Polish diplomat and philosopher
Piotr Andrzej Ogrodziński (born 7 September 1951) is a Polish diplomat, activist and philosopher.
Activist.
Ogrodziński was born in Paris where his father, Przemysław Ogrodziński, was serving as the Polish charge d'affairs at the Polish embassy. Ogrodziński's father was a senior diplomat under the Communist regime. Ogrodziński's mother, Halina Jacuńska-Ogrodzińska, was recognized by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem as one of Righteous Among the Nations on 28 June 1979 for hiding two Jewish women, Maria Glass and Olga Lilien during the Holocaust.
In a 2008 essay, he recalled about his generation: "My generation, born into the Polish People’s Republic, took the meagerness of life under socialism as a given, but, step by step, discovered that it didn’t work because of its economic inefficiency and its false ethics. Initially, we lived practicing opportunism by pretending to believe in the ruling ideology and being preoccupied by small things. It was the grayness of “a little stability” or – as the Czech writer Milan Kundera called it – the unbearable lightness of being. Our experience and sense of history were based on a chain of strikes and political upheavals of 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976 and 1980–81."
As a five-year old in Warsaw, Ogrodziński witnessed the Polish October revolution of 1956 where a nationalist faction of the Communist Party under Władysław Gomułka overthrew the Stalinist leadership as he remembered seeing huge crowds of workers march down the streets of Warsaw demanding a new government. Gomułka had spoken of a "Polish Road To Socialism", promising greater independence from the Soviet Union and a de-Stalinizing "thaw" similar to the one in the Soviet Union. Initially popular, Gomułka's authoritarian style of leadership had made him unpopular by the late 1960s. As a high school student in January 1968, Ogrodziński attended the celebrated theater production of the play "Dziady" ("Forefathers") by Adam Mickiewicz. "Forefathers" was set in the 19th century Congress Poland and featured Russian villains, leading to Varsovian audiences of 1968 to see the play as a metaphor for Soviet domination of Poland. The banning of "Dziady" on 30 January 1968 after playing for only 14 times set off the "March events" in Poland that severally threatened Gomułka's hold on power. Ogrodziński recalled that the principal problem with opposition to the Communist dictatorship was the divide between the working class and the "intelligentsia". During the March events of 1968, it was university students and intellectuals who protested while the working class assisted the police. In December 1970 a workers revolt broke out in Gdańsk, leading to the Polish Army being deployed against the working class of Gdańsk with at least 44 workers shot down while the intellectuals and students stayed passive.
From 1971 to 1975, he attended the University of Warsaw, where he graduated from the Institute of Economic Sciences. As a student, he become involved in opposition to the Communist dictatorship, working for a transition to a democracy. As an young anti-Communist activist, Ogrodziński worked to bridge the gap between the working class and the "intelligentsia", believing that an alliance of the workers and intellectuals was the best way of bringing down the Communist regime. Ogrodziński felt that the protests and strikes of June 1976 were the turning point in the struggle against the regime as for the first time the workers and intellectuals worked together. From 1977 onward, he worked to provide logistical support for the underground newspaper of "Robotnik". In a 2013 interview, Ogrodziński stated: "For me, I was Left-oriented, but quite critical of the Polish People’s Republic. Already in the 1970s, I was in the gray zone of KOR ["Komitet Obrony Robotników"-Workers Defense Committee]. They had a bulletin called "Robotnik" (Worker). Their archives were at my flat. The editorial board met at my flat. So, I knew them...I was not part of KOR, but they were my friends. They were not happy with my leftish orientation, but they turned out to a large extent to be leftists too." Keenly interested in the philosophy of politics, Ogrodziński worked at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences from 1978 to 1990.
In September 1980, he joined the newly founded "Solidarność" union, which had just staged a successful strike at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980. In October 1980, Ogrodziński founded the journal "NTO" ("Nauka-Technika-Oświata"), representing the members of the science, technology and education workers section of "Solidarność". Ogrodziński recalled about his activities in 1980-81: "As a journalist working for "NTO", a regional Solidarity bulletin, I would travel through Poland and was welcomed by complete strangers as if I was a good, old friend. There was little suspicion – and a lot of enthusiasm and good faith".
Following the declaration of martial law on 13 December 1981 that saw "Solidarność" banned, he worked with the underground CDN publishing house from February 1982 onward. Ogrodziński joined the illegal MRKS (Inter-Factory Workers Committee of "Solidarnosc"). About the underground struggle in the 1980s, he remembered: "When I think of those days, I am moved by the bravery of people who let us use their homes for meetings of our underground organization. We could not meet in public places since the police constantly watched them. Every few months we had to change apartments and find new people who were afraid but felt obliged to help us." On 1 May 1982, for the May Day celebrations, Ogrodziński helped to organise "Solidarność" demonstrations in Warsaw against the regime.
In 1986, he was awarded a PhD in philosophy at the University of Warsaw. In the 1989 elections for the Sejm, he was involved in the campaign of the Solidarity Citizens' Committee. Ogrodziński helped to design the famous "High Noon" poster featuring Gary Cooper as the sheriff from the 1952 film "High Noon", but wearing a "Solidarność" badge in place of the sheriff's badge and carrying a ballot instead of a gun.
As someone who had grown up under the Communist dictatorship, Ogrodziński is keenly interested in creating a philosophy that will uphold a civil society. The Polish philosopher Piotr Gliński summarized Ogrodziński's work in philosophy as: "Moral social order stands guard over civic relations . The development of civil society would be jeopardised whenever there exists a significant gap between the state and society". In 1991, Ogrodziński published a book "Pięć tekstów o społeczeństwie obywatelskim" ("Five Essays on Civil Society"), which argued that Poland's principal problem was a "crippled civil society" after decades of foreign rule starting in 1939.
In August 2013, Ogrodziński stated in an interview: "I published a small book called "Five Essays on Civil Society". At the beginning of the 1990s I was involved in the topic of civil society, which was an East-Central Europe sort of topic. The main thrust of my argument was that there is a strong logical relationship between market economy and democracy. I never interpreted civil society simply as a set of NGOs. I saw it as a certain structure of society in which the state is externalized - this is the Hegelian sense of civil society -- so that there is a space for freedom of action. The market is logically a type of such activity. There are certain rules but within the rules there is room for initiative. But that was probably the mainstream thinking of quite a few people at that time, that if you want to have democracy you need to have a market economy. It had a catastrophic result for those who were largely the real authors of the transition, since the power of "Solidarnosc" was connected to the great industrial plants, which very often proved to be economically inefficient. The current market reality of the Gdańsk shipyard is a symbol of such a process."
At an academic conference in London in 1993, Ogrodziński noted in Hungary, the Czech republic and Slovakia, the concept of "Mitteleuropa" (German for "middle Europe) had much appeal, but in Poland the concept of "Mitteleuropa" was seen as a threat, which he attributed to Poland's experiences of being partitioned four times, which led the Poles to see Prussia/Germany as a threat from the west in a way that the Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks did not. Ogrodziński also noted the fluidity of Poland's eastern frontiers, which frequently changed over the centuries, further limited the appeal of the "Mitteleuropa" concept as for the Poles the precise eastern ends of Poland were often the subject of debate. Ogrodziński gave as an example that the city his parents were from, Lwów, a place that the Poles regarded at the time as an integral part of Poland, was now the Ukrainian city of Lviv. Ogrodziński noted there was some uncertainly about Poland's precise identity within Europe, citing the well known remark by the playwright Sławomir Mrożek that Poland was east of the West and west of the East. The Australian philosopher Kenneth Minogue noted that the question "Should Poland become more like the West?" was a difficult one, arguing that the economic advantages of such a change would have to be balanced against the threats to Poland's cultural identity and values. In response, Ogrodziński argued that before 1989, it was possible to ask straight "yes/no" questions on this issue, but that was now longer the case as Polish opinion on this issue was very complicated and nuanced. Ogrodziński noted his own surprise to discover that as a citizen he now had the right to demand a say in how the Polish state spent its money. Ogrodziński argued that the changing meanings of what it now meant to be a Polish citizen ensured there was no unanimity on this issue at all in modern Poland as there was much debate about the precise meaning of Polish citizenship in a philosophical sense.
Diplomat.
From 1991 to 1997 Ogrodziński was an assistant professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Following his father's footsteps, in 1993 he started working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Ogrodziński served as the deputy director of the Department of Studies and Planning from 1993 to 1997, as a counselor minister from 1997 to 1998 and as deputy ambassador of the Polish embassy in Washington from 1998 to 2001. In Washington, his principal duty was negotiating Poland's accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which had one of the principal goals of Polish foreign policy since 1989.
In 2001, he was promoted as the director of the American department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Ogrodziński took an Atlanticist line, saying in 2004: "This is a country that thinks seriously about its security. There's no doubt that for such a country, it's good to be a close ally of the United States". In 2004, he told the American media his concerns over what he felt was a lack of American gratitude for Poland's contribution to the Iraq war while denying Poles visa free travel to the United States, saying: "It's very hard to explain why one Polish kid is risking his life in Iraq and another kid is being stopped at the U.S. border because he happened to land in the wrong city".
From 2004 to 2009, he served as the Polish ambassador to Canada. As the Polish ambassador in Ottawa, Ogrodziński's principal concern was the war in Afghanistan, where both Polish and Canadian soldiers fought together against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Ogrodziński stated in 2006 about the war in Afghanistan: "We want to see the ISAF operations be successful. The more flexibility in the possible use of troops, the better". As both Poland and Canada were one of the relatively NATO members that allowed their soldiers to fight in the dangerous Kandahar province of Afghanistan, which was a hotbed of Taiban activity as it bordered Pakistan, the Polish stance won Poland many admirers in Ottawa.
On 14 October 2007, a Polish man, Robert Dziekanski, was killed in Vancouver by four constables of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who zapped him several times with Tasers, causing him to suffer a fatal heart attack. The killing of Dziekanski, which was recorded live by a man named Paul Pritchard at Vancouver International Airport caused much controversy in Poland where it was widely felt to be a case of excessive force. Ogrodziński asked for Canadian officials to discuss the Dziekanski case. At the time, Ogrodziński told the Canadian media: "The video does not give us a clear recording of