In 2017, over 130 Polish intellectuals, spanning the ideological spectrum, began meeting as the Social Contract Incubator, to design attempt institutions strong enough to hold disagreement.
The result was Let's Agree on Poland (Oxford University Press, 2025), a constitutional reform proposal built on the radical idea that ideological difference, like linguistic or regional difference, is not a problem to be solved, but a fact to be designed around.
The Polish edition, Umówmy się na Polskę (Znak, 2023), became an improbable bestseller, hailed by Polityka as "the most important book on Polish politics since 1989."
The book offers a concrete constitutional reform proposal, built around a model of strategic decentralization that reduces the winner-takes-all stakes driving today's democratic crises. It then offers something rarer: enlisting some of Poland's leading fiction writers, it imagines life under the proposed constitution: five short stories set in five different regions, each governed according to a distinct political culture—progressive, conservative, leftist, Christian democratic, classical liberal.
The European Studies Centre is pleased to host three contributors to the project for a panel discussion, and readings from the book's fiction chapters.
