in the Communist World, 1956: The Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and Upheavals in Poland and Hungary (forthcoming, 2010). He was the translator and American editor for The black book of communism: crimes, terror, repression, published by Harvard University Press in 1999. He is completing another book titled From Dominance to Hegemony to Collapse: Soviet Policy in East-Central Europe, 1945-1991. Professor Kramer also has written more than 150 articles on a variety of topics. His article "Ideology and the Cold War" in the October 1999 issue of the Review of International Studies was awarded a prize by the British International Studies Association for the best article published in the field of international relations in 1999. He has been a consultant for numerous government agencies and international organizations, including the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Defense Department, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Naval War College, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the UN World Institute for Development Economic Research. CHARLES KING · Discussant for the panel Re-thinking the Political and the Dynamics of Modernity Biography: Charles King is Ion Raţiu Professor of Romanian Studies and Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University, where he also serves as chairman of the faculty of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. His books include Nations Abroad: Diaspora Politics and International Relations in the Former Soviet Union (1998), The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (2000), The Black Sea: A History (2004), and The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (2008). IRENA GRUDZINSKA GROSS · Remembering March 1968 Abstract: The 40th anniversary of 1968 events in Poland was an occasion to reevaluate the causes and long-term consequences of this social upheaval. For the first time the forced emigration of Polish citizens of Jewish descent was foregrounded in both official and unofficial celebrations. I will look at the changes in the interpretation of these events and try to propose some conclusions as to their impact. Biography: Irena Grudzinska Gross is at present teaching at Princeton University in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is working on modern European intellectual history and literature, especially in relation to the formation of Eastern European nation-states and their cultures. Next year Yale University Press will publish her most recent book, “Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky—The Fellowship of Poets.” In the years 2003-2008, she was the Director of the Institute of Human Sciences at Boston University, where she also taught comparative literature. In 1996-2002, she was Ford Foundation’s program director for East-Central Europe. JOHN LAMPE · Discussant for the panel The Crisis of ‘Really Existing Socialism’ and the Failure of “Socialism with a Human Face” Biography: Professor Lampe's most recent books are Balkans into Southeastern Europe, A Century of War and Transition (Palgrave, 2006) and Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of 20th Century Southeastern Europe, co-edited with Mark Mazower (CEU Press, 2004). In 2000, he published the second edition of his Yugoslavia as History, Twice there was a Country for Cambridge University Press. His initial book was Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950, From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations, with Marvin Jackson (Indiana University Press, 1982), winner of the first annual Vucinich Prize for a publication for publication on Eastern Europe from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. A former Foreign Service Officer, Professor Lampe directed the area studies program for Southeastern Europe at the Foreign Service Institute from 1980 to 1985 and the program in East European Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington from 1987 to 1997. He is currently a Senior Scholar at the Wilson Center. He continues to travel regularly to the region and to comment on current events for the Voice of American and other media. JEFFREY HERF · The Questions of Communism and Violence in West Germany
Abstract:
The radical left in "1968" in West Germany, Western Europe, the
United States, Japan and in various "third world" countries
advocated communist revolution by armed force if necessary. It
denounced criticism of existing communist regimes as being
nothing more than the ideological tool of "U.S" or Western
imperialism. The radical left in the West thus distanced itself
from criticism of "real existing socialism" in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union other than to say it was more boring and
drab than the "national liberation struggle" waged in Vietnam.
In global perspective, the eruption of 1968 in Europe and the
United States was, in part, a reaction to the mistaken belief
that the Communists in Vietnam had won a major military victory
in the Tet Offensive of January-February. It was a "Hegelian
moment" infused with enormous optimism that global revolution
was a real possibility and that American imperialism was going
to be defeated. A crucial aspect of this mood was
Biography:
Jeffrey Herf teaches Modern European and German political and
intellectual history at the University of Maryland in College
Park. His books include: Reactionary Modernism: Technology,
Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich(Cambridge
University Press, 1984); War by Other Means: Soviet Power,
West German Resistance and the Battle of VICTOR ZASLAVSKY · The Prague Spring: Resistance and Surrender of the PCI Abstract: By 1968, Czechoslovakia became the epicenter of a reformist movement directed at liberalizing and democratizing the "popular democracies" of Eastern Europe. According to their declarations, Czechoslovak reformers aimed at transforming Soviet-type socialism into "socialism with a human face”. The leaders of the PCI enthusiastically supported the Czechoslovak reforms since the reformist course of the Czechoslovak Communist party under Aleksander Dubcek's leadership offered the PCI a new option to improve its public image and expand its influence. Soviet internal documents indicate, however, that Italian Communist leaders thoroughly misconstrued Moscow's reaction to the Czechoslovak events. In July 1968 the Soviet leadership sent a series of letters to the Western communist parties that contained the first formulation of what would become known as the “Brezhnev Doctrine”: “We cannot accept the loss of such a key element of the socialist system as socialist Czechoslovakia". The Politburo intended to warn the foreign Communist parties that a military invasion of Czechoslovakia was highly probable or even inevitable. The PCI leadership conveyed to Moscow its conviction that there existed no valid reasons that would justify the Soviet invasion and tried to find a compromise between its support for Czechoslovak reformers and its acceptance of the legitimacy of Moscow's preoccupations. Thus, the PCI leadership took an ambiguous and contradictory position that would haunt the PCI for the duration of the Prague Spring crisis. Taken by surprise by the Warsaw pact intervention, the PCI published an initial declaration in which the PCI Executive expressed a "strong dissent" from the armed intervention in Czechoslovakia, branding it "unjustified" and declaring solidarity with the reformist course of the Czechoslovak CP. Several leaders of the PCI expressed unprecedented criticism of Soviet actions. Simultaneously, the PCI Executive stressed that its "deep, fraternal and sincere" relationship with the CPSU remained intact. Such reaction irritated Moscow that paid considerable attention to the gathering of information of the internal situation in the PCI relying both on Soviet intelligence together with diplomats and commercial representatives and on a wide network of informers and "trusted persons" inside the PCI. The information concerning schisms between the PCI leadership that condemned the invasion and the many rank and file members who supported it proved of primary importance in the elaboration of Kremlin's policy towards the rebellious PCI. To influence the PCI Moscow used various kinds of levers from financial pressure to a threat of splitting the PCI by prompting the pro-Soviet faction to leave the party. But the most important factor keeping the PCI in the Soviet orbit was the communist identity of its members, leaders and rank and file members alike, based on anti-capitalism and demonization of social democracy. As a result, the PCI embarked on a permanent search for a mythical "third way" between the Soviet model and social democracy, generating a sterile "eurocommunism", virulent anti-Americanism and glorification of the Third World as the crucible of anti-capitalist revolution. Unable to break with a bankrupt Soviet Union, the Italian Communist party condemned itself to extinction. Biography: Victor Zaslavsky is Professor of Political Sociology at the Free International University for Social Sciences, Luiss Guido Carli, Rome. He is the Director of the Transition Studies Center (Luiss) and co-editor of the journal “Ventunesimo secolo”. He also taught at the University of Leningrad, Memorial University, Canada, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and Universities of Florence, Venice, Bergamo and Naples. Among his publications: Klassensäuberung. Das Massaker von Katyn, Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2007 (Hannah Arendt Prize for 2008); Togliatti e Stalin. Il PCI e la politica estera staliniana negli archivi di Mosca, (with Elena Aga-Rossi), enlarged and updated ed., Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007; La Russia postcomunista. Da Gorbaciov a Putin (with Lev Gudkov), Luiss University Press, 2005; Lo stalinismo e la sinistra italiana, Milano, Mondadori, 2004; Storia del sistema sovietico. L’ascesa, la stabilità, il crollo, 2d ed., Roma: Carocci, 2004.; The Neo-Stalinist State. Class, Ethnicity, and Consensus in Soviet Society. New York: Sharpe, 1994; From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics, (with G. W. Lapidus). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Das russische Imperium unter Gorbatschow. Seine etnische Struktur und ihre Zukunft. Berlin: Wagenbach, 1991. JEFFREY ISAAC · Hannah and Me: Reflections on 1968, and on Growing Up Not So Absurd in New York City Abstract: In this essay I will proceed from a commentary on the writings of Hannah Arendt on the 1960’s to a commentary on my own experiences of the 1960’s. Arendt is a useful foil. Furthermore, having written a book about her, I am often expected to speak about her, and I believe in giving the audience what it wants. But the real purpose of the paper is to offer a serious political reflection as someone who did NOT experience the sixties as an adult, but who experienced the legacies of the sixties as a college student in the mid-1970’s, and whose own intellectual formation, as an American academic scholar and would-be public intellectual, is worth some serious reflection—at least for me. My story involves little heroism or intellectual profundity. And that is the point. Or at least part of it. In this paper I will wrestle against the tendency to reflect on “1968” by commenting on the reflections of its famous intellectual protagonists—Cohn-Bendit and Hayden and Michnik et alia. Instead, I will consider how “1968” appears from the vantage point of a post-New Left academic political theorist who has been shaped by the sixties, its ideological contests, and the past forty years of argument about their meaning, but who did not experience these contests directly, and whose intellectual formation is marked by the virtues and vices of the detachment characteristic of the contemporary university. Biography: Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor and Chair of Political Science at Indiana University, where he also serves as Director of the Indiana Democracy Consortium. He is also the Book Review Editor of Perspectives on Politics. His most recent book, The Poverty of Progressivism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), is an interpretive essay on the decline of liberal progressive politics in the United States. Democracy in Dark Times (Cornell, 1998) offers an interpretation-- influenced heavily by the writings of Hannah Arendt-- of the fate of democratic impulses in the wake of the Eastern European revolutions of 1989. Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion (Yale, 1992) is a comparison of the writings of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus In these books, Professor Isaac explores the possibilities and limits of radical democratic political agency in the contemporary world. Professor Isaac has written extensively on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, in the books noted above, and also in such periodicals as Political Theory, American Political Science Review, Social Research, Praxis International, and Tikkun. He has also written extensively on the political thought of anti-communist dissidence, in Social Research, East European Politics and Societies, Common Knowledge, and a number of anthologies; on the concept of power, and the philosophy of social science, central themes of his first book, Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View (Cornell, 1987); and on the themes of democracy and pragmatism. Professor Isaac is editing a new edition of The Communist Manifesto for Yale University Press’s “Rethinking the Western Tradition” series. He serves on the editorial boards of Polity and Dissent, and as an editorial associate of Constellations. He is also a gigging jazz and blues musician active on the local Bloomington music scene. For three years he was the keyboard player for Code Blue, a Bloomington-based blues band, whose 2004 CD “Code Blue Featuring Bobbie Lancaster” featured two of his original tunes (which can be accessed at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/codebluemusic). He currently leads and plays piano for The Postmodern Jazz Quartet, which plays regularly at Tutto Bene in Bloomington, and has been featured on WTIU (http://www.myspace.com/pmjq ). JIŘI PEHE · The Prague Spring and Its Post-Communist Memory Also, Discussant for the panel Post-Marxist Utopia and the Rediscovery of Radicalism Abstract: In the post-communist Czech Republic, majority of leading journalists, young historians, and politicians in the Czech Republic believe the Prague Spring in 1968 was primarily a communist affair — an attempt by reformers to prevail over hardliners within the party — and as such is of little interest to today’s authentic democrats. It is often argued that leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1968, including First Secretary Alexander Dubcek, were naïve to think they could sustain “socialism with a human face.” When they abolished censorship, tolerated artistic freedom, eased travel restrictions and allowed new civic movements to come into existence, they merely created a “virus” that threatened the communist system. The Soviet-led invasion, according to this view, not only proved that communism could not be reformed but also cruelly thwarted the idealistic beliefs of many Czechs and Slovaks — especially their assumption that the West was so impressed with the Czechoslovak experiment in liberalized communism that they would no longer accept the cold war logic under which the Kremlin had the right to protect its interests within the Soviet empire. A good illustration of the conflicting attitudes of many Czechs toward the communist past is a recent discussion in the Czech parliament of a law that established state-run Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes that holds and studies the communist archives. In giving the institute such a complicated name, lawmakers had to define “totalitarianism.” In the end, they decided that communist totalitarianism in the Czech Republic includes the entire period from the communist takeover in 1948 to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Many people who experienced the liberal political and intellectual atmosphere of 1968 understandably have problems with that definition. Including 1968 in the totalitarian period makes it difficult to explain how it’s possible that the Prague Spring produced works of literature, film and drama more significant than anything the country has produced since the fall of communism in 1989. True, the invasion ushered in a humiliating period, which started with the leaders of the Prague Spring being taken to Moscow and forced to sign the so-called Moscow Protocols, under which more than 100,000 Soviet troops were stationed in the country for an “indefinite” period. It continued, in the spring of 1969, with the installation of a neo-Stalinist regime, led by Gustav Husák, under which all the liberal achievements of 1968 were destroyed. The “normalization” regime that lasted from 1970 to 1989 was one of the most oppressive periods in Czech and Slovak history. In fact, the Prague Spring was connected to the awakening of civil society. A generation of older people who grew up in a democratic Czechoslovakia before and just after World War II joined forces with younger people who were disappointed by Stalinist communism, in launching a social movement. In time, their “socialism with a human face” would have undoubtedly led to calls for real democracy. This widespread renewal of active citizenship, which showed that a majority of people wanted to be free and would pursue their dream knowing well that the Kremlin would do its best to stop the movement, was the Prague Spring’s most important legacy. Biography: Jiri Pehe is a political analyst and author of several books--both scholarly works and fiction. Since 1999 he has headed New York University in Prague and NYU's Prague Institute for Democracy, Economy, and Culture (PIDEC). He also teaches at Charles University in Prague. From 1997 to 1999, Pehe served as the head of the Political Cabinet of Czech President Vaclav Havel. From 1988 to 1997, he served as Director of Analysis at the Research Institute of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and Prague. Pehe studied Law and Philosophy at Charles University in Prague and International Affairs at Columbia University in New York. BRADLEY ABRAMS · From Revisionism to Dissent: The Creation of Post-Marxism in Central Europe in the Wake of 1968 Abstract: My contribution takes 1968 as a departure point, as I view the events of that year in Europe as the historical moment at which left-wing intellectuals in Central Europe – the two Germanies, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary – became disillusioned with Marxism. The failures of the Polish “March Days,” the West German student movement (and its French counterpart) and, most importantly, the Prague Spring signaled for many the end of attempts at radical social change the relied upon Marxism as their primary tool. There was no linear movement from Marxism to something discrete that can be termed post-Marxism, however. Intellectuals East and West adopted different strategies from the late 1960s until the turning point of the Helsinki Accords was reached in 1975. What emerged in its wake in the late 1970s was less a metanarrative than a shared belief in the importance of several issues, among them human rights, the environment, peace and disarmament and the critique of mass, consumer society. These issues brought Central European organizations, such as the Green parties, KOR and Charter 77 together in a dialogue across the Iron Curtain, and helped give renewed energy to the notion of a Central Europe itself. Biography: Bradley Abrams has taught modern Eastern European history at Copenhagen University and Columbia University’s Department of History. Since 2004, he has also served as the Associate Director of the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and Eastern European Studies at Columbia, and is the current President of the Czechoslovak Studies Association. He is the author of The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (2004). Among his more recent articles are “The Politics of Retribution: The Trial of Jozef Tiso in the Czechoslovak Environment,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe, (2000), “The Marshall Plan and Czechoslovak Democracy: Elements of Interdependency,” in Martin Schain, ed., The Marshall Plan. Fifty Years After (2001), and “World War Two and the East European Revolution” (East European Politics and Societies, Fall 2002). Two further articles, “Hope Died Last: The Czechoslovak Road to Stalinism” and “Reklama or Propagace? The Rise and Fall of Socialist Advertising in Czechoslovakia” are forthcoming. He is currently working on a project entitled “Normalizing the Socialist Good Life: Consumption, Consumerism and Political Legitimacy in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring.” JAN-WERNER MÜLLER · What Did They Think They Were Doing? The Political Thought of 68 Abstract: Three interpretations of what 68 meant have tended to dominate popular and academic discussions for quite some time: 68 succeeded as a form cultural criticism, but failed as politics; 68 was a social revolution without being a political revolution at the same time; and, most conventionally, 68 was a form of generational revolt. All of the above are true, but all three interpretations also intentionally or not serve to sideline what might simply be called the content of 68 political thought. This paper presents an analysis of 68 political thought, with particular emphasis on the 68’ers’s attempts to draw on theories from earlier in the twentieth century. The reasons why such attempts largely failed are also analyzed. Biography: Jan-Werner Müller is Associate Professor of Politics at Princeton University. During the academic year 2008-9 he is an OSI Fellow at CEU, Budapest. He is the author of Constitutional Patriotism (2007), A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (2003) and Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (2000). KAROL EDWARD SOŁTAN · The Divided Spirit of the Sixties Abstract: The sixties - with 1968 their symbolic high point - should be seen as a chapter in a larger story composed of two other chapters of accelerated history since World War II: the 1940s between World War II and the Cold War, and the more recent period we associate with the year 1989. The most notable feature of this story is the development of the project of a global civic awakening (now taking form of a global civic society) in opposition to what we might call the Enlightenment’s Ancien Régime. Implicit in the story is a widely shared interest in awakening human creative potential in all spheres, including forms of consciousness, styles of life, modes of human interaction, and institutions. Among the theoretical formulations this story engendered, there are theories of human and social potential, critical social theory (e.g. the Frankfurt School), humanistic psychology (e.g. Maslow), philosophy of personalism (in US: Martin Luther King and others, in Prague: Patočka and Havel, in Cracow: Tischner and Wojtyła). The many manifestations of this world-altering project share a commitment to developing human creative potential; but they also reflect deep divisions in how the project is formulated. We can organize our understanding of these differences by constructing two ideal types. For the first type, revolutions are the most perfect models of creation: creation involves the rejection or destruction of what came before, a liberation from the constraints of the past, in order to create something entirely new. The project of developing human creative potential can then be seen as a generalization of the experience of revolution, directed now not simply against an oppressive state, or an oppressive economic system, but against multiple forms of oppression, institutional and cultural. Liberation occurs on multiple fronts, all forbidding is forbidden, all authority is subverted (the authority of the state and the firm, of the university and the school or the parent, the authority of the text). With their eyes fixed on the student revolts of the sixties, and perhaps especially on the May 1968 events in Paris, and on the various forms of liberation that seemed to dominate the period, many identify the sixties with this model, creating a ready-made contrast with the spirit of 1989. But this will not do. It does not, for instance, apply to the spirit of 1968 in Warsaw or Prague. And this is not just a contrast of location, with the sixties under communism different from the sixties in the prosperous democratic world (and different still in the Third World). Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement do not fit this model, and neither do the other reform efforts guided by the spirit of non-violence, a politics of truth and love, and a commitment to the principle of equal and inviolable human dignity. The spirit of Gandhi, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (invoking human dignity in its opening phrases), or of the answer Article 1 of the German Constitution gave to Hitler (“Human dignity is inviolable”) is very much alive in the sixties, as it will be in 1989. So we have a second model of what developing human creative potential means, an anti-revolutionary one. Those who adopt it do not embrace destruction. If creation inevitably requires destruction, as it often does, let it be seen as a struggle against destruction, and against violence. And it does not involve rejection of the past, to replace it with the new. Creation is often a process taking place over time and thus requiring continuity and a certain form of loyalty (a civic loyalty, let us call it) to what we inherit from the past; it involves renewal more often than the creation of the entirely new. The political commitments of this model center on the principle of equal human dignity, and on the human rights that derive from this principle. The political instrument of this model is a self limiting social movement exemplified by Gandhi in the 40s and by Martin Luther King in the 60s. Biography: Karol Edward Sołtan is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland in College Park. He is also Director of the Committee on Politics, Philosophy and Public Policy, and teaches at the University of Maryland Law School. His writing has centered on identifying the skills and values required for a civic awakening (arguing for a new discipline of civics: “Selznick and Civics” in Robert Kagan and Kenneth Winston, eds. Legality and Community [2002]), and on elaborating a militant or deep form of moderation (e.g. in “Constitutional Patriotism and Militant Moderation”, International Journal of Constitutional Law, 6(2008): 96-116). He has also occasionally practiced what he preaches, including advising the Kurdistan Government in the constitutional negotiations in Iraq in 2005. NICHOLAS MILLER · Yugoslavia in 1968: Hopes, Crisis, Disappointment Abstract: Tumult defines Yugoslavia’s 1968. Between Belgrade’s student movement, upheaval in the Serbian League of Communists, the continuing emanations of national feeling in Croatia, and rebellion in Kosovo, the year was one of entirely mixed messages, as the dynamism of Yugoslavia’s partisan experiment began to give way to a new dynamic of ethnic affirmation. 1968 offered no conclusions for Yugoslavia, only hints of a great transition. In my presentation, I will argue that the single major disappointment of 1968 (the failure of the student movement) was merely one in a line of blows in the destruction of what I will call the “partisan project” in Yugoslavia. As with all historical phenomena, it is difficult and usually counterproductive to argue that a single year, or point in time, can effectively illustrate a process, so I will reach back and move forward in making my point, which is that for various entirely understandable reasons, many of the peoples of Yugoslavia had come to mistrust the Tito regime’s promise to render national identity unimportant in that state. Of all of these events, only the Belgrade student movement fits comfortably into any European-wide paradigm regarding the year itself. The others…just signs of upheaval in a state that had yet to determine how to govern itself. The rest of 1968 for Yugoslavia did not follow the script established in the rest of Europe. While there were certainly people in the streets of Yugoslavia, the reasons they were there were resolutely national, and, it should be noted, euphoric. Kosovo’s Albanians, Croats to the north, and even Serbs who who were energized by the Albanian and Croatian events, all had begun to feel a new sort of empowerment that did not fit the by-now fading commitment to the development of a new Yugoslavia, freed at least of competetive nationalism. In my paper, I will attempt to capture and explain this moment of tumult in Yugoslavia in 1968. Biography: Nicholas Miller is professor of history and chair of the department of history at Boise State University. He has written two books: Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia before the First World War (Pittsburgh, 1997) and The Nonconformists: Culture, Politics, and Nationalism in a Serbian Intellectual Circle (Budapest and New York, 2007). He has written many articles on topics ranging from Serbian nationalism to democratization in Serbia, the Serbian community of Croatia, and the challenges of US policymaking towards Serbia. He is now beginning a book project on the liberation of Belgrade in 1944. Miller received his doctorate in history from Indiana University in 1991. AURELIAN CRĂIUŢU · Thinking Politically: Raymond Aron and the 1968 Moment in France Abstract: Raymond Aron’s books stand out as an example of lucid political judgment in an age of extremes in which many intellectuals shunned moderation and were attracted to various forms of political radicalism. My paper focuses on Aron’s reflections on the 1968 events in France, presented in his book La Revolution introuvable. I examine Aron’s narrative and interpretation of the causes of the events, as well as his critical reflections on the profound problems afflicting French society in genera. I then turn to Aron’s metaphor of the “committed observer” and comment on his views on the role, virtues, limits, and possibility of moderation in political life. Biography: Aurelian Crăiuţu is Associate Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is currently a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Professor Crăiuţu is the author and editor of a number of books including Liberalism under Siege (2003), In Praise of Moderation (2006, in Romanian), Tocqueville on America after 1840 (with Jeremy Jennings) and America through Foreign Eyes (with Jeffrey C. Isaac). He is currently finishing an intellectual history of the idea of political moderation, entitled The Extremism of the Center: Faces of Moderation in Modern Political Thought. CĂTĂLIN AVRAMESCU · Socialism Liberalism Democracy: Lessons from Eastern Europe Abstract: The transformations of 1968 can be indicated by different concepts. While the student movements of Paris have left an impression of radicalism that was associated ever since with the movements of 1968, in Eastern Europe it was rather the opposite: here, the keyword seems to have been “moderation”. It was the drive towards a moderate socialism, one that would accommodate a larger degree of liberty and democracy, which animated the Marxist revisionists and the dissenters of countries like Romania. This did not result, however, in a rapprochement with the liberal-conservative tradition of moderation and skepticism, exemplified by authors like Halifax or Oakeshott, but to an emphasis on the participation of the individual in a collective project that will prove ultimately more resilient than expected. Biography: Cătălin Avramescu is a former fellow of Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced Studies, Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities/University of Edinburgh, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study/Royal Dutch Academy, Herzog August Bibliothek, Clark Library/Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies, Department of Social Philosophy/University of Helsinki, Institut für Geschichte/Universität Wien, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia/Università degli Studi di Ferrara, and New Europe College/Institute for Advanced Study. He published articles and studies in the history of modern philosophy, a book on the history of the social contract theories, and translated in Romanian David Hume’s political essays, Thomas Hobbes’ De Corpore Politico and Rousseau's Social Contract. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest. TEREZA-BRÂNDUŞA PALADE · Post-Marxist Mentality and the Intellectual Challenge to Ideology after 1968 Abstract: Did the disillusionment with Marxism after 1968 yield only an anti-ideology, i.e. a political doctrine that is merely opposite to Marxism, while still sharing with Marxism the same ideological mentality? In trying to provide an answer, I shall first try to clarify in what consists the Marxist ideological mentality, that presupposes an utopian vision and an idealistic confidence in a system of thought made out of subjective certitudes, which are supposed to transcend all the factual and rational knowledge of the world. Then, I shall take into consideration Leszek Kolakowski’s rejection of the Marxist utopia after 1968 and his stance towards an ideological mentality in general. On the basis of Kolakowski’s post-Marxist attitude, I shall finally sustain a reflective intellectual challenge of the Marxist forma mentis that is more attached to the quest for truth than to other a priori ideals, whose non-Marxist appearance may still conceal the potential to legitimize oppressive institutions. Biography: Tereza-Brânduşa Palade is associate professor at the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration (Bucharest), teaching Political Ethics and Theory of Democracy. She is the author of The Night of Metaphysical Thought. A Critical History of Hobbes's Nominalism (Noaptea gândirii metafizice. O istorie critică a nominalismului lui Hobbes) (2008), Reason, faith, and human dignity. On the life and thought of Edith Stein (Raţiune, credinţă şi demnitate a omului. Despre viaţa şi gândirea lui Edith Stein) (2008), The end of Leviathan. Survival and liberty in communism (Amurgul Leviathanului. Supravieţuire şi libertate în comunism (2000), Renovatio mundi. An essay on the Millennium between apocalyptic traditions and modernity (Renovatio mundi. Eseu despre Mileniu între tradiţii apocaliptice şi modernitate) (1998). Her current research interests are in the intellectual history of relativism and skepticism and in the passage from metaphysical rationality to relativism and agnosticism. CRISTIAN VASILE · 1968 Romania: The Intellectuals and the Failure of Reform Abstract: My paper examines the relationship between Romanian intellectuals and Ceausescu’s regime, with a particular emphasis on the late 1960s. It surveys some of the reasons for the absence of a solid Reform movement oriented towards a dissident Marxism, and capable of defying the neo-Stalinist tendencies of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) power holders. The paper will also analyze the 1968 political and ideological actions of some important figures of the Romanian intelligentsia. Unlike Czech and Slovak philosophers, their Romanian peers did not draw up and did not pursue the path of a anti-Stalinist critique with elements of alternative political conceptualization. The belated appearance of an anti-Soviet strand in the nation-building process under communism, the radical anti-intellectual repression wave at the end of 1950s and beginning of 1960s, and the internal disputes within Creative Unions, Universities, and Academy, all these were crucial factors that favored Ceausescu’s concentration of power and instrumentalization of national feelings. With few exceptions tainted by opportunism and timidity, Romanian philosophers neglected the cooperation and dialogue with the writers’ guild. By and large, the latter hoped, especially between 1965 and 1971, to get the best out of their strange bed-fellowship with Nicolae Ceausescu. Subsequently, many of them joined the RCP and supported the communist leadership in the context of the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia. When the intellectuals’ confidence in Ceausescu was shattered mainly by his neo-Stalinist drive from 1971, it was already too late for any reform or revisionist attempt. Biography: Researcher at the „Nicolae Iorga” History Institute of the Romanian Academy (Bucharest). Dr. Vasile is also Coordinator of the Advisory Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania and former Scientific Secretary of the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (April 2006-April 2007). He has written numerous articles on church and politics in twentieth-century Romania and on politics of culture under communism. He is author of three books: Biserica Ortodoxă Română în primul deceniu comunist [The Romanian Orthodox Church in the first communist decade] (2005); Între Vatican şi Kremlin. Biserica Greco-Catolică în timpul regimului comunist [Between Vatican and Kremlin. Greek Catholic Church under Communist regime] (2003); Istoria Bisericii Greco-Catolice sub regimul comunist. Documente şi mărturii [The History of the Greek Catholic Church under the communist regime – documents and oral interviews] (2003). His article, „The Suppression of the Romanian Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church”, was published in East European Quarterly (No. 3, September, 2002). Dr. Vasile was also co-author and co-editor of the Final Report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Romanian Communist Dictatorship (2006, www.presidency.ro). The printed edition was published by Humanitas in 2007 (Co-edited with Vladimir Tismăneanu and Dorin Dobrincu). He is presently working on a book that focuses upon the dynamics within the arts and education in Romania between 1948 and 1953. BOGDAN CRISTIAN IACOB co-author: · Betrayed Promises: Ceausescu, the Romanian Communist Party, and the Crisis of World Communism in 1968 Biography: PhD candidate at Central European University, History Department with a dissertation titled “Stalinism, Historians and the Nation in Romania (1955-1977)”. He is also research fellow with the Center of Advanced Studies in Sofia in SCOPES Curriculum Development Project, hosted by Fribourg University (Switzerland). He is currently project coordinator with the Romanian Cultural Institute (Bucharest). Between 2004 and 2006, he was associate coordinator with Pasts Incorporated Center for Historical Studies (Budapest). In 2006-2007 he was a research fellow at Center for Advanced Studies at Leipzig University and at the Center for the Study of Post-communist Societies at University of Maryland (College Park). Among his publications are: „Some Considerations upon the Characteristics of History Production in Romania under Communism (1963-1974)” in Dusan Janjic si Florian Bieber eds., Globalization, Nationalism, and Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans (2007); "Finding the Nation in Socialism - Platforma Program and the “Recourse to History" in Arhivele Securitatii (vol.4, 2008); “Paradigm Dynamics in Soviet Historiography 1931-1953”, Historical Yearbook (2007); „O clarificare necesară. Condamnarea regimului comunist din România între text şi context”, Idei în Dialog (I-IV, August-November 2007); and, “National-Stalinism: Ideology between Ascribing Class and Re-Imagining Community”, Historical Yearbook (2008). |
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