MAEUS Student Nicholas Zalewski on Writing a Weekly "Europe Central" Column as Part of a Remote Internship with Modern Treatise

By Nicholas Zalewski, M.A. Student in European Union Studies and Graduate Research Assistant, European Union Center

Over this past winter break I was selected for an internship with Modern Treatise. I found this internship through LinkedIn while searching for remote internships. As I am finishing my last semester of my MA in European Union Studies and still have my lease in Champaign-Urbana, I was not able to move in order to complete an internship. 

As many internships are unpaid, I understand students may be unwilling to relocate due to the financial burden as well. Instead of waiting to do an internship in the summer, I encourage you to look for internships you can complete remotely during the school year as well. While it may seem intimidating to see high numbers of applicants for internships it is important to apply for any that you feel you already have relevant skills and experience the interviewers may be interested in. It is difficult to predict who will be selected, but if you do not apply you will never have the opportunity to receive an acceptance. Not all internships are 40 hours a week yet can still add valuable experience to your resume. I devote between 10-15 hours a week to my internship.

Modern Treatise is an online magazine targeting Millennials aged 25-34 years old. I will be an intern for Modern Treatise for six months. During this time, I will be writing the weekly column Europe Central in the International section of the magazine. The aim of the Europe Central column is to highlight important topics and developments from various parts of Europe that are not always reported on in American media. An exciting aspect of the internship is I am able to pitch my own ideas for the column. I use my experience of tracking down unusual stories that I gained while searching for interesting articles to include in the "Meanwhile in Europe" section for the European Union Center’s e-weekly. Despite what people may think, many European Union member states have newspapers published in English which can help Americans gain insight into each country. Besides looking for sources in English, I am also able to utilize my foreign language skills and look for relevant articles in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. I am excited to use this opportunity to expand my knowledge of Europe and learn more about European countries that Americans often neglect.

In my first article I discuss the rural-urban divide and two potential solutions Spain is using to try to lure younger Spaniards into working in rural areas. This is relevant as European countries may struggle to maintain their currently stable food supplies if the populations in rural regions continue to age as the young continue migrate to urban areas. A poll conducted in several Eastern European countries showed that a very small percentage of teenagers plan on working in agriculture. The majority of teenagers polled attached negative values with any work involving agriculture. These negative values included that it requires a lot of manual labor and that it is a job only suitable for men. For this article I found it beneficial to be able to read articles in Spanish as there were very few articles written about these initiatives in English and some details were excluded as well.

The second article looks at Kosovo’s recent elections which resulted in Vetëvendosje winning. Albin Kurti, leader of Vetëvendosje, stated he would support a referendum in Kosovo to form a political union with Albania, and also made it clear he would vote yes. Kosovo may struggle to accomplish this with Albania’s current ambitions to join the European Union. Albania is currently waiting to start negotiation talks with the EU but may form a union instead with Kosovo if its chances of joining the European Union fade away. Albanian politicians have made it clear they will unite with Kosovo inside or outside the European Union. There is support in Kosovo for a political union with Albania since Kosovo continues to struggle to gain official recognition of its independence from Serbia.

A new column is published weekly at 5:00 a.m. on Tuesday. The third article, published March 9, discusses how some Eastern European countries have seen an influx of citizens moving back due to the pandemic. You can read these columns here.

MAEUS Student Nicholas Zalewski on Writing a Weekly "Europe Central" Column as Part of a Remote Internship with Modern Treatise

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The Absurdists are Back: Poland Today

Photo by Dawid Drabik

By George Gasyna, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures, ggasyna@illinois.edu

 

“The action was taking place in Poland, that is to say, nowhere.”

                                                                        -- Alfred Jarry, Ubu the King (1896)

 

Good old Alfred Jarry, eh? Always on the lookout for outrageous material that would leave the bourgeoisie properly stunned and épatée.[1] The French master symbolist’s best-known play, explicitly meant to offend and disgust its fin-de-siecle audiences, seems to have had it all: madness, exiled royals and regicide, ethnic strife (predictably involving Russia and Poland), discordant slang, swear words, parodies of several of Shakespeare’s most famous scenes, pataphysics, puppets! And of course the central notion that Poland, where the play is set, is an unknown, incongruous place. 

 

Yet from another perspective Jarry’s revolutionary theatre relied on a commonplace (if you’ll pardon the pun) that was so utterly 19th century as to be almost comically sentimental: Poland as nulle place, Poland as a nothing nowhere. How the worm has turned: unlike during Jarry’s era, these days not only is Poland not a nowhere, since it can again be located in the middle of Europe on even the cheapest of maps, but there is much action going on, involving many players, state actors and privateers alike; and it is often in the news for reasons that are not mere recitations of absurdity. Or aren’t they? If you have consistently been missing news from and about Poland, your most humble and obedient servant is here to help you make up your mind. 

 

No longer an abstract nowhere as it had been during the long century of Partitions from the 1770s until 1918, when it indeed disappeared from the map, having been carved up by autocratic neighbors, and then, having shed the legacies of communist rule of the second half of the 20th century, Poland of today is a rapidly modernizing place. A full member of NATO and the European Union, it boasts a robust economy and an infrastructure that, after decades of neglect, now looks and feels very much at par with the European west. It is also a self-described friend and ally of both Europe and America, and a lover of freedom. 

 

Odd, then, that it should also be a place in which ancient resentments and calls for national purification on a scorched earth level are finding fertile ground, and where old monsters of anti-Semitism, rabid ethnonationalism and populist autocracy are becoming reawakened and reactivated, as the regime in power — PiS, an acronym for Law and Justice — giddily goes around pointing fingers at (but first manufacturing and distributing wholesale) new enemies of the state. That all of this should be occurring in a country that has long liked to think of itself as historically exceptional in its admiration of heterogeneity and toleration, again now (just as in the time of Jarry) self-anointed as a spiritual leader of European nations, and a nation that singlehandedly — so the myth goes — handed defeat to the combined dark forces of Soviet Communism just three decades ago, requires a closer look at the forces involved and motivations of those who are attempting to inscribe themselves directly as movers of history. 

 

In a sort of short-hand, one might declare that the most potent symbol of modern Poland’s (self-described) exceptional position and thus historical task – from a totally disinterested perspective, neither that of an uber-patriot or that of a critic — is the 1989 Round Table power sharing agreement. The set of meetings, conducted over a period of some three months around a large round table (hence the name) that had been expressly built out of Polish oak for the occasion, negotiated a path for power sharing between the ruling Socialist regime and the intellectuals and activists from the Solidarity trade union and effectively prevented civil war. Its lasting consequence was power being peacefully transferred from the former to the latter, in a process that also saw the first freely democratic election of the eastern bloc in the post WWII era;[2] at the time and until recently, the Round Table was a symbol of consensual politics that enacted the will of the people in a rationalist manner and taught the world that radical political transition need not be accompanied by radical political instability. Indeed, no lives were lost to political violence in Poland during the 1989 transition period, even if there was some instability (an inevitability given the enormity of the task). 

 

That round table, as image, paradigm, and symbol, is now dead and buried. At the risk of appearing punctilious, let us say it more directly: what had long been described as the greatest achievement of the Polish dissident, pro-democratic, pro-Western movement of the second half of the 20th century, has in the last couple of years been figuratively chopped up for lumber to stoke various fires of the ruling regime’s new pragmatics of divide-et-impera. Perhaps this effort will limit itself to burning anti-patriotic and thus “incorrect” tracts merely in a figurative way; yet there are signs that the moment of symbolically torching the sundry witches that the regime has set up as the current enemies of its hoped-for civitas may in fact be turning into something significantly darker and more ominous. The consecrated heroes of the movement, from past Solidarity leader (and Time Magazine’s 1981 Person of the Year as well as 1983 Nobel Peace Prize winner) Lech Wałęsa to former Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, have of late been vilified with predictable invectives (respectively: double agent; Jew in the service of foreign powers). Beyond these and similar nonsensical ad hominems, which could in some sense be viewed as a protracted settling of scores, consider these English-language headlines of relatively recent vintage: 

 

Children beat effigy of Judas in Poland, amid persistence of ‘medieval anti-Semitism’ (April 23, 2019; Washington Post)[3]

 

Polish cities and provinces declare ‘LGBT-free zones’ as government ramps up ‘hate speech.’ (22 July 2019; Independent)[4]

 

Poland's [ruling party leader] Kaczynski condemns gay pride marches as election nears. (August 18, 2019; Reuters)[5]

 

Poland enforces controversial near-total abortion ban. (28 January, 2021; BBC)[6]

 

Abortion law protests in Poland put civil liberties in the spotlight.

"This is essentially a fight for our rights and our lives," lawyer Eliza Rutynowska told NBC News.(Jan. 30, 2021; NBC News)[7]

 

The Polish Government’s Holocaust ‘Truth Campaign’ Is a Weird Mix of Authoritarianism, Ignorance, and Injured Pride. (Feb. 25, 2021; The Tablet)[8]

 

These messages — all of them reported by reputable and fairly middle-of-the-road media — should well give one pause. What is happening in Poland? What has happened to Poland? All the more reason, then, why this month’s symposium on populism in today’s Poland is particularly timely. The panelists, including Warsaw-based activist and journalist Konstanty Gebert, have been invited to provide a sober counterpoint of accountability-taking to the self-serving and divisive discourses now on offer from Warsaw. The focalizing points of the news from Warsaw, now as throughout the last three centuries — the period that corresponds to Poland’s rise to modernity — are Polish-Jewish relations and the notion of who and what is a Pole, and who should or should not be counted as a “good” or a “patriotic” Pole. The Polish government’s current list of personae non gratae includes, evidently, women, liberal-minded people, Jews, and LGBTQ+ people. A rough back of the napkin calculation shows this to comprise at least half of Poland’s population — thus revealing a country that has decided that it is at war with itself, and possibly well on its way of becoming lost to itself. It seems that Jarry’s deconstructive talent for picking up on the absurd in people and their politics was spot on after all.

---

[1]https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/08/an-inglorious-slop-pail-of-a-play/; https://interlettre.com/bac/702-ubu-roi-d-alfred-jarry-resume-et-analyse

 

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/world/from-the-archive-blog/2019/feb/06/polish-round-table-talks-1989

 

[3]https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/04/23/children-beat-effigy-judas-poland-amid-persistence-medieval-anti-semitism/

 

[4]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/poland-lgbt-free-zones-homophobia-hate-speech-law-justice-party-a9013551.html

 

[5]  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-lgbt/polands-kaczynski-condemns-gay-pride-marches-as-election-nears-idUSKCN1V80FD

 

[6]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55838210

 

[7]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/abortion-law-protests-poland-put-civil-liberties-spotlight-n1256252

 

[8]https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/poland-holocaust-controversy-yad-vashem-response

 

The Absurdists are Back: Poland Today

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