A memorial tribute to Dr. Andrzej Werner, founder-president of the Jean de Bloch Society (Warsaw).(In memoriam)

It is with great sadness and a deep sense of loss that we learnt of the death of Dr. Andrzej Werner on 29th October 2007 in Warsaw in a road accident. He was not only a contributor to this Journal but, for several years, from 1985 until effectively the end of the Cold War, also the only member of its editorial board who resided in a country belonging to the communist bloc. That such a thing was possible at all is, on his part, testimony to his independence, courage, and fearlessness

Born in Warsaw in 1933, Dr. Werner was an expert on, and strong supporter of, the European unification movement who taught political science at the University of Warsaw before joining the Ministry of Foreign Trade (1960-1977) where he was centrally involved in negotiations with the European Economic Community (as it then was). His many high-level contacts, both in his own country and abroad, especially in western Europe, undoubtedly provided some measure of protection when, in 1981, he decided to exchange a secure and prestigious post in the diplomatic service for a much more precarious existence as an independent peace researcher and activist. His honesty and outspokenness led him to become a dissident, and one who decided not to leave the country he so deeply loved and whose independence and affiliation to the European Community he passionately promoted.

Zdzislaw M. Rurarz, a close colleague and friend of Dr. Werner, and with whom he worked at one time as a member of the Polish trade delegation at the embassy in Washington, D.C., was to express his dissatisfaction with the communist regime in a spectacularly different fashion. Rurarz ended his diplomatic career as ambassador in Tokyo whence he defected to the U.S. in 1981 following the imposition of martial law in Poland. He died at the beginning of 2007, with neither his death sentence lifted, nor his citizenship restored.

Dr. Andrzej Werner was the author of several scholarly books in his native Polish, as well as of numerous articles in the periodical press (he was proud of his accreditation as a journalist and numbered many prominent journalists, Polish and foreign, among his friends). His initial contribution to this Journal was a lengthy review essay of the first-ever biography of Jan Bloch (1836-1902, better known in the West as Jean de Bloch), the great Polish entrepreneur who, in the last decade of his life, wrote a prophetic and monumental six-volume study detailing the nature of a future great war, and warning the world against unleashing a catastrophe that would result in mass slaughter on the battlefield and social revolution at home. As part of his campaign, Bloch established the world's first peace museum in the Swiss city of Lucerne (1902), a type of public peace education institute that we are becoming familiar with today but that was unheard of at the time. The museum became a popular visitor attraction but it fell victim to the war and closed its doors shortly afterwards. Bloch was prominent in the small group of leading peace activists who lobbied official delegates at the First Hague Peace Conference in 1899. The conference had been called following an appeal by Tsar Nicholas II who was very familiar with Bloch's theories about the war of the future. It is with considerable justification that at the time Bloch was regarded as the spiritual father of the conference.

Bloch's liberal economics, great entrepreneurship, scientific condemnation of war as an uneconomic and dysfunctional practice, and advocate of economic cooperation--not least as a means of overcoming war--greatly appealed to Werner who devoted the last twenty-five years of his life to making Bloch better known both at home and abroad as well as to working for the causes that he had stood for. In 1987 he established the Jean de Bloch Society in Warsaw and was its driving force and moving spirit, organising conferences and exhibitions, publishing articles and promoting and sponsoring research on Bloch. Thanks to Werner and the support he ...