Civil Society and Democratic Theory

Gideon Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134524051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book introduces radically alternative models of civil society that have been developed outside the liberal democratic frame of reference, models which suggest that civil society does offer new and non-statist democratic possibilities. Drawing on a wide range of civil society theory-practice from Eastern Europe and Latin America (including the Zapatistas in Mexico), and from visions of global civil society too, this book is uniquely positioned to consider the questions posed by these alternative voices for democratic theory and practice.
* Are there alternatives to the liberal democratic vision of civil society?
* Is a democracy located in civil society rather than the state either possible or desirable?
* How and why has the concept of civil society come to be used so widely today?
* Can global civil society further the struggle for democracy initiated by national civil societies?

Part I
The parallel polis

Central–East European models of civil society

1 ‘The self-limiting
revolution’

Polish voices

Despite its Western European pedigree, we must look outside West European thought to account for the re-emergence of the idea of civil society in recent years. This re-emergence had much to do with the events surrounding Solidarity, the independent trade union, with its unique activities in communist Poland during 1980–81, and thus also with the theoretical–political models worked out by the Polish democratic opposition during and even before this period.

As early as 1956, nationwide strikes saw Polish workers abandon the communist party trade unions for their own local and autonomous trade councils based in the factories. Although this instinct for self-organisation was subsequently suppressed by the Polish communist party-state, a precedent was set for the remarkable birth of Solidarity following on from the strike at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk in July 1980. Striking in support of the Gdansk shipbuilders, workers across the country were, in their turn, supported by the Gdansk caucus, who now called for their strike to continue until all factories’ demands were met. As ever-increasing numbers of factories joined the subsequent Inter-Factory Strike Committee (MKS), the list of demands to be met if work were to be resumed also grew. The first and most significant of these, by now highly political, demands was that the communist government must accept ‘free trade unions independent of the Communist Party’. Faced with a crippling general strike, the Party had little choice but to accede to these demands. Following the Gdansk Agreement, as it came to be known, the creation of the free trade union, Solidarity, took place through the amalgamation of over thirty regional unions in September 1980. Although it was only to last until December 1981 (at which point, under threat from the Soviets, martial law was declared and Solidarity crushed – its leaders imprisoned), Solidarity was seen as a beacon of hope for all of communist Eastern Europe in one sense in particular: it appeared to participants and observers alike to herald the rebirth of civil society there.

At stake, then, in detailing the Polish discourse on civil society is a proper understanding of the recent history of the concept. Indeed, Andrew Arato helped to restart the debate on civil society in the West with his 1981 analysis, in the then left-wing journal Telos, of the Solidarity events according to the model ‘civil society against the state’ (Arato 1981). Arato was thus the first to use a previously contextualised Polish debate about civil society as a category of political theory generally – that is, as connected to notions of the public sphere allegedly applicable to all societies (Ely 1992: 176). The considerable influence of Arato’s work on civil society theory therefore constitutes, at least in part, the popularisation of the ‘Polish model’ of civil society.

Yet the architects of this model sought originally to articulate their ideas with specific reference to what they saw as the uniqueness of the Polish context. As Arato wrote in his 1981 essay, reviewing these thinkers and their models, ‘The categories of civil society are not extraneous to the Polish events’ (1981: 23). At stake for Polish theorists was not a generic account of democratic opposition in the realms of theory, but the discovery of a model of democratic practice that could take account of the constraints of their situation. It was in developing this practice that they came increasingly to rely on the idea of civil society.

Encapsulating this union of theory and praxis was the idea of the ‘self-limiting’ revolution. First explored by Polish theorists before 1980, it came also to characterise something of the character of Solidarity: ‘Solidarnosc sought neither to form a political party nor to “capture” state power. It sought neither the restoration of capitalism nor the withering away of the state. Rather, it pursued a self-limiting “evolutionist” strategy’ (Keane 1988a: 5). This undoubtedly strategic approach to opposition may appear to have signalled the abandonment of more substantive political values. Yet the tactic of the peaceful transformation of society towards self-organisation – which would ‘hollow out’ and eventually transform the institutional arena1 – although undoubtedly pragmatic in its recognition of the limits to action posed by Soviet power in the region, was not by any means purely instrumental.

This ideal of ‘self-limitation’, of autonomous self-organisation outside the official and state sphere, was understood as an end in itself. As a value that came to prominence within the Polish civil society debate, but which is now a significant component in much civil society theorising of a more general nature, ‘self-limitation’ is illustrative of the significance of this debate:

The self-limiting revolution avoids the total destruction of its enemy, which would inevitably mean putting itself into the place of the sovereign, thereby depriving society of its self-organisation and its self defence … The common core of all the interpretations [of self-limiting revolution] … is the concept of civil society, or rather some of the components of this concept. All agree that civil society represents a sphere other than and even distinct from the state.

(Cohen and Arato 1992: 74)

I proceed in this chapter by looking, first, at the origins of thinking about civil society in Poland in the formative years 1976–81. In the section ‘Civil society and totalitarianism’, in order to establish a broader theoretical context to these developments, I outline the importance of the totalitarian paradigm to the new thinking about civil society. In ‘The politics of civil society’ I highlight the distinctive elements of the ‘Polish model’ and the political debates contained within it.

Content, context and timing

Ideas that after 1980–1 fall under the rubric of civil society are expressed by three main thinkers (Leszek Kolakowski, Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron) in essays from as early as 1971. All of these men were Polish, seeking to develop new approaches to political opposition in the wake of the failure of two major challenges by workers to the communist system in 1970–1 and 1976.

In 1976 the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) was formed, in which Polish intellectuals, including Michnik and Kuron, re-established close ties with the workers’ movement. In the same year, Michnik’s highly influential essay ‘A New Evolutionism’ was published (see Michnik 1985), which built on earlier work by Kolakowski, an exiled philosopher. Before 1980 and these developments, the term civil society had been used in only a number of isolated places: by Smolar in the preface to Une societe en dissedence – a volume of writings by Polish dissidents published in 1978; and by Rupnik, following Kolakowski, as a term for the new ‘post-revisionist’ opposition strategy (Arato 1981: 23). Yet by 1982, a series of lectures under the title Power and Civil Society given by Leszek Nowak – a philosopher and Solidarity activist – to his Solidarity co-internees is orientated entirely around the concept of civil society, defined as ‘the sphere of civil autonomy’ (Nowak 1991: 29).

Kolakowski, although in exile, set this process in train as early as 1971. In his essay ‘Hope and Hopelessness’ (1971), Kolakowski distanced himself from the prevailing pessimism concerning the likelihood of democratic political change in Eastern Europe following the Soviet ‘normalisation’ of Czechoslovakia. Despite the willingness of the Soviet Union to use overwhelming force in the region when processes of reform from within ruling communist parties went too far (as in Czechoslovakia in 1968), Kolakowski believed that Soviet-type systems could nonetheless be reformed ‘from below’. Because the party-state could only retain its control by suppressing all dissent, Kolakowski called for the reconstruction of the social sphere through resistance. This resistance was not to be aimed at overthrowing or substantially reforming the communist regime directly, but at creating a growing societal realm free from party-state control. As Kolakowski put it, oppositionists should look for a reformist orientation ‘in the sense of a belief in the possibility of effective, gradual, and partial pressures, exercised in a long term perspective of social and national liberation’ (1971: 42).

Stimulated by Kolakowski’s ideas and, further, by the failure of recent workers’ strikes, the new political thinking inside Poland came to hinge on wo key themes: the interrelated oppositional strategies of ‘evolutionism’ and putting ‘society first’. The former strategy was outlined originally in Michnik’s essay ‘A New Evolutionism’. The idea of ‘evolutionism’ was intended as a critique of revisionism in that, like Kolakowski, although Michnik thought it only realistic to accept the limits imposed by Soviet power in the region for revisionism itself, he did not see this as imposing limitations on action as such. ‘For me’, he wrote in this essay, ‘the lesson of Czechoslovakia is that change is possible and that it has its limits … [R]evisionists … believed in having concessions and rights “granted” from above rather than in organising pressure from below’ (1985: 139–40).

Parallel to these intellectual developments, Michnik was also part of a movement seeking to put them into practice – the ‘organisation of pressure from below’ taking the form of the KOR. ‘To offer solidarity with striking workers’, he wrote in ‘A New Evolutionism’, ‘… is to challenge the intraparty strategy of the revisionist[s] … Social solidarity undermines the fundamental component of [reformist] strateg[y]: acceptance of the government as the basic reference point’ (1985: 142). As will become apparent, this link between theory and praxis was to be characteristic of the Polish model.

However, if reformism would not work, then the idea of ‘evolutionism’ accepted that neither would revolution:

The dilemma of nineteenth-century leftist movements – ‘reform or revolution’ – is not the dilemma of the Polish opposition. To believe in overthrowing the dictatorship of the party by revolution … is both unrealistic and dangerous. As the political structure of the USSR remains unchanged, it is unrealistic to count on subverting the party in Poland.

(Michnik 1985: 142)

Eschewing violent revolutionary action was not mere pragmatism, since Michnik denied wholeheartedly that the Leninist vanguardism required for such actions had any legitimacy. ‘Given the absence of an authentic political culture or any standards of democratic life, the existence of an underground would only worsen the illness and change little …’(Michnik 1985: 142).²

What, then, was the evolutionary strategy to consist of?

In my opinion, an unceasing struggle for reform and evolution that seeks an expansion of civil liberties and human rights is the only course East European dissidents can take. The Polish example demonstrates that real concessions can be won by applying steady public pressure on the government … To draw a parallel with … the Spanish model … [evolutionism] is based on gradual and piecemeal change, not violent upheaval and forceful destruction.

(Michnik 1985: 142–3)

Nevertheless, as Michnik (1985: 146) made clear when he ruled out the idea that reformers in the party could be political allies, putting pressure on the government to concede civil liberties and human rights was a hoped for byproduct of ‘new evolutionism’, not its raison d’être:

what sets today’s opposition apart … is the belief that a program for evolution ought to be addressed to an independent public, not to totalitarian power. Such a programme should give directives to the people on how to behave, not to the powers on how to reform themselves. Nothing instructs the authorities better than pressure from below.

(Michnik 1985: 144)

This ‘society-first’ strategy, as it has been termed, was at the heart of the new civil society approach for other Polish theorists too. Bernhard gives the example of Kuron’s changing political thinking at the time, which reveals a similar trend. In the mid-1960s Kuron, along with most other dissidents, still addressed his grievances to the party; in this way, the final legitimacy of the party was not called into question. For example, Kuron’s ‘Open Letter to the Party’ (co-authored with Karol Modzelewski) from this period advocated a programme of socialist self-management that, despite its plea for decision-making to be decentralised to the workers and the peasantry, was, according to it own title, self-evidently not intended primarily for this wider audience (Bernhard 1993: 313). Yet, like Michnik, by the mid–late 1970s Kuron was looking towards ‘society’ as the locus of political change rather than the party-state. This can be seen from his 1976 pamphlet on oppositional strategy, which Arato claims was the first to outline ‘a systematic programme for the reconstitution of civil society through the re-establishment of the rule of law, an independent public sphere and freedom of association’ (Arato 1981: 28). And in 1981, intimating once again his departure from conventional state-directed dissidence, Kuron wrote, ‘of course it would be better if the party mustered up enough strength for an inner reform. But I know too little about that and have no way of influencing it. I have to think in terms of my own categories’ (1981a: 95).

Kuron also shared Michnik’s view of the need for an evolutionary process of change, for ‘self-limitation’ by the organised forces of pressure from below. Indeed, the ‘self-limiting revolution’ was a term first coined by Kuron during the Solidarity period. ‘Let me express the conviction’, he stated, ‘that in the interests of the Polish nation, and all other nations of the Soviet bloc, that these changes are accomplished in an evolutionary manner’ (cited in Hankiss 1990: 150). Elsewhere, in a 1980 edition of an opposition information bulletin, Kuron also called for a path to democratisation that would ‘safeguard national security by not overstepping [its] boundaries’ (1981b: 37). Then in a 1981 interview, even at the height of Solidarity when so much seemed to have been achieved, he re-emphasised how vital it was ‘not to lure the [Soviet] wolves out of the woods’ (Kuron 1981a: 94). Again, it is important to see the normative, rather than purely tactical, nature of this emphasis on ‘self- limitation’. In 1982, despite the defeat of Solidarity’s self-limiting strategy after the imposition of martial law, Nowak addressed his Solidarity co-internees in continuing support of this strategy, ‘according to a well-known saying, “the revolution devours its own children” ’ (1991: 57):

[Revolutionary] utopia does not offer any guarantee of universal freedom, equality, and fraternity, except for one: the good will of the revolutionaries … Therefore [revolutionary] utopia expresses the interest of the oppressed, but it does so only so long as the social system against which it has turned lasts.

(Nowak 1991: 97)

Recognition of the futility of replacing one absolute power in the state with another led the ‘society-first’, or civil society, theorists to deny interest in state power as a permanent feature of their political programme.³ In this sense, the Polish model of civil society, as Arato for example has always claimed, did implicitly advocate the separation of spheres between state and society as more than merely strategic:

While the full range of meanings in the concept of self-limitation was never fully articulated … the notion … meant not only the need to avoid the transformation of the movement of society into a new form of unified state power, but also that one will not attempt to impose the logic of democratic coordination on all spheres by suppressing bureaucracy and economic rationality. Movements rooted in civil society have learned from the revolutionary tradition the Tocquevillian lesson that such fundamentalist projects lead to the breakdown of societal steering, productivity, and integration, all of which are then reconstituted by dramatically authoritarian means.

(Arato 1990: 26)

However, despite their undoubted acceptance of the necessity of an autonomous societal sphere (which is how they defined civil society in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The Parallel Polis
• Part II: Democracy At The Grass Roots
• Part III: The Taming Of The Idea Of Civil Society Since 1989
• Part IV: New Alternatives?
• Part V: The Democracy Of Civil Society
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography