“For a globalising and increasingly interdependent world, the most important challenge is solidarity, encompassing the whole of human relations, both with other people as well as with nature. And deep solidarity needs a deeper kind of culture. For people of the new age – providing their actions do not lead to a catastrophe by succumbing to the growing forces of xenophobia and selfishness – real liberation will be brought by empathy, for which they will fight with the same determination and courage as before they fought for freedom and which they will shape not so much by avoiding freedom, but by voluntarily renouncing it, or – which is all the same – by sharing it wisely.”
Czyżewski’s essays locate Central Europe at the centre of the most important questions and problems for the contemporary world: the crisis of communality, growing divisions and increasingly heated cultural wars. This part of the continent appears here as an ethos and an attitude which counters rootlessness with belonging, the complex of provincialism with the power of the province, and the sharply outlined borders with a space of interpenetration and coexistence.
Krzysztof Czyżewski received for his book the Ambassador of New Europe award.
Krzysztof Czyżewski – Polish writer, director and animator of intercultural activities, co-founder of the „Pogranicze – sztuk, kultur, narodów” [“Borderland – of arts, cultures, nations”] Centre in Sejny and the Pogranicze Foundation. In 2011, together with the foundation team, he launched the International Dialogue Centre in Krasnogruda. Initiator of intercultural dialogue programmes in Central Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Indonesia, Bhutan, North Africa and other borderlands of the world. Lecturer at many universities in Europe and the USA.
