Woodard spoke at the University of Warsaw, the OSW Center for Eastern Studies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and on TVP World, TVN-24, and POLSAT News
January 20, 2025
WARSAW, POLAND – Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard spent last week in Poland, presenting the project’s work to students, scholars, diplomats and public officials and appearing on all three of the country’s competing nationwide television networks.
During a week when Europeans deployed military forces to deter a possible attack on their territory by the United States and when unlawful behavior by federal agents in Minneapolis was headline news on the continent, Woodard shared his work on why the U.S. has always been vulnerable to democratic and territorial collapse, what can be done about it, and what the implications are for the Trans-Atlantic alliance and European security.
“We’re, by political science standards, a hybrid regime: no longer a properly functioning democracy, not yet a dictatorship,” he told the staff of OSW, the Center for Eastern Studies, one of Poland’s leading international relations think tanks. “What happens next depends largely on the American public, who will have to ‘lead from behind’ to save themselves. I think they will. But it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
“The damage for the world at large, I expect, is irreversible,” he added. “The post-Cold War world is gone. So too is the post-World War II international order. We’re all going to have to craft something new and, hopefully better.”
Woodard was in Poland to present at OSW, the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ “American Fridays” lecture series for scholars and diplomatic officials, sharing Nationhood Lab’s work on the regional divisions in the country, the battle over our national purpose, and the development of an effective civic national story based on the values in the Declaration of Independence.
During his trip, he also appeared as the in-studio guest on three national news broadcasts: TVP World’s Talking with TVP World, TVN-24’s Fakty, and POLSAT News’ Dzień na Świecie, where hosts wanted to know what the implications were of Trump threatening Greenland, Europe deploying troops to defend it, and the violent and often unlawful behavior of federal ICE agents in Minneapolis in other cities.
“Trump has a bully personality and bullies tend to want to punch down, not punch up, and tend to be cowards when it comes to somebody who will fight back, so having [European] troops and making to not possible [for the U.S] to land a few paratroopers and take over the territory is probably a constructive thing and it will lilkely dissuade him from doing something like that,” he told TVP World’s Sascha Fahrbach. “It creates a tripwire and a cost. Unfortunately, we live in a world where this action was probably constructive.”
As a journalist in the 1990s, Woodard covered Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe and the Balkans for the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Nationhood Lab, based at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, is an interdisciplinary research, writing, testing and dissemination project focused on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the federation’s stability. The project delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.