Eurasia's New Frontiers: Young States, Old Societies, Open Futures

I. The Weakness of Civil Society

I The Weakness of Civil Society “To talk of many things . . . ” Lewis Carroll Civil society is hard to define but easy to idealize. Whether we realized it or not, many of us in the West grewuppermeatedwithideasthatset“society”overagainst state power. They are centuries old. In America, our founders looked to the English philosopher John Locke’s defense of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 for legitimation of their resistance to arbitrary royal rule here. HalfacenturylatertheFrenchmanAlexisdeTocqueville taught us that vigorous voluntary activities independent of the state are the necessary foundation of a healthy democracy.TocquevilleinturnwasreachingbacktoBaron de Montesquieu’s eighteenth-century vision of English governance, in which the “intermediate bodies” in society tempered and guided the monarch above and the people below. Tocqueville was seeking a hedge against the new tyrannies spawned by the French Revolution— against Robespierre and Napoléon. He had a French 15 agenda, in other words. But he admired so much about our young republic that we thought he was writing just for us. In our century the Cold War then locked in the concept that “society” both creates government and must be defended against government. One reason we indicted Soviet Stalinist rule, after all, was that it atomized society —that it left the individual naked and helpless against those in power. As the Cold War drew on, furthermore, it produced first the Soviet dissidents, beginning in the 1960s, and then the civil society that burgeoned in parts of the European East in the 1980s. Civil society thereby took concrete form before our eyes. It was not simply a concept we could share, it was a living instrument of political struggle against Communist dictatorship that we could applaud and encourage. Václav Havel and Charter 77 speaking truth to power; Adam Michnik and Solidarity acting “as if” they were free: these were real people. Their roots might be strange to us: their movements were also revivals of older indigenous political traditions, of intellectuals claiming a “government of souls,” traditions that were unlike anything in our politics. But they admired us too, so their local European agendas mattered as little to us as Tocqueville’s had. Then in 1989 these movements triumphed, or so it seemed, all across East Central Europe. Their astonishing success is still fresh in memory after nearly twenty years, and it has made “civil society” a universal positive category in Western political discourse ever since. It is not simply the persistent East European vogue for political parties with civic or citizens’ in their names: free Czecho16 Eurasia’s New Frontiers slovakia began with the Civic Forum; the lead party in Poland’s ruling coalition in 2008 was the Civic Platform; even repressed Belarus now has its embattled United Civic Party. The concept’s resonance is something larger: whatever the nuances, 1989 made it seem that the very ages—History,astheMarxistsusedtosay—validatedcivil society as a power in its own right, facing a threatening or at least malign state. Most historical examples of that kind of civil society have in actual fact come from the West rather than Europe’s East, but even on its home ground, civil society has been idealized. More than a reality, it has been a category of thought. In early modern Western Europe, the state emerged first as a distinctive institution, before what we now call civil society. Indeed the state often had a hand in creating civil society, as princes reached down to commoners for support against nobilities. One reason the tactic was attractive was that emerging capitalism was freeing some economic activity from state control, so that commoners were gaining resources that were useful to kings. Kings and commoners were nevertheless uneasy allies. States only slowly tolerated the emergence of what we would recognize as a citizenry: groups of politically self-conscious people who recognized each other and were able to work together for common purposes across and beyond kinship and class lines. As early modern turned to modern in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, technology and economics created larger and larger economic units, and the population alsoorganizeditselfmore—intoworkcollectives,intoassociations , eventually into political parties. Political parties The Weakness of Civil Society 17 are not the same as civil society, but they are related to it, since they too require some autonomy and some scope for self-chosen activity. Even as new formations came into being, however, subjects and citizens in Western Europe still looked to the state to...