Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968

TWO: Civil Society and the "Third Road"

TWO Civil Society and the "Third Road" What is "civil society?" For some years now, this rather oddsounding category has been creeping into discussions of contemporary politics.! In Western Europe, it has been a key concept of the new social movements of the last twenty years. In Poland, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, it became the central category of democratic oppositionist thought in the 1970s. The term grew so pervasive under Solidarity that when one Party official in 1988 wanted to mock Solidarity's program, he did so by making derisive reference to "His Excellency, Civil Society." 2 What-this chapter asks-is all the fuss about? The concept ofcivil society is an old one. It had its greatest currency in political theory of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and reached simultaneously a zenith and nadir in the works of Marx. Significantly, the original German term, burglische GesellschaJt, can be translated either as "civil society" or "bourgeois society." When Marx, in a process discussed below, essentially reduced the problems of the state to problems of the economy, he unmistakably gave the term a "bourgeois" bent; not surprisingly, Marx's use of the term has almost always been translated as "bourgeois society." Marx's usage stuck, and subsequently the analysis of civil society was usually reduced to an analysis of the market system. The concept thereby disappeared from political discourse for well over a century, until social upheavals in the 1960s and 1970S precipitated a revival. Its revival today in Europe is connected with important contemporary developments; most important, it is connected with the problem of statism. The twentieth century has witnessed the rise ofstrong, activist states throughout the world. In Europe, statist development took off particularly after World War II, in response to popular demands for orderly economic development and for increased social welfare programs. The growth of the state was defended as a "democratic" development: the 19 20 / Civil Society and the "Third Road" state would extend to all citizens the opportunities and benefits previously accessible only to the few.3 In Western Europe, statist tendencies were sanctioned by electoral ballots; in Eastern Europe, they were imposed from without and were incomparably more extensive, but there, too, the justification was that the strong state would take care of those basic needs of the population that had previously been ignored. These claims were initially quite convincing. Mter all, who else but the state was big enough to reconstruct whole countries destroyed by war? By the 1960s, however, the claims had worn thin. Higher standards of living and more extensive education had contributed to a widespread feeling that the state no longer needed to dominate public life, that citizens could and should take a greater role in planning their own lives.4 And so the original, non-economic understanding of civil society began to re-emerge. If the cause of democracy once could be advanced by a strong state counteracting the inefficient and inegalitarian trends of a free market, the cause of democracy now seemed to require a fight against an overly large state itself. New democratic theorists and activists sought to oppose the state not in the name of the prewar free market, but in the name of a free, mature community of independent citizens. This brought them back to an appreciation of a model of political life dating to the old Greek polis, a political community of cultured citizens freely discussing politics and coming to an informed judgment. It seems that by the 1960s, many people in both East and West thought that such a community could really exist-if only the twin obstacles of state and market could be overcome. The 1960s saw a huge expansion ofcitizen movements everywhere, causing state leaders everywhere to speak of impending "anarchy" and "chaos." The charges were similar whether they issued from Warsaw or Paris, Belgrade or Rome, Mexico City or Chicago. Although the new citizen movements were defeated in the 1960s, their theorists sought a way to defend the movements' democratic claims. They wanted to refute the charges that these movements were trying to sow anarchy or reject modernity. And it was in this context that the concept of civil society found its way back to the center of political discourse. Theorists began recalling that civil society referred to the public space for citizens to interact as equals on a variety of levels, not just the level of the marketplace. It referred, perhaps above all, to what Jiirgen Habermas...