Two Decades After the Fall: Whatever Happened to the Civil Society?

Two Decades After the Fall: Charles S. Maier

“BLISS WAS it in that dawn to be alive,” Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution. For those of us entering or already in middle age twenty years ago, the events of 1989 represented a thrilling moment of human emancipation. An oppressive system that for all of our adult lives had gripped Russia and East Central Europe simply dissolved without resistance—a few bloody-minded efforts aside in Romania and the Soviet Union. Not that resistance had entirely disappeared. The forty-five years after the war witnessed workers’ protests in Berlin in 1953; “bread and freedom” demonstrations in Poland and revolutionary upheaval in Budapest in 1956; the exhilarating Czechoslovak reforms of 1968; and the fusion of intellectuals and workers in Solidarnosc in 1981. But these movements had been suppressed; leaders arrested or exiled to the provinces; ultimately Soviet tanks prevailed over national and democratic aspirations. Even if Stalinist terror had been dismantled in the late 1950s, the communist regimes relied on surveillance, manipulation, and coercion and prevailed. How could it ever change?

Still, it was changing despite the setbacks. Brave dissenters in the seventies and eighties–Andrei Sakharov, Robert Havemann, Vaclav Havel–demonstrated that individual protesters might claim rights of free expression, supposedly guaranteed even in communist countries by virtue of the Helskinki accords. The individual protesters of the 1970s were succeeded by movements of collective protest in the 1980s—a decade in which the economies of the state socialist lands showed increasing signs of atrophy and sclerosis. Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to decentralize the economy (perestroika) and allow open debate (glasnost) gained a momentum that he had not anticipated, but which to his historical credit, he accepted. It was becoming clear that Soviet tanks would no longer be deployed to prop up discredited rulers. This fact does not diminish the impromptu bravery and organizational savvy of the civic leaders in autumn 1989. By the spring of 1990 multiparty elections, supported by Western NGOS with Xerox machines, faxes, and heady speaking invitations were changing the basis of rule.

Two decades later it is hard to recapture that exhilaration of democratic birth in Eastern Europe. Most political upheavals, of course, bequeath post-revolutionary blues. Michael Walzer has described the disappointment in the wake of Britain’s the Puritan revolution; French Jacobins left behind memoirs of disillusion, – but the disenchantment after 1989 had its own particular form, the brief ascent and then silence surrounding “civil society.”

Civil society was the political mantra of 1989. Whether it was the new protest movements crystallizing in the very moment of protest (as in East Germany and Czechoslovakia), or the re-emerging independent labor unions, or the churches that once again seemed vibrant nuclei for organization, or the proliferation of smaller circles of ecologists, peace movements, and women’s groups–the moment for “civil society” had arrived. And just as the Central and East European left of l917 in had posited “soviets” or “councils” as the socialist alternative to a stodgy bourgeois liberalism, so the champions of l989 envisaged civil society as a new political alternative. Emerging after decades of being prohibited, or infiltrated and suborned, society was pulsating with the energy of self-organization. Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen among others traced its philosophical roots, scholars of East Europe wrote reams about its re-emergence, foundations rushed to support the new self-constituted groups. Civil Society embodied the spontaneous force of liberation. It also seemed to resurrect some of the utopian thrust of 1968 and thus redeem that earlier challenge to both Soviet communism and supposedly stale Western liberalism.

But twenty years on, civil society serves at most to describe a residue of pressure groups, or shelters for non-political movements. The idea that the institutions generated by civil society–the round tables in lieu of parliaments, the civic movements in lieu of parties, the reformist churches, and a labor unionism informed by intellectuals–might durably supplant the humdrum politics of liberal party alternation has long since dissipated. The notion that new politically vital forms were emerging from the breakdown of state socialism has dissipated. Whatever happened to civil society?

In fact it was unrealistic to expect civil society to endure as the basis for a long-term organization of political society. The 3 percent voting returns for the German “Bündnis 90” in the spring of 1990 was a harbinger of its attrition. Czech Civic Forum did better, as did Solidarnosc initially. But even if relatively successful in the elections of the early 1990s, these movements split into neoliberals and rather meager intellectual remnants that have long since lost their allure. Civil society turned out to be a vector of transformation—not an institutional destination. For a brief moment the promise of civil society gave hope that post-communist societies might be spared shabby political bargaining, the influence of money, and populist electioneering. But as the anthropologist Victor Turner suggested, those liminal moments of transformation in which it seems possible to organize society without institutional constraints are fleeting at best.

We can see now that the forces arrayed against civil society—no longer the Kremlin’s repression, but the West’s prosperity—remained too powerful. The very resurgence of Western capitalism in the l980s that doomed the Soviet command economy to obsolescence would also overwhelm the social democratic and non-market impulses the champions of civil society sought to nurture. The nomenklatura of the East recognized the future more clearly than the idealists of the civic movements. They prepared their exit from the state party and took strategic positions in the new capitalist order of Eastern Europe. The organizations of civil society fissioned into the breakdown products of social democratic populism and neoliberalism. They were personified by the divergent political trends in a fissioning Czechoslovakia: Vaclav Klaus’s neoliberalism and Vladimir Meciar’s populist nationalism.

Civil Society had a geopolitical analog that also disappeared as a territorial option: the “Central Europe” championed in the late 1980s by intellectuals such as Timothy Garton Ash from the West and Gyorgi Konrad from Hungary. Central Europe briefly beckoned as a geography of transition—an idea built on the memory of late Habsburg cosmopolitanism and supported by Catholic intellectuals and the remnants of the extirpated Jewish communities. But once the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviets relinquished their grip, the intellectuals and populations of “Central Europe” wanted “Europe” without the Habsburg modifier: Brussels not Vienna or Prague.

So to pose Christa Wolf’s question about East Germany: “What remains?” Intellectuals, institutes (many of which are supported by George Soros), and journals: the Central European University in Budapest, the Institute for Human Science in Vienna, Gazeta Wyborcza. There is also the memory of the brave intellectuals, such as Bronislaw Geremek, who were attacked after 1989 by demagogues who had profited from their long resistance and the brave survivors themselves, such as Adam Michnik and Havel.

But twenty years after 1989, it would be wrong just to mourn the brief passage of a utopian alternative. Central and Eastern European “civil society” is often uncivil, although the European Union has made it less so. But the real achievement lies in the fact that the institutions that Eastern Europe has ended up with so far are freer and more democratic than those imposed on the region after 1945. Political revolutions or transformations are exciting in their brief suggestion that institutional constraints on liberty will disappear or that equality will durably and rapidly advance. Possibilities glimpsed are never entirely foreclosed.

Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University.