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Conveners Myron (Mike) Aronoff Jan Kubik Admistrative Manager Ariel Fernandez During 1999-2000, the Center for Russian, Central, and East European Studies and the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers University, ran the seminar ACultures of Democracy and Democratization: Israel, Eastern Europe and Beyond.@ Both CRCEES and the Bildner Center collaborated in seeking outside funding, developing the topic, publicizing the offering, and both in turn hosted the seminar for a semester. Other units contributing support to the seminar included the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School, and the Office of Global Programs. Seven Senior Fellows (one from Israel, three from Eastern Europe, and three from the US); three External Junior Fellows (one from Israel and two from Eastern Europe), and seven Rutgers Fellows (doctoral candidates and graduate students) took part in the seminar. Each week, a different participant presented his or her work Additionally, the seminar hosted six renowned outside speakers, including: Lech Walesa, the former President of Poland, the Solidarity movement leader an the Nobel Prize winner; Yaron Ezrahi, the prominent Israeli political philosopher and public intellectual; Konstanty Gebert, the influential Polish-Jewish journalist and activist; Prof. Robert Hayden, one of the US leading experts on the Balkans; Prof. Joel Migdal, one of US foremost authorities on the state-society relationships, and Dr. Vojin Rakic, a Rutgers graduate, a leading young scholar of Serbia. Five invited speakers, in addition to their participation in the Seminar, offered public lectures. The seminar's focus was on specific cultural preconditions of democracy and democratization. We discussed the relationship between democracy-building and such collective identities as civil society, nationalism, ethnicity, religion, and socialism. Our investigations focused also on the way established democracies and democratizing states deal with the questions of class, gender, and race. Among the countries we studied were Israel, the Czech Republic, Cuba, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Slovakia. An influential student of democracy, Larry Diamond, observed that:
We examined several collective identities which are "democracy-friendly," which accommodate the values of "moderation, tolerance, civility, efficacy, knowledge, participation." We also tried to determine whether the attribute of being "democracy-friendly" is universal or relative, for the role of a collective identity in promoting democracy depends on the cultural, social, and political contexts within which this identity arises, develops, and thrives. Religion for example, under certain circumstances is a powerful weapon in struggles for liberalization and democratization, while under other conditions it functions as a force indifferent or antithetical to democracy. We investigated also those collective identities which are seen as unequivocally inimical to democracy: radical populism, xenophobic nationalism, and religious fundamentalism (integrism). Socialism, in its various guises, and its relationship with democracy was also analyzed, since this ideology has been historically one of the most powerful identity-forming factors in the countries we focused on. Finally, we studied the re-definition and politization of class, gender, and race and their role in expanding or limiting the boundaries of citizenship and political participation. The seminar engaged in a careful reconstruction of how these collective identities interact with each other, co-constituting cultural fields of old and new democracies. We attempted to identify specific constellations of collective identities and specific conditions under which democracy is threatened. Inevitably, then, our work focused both on the politics of collective memory creation and new identity formation. Additionally, we investigated how various collective identities are invoked, used, and remodeled by political actors who compete for dominance in democratic polities. Another task of the seminar was to identify the most pervasive tensions or contradictions within the political cultures of democratic states. We examined specific historical forms in which these tensions manifested themselves; we also scrutinized their role in concrete political struggles. Among the basic tensions we discussed were:
Sponsor InformationThe Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life Center for the Study of Russian, Central and East European studies Contact Information
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