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Civil Society and the Present Age
Bronislaw Geremek
It is an old epistemological truth that an entomologist can write about ants without having been one. In presuming to speak on the topic of civil society, I face a completely different problem, for I wonder whether my own experience of having been an "ant," as it were, hinders executing the "entomologist's" role. Not being sure of an answer to that question, I can only declare at the outset that the following remarks come from an observer who is anything but indifferent.
Bronislaw Geremek The concept of civil society appeared fairly late in the annals of Central and Eastern European resistance to communism. Its advent resulted from the realization that the state had fallen completely into the hands of the communist oligarchy, and from the conviction that society nonetheless retained the power to organize itself independently as long as it eschewed anything overtly "political" and stuck to "nonpolitical politics." The main form of resistance was the phenomenon of dissidence, which usually was of an isolated, marginal, and even self-consciously hopeless character. Yet however quixotic "dissidentism" may have seemed, it did constitute a form of public involvement that defied the communist system. Dissidents engaged in their own peculiar type of mental resistance, which typically began with a refusal to participate in falsehood, grew into a desire to bear loud witness to one's own views and conscience, and then finally drove one to political action. The scope for such action long remained extremely narrow, for communism's all-pervasive power was carefully calculated to leave as little room as possible for any kind of independent civic action.
Moral resistance, though seemingly hopeless against systems that are based on political and military force, functions like a grain of sand in the cogwheels of a vast but vulnerable machine. The concept of civil society, understood as a program of resistance to communism, first appeared in Poland during the late 1970s and early 1980s, primarily in conjunction with the Solidarity movement. At long last there had appeared in the communist world an independent mass movement to contradict the ruling system. Organized as a labor union, Solidarity could boast not only ten million urban members--both workers and intellectuals--but also the support of the peasants, who made up in anticommunist intensity what they lacked in organization. Even Poland's three-million-member Communist Party could not be said to be fully outside of this movement, for one-third of its members also belonged to Solidarity--and by no means simply as fomenters of internal division. When Solidarity spoke, therefore, it could do so in the name of "We, the People."
Confronting this enormous popular movement was the power apparatus of the regime: the military, the police, and the political administration (including the Communist Party bureaucracy and the nomenklatura). Yet these had no legitimacy; they remained outside of societal control, but they also lacked any societal support. We in Solidarity hoped to surround this unwanted creature with something like a cocoon, gradually isolating and then marginalizing the party-state apparatus.
The naïveté of this conviction was obvious, but its power could not be ignored. The simple old ethical injunction "Do not lie" had, after all, enormous political significance in widening resistance to the communist system. Moreover, the cost of such nonviolent resistance was low, while its consequences were far-reaching indeed. Even the crudest totalitarian system requires a certain amount of societal acquiescence. Such systems thrive on political passivity, but they also need a certain amount of participation, even in fictional forms such as voting in fake elections designed to foster the appearance of democratic legitimacy. Moral resistance, though seemingly hopeless against systems that are based on political and military force, functions like a grain of sand in the cogwheels of a vast but vulnerable machine. The idea of a civil society--even one that avoids overtly political activities in favor of education, the exchange of information and opinion, or the protection of the basic interests of particular groups--has enormous antitotalitarian potential.
The concept of civil society in opposition to the state has its roots in the eighteenth century. An important place in the thought of the Enlightenment was occupied by the conviction that society exists prior to ruling authority, and that while ruling authority is founded on a contract, society rests on man's natural freedoms. This understanding of civil society as a community of free and equal citizens--as manifested, for example, in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789--proved of immense value in struggles against despotism. Although major emphasis was placed on individual human rights, a significant role was reserved for public opinion, understood as expressing the "collective will," whose formation then becomes the goal of political activity. In this early tradition, civil society with its various guilds, associations, and parties stood opposed not so much to the state per se as to absolute monarchy. Republicanism and constitutional monarchy came to the fore as the preferred regimes for guaranteeing those natural or contractual rights on the basis of which a civil society could become a state.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx and other socialist thinkers offered their own gloss on the relationship between society and the state. Seeing the state as an instrument of class rule and a servant of capitalism, they took as a goal the state's eventual abolition and the formation of a stateless society. In practice, however, socialism has never brought about the weakening of the state, but on the contrary has strengthened it and enormously extended its control over economic and social life. The Jacobin model of a powerful centralized state heavily influenced both the socialist parties of the nineteenth century and the communist movement of the twentieth. In communist countries, the "withering away" of the state lingered on as a rhetorical trope, but was never a serious practical possibility. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, in his prison notebooks, envisioned a "regulated" society that he thought could function smoothly without the institution of the state or any other wielder of force. In this manner, he hoped, the state might become marginal, with political life centering on a kind of positional warfare over hegemony in civil society rather than power in the state.
In both the liberal and the socialist visions of civil society, the organizing principle is some notion of human rights--and by no means only those that concern the political sphere. Social and economic rights also had their place in these visions. In keeping with this approach, there appeared trade unions, sports associations, and various types of local brotherhoods. While hopeful visions of the future fired the social imagination of the nineteenth century, the twentieth would in fact witness a dramatic deepening of the void between state and society. The state, at least in Europe, would become an omnipresent Leviathan bent on shrinking the autonomy of individual areas of life and asserting its control over even the most intimate spheres of private existence. Out of this overweening twentieth-century European state, the totalitarian systems of our time would be born.
One useful way of thinking about totalitarianism is to see it as a particularly brutal attempt to settle the conflict between the state and society by utterly subordinating the latter to the former. Totalitarian authority not only undertakes the extreme centralization of the state, but also strips citizens of their rights and conquers or destroys all those autonomous structures that normally give shape to social life. Fascism at least left a significant part of the economic sphere outside of its monopoly of power; communism lacked even that minimal restraint. In both types of totalitarian systems, the liquidation of civil society was thought necessary to guarantee the state's continued monopoly of power.
A different notion of how to resolve the state-society tension also arose around the turn of the last century. Adherents of this vision hoped for the overthrow of the state, seen as an apparatus of force, through the organization of societal resistance from "the bottom up." Organizational tasks once accomplished only with raw power and the threat of force would be solved through voluntary cooperation, thus simultaneously supplanting the state and depriving it of its very reason for being. This vision of future development would come to be known as anarchism.
Anarchism, of course, was destined to be marginalized during the twentieth century, though it has still, in one form or another, managed to haunt modern politics right up to our own day. Sometimes the anarchist impulse shows up in would-be utopias of communal life or countercultural youth movements--examples of which flowered briefly in both Europe and North America during the late 1960s--and occasionally it appears in the dismal and dangerous guise of terrorism.
Beside these anomic or violent methods of overcoming the contradiction between state and society there stands a third option that clearly respects the distinction between the one and the other. Contemporary public life evinces a troubling drift toward the politicization of all aspects of human existence; the result is an increasingly pervasive societal disgust with politics and politicians in general. In this situation, the vision of a society organizing itself becomes a guide for activities meant to hold the line against creeping overpoliticization.
Throughout all of recent history, the concept of civil society seems to have been endowed with a life of its own. It has gone through various fluctuations, certainly, but has remained continually with us, at least in thought or political imagination. It has taken on its greatest power, however, during times of direct confrontation with the communist system.
The euphoria that came from overthrowing communism and returning to the community of democratic nations furnished most of the emotional "start-up capital" for the transition period that began, for us Poles, with the elections of June 1989. Our jumping-off point was that very singular situation in which an entire people looks around and suddenly realizes that it can take charge of its own destiny by building a sense of solidarity based on commonly held convictions. This passage from individual and small-group dissidence to independent mass organizations such as the Solidarity trade union, the Solidarity farmers' union, and the Independent Students' Union was understood, not only by learned observers but by the participants themselves, to be the first flowering of a new, postcommunist civil society. The magnificent phrase "We, the people" kept popping up in underground literature and opposition rhetoric. In the Roundtable Talks of 1989, one side went under the name of "party-governmental," while the other side was called--and called itself--"societal." The Catholic Church, in its role as an arbitrator and moderator of the negotiations, continually employed this usage. This meant that politics had prevailed over geometry, squaring the "roundtable" to give it two opposing sides. The longstanding contradiction between Poland's communist state and its noncommunist society had at last found expression in the language of politics.
It took a decade--from Solidarity's birth in the Gdansk shipyards in August 1980, through the years of martial law and repression, to the elections of 1989--for our civil society to assert itself fully. In most of the other communist countries of Central Europe--thanks in part, perhaps, to the Polish example--the peaceful triumph of civil society seemed to occur with a stunning suddenness.
Still more remarkable was the series of events that took place in Russia during the memorable summer of 1991. The August putsch looked like a sure winner; its success seemed not only probable but simply unavoidable. Let us remember that Boris Yeltsin's call for a general strike and mass resistance at first aroused no echo. The brave crowds that took to the streets in defense of democracy in those grim early hours after the coup plotters struck appeared merely to be displaying that strain of doomed gallantry which has so often manifested itself in the history of Russia, a country where one drinks toasts to "the success of our hopeless cause."
Then everything began to change; the hopeless cause succeeded. The events of last August showed that even veteran Soviet apparatchiki were no longer immune from the contagion of democracy and rights--that force could lose. The "strength of the weak"--of solidarity among ordinary people--made itself felt. The events of those days and nights brought people together, freed them from fear, and to determination added hope. Careful analysts have noted that only a small part of society took part in these events. In the eye of the hurricane itself, in Moscow, hardly one-hundredth part of the people was involved. Yet those days were decisive for the whole society, for as they wore on, the awareness of a new arrangement of power was taking hold. A mass movement of resistance against unjust force was emerging, bringing with it a sense both of power and of brotherhood. That special moment still resonates, and plays a role in the politics of Russia similar to that played in Poland by memories of Solidarity at its peak of cohesiveness and moral clarity. In Poland, however, the myth of brotherhood rediscovered also went hand in hand with independent social organizations in the spheres of culture, education, information, and the professions.
The destiny of Europe as a whole is intimately bound up with the east's still unresolved transition from communism to freedom. It is as if the festival lights have suddenly gone dim, and in the place of enthusiasm and rejoicing have appeared fear and perhaps even regret for the lost stability of the Cold War world. I have already mentioned that the euphoria and exhilaration of the beginning provided the initial "capital" needed to meet the exigencies of Poland's democratic transition. This capital was useful during the painful period of "shock therapy" that was needed to free the economy from the crippling embrace of central planning and state ownership and to usher in free enterprise and markets. The patience and hope springing from this initial moment of joy made possible a kind of psychic amortization of the reductions in real wages and social services that shock therapy brought.
Now, however, the reality of everyday life is gaining the upper hand on the impulse of enthusiasm. Memory's influence is inevitably waning; hopes and fears about the future overshadow the glow of past achievements. After two years of reform, in Poland as in postcommunist countries generally, frustration and dejection are on the rise, and patience and hope are in short supply. Growing xenophobia and national separatism, searches for scapegoats, and animosity toward Jews, Gypsies, and other minorities are all tokens of this postcommunist letdown. There are those who say that the appearance of virulent nationalism amidst the ruins of communism in Central Europe is unavoidable. Once again, Bosnia and Herzegovina are on the front pages of the world press; once again, Sarajevo has an ominous ring. The hope that the disintegration of communism will be accompanied by rising chances for peace and order in the old communist lands is thus weakened, if not altogether dashed.
Along with the nationalist threat, we are witnessing the return of other dangers that once seemed to belong to already closed chapters of European history. Even in the former East Germany, where the costs of economic transition are being defrayed by massive aid from Western Germany, horrifying examples of social pathology are springing up. The pain of economic reform has also affected the recent elections in Poland, where demagoguery and populism have evoked a significant, though certainly far from overwhelming response in society.
Between an ever more prosperous and unified Western Europe and the poor, unstable postcommunist East, a civilizational gulf is widening. The nations of the European Community are in no position, however, to wall themselves off and to look down with detachment at the postcommunist turmoil that is troubling the eastern half of their continent. The destiny of Europe as a whole is intimately bound up with the east's still unresolved transition from communism to freedom. It is as if the festival lights have suddenly gone dim, and in the place of enthusiasm and rejoicing have appeared fear and perhaps even regret for the lost stability of the Cold War world.
Looking back from our present vantage point--after communism, but after the rise and fall of postcommunist euphoria as well--we veterans of that independent social movement and moral crusade called Solidarity have cause to wonder whether our hope of creating a civil society was only an illusion. I do not believe that it was. Under the oppressive conditions of the communist system, the very ideaof a civil society had real liberating power. It helped make possible--thanks to the adamantine independence of the Catholic Church and to Solidarity--areas of genuinely independent action. Moreover, these zones of independence were, by the standards of other peoples living under communism, undoubtedly enormous. Yet there is another sense in which our hopes have been exposed as illusory, for we believed that the civil society we were forming in the midst of our struggle against communism would prove a strong buttress upon which a future democratic order could lean after the collapse of authoritarian power.
The destruction of communism and the recovery of freedom are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the birth of democracy. Democracies are built only over time, through the forming and functioning of democratic institutions; through peaceful competition among political parties; through the existence of independent means of mass communication; through successive free elections and changes of governments; and finally through the growth of a democratic political culture. The process is one of gradual maturation, both of democracy itself and of people in the ways of democracy.
After the elections of 1989, I was among those who tried to preserve the unity of Solidarity in public life. Poland's postcommunist party system was raw and inchoate then, as it remains at the time of this writing. New parties were springing up like mushrooms after the rainfall--in 1991 there were close to 300 of them--and the call for political pluralism was being answered with a vengeance. Yet like the citizens of most other postcommunist countries, many Poles viewed the whole phenomenon of political parties with profound unease. The idea of civil society naturally suggested an effort to maintain the national unity and civic spirit of Solidarity, so Solidarity activists created both a national civic foundation and a network of citizens' committees throughout the entire country, from the village level on up. We called the democratically elected parliamentary bloc representing Solidarity the Civic Club. We repeatedly invoked the words "civic" and "citizen" with the conviction that they were in keeping with the notion of civil society.
In retrospect, it is apparent to me that we were trying to change hard realities with mere words. The unity of honest and altruistic people in solidarity with one another was supposed to overshadow social atomization, conflicting interests, and group and individual egoism. The magic of the word "citizen," in Poland or in Czechoslovakia, came from the widespread sense that it referred less to one's subordination to the state and its laws than to one's membership in an authentic community, a community whose essence was summed up in the term "civil society."
Our search for this kind of community may be regarded as naïve or even irrational, but there is no denying that it was a highly effective force against totalitarianism. The problem is that when the common enemy, totalitarianism, disappears, the reason for being of such a community begins to evaporate. It is then that a fundamental choice emerges: an open society or nationalism.
Nationalism--to the meaning of this word in Anglo-Saxon political discourse and tradition it would be appropriate to add here a negative value sign--does meet, in a certain way, the need of community. Nationalism gives a community a clear contour by appealing to ethnic ties; it treats national history not as something that provides a choice of traditions but as a kind of tribal biography; and those outside the magic circle, whether they reside within or beyond the country's borders, are viewed as enemies. Finally, nationalism exploits memories of how national feelings were stifled by the communist regime, and how they helped to cement the resistance against communism.
It is significantly more difficult to meet the need for unity--a need that is especially visible in all of the postcommunist countries during these difficult times--in the context of an open society. Democracy is not, after all, the constitutive substance of the community but the play of competing interests. It is based not on emotions but on the rationality of lawfulness, stability, and control. Freedom easily awakens passions and fascinations, but it results in democracy, if at all, only with great difficulty. I am convinced that established no less than fledgling democracies must concern themselves with developing mechanisms to engage citizens in the common enterprise of public life.
Jürgen Habermas has spoken about the self-organized spheres of public life based on solidarity and communication. He referred to them by the well-known phenomenological term Lebenswelt (life-world). Habermas was talking, of course, about civil society, though not in the specific (or exotic) context of resistance against communism, or of the postcommunist "transition" period. Politics in the established democracies is becoming dominated by professional expertise and large, impersonal structures or parties. The Russian word apparatchik, meaning a functionary with powers that do not result from elections, and who is not responsible to a designated constituency, describes a type that did not disappear completely with the collapse of communism. The apparatchik also exists (albeit in far less malign forms) in contemporary Western democracies, and is even becoming stronger as the technology of power grows ever more complicated. As the political role of the apparatchik waxes, that of the citizen must wane accordingly.
There is no greater threat to democracy than indifference and passivity on the part of citizens. In the American political system one can detect--at least from the point of view of a European observer--the functioning on a wide scale of a civil society though the term itself is not very popular. The enormous scope of social, philanthropic, educational, cultural, and trade or professional activities takes place beyond the influence or control of federal or state administration. Foundations, associations, and self-help and neighborhood groups take on certain public obligations, making their independence from the state the basis for their existence. The fundamental question remains, however, as to what degree this directly bears upon public life or politics. American political parties, after all, fulfill the function of association only to a limited extent; first and foremost, they are structures that serve the election process.
In European countries the extent of autonomous societal activity varies, as does the degree of state interference in the life of the individual. The relation between the private and public spheres is also varied. It can be said, however, though with some risk of oversimplification, that a real danger is presented by the fall in interest in politics, by retreatism from public life.
There is no greater threat to democracy than indifference and passivity on the part of citizens. A monarchy or a despotism can get by with mere subjects; democratic republics cannot survive without citizens. Political parties in Western Europe are in a state of crisis. Politics is focusing increasingly on the personalities of candidates rather than on parties and their programs. Aversion to the ubiquitousness of the state and growing citizen alienation from politics have restored urgency to the question of civil society and its role in democratic civilization.
. . .we must ask whether the idea of a civil society--however effective it was in helping to bring down communism--will turn out to be useless in the building of democracy. Let me return, in closing, to what I know best--the experience of Poland. It is interesting to compare how Solidarity was perceived by U.S. and West European public opinion. In America, Solidarity aroused enthusiasm and gained wide support as the only mass anticommunist movement and independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. Europe was fascinated primarily by the spontaneous organizational power, the authenticity of involvement, and the peculiar climate of brotherhood that characterized Solidarity. One might even say that European opinion was transfixed by the vision of a civil society that Solidarity embodied during its heroic period of 1980-81.
In light of the dangers that have appeared on the horizon for Poland in particular and for Central and Eastern Europe in general, we must ask whether the idea of a civil society--however effective it was in helping to bring down communism--will turn out to be useless in the building of democracy.
I do not think that it will. Rather, the concept of civil society will retain its validity, both as an instrument of analysis and as a program of pragmatic action. Its internal content has changed, however. The civil society of 1980 was the projection into the future of a vision that rested upon an awesome emotional unity. The civil society of more than ten years later cannot and should not base itself on emotions, but on the building of carefully nurtured institutions; on the practical realization of ethical values; and on the involvement of the greatest possible numbers of people in public life. The main task now is constructing democratic mechanisms of stability, such as constitutional checks and balances; civic education in the spirit of respect for law; and the encouragement of citizen activism. The civil society does not act in opposition to the democratic state, but cooperates with it. It no longer has to be a kind of "parallel polis," but now can simply be part of the polis.
Political operatives and politicians perceive public life in terms of the technology of power and immediate results. Statesmen and philosophers want to make political strife and competition for power subject to moral principles and long-range visions. The truth, as usual, lies in the middle: what is needed is a technology of power that is foreign neither to the "ethics of conviction" nor the "ethics of responsibility." In the end, a robust civil society offers the best prospects for overcoming the divergence of state and society and bringing citizens into active engagement with public life. Only under such conditions can democracy be made secure.
Introduction
W. Robert Connor
Civil Society
and the Present Age
Bronislaw Geremek
Economics and
Human Values
György Varga
Religion, Nationalism,
and a Civil Society
Conor Cruise O'Brien
On Being Sane
in the Midst of
Madmen
Eduardo Rabossi
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Revised: February 1998
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