Brzezinski reminds conference of emigre impact on transition
Poland may be a regional transition leader but it's not home free. Lots of challenges lie ahead, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and currently professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, both for Poles and for the Polish emigres who have been a key resource during the past half century.
Without ever mentioning the current government unrest, he touched on some key concerns.
"It is very important for Poland to be perceived to be worthy and trustworthy of NATO membership," he said, adding that this requires a broad-scale development of society, pluralism and good leadership.
Good leaders, Brzezinski said, would distinguish "democracy from anarchy," patriotism from exaggerated nationalism, "faith from fanaticism, independence from being left alone."
Brzezinski, who left Poland as a 10-year-old when his father took a diplomatic posting in Canada, received an honorary doctorate from Jagiellonian University June 16. He was also a speaker and commentator at the first Krakow meeting of the Polish Arts & Sciences Institute of America (PIASA), founded in 1942 by emigre scientists.
Poland will be tested in the years ahead as economic and political firestorms erupt in this very unpredictable global world, he said, where both global players and political blocs are subject to change.
The questions he raised included whether "there will be a widening of Europe without a more profound unification;" the political consequences of China's dramatic economic development, which could include a China-U.S. conflict "over the pretext of Taiwan," which could lead to the militarization of Japan "and divert the U.S. from Europe to the Far East."
The best-case scenario would be "the Europeanization of Russia" and a broadening of Europe in a way that would continue to involve the United States, he said. The worst case would be "the rebirth of Russian imperialism," the deterioration of Western Europe and a U.S.-China conflict that would spell a U.S. withdrawal from Europe.
"For Poland, all that has great consequences," he said.
The three-day PIASA conference had its share of VIPs including the Ukrainian ambassador; the newly appointed Polish ambassador to Washington, Przemyslaw Grudzinski; President Aleksander Kwasniewski's emissary Barbara Labuda (whose father had been active in the original Krakow institute) and the U.S. Embassy's Cesar Baltran.
There were dozens of scholarly papers but none on the role of emigres in supporting Poland during its era of Soviet-imposed state socialism, and helping the country find its footing after 1989 and ultimately get into NATO. That topic was broached in corridor conversations, although some speakers addressed it explicity, including Brzezinski.
" emigres played a very, very important role by documenting and furthering independent political thought," he said, at a time when this was rare and risky in occupied Poland.
As the PIASA meeting closed with a banquet in the 14th-century Zamek Krolewski founded by King Casimir the Great, Brzezinski told the more than 300 scholars: "You represent the coming of age of the Polish American and of the Polish community in America, which is established and increasingly respected. You have every reason to be proud for what you stand for, what you have achieved and what you have gone through."
He also acknowledged the huge influence of Polish Americans in the transition. "The fact that Poland is free and successful is due to the fact that the Polish American community every one of you helped in that," he said. "Everyone can be proud that in a true and formal and binding way, the United States and Poland are allies. Everyone in this room contributed to that and I really mean it. "
Brzezinski is the vice president PIASA. Historian Piotr S. Wandycz of Yale University is president.
Jagiellonian University Rector Franciszek Ziejka had worked closely with PIASA executive director Thaddeus Gromada on the Krakow conference, held as the university celebrates its 600th year. In an interview, he spelled out his view of PIASA's importance.
"PIASA from New York had the same role as that of our university during the 19th century," Ziejka said, at a time when Poland as a country had been dismembered into three parts and did not exist. "It was possible to develop free intellectual thought and research, to speak, to prepare more intellectuals."
The original Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences (PAU), established in 1872 with influence far beyond the Austrian partition of the former Poland, was "forcibly suspended" by the communists between 1952 and 1989, with its property seized and given to the newly created Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN).
The final PIASA plenary session was in the reclaimed three-story headquarters of PAU on ulica Slawkowska, in Krakow's Old Town. PAU President Kazimierz Kowalski, a paleontologist, said there now are 256 Polish members and 125 foreign members. The research institute, whose members get no government stipend unlike associates in PAN, is undertaking work that had not been possible before, such as research on Poland's government in exile during World War II and on the Lemkos, an autonomous religious group forcibly uprooted and scattered by the Soviets after the war.
Its recent conferences included a symposium on Jews and Judaism in contemporary Polish research and a conference organized with Jagiellonian University and the Polish Physiological Association on the centennial of the discovery of adrenaline which was made simultaneously by Polish and English researchers.
A sixth faculty on "artistic creativity" was founded in 1994 to recognize and draw from world-class Polish artists in the fields of literature, music, film, painting, architecture, sculpture and theater. The faculty's 23 members include Nobel laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska, filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, composers Krzysztof Penderecki and Wojciech Kilar, and writers Stanislaw Lem, Slawomir Mrozek and Ryszard Kapuscinski.
