Introduction: In 1989, amid the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe,
the National Humanities Center began to explore the idea of
a "civil society." The phrase, resounding in regions
emerging from oppressive regimes, was often employed with
only vague awareness that it was a notion reaching back to
the ancient Greeks, shared by the European Enlightenment,
and debated by such figures as Hobbes and Locke, Hegel and
Marx, and, of course, the founders of the American republic.
To clarify the theoretical issues and their practical
implications, the Center supported new scholarly work in
this area and organized three conferences, the last of
which brought together thinkers from Central and Eastern
Europe and from Latin America to examine the theme,
"Consolidating Freedom: The Role of Civil Society." Many of
the Latin American participants had witnessed the transition
from authoritarian governments to more democratic ones; the
Central and Eastern Europeans had experienced the collapse
of the Soviet system and the effort to establish free
institutions. The conference, held in Costa Rica in February
1995 with the cooperation of the Inter-American Institute of
Human Rights in San Jose and the help of the John M. Olin
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rockefeller
Brothers Fund, tested the hypothesis that a strong
democratic polity depends on a democratic culture, which in
turn requires a vital civil society, with individual
initiative, effective non-governmental organizations, and
vigorous exercise of the freedoms of press, religion, and
association.
At the conference, Francis Oakley, former president of
Williams College and a 1990-91 Fellow of the National
Humanities Center, offered a summary view of the issues that
emerged. The distinguished company included three scholars
to whom he alludes: Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Fellow 1989-90,
1994-95; Professor of Anthropology, University of
California, Berkeley), Conor Cruise O'Brien (Fellow 1993-95;
Pro-Chancellor Emeritus, Trinity College, Dublin
University), and Richard Rorty (Center Trustee; William Rand
Kenan Professor of the Humanities, University of Virginia).
The following is an edited excerpt of Oakley's remarks.
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Prospects for a Democratic Societyby Francis OakleyI am a medieval historian who spends most of his time in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though occasionally reaching forward into the seventeenth, and whose interests focus on political and constitutional thought and affiliated theological ideas. That being so, I bring to the question of today's civil society consciousness of the fact that these medieval centuries were times of great constitutional creativity. They saw the adaptation and transposition into public law by canon lawyers of principles drawn from Roman private law and the creation of mechanisms permitting broad consensual involvement of subjects and citizens in the government, not simply of communes or city-states, but also of whole provinces and large territorial states. As a result, representative institutions grew up at the provincial, national, and international levels all over Europe, and began the slow, painful process whereby rulers could be limited in the exercise of their power and, to some rough, minimal degree, held accountable for it. The international level I have in mind is the sphere wherein one would least expect to find constitutionalist mechanisms--the universal Latin Church. It was in that Church, through the agency of representative general councils claiming jurisdictional superiority to their papal monarchs, and vindicating that superiority to the extent of judging and deposing popes for their crimes--that such restraints on the power of monarchs were most dramatically displayed. And it is in that Church that the constitutionalist and political theories legitimating such claims were most persuasively defined and most fully developed, though since the rise of ultramontanism and papal absolutism in the nineteenth century, this has become in large measure forgotten. But if I cannot help being conscious of such remote developments, I cannot help being even more aware that such constitutionalist mechanisms failed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in almost every part of Europe. During the seventeenth century, they came very close to disappearing in England too. It took two civil wars, a regicide, an experiment in military dictatorship, and a subsequent revolution before their survival there was assured. And despite the sophistication of their theoretical underpinnings, they failed also, of course, in the Latin Church. Indeed, given the record of the Catholic Church in Latin America and Eastern Europe, the failure of constitutionalism in the Latin Church (and its obliteration from the ecclesiastical memory) may, in its historical consequences, have been the most catastrophic failure. So I view the emergence recently of liberal democratic regimes with a sharp sense of the historical odds against the survival of constitutionalism. The odds are even higher for the rise and survival of liberal democracy--a much more complex and singular phenomenon which, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes has insisted, presupposed in its inception a historically peculiar, and certainly far from universal notion, of autonomous individuality. We should not, then, approach the future prospects of democracy with enormously high expectations. We should not be surprised by setbacks and even failures. We should expect them. We should even entertain the possibility that they may well be necessary, if painful, moments in the maturation of a viable civil society. Nor should we place too much faith in documents or be too disappointed when they are scrapped. During the late 1950s and the 1960s, as the pace of decolonization quickened, the writing of constitutions was a veritable growth industry, but the subsequent history of the successor states in Africa has been punctuated by the subversion of even the most cleverly-drafted constitutions. In that respect, Africa is far from being unique. My perception of civil society is also affected by my experience of having been called upon for some years to lead a small but proud institution possessed, by North American standards, of a very long history, and with deeply-ingrained customs and traditions--some of them noble, some tinged with less admirable traits. That experience was positive and deeply fulfilling, but it left me with an acute sensitivity to the sheer difficulty that one encounters (even in a privileged, benign and instinctively consensual institutional setting) in trying to prevent the attenuation--degradation even--of collective purpose. Yet there is nothing at all extraordinary about the obstacles one confronts in making the effort to infuse such an institution with an assured sense of mission. They range from the challenge of rival visions to the total absence of vision, from parochialism and ignorant pretentiousness to routine academic angularity, to mulishness, to moral blindness and even to a measure of moral turpitude. I can truthfully say, especially to those postmodernists who are rubbing along through life without benefit of metanarrative, that original sin is alive and well in the Berkshire valleys of western Massachusetts. And I venture to suspect that it may conceivably have some resonance in the large world beyond our mountains. That leads me to sympathize very much with those who emphasize that voluntary organizations can themselves be malign. We should not assume that the state sector of our civil society has any monopoly on pathology. And if things are difficult to keep on course in the often extremely favorable institutional setting of the voluntary sector, one cannot but be impressed by the sheer enormity of the challenges confronting nations that are currently in the process of instituting or reestablishing constitutionalist regimes, let alone those that entertain the larger ambition to embrace or consolidate liberal democratic institutions. So, where does all of this put me along Conor Cruise O'Brien's continuum of pessimism to optimism? What I have had to say should place me, I suppose, well towards the outer, pessimistic reaches. But I find myself reluctant to be located on that continuum at all. If I am well aware of the sorry historical record of setbacks and failures, I also cannot help taking heart from some of the successes. Despite the predictions of so many pundits that Portugal and Spain would be unable to make an effective transition to liberal democracy after the ending of the Salazar and Franco regimes, they succeeded in so doing. If so many tyrannical regimes have flourished in Africa, constitutionalist (if not necessarily liberal democratic) orders have survived in Botswana and Zimbabwe, and, against all forecasts, have made an unexpectedly successful start, at least, in South Africa. And, whatever its flaws, a parliamentary, constitutionalist order will soon be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in the vast reaches of the Republic of India. Rather than pessimism, I am left simply with a sense of the wisdom, in these matters, of modest expectations, of the importance of attending carefully to the nourishing of grass roots initiatives--the network of voluntary organizations, the collaborative efforts of state agencies with the non-profit--all of those undramatic, piecemeal activities which go to weave and strengthen the very fabric of civil society. And if I firmly believe that we must allow our knowledge of the past--the distant past no less than the recent--to inform, chasten, and bridle our expectations, I also believe something else which speaks to my wish to avoid ending on a note of what Richard Rorty, I suspect, would call "terminal wistfulness." Nostalgia for the lost, archaic world of enchantment not being a viable option, we must go forward. And we cannot afford to relinquish, if I may borrow the title of one of Albert Hirschman's splendid books (and Hirschman, after all, is a development economist), an intractable "bias for hope." For we badly need the forward impulsion generated by the very urgency of that hope. |