KF Online Programs

Webinar: Transatlantic World through Polish and American Eyes - similarities and differences of perspectives - A talk by Prof. Bohdan Szklarski and Amb. Daniel Fried

Thursday, June 11, 2020, at 1:00pm

As the Polish-American diplomatic relations reached its centennial in 2019 and strategic partnership between both countries seems to be stronger than ever, questions remain open on the extent of convergence of interests between Washington and Warsaw. Political scientist and expert on the Polish-American relations, Professor Bohdan Szklarski of the University of Warsaw and Weiser Family Distinguished Fellow and former US Ambassador to Poland Daniel Fried will elaborate on the political, economic, cultural, environmental and security cooperation between Poland and the USA as viewed from the perspective of each country.

Transatlantic World through Polish and American Eyes

- Similarities and Differences of Perspectives

- A talk by Prof. Bohdan Szklarski & Amb. Daniel Fried

Thursday, June 11, 2020, 1:00 PM EDT

The talk will be held via Zoom and live-streamed on the KF Facebook page. Viewers will be able to ask questions using the Q&A feature. Maximum of 100 view-only attendees will be able to participate in the webinar. There's no advance registration. Attendance will be on a first come first serve basis. 

When: Jun 11, 2020, 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Please click the link below to join the webinar:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89145093824

Or join the webinar via iPhone one-tap :

    US: +16465588656, meeting ID; 89145093824#  

The time when the Atlantic was a body of friendly waters joining two continents is gone. Make no mistake, it is not the last three years that have brought a drift towards the separation between Europe and the USA. While the distance from Paris to Washington seems to have grown by thousands of miles. there are countries like Poland, which seem to disregard or at least downplay the drift-apart tendency and keep seeing the Atlantic as a small lake. Each perspective has solid as well as imagined grounds. The purpose of this talk is to discern the extent to which the relations across the Atlantic still evolve around commitments of the heart (as Poland would see them) or are they becoming based primarily on the rational calculation of interest (as the concerned skeptics have it). This eternal conflict of the reason and the heart reveals two perspectives on the Trans-Atlantic World in the 21^st century. How opposite? How compatible? Come to the talk to find out and share your thoughts on it.

Bohdan Szklarski, Professor of Political Science at the University of Warsaw, a specialist in the field of studies on democracy, political leadership and political culture; currently, a Visiting Professor at the University of South Carolina, KF grant recipient.

Prof. Szklarski served as a Head of American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw in 2012-2016 and of the Department of Political Science at Collegium Civitas in 1997-2007 where he also lectured. Graduate and lecturer of numerous American and Polish universities. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Alcala, Madrid; Torino University; Paris Diderot University; University of Athens; Kyongpook University Daegu, South Korea; Notre Dame University; Boston College; Northeastern University; City University of New York; University of Louisville; University of Kentucky. Co-founder and Head of Leadership Research Laboratory at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. Author of several books, over 50 articles and chapters in scientific papers. One of his many publications is Symbolic leadership: between governance and representation. American Presidency at the end of the 20th century (2006). Professionally he is interested in the subject of political leadership, political communication, political culture, political anthropology, and American internal and foreign policy. He often appears in the media as an expert on current political events in Poland and in the world.

Ambassador Daniel Fried is the Atlantic Council's Weiser Family Distinguished Fellow. In the course of his forty-year Foreign Service career, Ambassador Fried played a key role in designing and implementing American policy in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. As a special assistant and NSC senior director for Presidents Clinton and Bush, ambassador to Poland, and assistant secretary of state for Europe (2005-09). Ambassador Fried crafted the policy of NATO enlargement to Central European nations and, in parallel, NATO-Russia relations, thus advancing the goal of Europe whole, free, and at peace. During those years, the West's community of democracy and security grew in Europe. Ambassador Fried helped lead the West's response to Moscow's aggression against Ukraine starting in 2014: as State Department coordinator for sanctions policy, he crafted US sanctions against Russia, the largest US sanctions program to date, and negotiated the imposition of similar sanctions by Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia. 

Ambassador Fried became one of the US government's foremost experts on Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. While a student, he lived in Moscow, majored in Soviet studies and history at Cornell University (BA magna cum laude 1975), and received an MA from Columbia's Russian Institute and School of International Affairs in 1977. He joined the US Foreign Service later that year, serving overseas in Leningrad (human rights, Baltic affairs, and consular officer), and Belgrade (political officer), and in the Office of Soviet Affairs in the State Department. 

As a Polish desk officer in the late 1980s, Fried was one of the first in Washington to recognize the impending collapse of Communism in Poland and helped develop the immediate response of the George H.W. Bush Administration to these developments. As a political counselor at the US Embassy in Warsaw (1990-93), Fried witnessed Poland's difficult but ultimately successful free market, democratic transformation, working with successive Polish governments.

Ambassador Fried also served as the State Department's first special envoy for the closure of the Guantanamo (GTMO) Detainee Facility. He established procedures for the transfer of individual detainees and negotiated the transfers of seventy detainees to twenty countries, with improved security outcomes.   

Dan Fried has been married to Olga Karpiw since 1979; they have two children (Hannah and Sophie), and are the besotted grandparents of Ava Helen Fried Hanley.

<< Return to KF Online Programs