Jaci Eisenberg: How did you become interested in your specific areas of research? Could you walk us through first what exactly you research, and then perhaps process that has led/leads you to chose these areas.
André Liebich: I’ve been working the last few years on issues of nationalism and minorities, and that’s a stage in a long process. I’ve always been interested in the relation between ideas and politics, in an historical perspective. I began as a political scientist, my first degree was in political science, and economics. I then did a degree in Soviet studies, and then a Ph.D. in Political Science. My initial interest was in political theory, and because I had this interest in what was then Soviet-dominated or Communist Europe, I was interested in Marxism and Marxist regimes. My first book was in political theory, on an aspect of Hegelian thought. My second and third books were, respectively, on Russian Socialist émigrés, and on minorities in Eastern Europe. I have very eclectic interests, but there is sort-of a fil conducteur which is ideas, even minorities of course is a recent concept, and how they work themselves out in the political sphere. I do contemporary things as well, both in terms of teaching and services, and occasional work. But I think my serious work involves looking backwards to see how this relation between ideas and politics has played itself out at different times.
Jaci Eisenberg: You had just mentioned your teaching. While we’re on that topic, could you talk a little bit about the courses you’re teaching this semester?
André Liebich: Yes, this semester I’m giving a “Nationalism” class, which is a service class that the history and politics section does for the MIA. It’s nationalist theory, so we read authors and look at case studies. My other class this semester is called “Reading the Yugoslav Wars”, and that’s contemporary historiography. There’s an enormous literature already on the Yugoslav wars. We’re looking at schools of thought, biases, debates, even controversies of which there is no lack. The “Nationalism” class is one which I’ve given previously twice. It’s a regular, semi-obligatory class for the MIA. The “Yugoslav” class is my own choice, and that’s also something, that is very valuable and, some extent, specific to this section: we’ve always had a lot of liberty to choose what we want to teach, and we are encouraged to change our teachings. The rationale behind this is that we are a small Institute, students are here at least two years, so they should have some sort of choice in the classes they are offered. In the autumn I gave a class on “Political Ideas”, which is also an obligatory class for the International History and Politics – MIS incoming students, next year it will be semi-obligatory. And I gave a class on “Minorities and Nationalities” in a largely historical perspective. Next year I’m going to give a class in the autumn on Russian Foreign Policy since the fall of the Soviet Union. I’ll try to look at continuities - ideological continuities, ways of thinking, and security concepts - in both present Russia, Soviet Union, and even Tsarist Russia.
Jaci Eisenberg: Where have you studied? How did that path progress into teaching?
André Liebich: I was brought up mostly in Montreal, and I went to McGill, which is a good Canadian university. I studied political science and economics - it was one department at the time, a bit like History and Politics are here, and everybody had to take a Minor in Economics. So, in fact, I took some History courses, but not that many. I went on from there to Harvard, to the Soviet Studies program. Harvard has the oldest Russian Research Center in the US, and, of course, it’s a very dynamic place. That was a two-year program, from which I went on directly into, what is called then and now at Harvard, the Government department. There I wrote my thesis with two people: Adam Ulam, whose title was Professor of both History and Politics, a specialist of the Soviet régime, who had actually begun as a specialist of the British Empire and of British labour; my other thesis director was Judith Shklar, who was a classical Political Theorist, with books on the great political philosophers, such as Rousseau, Hegel, and on normative theory, notably a book entitled "Ordinary Vices.” As I was finishing my studies, I got a fellowship to go to Oxford, St. Antony’s College, which is a very cosmopolitan place; it’s one of the newest of the colleges, a graduate college, and by Oxford standards it is very laid-back. It’s something of a meeting place for people from all over because they have regional centers, a Europe center, a Russian center, a very famous Middle East center, and now a Japan Institute too. From there, I went back to Montreal, where I began teaching, at a newly-founded university the Université du Québec à Montréal, the first state university in Quebec. In my sixteen years of teaching in Montréal I also taught at my alma mater, McGill, and at the Université de Montréal as well. I became Professor of Political Science, Secretary of the Canadian Political Science Association, and so on. It was when I came here, in 1989, that I discovered that I was a Historian. And I was very pleased to learn that, because the way in which Political Science had developed left me completely cold. To my great relief, I no longer had to subscribe to or read the American Political Science Review. My Chair here when I came was called “le monde communiste.” This was autumn 1989. My first class was on the Socialist bloc and every week one of these countries ceased to be Socialist. That was a moment when I was reconfirmed in my belief that history gives us much more of a handle to understand what is happening, even today than formal models or one-size-fits-all political science approaches. It seems to me that the fall of the Soviet Union was the great failure of social science at the time; Historians didn’t anticipate this either, of course, but they weren’t in the business of anticipations and they could take a much longer view. Once it happened, it was much easier for them to find their point de repère, and their way. I remember after 1989, journalists called and were very eager to know about the Sanjak of Novy Bazaar. Well, you had to be a historian to know what this was because it hadn’t been mentioned for the last 80 years. Suddenly, places and matters such as these became contemporary, relevant, and burning issues.
In the course of my career, I spent several years on sabbatical or on research leave. I went back to my second alma mater, Harvard, for two years. I was at the Kennan Institute, which is the Russian Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. I spent a year at Stanford at the Hoover Institute, where they have marvelous archives – that’s where I was working on Russian émigrés. And here, since I came to Geneva, I have spent a year at Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is of course a fabulous place, it’s Einstein’s office, and all that. The Princeton Institute treats its members very well. . But the experience confirmed to me that I was happy to be in a European setting. Since then I’ve been on sabbatical in London for a semester, and I’ll be going on sabbatical next year as well, in the Winter semester, to St Antony's and then to Nuffield College, in Oxford.
Jaci Eisenberg: Could you talk about some of the books, or perhaps research projects you’ve been involved with in the past?
André Liebich: When I was studying Political Science at McGill, a great revelation was Charles Taylor’s class in the history of Political Thought. I became utterly fascinated by Hegel, on whom Taylor was then writing. A visiting French academic at Harvard, Miguel Abensour, suggested that I do my thesis on a figure whose name came up frequently in discussions of the origins of Marxism but who had never been studied in his own right. This was August Cieszkowski, a Young Hegelian, French utopian socialist and Polish Messianist, meaning he tried to offer an interpretation of Polish, indeed universal, history, in terms of suffering and redemption. A very interesting figure, who hadn’t been really treated in depth in historiography, in part because he was so difficult to pin down. He wrote his philosophy in German, his social works in French, and his messianic quasi-religious philosophy in Polish. Obviously, a very particular combination My thesis on Cieszkowski was an intellectual biography, where I tried to set him in a Mannheimian perspective. It’s called “Between Ideology and Utopia,” which refers to the two paradigms that Karl Mannheim offers, and, which as my title suggests, don’t seem to me to be adequate, because some people fall between the two, as did August Cieszkowski. Then I did an edition of Cieszkowski's writings in English, published by Cambridge University Press. It put at the disposition of an English-language reading public, texts which were obscure and in different languages.
By then I had begun teaching, and I came to author a number of articles on contemporary Eastern Europe, which I still continue to do and still enjoy. I tried to explain how different Eastern Europe was from the Soviet Union, as I try to explain today how different it also is from Western Europe, as I think we are finding today. My next big project was Russian Emigration. I was going to do a political and ideological history of the Russian Emigration, and I was going to divide it into schools across the political spectrum – left, center, right. I began with the Left, the Mensheviks, and I never left them. There was so much fascinating and original material there and they were so influential in developing the way Socialists in the West saw the Soviet Union. The Mensheviks criticized the Soviet Union, from a socialist perspective, and never ceded to outright anti-Sovietism. That project took me much longer than expected, it was very much a labour of love. I spent much time in different archives – Stanford, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, London but at the time, the Soviet Union was closed for this sort of research. Since then, I have gone to Russia, to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything. I have been relieved to find that none of my Mensheviks had been a secret Soviet spy I published that book, which was very well received, won a prize, and is being translated., I am still involved in work on the Mensheviks, because the history of the emigration has become very important in post-Soviet Russia, whereas it was banned in the past, treated with utter contempt, and so on. Now it’s a real source of legitimacy, a sort of point d’ancrage, the link with "Another Russia," the authentic Russia, as it were. Indeed, in post-Soviet Russia, there is something of a cult of the emigration, which is a little bit disturbing, because some of these émigrés were pretty scary, but the Mensheviks have had their share of attention, of course, because of that. So I have been putting out Menshevik documents with Russian colleagues. There are now six volumes, and a seventh, final one is coming out. These are archival documents which are published with lengthy introductions, annotations, indices, and biographies, and so on.
Since I came to Geneva, I have turned to minority issues, initially because the Swiss government was very preoccupied with the minority problem. I first did a commissioned report and then as I became more involved in that the subject, I started giving classes, several of my seminars were devoted to this. I directed memoires and theses in this area, some of which have been published. I wrote a book in French on minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, which is something of a popularization, justified by the fact that there is so little in French on minorities, the French are allergic to the idea of ethnic minorities. They believe they don’t have any at home and, if they do, they don’t want to see them. From minorities I went on to nationalism. And the major book that I am preparing, is to be called Must Nations become States? It’s about the developement of the idea of self-determination from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a number of case studies. I have a chapter on the Poles in Paris after 1830, a chapter on Mazzini, another one on the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a final one on Masaryk and the creation of Czechoslovakia. That’s a project which has been generously financed by the Fonds national, one that I should have finished already, but there’s always something more coming up.
I’ve worked also in Roma issues, and I’ve written on that, both scholarly and popular articles. I’m involved now in an EU project, which is about seeking out best practices in Roma policies in Central and Eastern Europe. Applied or policy research is not really my cup of tea, but it’s something that one does, as a service, and as a different way of approaching one's subjects of research. I’m also involved in a project on citizenship, which is particularly interesting because it has all sorts of ramifications. This is a project which originated at the Carnegie Endowment and has become a network nested at European University Institute in Florence. I have contributed to the project's book on the new EU members. A second edition is now coming out. It includes the newcomers, Bulgaria and Romania and we also have Croatia and Turkey, perhaps in a sort of anticipation. Although there is a Professor of Law from Edinburgh co-directing the project it’s really the social-historical-political analysis of citizenship laws and practices, that is so interesting. It’s as if citizenship were too important to be left to the lawyers! There is always something new or surprising to discover as one looks at the implications and the image of the state that comes through in the way that it formulates and implements its nationality policies, especially since citizenship laws are changing all the time, all the more so in the post-Communist countries - being a plural citizen myself, I’m very interested in citizenship.
Jaci Eisenberg: You’ve just mentioned quite a few projects that you’re in the process of completing. Do you have any on tap for the future?
André Liebich: Yes, well, I do have to get some things off my desk, but I do have two projects for the near and further future. Both are of a biographical nature. When I go on sabbatical next year to Oxford, I want to do a biographical study of a British journalist called Henry Wickham Steed. He was editor of the Times during the First World War and just after the First World War, but the way that I come across him is that he was the great promoter of Central European independence. He had a very colorful life, of course, as a Foreign Correspondent in different places. Very contradictory person, with a complicated personal life. I found his unpublished memoirs in addition to his published memoirs and I got permission from his executors to use them. There’s another further biographical project which I want to do somewhere down the road, which is about another also very complex and very contradictory personage known under different names, Michal Czajkowsk, but also Sadyk Pasha. He was a Polish exile of the 1830s who wrote popular romantic novels in French with a a Ukrainian theme, then went to the Ottoman Empire, converted to Islam, and became a high-ranking Ottoman official who created a Polish legion under Ottoman command. At the end of his life, he retracted everything, begged the Tsar for forgiveness, and went back to die in Russia. Very strange sort of person, who shocked his environment several times, an author, as well as a political figure, whose very name, “Sadyk” meaning faithful, was ironic, because he was seen by his contemporaries as faithless, as an apostate, as he had given up his Catholic Christian faith for Islam, then gave up Islam for Russian Orthodoxy. These are biographical subjects, which are going to be fun, but I think we all find that we don’t really define what we are going to do. You sit down to do one thing, and then you get a phone call, or someone writes you and says, we really need an article on this, and you say, oh, that’s a good idea. Or there’s a Conference and you say, ah! I think I could perhaps contribute something to this, or someone says, I really need you for one thing or another.
Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any other pieces of advice for the students in the IHP section?
André Liebich: I think this is a great place. There’s a combination of academic cultures, both at the level of the faculty, and at the level of the students, it’s really remarkable. There are many places which are quite international in terms of the student bodies these days. I was in England a few days ago, and at both the LSE and Oxford you hear French, German, East European languages, you see the people who are obviously from Asia, and so on. But the faculty tends to be much more homogenous. They tend to come out of the same, in this case, English, mold, or in the United States you have the American mold. Here you have people who have studied in all sorts of places, very often not places from which they originate. And that, I think, gives a sort of originality to the Institute.
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