Description

Performative Democracy explores a potential in political life that easily escapes theorists: the indigenously inspired enacting of democracy by citizens. Written by one who experienced an emerging public sphere within Communist Poland, the book seeks to identify the conditions for performativity—performing politics--in public life. It examines a broad spectrum of cultural, social, and political initiatives that facilitated the non-violent transformation of an autocratic environment into a democratic one. Examples of performativity range from experimental student theater, through the engaged political thinking of dissident Adam Michnik, the alternative culture, and the Solidarity movement, to the drama of the Round Table Talks (and their striking parallels in South Africa), and finally, the post-1989 efforts of feminist groups and women artists to defend the recently won right of free public discourse. The book argues that performative democracy, with its improvisational mode and imaginative solutions, deserves a legitimate place in our broader reflections on democracy.

• Examines in vivid human terms the democratic aspirations and practices that led to democratic change in Poland but went largely unnoticed by western media and policymakers.
• Traces how experimental student theater groups, though subsidized by a totalitarian regime afraid of any authentic public life, created pockets of public space for free and meaningful expression that were then augmented by uncensored underground publishing and further expanded by the Solidarity movement into a democratic society within the totalitarian state.
• Describes how two apparent miracles of recent history--that Communism in Poland was brought down without violence and that apartheid in South Africa was ended without a bloodbath--were the results of hard work and a new approach to change what the author calls "performative democracy."
• Reveals striking parallels between the drama of Poland's Roundtable Talks in 1989 and that of the negotiations in South Africa that ended apartheid in 1994.
• Describes how, after Poland's democratic elections, women artists in the 1990s had to fight to sustain the newly won right to free public discourse.

Author Info

Born and educated in Poland, Elzbieta Matynia is Associate Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research and Director of the New School’s Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, through which she has developed innovative modes of learning and research grounded in international academic collaboration.

Reviews

"A first-rate and firsthand account of the slow but inexorable transformation of Poland."
—Christopher Hitchens, Slate

“This beautifully-realized original book explores the borderlands governing the zone between that which is permitted and that which is not to illuminate how democracy and dignity can develop out of harsh and humiliating authoritarian conditions. Focusing on transitions to political regimes and transformations to gender, Performative Democracy is an instance of what it analyzes—for it is that rare intervention that itself can help generate the change it most admires.”
—Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University

"Spanning Polish history from the days of incipient rebellion against Communist rule through the Solidarity movement of the 1980s to today’s democratic Poland, Performative Democracy sheds new light on what it is people are doing when they act democratically. Even as Matynia, who participated in many of the events she describes, elucidates their common features, she captures and infectiously renders their exhilarating atmosphere and spirit to the reader."
—Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People

“Even for me, a participant in the midst of these events, what Matynia writes is new and even startling. It is an excellent lesson in how to rise above one’s deepest fears and hatreds—a lesson that is still enormously relevant.”
—Zbigniew Bujak, electrician, a key Solidarity leader, member of the democratic underground in Poland, Political Scientist