Straight from printing press
on July 2, 2007
in local
In October 2005 a group of philosophers, sociologists, historians and geographers from across Europe gathered at the conference in Białowieża to discuss the frontier identity in the New Europe, as seen from the countries they represented. Last December, when professor M. Kowalska (the faculty of sociology at University of Białystok) came and offered Global Village the job to co-edit the proceedings of the conference in English and French, we took the promising challenge. Six months on and the book has just been published.
These are not the kind of texts you’d run your eyes over if you shy away from history or current affairs. But if you don’t, you qualify as a dedicated reader.
An excerpt from Marek Siemek’s article:
?…the collapse of communist systems in Central and Eastern Europe was insufficient to fill, or at least substantially diminish, the gap between the West and East of the continent. This gap was created by a tough and merciless difference between the pre-modern and modern forms of socialization rather than by an ideological and military confrontation between “the totalitarian Communism” and “the democratic capitalism”. The gap can be gradually closed only on the way to social modernization, whose essence is building of an enlightened civil society organizing its life and actions in a rational manner within the framework of modern institution of the state of law.
This means that the essence of modernization is, for European countries known today as “post-communist”, constituted by the demolition of the East which exists in us. It is in this sort of East that the all-embracing immaturity of these countries and their incapacity in the face of the twentieth century’s challenges is today concentrated and symbolically expressed. This East, understood as the quintessence of parochial provincialism, intolerance and aggressive hostility towards aliens, nationalism hidden behind the “patriotic” or “God and fatherland” demagogy, ideological obstinacy and blindness; in short: all the through-and-through irrational non-transparency of social and intellectual life, is rooted much deeper in people’s mentality that one could have expected. It is this factor that constitutes the greatest obstacle on the road to modernization?
