Under communism the nations of Eastern Europe never had a 'civil society.'
A 'civil society' exists when individuals and groups are free to form
organizations that function independently of the state, and that can
mediate between citizens and the state. Because the lack of civil society
was part of the very essence of the all-pervasive communist state, creating
such a society and supporting organizations independent of the state - or
NGOs - have been seen by donors as the connective tissue of democratic
political culture - an intrinsically positive objective.
--Janine R. Wedel, 1994: 323.
[Scholars such as Chris Hann] criticize the notion put forth by some western scholars and former Central European dissidents that there was no civil society in Central Europe during the communist period . . . . [because the concept of "civil society" did not exist, for example, in the Polish Political Dictionary published in New York in 1980 and London in 1985. . . .] However, civil society itself continued to thrive at the grass-roots level, although Western intellectuals could not possibly have been aware of it. . . . [Dissidents] liked to imagine themselves as the "heroic underdogs" opposing the totalitarian state. In effect, Hann asserts, scholars were mistaken in perceiving members of communist societies as atomized and unable to form an authentic civil society. . . .
[Civil or what can better be called "civic" society existed in the following forms:
--Michal Buchowski, 1996: 83.
The above contradictory quotes appear to suggest that the concept "civil society" is not universal meaning, but in reality the latter wrongly suggests that some scholars do not understand the difference between "civil" and what Buchowski calls "social" society. Although Buchowski clouds the issue by explicitly calling his concept "civic" society, the concept civic and his illogical jump to civil society is entirely inappropriate, as is discussed below.
To develop my argument and examine Central-Eastern Europe's attempt to import the modern Western model of civil society, I analyze in the Part One the theory and history of the West's concept of civil society and its rise in Eastern Europe. In Part Two, I take up Romania as a case study, drawing upon my role as participant-observer of as well as upon the literature. In both parts the twin themes are implicit irony and complexity in the process of organizing modern civil society.
The term civic has its origins in ancient Greece where citizens invented the idea of participatory democracy to organize the city-state. Since then, the notion of civil society has been used in different ways by different groups and at once defined variously by intellectuals. There are various traditions of civil society.
The first to explicitly use the concept were the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century. They created an important body of thought, which planted the idea of establishing a market economy with moral values.
Subsequently, the French tradition begun by Montesquieu and de Toqueville has posed the idea that civil society has multiple dimensions. They emphasized the role of non-political autonomous associations among citizens (Hann & Dunn, 1996: 5). De Toqueville's travels led him to conclude that the new United States of America was the epitome of civil society, the USA having built upon and gone beyond the English civil law tradition. Eventually England, too, would see its own civil society flourish by limiting the power of the monarchy under which it continued to live.
From such thinking about civil society emerged the concept that there is a sphere of activity separate from the state. The basic notion of civil society is that the people can and should prevent the state from becoming authoritarian by keeping watch on it while at the same time demand that it work properly for the general population. By definition civil society should also develop non-state activities.
The rise of civil society in Western Europe and the USA was set back by World War I and world economic depression from 1929 to 1939. To face these emergencies, state power was seen as necessary for political and economic defense. In the USA, New Deal's mixed capitalism and its expansion of state activity offered an alternative to the rise in Europe of statist fascism and communism.
In Eastern Europe, the Western concept of civil society had only partially penetrated by the early twentieth century. There, however, it existed in widely varying degrees ranging from incipient democracy in Poland to monarchy in Romania. In the latter civic responsibility was exercised by the nobles and the small middle class.
Expansion of civil society in Eastern Europe, which was disrupted by World War I and remained weak during world economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s, saw its basis for action decapitated by coordinated German-Russian actions and German invasion by the early 1940s. Both Germany and Russia ruthlessly suppressed civil society. (Germany did set up the Vichy France government but it was a fake civil society designed to win acceptance of German occupation.)
With victory over Germany in 1945, Russia set out to break nascent civil society by Stalinizing Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Thus, Bolsheviks and some Socialists conducted a deliberately destructive and brutal campaign to liquidate associations, independent trade unions and artisan guilds, community groups, churches, and social movements (Tismaneanu, 1996, p.63). Among other values, the communists erased the notion of noblesse oblige and middle class social responsibility as they broke both the nobility and the bourgeoisie.
Because World War II had expanded the role of the state in all spheres worldwide, the post-war era in the West had to contend with reinvigorating civil society. By the second half of the 20th century, the concept of quasi-autonomous government organizations (QUANGOs) emerged in England, but most recently the QUANGO has come to be seen as seriously flawed, thus requiring that it be replaced by the sophisticated idea to establish non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The NGOs implicitly solves the English dilemma now faced by countries such as Romania, wherein the QUANGO is responsible neither to the government nor to the citizenry. In establishing a space separate from the government but responsible to the citizenry, the NGOs mediate between citizens and state.
In society's four sectors, NGOs constitute the fourth. NGOs are autonomous free associations of individuals and groups who may or may not depend on income from the state (society's first sector) or from private individuals and businesses (the second sector) and which may or may not depend entirely on volunteer participation and/or paid staff. NGOs usually attempt to register with the government in order to achieve a tax-free status that allows them to receive donations deductible against the income of the donors--hence the incentive to donate. NGOs include grant-making and grant-receiving foundations as well as not-for-private-profit operating organizations such as hospitals, orphanages, universities, and churches.
It is important to distinguish between the NGO and the QUANGO. Where the NGO falls into the first sector of societal organization, the latter falls into the first sector because it is dependent upon and reports to government and because it operates autonomously with its own budget. The QUANGO often involves activities such as operation of national museums, schools, and research institutes that compete with NGOs for funding. The U.S. Agency for International Development prefers to fund NGOs and not QUANGOs but face problems in doing so because governments in Eastern Europe are short of funds to operate the QUANGOs thus try to channel funds to them. For this reason, governments often make the registration and operation of NGOs difficult, thus reducing competition for funds. That civil society defines the sphere of activity separate from the state clearly emerges in the burgeoning literature on the role of citizens in East Central Europe. Recent books have theorized in different ways about how civil society is defined by the dynamic of and tensions between the state and non-state activity. These authors include Ernest Gellner (1994), Jean L. Cohen, (1992), Andrew Arato (1992), and Adam Seligman (1995).
In this literature the strand of the civil society tradition that is most relevant in Eastern Europe is the one that calls for intellectuals to oppose the ruling intelligentsia who blindly support statist power. Its main feature is that it separates civil society sharply from the state. That is why it was so attractive to intellectuals who have not wanted to end the state's heavy hand that too often stands for the status quo rather than change. The majority of Eastern European political dissidents (such as, Miklos Haraszti, Kis Janos, and Victor Orban) argued that civil society, in its traditional forms, has been endangered by collectivism, etatization of social structures, and regimentation (Stokes, 1996: passim).
The so called intelligentsia who sought simple communist solutions justified its role as the 'vanguard of society.' They helped the communists to construct a new class of bureaucratic apparatchik and ruling elites later defined as nomenklatura (Gellner, 1991: 495). In the meantime, humanist intellectuals who questioned power and opposed censorship were allowed to go on working in peripheral positions, but only so long as they did not overtly challenge the state's authority.
In its early stages, the process of collectivization and heavy bureaucratization was justified by the intelligentsia who helped the communists preach to the workers that nationalization would benefit the masses. The result was destruction of intermediary networks. Thus, the complicity of the statist-oriented intellectuals helped destroy the societal networks that promoted civic articulation between the state and society. In destroying the interstitial "tissue" of the social construct in different degrees in all Eastern European countries, pro-state intellectuals did so because they knew that civil society threatened the very nature of the communist ideology upon which they fed, literally and figuratively.
Although, when the communists had seized power in the Eastern Europe of the late-1940's, anti-state intellectuals (including writers, philosophers, and sociologists) had theorized about idealistic future society, that impractical approach later gave way to realism about how to make day-to-day life livable. For example the Polish dissident Adam Michnik, one of the founders in 1978 of KOR , called for a strategy of "self-organization" in the Community for Social Self-Defense. This dissident movement was established originally to provide legal and material assistance to the families of workers imprisoned after the 1976 strikes (Jan Jósef Lipski, KOR A History of the Workers' Defense Committee in Poland 1976-1981, 1985: 183). Later KOR became the base for a strategically coherent movement of mass organized protest that would become Solidarity.
The emergence of several independent organizations began implicitly to challenge the state power such as the Polish chapter of Amnesty International (ROPCiO, the Polish acronym), the Nationalist Confederation for Independent Poland, and the incipient Free Trade Union, each with their own publications, .
In Czechoslovakia, two important political dissident thinkers emerged by the late 1970s. Vacláv Havel called for people to "live within the truth," independently of official structures, and even to ignore the official political system (Havel, The Power of the Powerless, 1990: 45). Vaclav Benda called on population to "remobilize" within the civil society (The Parallel Polis, 1978: 15). The break with the régime was implicitly contained in dissidents rhetoric, but it never reached maturity under these repressive regimes. Only later did it constitute itself into a serious challenge to the state.
In Hungary, philosopher György Konrad argued in his 1976 book Antipolitics that all power is antihuman, and therefore so is all politics. He called for destatification and an antipolitical, democratic opposition in his analysis of the issues of transition in East-Central Europe.
By the late 1970s the so-called remobilization of the population (especially including intellectuals) to work for the good of the state had run into trouble in Eastern Europe, as can be seen in the social and political science literature from Hungary. Studies of that time begun to observe the cleavage and interaction between the official and the alternative or "second society" (Hankiss, 1990: 147).
The emergence of an embryonic civil society in the 70s and the 80s with semi-autonomies and semi-liberties were possible mostly in the relaxed communist environment like that of Kadar, or Edward Gierek's Poland, but it could never develop into a truly autonomous alternative (Tismaneanu, 1996:144).
Political stirrings in Eastern Europe took off gradually, then, first in rather ensconced forms such as "flying university" lectures and writings in Samizdat publications (Berend, 1983:10). Later came participation in informal self-educational groups. The rise of organizations that pursued independent activities and the assumption of individual responsibility first became evident in Poland where the churches led in creating independent space for thought (Jan Jósef Lipski, KOR A History of the Workers' Defense Committee in Poland 1976-1981, 1985: 90).
Championing the national rejection of communism, KOR and Solidarity in Poland embodied a full-fledged and convincing alternative to the communist regime, contributing to the collapse of communist ideology even before the system imploded politically and economically in 1989 (Jan Jósef Lipski, KOR A History of the Workers' Defense Committee in Poland 1976-1981, 1985: passim).
Rise of alternative society beyond the reach of authorities had eroded the credibility of the ruling communists, implicitly destroying the monopoly of the state over the society and individuals (Hankiss, 1990: 164). Such society had shown a spark of life after the 60s, provided the civil nuclei that eventually became a serious challenge to the state (Tismaneanu, 1996:145).
In Czechoslovakia, political activists seized upon Chapter 77 of the Helsinki Human Rights Accord to anticipate a new type of politics (Tismaneanu, 1996:144). They used Chapter 77 to demand human rights, open dialogue and plurality of opinions as well as alternative structures, all of which eventually subverted the communist ideology at its weakest spots. Chapter 77 bolstered demands for free speech, free press, freedom from arbitrary search and seizure, freedom of movement, and judicial recourse against illegal arrest by the police and military.
In Romania, Ceausescu's extreme repression stunted intellectual protest against abusive state power. Only few individuals such as Mircea Dinescu, Paul Goma, Doina Cornea, and Radu Filipescu took the risk to openly protest the regime in the late 70s (Griffith, 1990: 172), and no organized urban socio-political activity took place in the 1980s.
Once the communists lost power in Romania, Iliescu promulgated Law 42 in 1990 as his "moral duty" to reward those who had helped defeat the dictatorship. The problem that arose, however, was that former communists bribed their way into the reward system, thus creating division and distrust in society and setting back the rise of consensus which needed to make a qualitative shift from collectivism to individualism.
Under the Iliescu regime (1990-1996), debate about modernization of civil society came to life, but effective results were not possible to achieve without the development of a new legal framework (Arato, 1990:14).
From 1990-1993, civil society benefited from pent-up demand and expressed itself in an explosion of activity which simultaneously differentiated and politicized itself during the relative vacuum of power as Iliescu sought to establish his power. This initial explosion was partly the consequence of the fact that political independence was in a sense political opposition and partly an inclination toward a populist "bottom-up" approach to democratic development (Carothers 1996: 67).
The first three year of Iliescu's period were marked by the rise of Western-style NGOs, most hopeful that their mere existence would bring foreign grants. Romanian NGOs involved free association of autonomous persons who volunteered to help raise funds to take up the immediate decline in state social benefits. Only a few NGOs were able to gain foreign funding for their plans which called for, among other things, the teaching of democracy, the operation of orphanages, and the networking of ethnic groups.
By 1992 the profile of NGOs revealed an open separation between political advocacy groups and civic advocacy organizations. All NGOs, however, undertook qualitative changes in their activity to achieve "institutional development, capacity building, and sustainability" (Samson, 1996: 129), the goal being to make the NGOs viable and effective.
The problems for Romania nascent civil society are complex. First, there too few competent leaders to staff both government and NGOs so that Romania can compete effectively in the globalization process. Second, NGO leaders are tending to move into politics and business. Nevertheless, notes Sandor (1994: 37), there is a chance that at least some of those who leave the NGOs will use their influence to support the nongovernmental sector.
Although in Romania the pre-communist 1924 Law 21 on charities has been reinstated in the 1990s, it does not regulate in a specific manner the nongovernmental bodies. Law 21 only provides a general, vague legal framework and no categories to encompass modern institutions or communities. This permits corruption and produces misunderstanding of what civil society is meant to be (Lucian, 1994: p. 39).
Crystallization of NGOs in post-communist Romania demonstrates the viable capacity of response to the challenges of transition. Having initially appeared when the state was impotent and withdrew, clusters of nonprofits and civil actors spontaneously filled the gap in an effort to overthrow of crumbling old regimes (Sandor, 1994: 36.)
But the revolutionary changes seem to presuppose only very quick extra-institutional mobilization. The transition of 1990-1992 allowed the re-emergence of an entire spectrum of voluntary organizations, groupings, and movements in the public life of East European societies. The voluntary sector is part of the "fourth sector" of societal organization (following to the state sector, the private, the mixed private and government sector) varies significantly from country to country in terms of its scope, institutional type and mission.
In my role as participant-observer of social life as a folklore student in the Department of Maramures during University years in Romania from 1983 to 1991 and since 1992 in my subsequent travels in Eastern Europe and Russia on behalf of PROFMEX, I have been able to compare the impact on civil society of the destatification and privatization processes.
What is striking to me is my personal experience as a student of rural folklore is to realize that the peasants of Northwestern Romania were bound together in matters of common self-concern. The peasants took decisions and solved by themselves societal problems in so called "claca". The "chopping tactics" of the socialist polity, did not always destroy but reinforced individualistic energies in most Romanian villages. The primary loci of resistance to collectivization at the village level, however, does not provide a model for transition of Romania to a modern pluralistic society, but does suggest that socially-based rural civil society is difficult to destroy because of its dispersed nature. Thus, my observations directly contradict those of Buchowski (1996, Chapter 4).
My travels after 1991 took me throughout Romania and especially to the capital and other urban areas. I realized that the NGO sector then in formation had two levels: the well-organized foreign foundations with well defined objectives (such as the Soros Foundation, with offices in the regions of Romania) and the Romanian voluntary interest organizations that were then that coagulated to solve immediate local issues. The latter are what the Romanians call "form without foundation" or original versions of not-for-private-profits that not only transfer the western models, but are mainly based on genuine social projects, according to Steven Samson (in Hann & Dunn 1996: 126).
At the national level, countries such as Romania have to create the true diversity of organizations that operate with cross-cutting and overlapping purposes. The latest law no. 32 of 1994 is not in accordance with the requirement of necessities of reasonable functioning of civil associations (Lucian in Regulating Civil Society, 1995: 76).
Even with imperfect law, the concept of civil society now implies some kind of formal organization, made up of thousands of constituent associations and charities organizations that compete with the state. Some non-governmental organizations and think-tanks keep check on the power of the state (the Center For Political Studies and Comparative Analysis, the Romanian Helsinki Committee, the Romanian Society for Human Rights (SIRDO), the League for the Defense of Human Rights (LADO), Liga Pro-Europa, Anti totalitarian Association - Sighet, The Academy for Ethnic Studies, in Sighet, the Civil Protection Maramures, the Titulescu Foundation, and the Association of Lawyers in Defense of Human Rights (APADO), while others make demands on the state it to pave the roads, extend electricity to villages, install telephones etc. Yet these foundations/organizations are specialized and act as watchdogs to make sure that the state fulfills its promises. One can find all these associations on the American invented Internet, the most democratic forum ever opened to anyone equipped with a computer and a modum. George Soros, the lone trouble-shooter, has funded and continues to fund Romania's NGO's accesss to the Internet, has provided for the staff's e-mail and has certainly funded all East Central European countries' where he has implemented the idea of open society. Soros Foundations (initiated in 15 countries worldwide) have as main goal for the year 2000 full access to all foundation activists to the Internet. This is a conscious desire for the staff as well, as the Internet is seen as the major research tool and access to global information in an era of cutting edge informational technology advancement.
What is evident from my consultations in Eastern Europe is that since 1993, after the initial post-revolutionary enthusiastic phase has passed, international assistance and donations have trickled into the region at such a slow rate that NGOs are disheartened. Even George Soros is worried about the future of the foundations that he has set up but he cannnot fund but for another ten years. Without a tradition of being able to raise funds in their own country, NGOs that mushroomed in Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland, and Romania in general have not received funds from abroad, as they had hoped.
The most acute problem faced by Eastern Europe's NGOs, then, is that of financing of their activities as they seek a place in the new institutional order. Since privatization pace is, generally too slow, the access of NGOs to private or corporate funding is not there and the law is not modernized to make it feasible (Lucian, 1996: 70)
Given that the relatively well-funded Soros foundations of Eastern Europe have concluded that foreign funding will not come in the near future, if ever, in 1995 they determined at their regional conference in Estonia to look inward for funding (Regulating Civil Society 1995: 76). This decision was ironic because Soros has given his foundations in Eastern Europe fifteen year before his funding ends. In the meantime, Soros, who has been the lone consistent funder, is already shifting his available funds to other battles such as legalizing marijuana in the USA and helping illegal immigrants to the USA to legalize their status and to become citizens.
Given the shortage of funds, some philosophers and practitioners of nonprofit activity are looking to the volunteering of time, not the volunteering of money, and they are narrowing the scope of their activity to moral influence rather than charitable activity. More specifically Eastern Europe's border areas, where the anti totalitarian sentiment was much stronger, non-governmental associations (such as Alma Mater Napocensis, Cluj-Napoca, the Academy for Study of Ethnic Conflict- in Sighet- Romania) have sprung up to prevent and buffer ethnic tensions. Some NGOs have succeeded as in Hungary and Romania (Soros Foundations For An Open Society) by trying to eradicate hate by publishing minority authors (such as Korunk in Transylvania).
I agree with Katherine Verdery, who, very much in the de Toquevillean tradition, argues that the concept of civil society is linked to the political processes and has become, in the Romanian case, interrelated to that of reconnecting to the democratic Western European values (Verdery, 1996: 106). Her point is that ruling political elites which have achieved symbolic capital through "resistance-based suffering" still dominate the public sphere, thus overshadowing other forms of a pluralist civil society. In some ways civil society still revolves around national symbols and symbolic values.
NGOs now seek to play a major role in resolving ethnic tensions. Ethnic problems are exacerbated by the fact that most of the countries are heterogeneous in their ethnic and religious composition. In Bulgaria, for instance, about 1 million of the 9 million inhabitants are Turks; Romani account for some 700.000 and another 400, 000 are Muslims. In Romania, the shares of population are Hungarians 7.1%, Romani 7%; in Czech Republic Slovaks are 3%, and Romani are 2.4%. In Slovakia, Hungarian are 10.7%, Romani 1.6%, Czechs Moravian, Ruthenian more than 2% (Transitions, Open Media Research Institute, Vol. 3 and 7 February 1997).
Where once existed the monolithic non-recognition of ethnic differences sector as espoused by the Soviet optic, since 1989 there has been radical change to multidimensionality. The idea is now to accommodate regional differences in development, tradition, local circumstances, and the current state of systemic transformations. As Andras Biro, a Hungarian activist has put it: " For the first time in 40 years we are reclaiming responsibility for our lives" (Salamon, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, 1994: 113).
In Romania, in the immediate aftermath of the 1989, in several ethnically heterogeneous villages (Bolintin, Casin, Miercurea Ciuc) houses of Gypsy ethnic minority were burnt and heinous killings occurred. On March 15, 1990 the Romanian security in direct complicity with Ion Iliescu brought busloads of Romanians from remote villages to Tirgu Mures. These villagers were told that they were to save Romanians who were being beaten in the city, where the usual March 15 celebrations were in progress. When the busses arrived, the villagers attacked the participants of the celebration and besieged the Hungarian minority's headquarters. It was there that the playwright Andras Sütö lost his eye. Several Hungarians and Gypsies were beaten and jailed for years. In a gesture of historic reconciliation, the current president Constantinescu has released them (1996). Nobody has ever investigated or publicly exposed this case. It is ironic that only in the USA, where the Non-governmental sector has become an industry, that conferences take place on the events that took place in the Romania but are totally disconnected from the realities in the region.
These 1990 events could happen because autonomous mediating institutions of NGOs did not yet exist to encourage the different ethnic groups to understand each other and to address issues treated individual-to-individual.
To what extent should Eastern European nations be copying or moving toward a Western trajectory of development of nongovernmental organizations? Some "rightist" thinkers demand that their countries return to their own organic evolutionary path with rebuilding of the dimensions of social plurality (Sandor, 1995, p. 36.) They claim that the most basic force is that of ordinary people who decide to take matters into their own hands to improve their conditions or seek basic rights in post-communist East Central Europe The well may be right that people need to rediscover the civic value of associativeness and donating time, but the decline of state expenditure in health and old-age protection is so dramatic that civil society must generate funds. In this age of globalization, funds do not only come from abroad (EU/PHARE or USAID) but also from foreign companies which set up foundations, thus leaving some profits to benefit the host country.
Civil society is the integrative bond needed to maintain coherence and it just begun to function. Even if in a very fragile stage, nongovernmental organizations are trying to help fill the void created by the process of restructuring devastated economies, in a capitalist environment. According to Zbignew Brzezinski, the former U.S. National Security Advisor, it will take well into the 2000s for East European countries to become pluralistic, free-market democracies, mainly because of the failure of East Europeans and Russians to completely demythologize the Leninist ideology (Tismaneanu, 1996: 182.)
Paradoxically, in these cycles of complex statification and destatification, "revolution from above" is needed now, because changes in the nonprofit law can be made only from above. And this refers also to the economic sphere where tax agents have become more efficient at collecting ruinously high taxes, and racketeers become more ruthless in extorting protection money, Eastern Europe's new rich have lost the incentive to seek public recognition for doing good, (Los Angeles Times, February, 1997). The state has to step back and has to recognize and allow the NGOs to operate. Incentive should be provided for donations to make them tax deductible. NGOs in Eastern Europe generally limp along pathetically on modest grants from abroad. This shows that the incentive for donation is absent. Now, amid unstable economy, charity workers find internal fund-raising hard to sell. The extension and consolidation of associativeness in organizations' network is mainly articulated by the promotion of the interest of these nuclei vis-a-vis the government (Sandor Dorel 1995, p. 37)
Although Dorel Sandor claims that the rebuilding and reemergence of segments of Romanian civil society has played a crucial role in the liberation from communist ideology, other analysts such Cohen and Arato (1992) are skeptical, implying that only 15% of NGOs are active.
U.S. foreign aid to Romania has been marked by controversy because assistance focused on democracy overemphasized the U.S. political model and focused narrowly on NGOs involved in political education (such as the Democracy Network program). Thus, Carothers (1996: 92) has argued that U.S. aid has slowed real political reform in Romania, actually prolonging the agony of the Romanian economic and political system. By creating harmful dependency relations and not targeting environmental societies, the ethnic associations, religious organizations, cultural diversity, that are real basis of democracy, marked a great leap backward (Carothers 1996: 94).
Because the concept of civil society is a dynamic concept and thus will always be troubled by contradictions, its connotations must be connected to practical actions and institutions, to all types of sociability, to communities, and to organizations. Civil society must also go beyond the textual discourse of elite groups. Political society is that element in de Toqueville which constitutes a necessary supplement to dualist models that contrast the state and its citizens.
The experience of some anthropologists who challenge the Western model of civil society (see Hann and Dunn, 1996) yields, on the one hand, the interesting insight that the dualist model wrongly casts civil society and government in completely pure, contrasting categories. On the other hand, their anthropological view is misleading because the core of its argument, as summed up in the epigram by Buchowski at the outset above, is that non-political, especially family life and village mutual self-help groups, offer an Eastern European model to define civil society. They do not tell us how this non-political model can achieve the organization of society at the local level in order to democratically encourage the development of modern ways of life capable of competing in a world reduced in size by instant communications.
The irony in such an observation as that made by Michael Buchowski (1996: 92) is that he himself suggests the fatal flow in communist thinking wherein many in Central European societies long to return to communist society because they seek to evade personal responsibility. He cannot escape this flaw by wondering whether or not Poland is less "civil-ized" since the fall of communism.
Despite the difficulties, Western civil society and its NGO model have gained prominence as a fundamentally flexible and truth-worthy vehicle for the realization of elemental human yearning for self-expression, self-help, and mutual aid. NGOs not only are an instrument of grass-roots independence, but they may perform an essential function of system maintenance by performing socially useful projects. Buchowski's social society at the village level was not completely stamped out even in Romania where the most repressive regime in Eastern Europe obliterated villages in the south to break "peasant thinking." While I can partly agree with Buchowski, my participant-observation of village and folk society in Transylvania, which survived the Ceausescu on-slought, contradicts his conclusion that family and local activity can challenge the Western model for development of civil society as it faces rapid urbanization.
That the attempt to create new civil society is well underway in Eastern Europe is manifest in the numbers. As of 1995 I found in Romania 3,000 more NGOs registered than in 1992. As of 1994, Salamon found in Poland several thousand foundations that were registered with governmental authorities, in Hungary some 7,000 foundations and 11,000 associations (Salamon, 1994: 112).
That they can function without new laws and in the face of competition from QUANGOs is not manifest.
Olga Magdalena Lazin, Director for Eastern European affairs PROFMEX NAFTA European Union e-mail: olazin@ucla.edu http: www.netside.net/~olga