Democracy Without Parties?
Kiss, Elizabeth
"My generation is very good at opposition, but not very skilled in building democracy." —Wiktor Kulerski, Solidarity delegate, Polish Sejm (Uncaptive Minds, August-October 1989) ivil society"...
...For them, civil society was a blueprint for democracy itself, with civil society replacing the state...
...instead they were called "forums" (Civic Forum, Hungarian Democratic Forum...
...This is a dangerous phenomenon...
...The tendency for East Central European intellectuals to embrace the ideology of the free market and to regard all government regulation with deep suspicion is, of course, aided by the antipolitical bias of a politics based on the idea of civil society...
...The civil society strategy undeniably helped bring about the collapse of communism in East-Central Europe...
...Although much less extensive than Poland's, Hungary also had its own "second society" initially centered around small groups of writers of samizdat, but expanded to include movements for environmental regulation and SPRING • 1992 • 227 for the protection of Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries...
...As the constituent republics of the Soviet Union begin confronting their own obstacles to democracy, they should try to learn from the experiences of their Western neighbors...
...While these decisions should be influenced by nongovernmental organizations —independent media, churches, trade unions, social movements, and pressure groups—legislative proposals ultimately have to be formulated and voted on by politicians...
...they publicly expressed their suspicion of concrete programs and argued that it was not their prerogative to formulate policies: Ralf Dahrendorf reported that one leading Hungarian politician remarked when asked about his party's economic policy, "That is not for us to say but for the people...
...Committee for Workers Defense (KOR) activists like Jacek Kuron and Adam Michnik in Poland...
...For most of the dissidents the swift collapse of the communist system and their own elevation to political power came as a surprise...
...Kis and Bence argued that autonomous social organizations within a one-party system could never replace the democratic interestrepresenting and conflict-resolving functions of a multiparty system...
...Democratic aspirations could not be satisfied with, in Havel's words, a static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility...
...Their values and rhetoric emerged in reaction to their experiences under Soviet communism during the last forty years...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...It also accelerated loss of ideological faith among members of the communist elite...
...or "committees" (the Citizens Committees, which became the political arm of Solidarity...
...This anti-political approach to democracy reflected an understandable tendency to associate party politics with Stalinism...
...But in the postcommunist era the interests of these two groups are not always going to be congruent...
...It was in this climate that some dissidents began, in the late 1970s, to develop a strategy of resistance that focused on reclaiming the political space monopolized by the party through developing and mobilizing "civil society...
...A social institution's independence from government does not guarantee that it will be conducive to democracy...
...They must formulate new foreign alliances and seek foreign trade, investment, and loans...
...Konrad supported "anti-politics," which he defined as "the political activity of those who don't want to be politicians and who refuse to share in power...
...East-Central Europe is particularly vulnerable to this contempt for traditional political institutions precisely when it desperately needs these institutions to dismantle the old order and build the new...
...Uncaptive Minds, March-April 1990) These attempts to maintain a politics of consensus and to eschew traditional political power were counterproductive...
...The role of the politics of civil society in the immediate postcommunist period should not, of course, be exaggerated...
...The use of Soviet military force to crush the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968 convinced opponents of communist rule that direct confrontation with the Communist party or attempts to radically transform it from within would not be tolerated by the Soviet Union...
...People were loath to call new political groupings "parties...
...See Michael Walzer's "The Idea of Civil Society," Dissent, Spring 1991...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...In an interview, Bujak (the brilliant chief tactician of Solidarity during its underground period) offered these rather confused comments: We shrink from the term "party" . . . [but] we envisage a formal individual membership of our Movement...
...Some even used explicitly antiparty slogans in campaigns, like Civic Forum's "Parties belong to party members, but Civic Forum belongs to everyone...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...But civil society cannot act as a substitute for state politics...
...The civil society approach was, of course, deeply political in that it tried to create opportunities for people to participate in public life...
...Politicians will have an enormous impact on democratic prospects in other ways as well...
...In the end political and personal differences led Civic Forum to split, six months after the elections, into (among others) the Civic Democratic party, the Civic Movement, and the Civic Democratic Alliance, creating confusion as parliamentarians elected as members of Civic Forum tried to decide which of its splinter parties, if any, to join...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...Wiktor Kulerski, Solidarity delegate, Polish Sejm (Uncaptive Minds, August-October 1989) ivil society" became a catchword for the democratic dissidents of East-Central Europe in the 1970s and 1980s...
...The Communist party-states in East-Central Europe sought to monopolize the entire public 226 • DISSENT sphere, controlling politics, economics, the media, the academy, and cultural and religious life...
...More generally, an attitude of suspicion and hostility toward government encourages political apathy, which, though an understandable legacy of communism, can undermine democratic authority as well...
...People were deprived of avenues for the free articulation and defense of their interests...
...But although this rhetoric of "us" versus "them" was a powerful anticommunist force, it did not translate very well into the new situation in which there was no longer a clear "us" and "them" and in which—especially in Havel's case, catapulted to the presidency within a few dizzying weeks — "we" now stood where "they" had always been...
...Among the effects of this "goulash communism" was the rise (not only in Hungary) of a new generation of communists who were economic pragmatists, and who were profoundly shaken by the progressive deterioration of East-Central European economies that began in the late 1970s and accelerated through the 1980s...
...Many dissidents continued to employ the rhetoric of civil society in an attempt to maintain democratic consensus and to retain the moral high ground...
...While there were significant differences among these people, they shared the core idea of the civil society strategy: its opposition of "society" to "state...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...For instance, skill in handling social dissatisfaction over falling living standards is required to prevent dangerously destabilizing social conflict or the rise of demagogues, and their actions will also determine the extent to which 230 • DISSENT former members of the communist bureaucracy will be able to convert their privileges into economic power...
...But there are serious problems with a democratic politics focused on civil society...
...The identification of democracy with civil society created a powerful vision of collective identity: civil society was "Us," state authority was "Them...
...Some dissidents viewed the emphasis on civil society as purely a transitory strategy and continued to espouse multiparty democracy as their final goal...
...Activists spoke of creating political "space" that would be filled by the "people...
...he also asserted that "parties should not take direct part in elections" and "should not participate directly in power...
...Critics of democracy have always stressed its self-destructive tendencies...
...The duality of "state" and "civil society" also played an important psychological role in uniting opponents of communism...
...Leaders of the "alternative society" also became negotiating partners of the Communist party in the roundtable discussions that preceded multiparty elections in Poland and Hungary and the resignation of the Politburo in Czechoslovakia, and subsequently became members of the new political elite...
...They must deal with such fundamental decisions as the role of trade unions, the restructuring of the educational system, and church-state relations...
...These were men and women who, at great personal risk and in the face of near-universal consensus that the status quo would remain basically unchanged for a very long time, continued to occupy the moral and political high ground...
...The suppression of civil society under communism made it possible to see independent trade unions and independent entrepreneurs in the "second economy" as partners united in opposition to the party-state...
...But many dissidents also became convinced that, with the loss of faith among the communist elites, a civil society strategy had a good chance of gradually forcing changes within the party, either through a sort of "implosion," as autonomous organizations took over the role of party organizations, or through the effect of attempts by the regime to coopt or compete with the opposition...
...alliances" (Alliance of Free Democrats, Alliance of Young Democrats...
...As Erazim Kohak and Tadeusz Kowalik pointed out in their sobering reports from Prague and Warsaw (Dissent, Fall 1991), many East-Central European leaders are oblivious to the ways in which unregulated markets undermine democracy...
...The East-Central European dissidents, like dissenters everywhere, defined themselves in opposition to the status quo...
...In Kuron's words, "[s]ociety organizes itself as a democratic movement and becomes active outside the limits of the institutions of the totalitarian state...
...And Havel wrote about a society characterized by "non-political politics," which would have no parties but would instead be based on spontaneous and ephemeral associations of a "post-democratic" kind...
...But we are not planning to conduct mass recruitment campaigns . . . . We intend to become a representative of the majority of society, although not everybody will be happy with us...
...Meanwhile, power was distributed through quasi-feudal patronage networks, and leading political, economic, and cultural positions were allocated among the more or less secret ranks of the nomenklatura...
...By the time Solidarity leaders abandoned their attempts to preserve social consensus and began to split into parties, personal disputes and widespread public distaste for politics helped bring about a fragmented, even chaotic result: in the recent national elections, voter turnout was low (about 43 percent) and the outcome indecisive, with twenty-nine parties, including the notorious Beer Lovers party, getting into parliament...
...They must construct a constitutional framework guaranteeing the rule of law and the rights of citizens and determine the powers and jurisdictions of branches of government...
...Solidarity's case was similarly made difficult by its unclear status as both a broad "civil society"-based alliance and a trade union, by the fact that it was forced by its own astonishing success in the partially free elections of June 1989 to form a government that attempted to work with a communist-dominated parliament, and by Solidarity leader Lech Walesa's initial retreat from politics followed by his reentry as a critic of his own movement's government...
...Many of those dissidents have now become politicians in postcommunist Eastern Europe, and often they have continued to make civil society the locus of their concern...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...They also provided no formal mechanism for articulating and resolving differences, thereby SPRING • 1992 • 229 enhancing a tendency for political differences to be expressed in terms of personal animosity...
...Many East-Central Europeans, disillusioned by these events and by the continuing gap between the official picture of society and people's lived experience, became cynical and embraced strategies of accommodation, which Vaclav Havel called "living within the lie...
...The former dissidents were reluctant to engage in party politics...
...It is an approach that also tends to romanticize civil society itself, ignoring its internal divisions and antidemocratic tendencies, and the role that governments must play in ensuring that nongovernmental associations do not endanger democracy...
...This duality was especially important in Czechoslovakia, where, during the Velvet Revolution, demonstrators in Prague's Wenceslas Square chanted, "We are not like Them...
...For them, the creation of a vibrant sphere of voluntary associations outside of state structures represented both the most practical and attractive democratic strategy...
...It stressed that democracy requires more than free elections, that citizens of democratic societies need networks of associations that provide opportunities to participate in shaping public life...
...It was civil society, not the state, that was suppressed in East-Central Europe for the past forty years...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...In these visions, civil society was no longer a complement to government, but an end in itself...
...Some opted to work within the system for goals they hoped would benefit their countries and consolidate their own power while being acceptable to the Soviets...
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...Civil society" could include a wide spectrum of activities, from cultural and religious organizations and human rights groups to independent economic activities ranging from trade unions to private enterprises...
...Both Solidarity and the Citizens Committees and Civic Forum/Public against Violence acted as broad alliances that claimed to represent all of civil society...
...They must decide whether it is legally permissible, socially just, and politically advantageous to prosecute or to revoke privileges of former communists who abused their powers...
...Poland —and now Russia—appear to have succumbed to the new technocratic utopianism of neoliberals who advocate the "shock therapy" of sudden marketization with scant regard for its social costs or for society's ability to take advantage of new economic opportunities...
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...These arise from the antipolitical stress of a civil-society-based politics, its hostility to traditional democratic institutions such as governments, parliaments, and parties...
...But the regeneration of civil society is only part of the story of democratization...
...Such visions reflected the stubborn nobility —one could say quixotic idealism—that characterized the dissidents' world...
...Another important factor influencing EastCentral European dissidents was the traumas of 1956 and 1968...
...The most striking example was the implicit "social contract" that evolved in Kadar's Hungary, which claimed political legitimacy because it could deliver relative economic prosperity...
...A tendency to reify civil society ignores important divisions among social groups—for instance, between growthminded economists and environmentalists or between conservative religious groups and feminists...
...Ultimately, attempts to make it do so proved counterproductive to democratization, since they failed to take seriously the role of government in a democracy and overestimated the unity of civil society...
...In Czechoslovakia, by far the most repressive of the three countries, dissidents managed to maintain a number of civil society initiatives, the best-known being Charter 77 and VONS, the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted...
...We wish to be open-minded...
...They created a network of autonomous organizations that would provide social space parallel, rather than directly opposed, to the one-party state...
...The declaration of martial law in December 1981 and the arrest of many Solidarity and KOR leaders was a dramatic but ultimately temporary setback for the Poles, who managed to revive the strategy of "Underground Society" in the post—martial law period by creating an astonishing array of autonomous institutions (four hundred periodicals, forty-one news agencies, the "flying university," underground theaters, and art galleries...
...But many also had deep philosophical commitments to the idea of civil society...
...These ideas of "society" versus the "state" or of the "second," or "parallel," society provided the theoretical basis for dissident initiatives, most famously for Solidarity's strategy of "selflimiting revolution" in 1980-81...
...This richer picture of a democratic society was a welcome antidote to the Reagan administration's formulaic insistence on free elections as a sufficient condition for democracy and offered a basis for criticizing the inadequacies of Western democracies as well...
...Party politics are concerned with Machiavellian games of obtaining and preserving power, while the politics of civil society are motivated by conscience and the desire, in Havel's words, to "live in truth...
...The new social order that will emerge in East-Central Europe and the extent to which it fosters democratic aspirations will depend in large measure on governments, parliaments, and parties...
...But in their sharp rejection of communist statism they embraced an antistatist attitude that translates badly into the postcommunist era...
...They emphasized non-confrontation and stressed toleration of a plurality of opinions to the detriment of detailed political programs...
...A primary focus on civil society ignores or devalues the role of traditional political institutions in constructing a stable democratic order...
...The focus on civil society can also be counterproductive because it overestimates the unity and democratic nature of civil society itself...
...Havel, "The Power of the Powerless") This all-too-relevant critique of Western democracy, fused with the antistatism born of life under communism, produced, in the writings of Havel and of GyOrgy Konrad— whose works "The Power of the Powerless" and Anti-Politics, respectively, are the classic statements of the civil society approach—the view that party or state politics are incompatible with true democracy...
...Strategically, the decision to eschew direct confrontation with the state was motivated, as we have seen, by historical experience and geopolitical realism...
...For example, as early as 1977 Hungarian dissidents Janos Kis and GyOrgy Bence criticized the view that multiparty democracy was an undesirable—as opposed to an impractical—option for East-Central Europe...
...They must figure out what to do with the vast amount of state property under their control—whether, for instance, to return enterprises to their previous owners or their descendants, sell them to the highest bidder, or distribute shares to employees—and how to strike an acceptable balance between justice and efficiency in the process...
...and samizdat writers and publishers like Gabor Demszky and Janos Kis in Hungary...
...It did not present itself as an opposition to one-party rule...
...This forced East-Central Europeans to develop a sharper geopolitical realism, to realize that the West was unable or unwilling to help them...
...One such lesson is that a democratic politics centered too exclusively on civil society can end up endangering democracy by failing to take seriously the political work needed to build it...
...In part this is because of what they have to work with: the Communist party-state largely monopolized political and economic life and owned most of the country's assets, leaving it up to the new governments to dismantle the old system...
...The pioneers of the civil society approach included the founders of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, among them Vaclav Havel...
...One can also have sympathy for the difficulty of the change in vocation and outlook demanded of former dissidents...
...But it is clear that conceiving the democratic community as civil society worked against the formulation of legislative programs by parties and decisive activity by new governments...
...But it is important to remember that good and noble intentions, like those underlying the commitment to civil society, are no guarantee of positive democratic results...
...Given the need to dismantle old structures and create new ones, traditional political institutions have perhaps the most important role to play in the first stages of democratization...
...We" would remain pure from the corruption of political power...
...East European Reporter, July 1990) The anti-party bias was not only a matter of language...
...The road ahead for the countries discussed here appears to be difficult though far from hopeless...
...This suspicion concerning the very idea of political parties was expressed by Zbigniew Bujak, founding member of one of the splinter parties of Solidarity, Democratic Action (ROAD...
...In East-Central Europe this emphasis on civil society provided a powerful theoretical tool for criticizing communism, as well as a successful strategy for undermining it...
...By influencing reformers within the Communist party, dissidents helped to bring about the relaxation of censorship and the increasingly independentminded behavior of communist-led organizations such as the People's Patriotic Front in Hungary and the nominally non-communist opposition parties in the Polish Sejm...
...It forgets that a civil society requires a democratic political and legal order to sustain it...
...The focus on civil society offered some general insights for democratic theory as well...
...Since the Communist party-state had sought to destroy or appropriate this space, the notion of civil society was especially suited to the East-Central European context...
...these countries face formidable obstacles that guarantee that the transition period will be stormy and difficult...
...Even though the ascent of Gorbachev and his decision to suspend the 228 • DISSENT Brezhnev Doctrine were obviously key factors, dissident organizations also played a necessary role in East-Central Europe's more or less orderly revolutionary transformation...
...In fact, equating civil society with the democratic political community is fundamentally inconsistent with the idea of civil society, which, as Hegel pointed out long ago, depends for its secure existence on a state-created and -protected legal framework...
...SPRING • 1992 • 231...
...As the communists consolidated their rule in the 1940s, they systematically destroyed or coopted all autonomous associations: political parties, trade unions, churches, and clubs...
...This process, which the Hungarian sociologist Elemer Hankiss called the "demobilization of society," had far-reaching effects...
...It also stemmed from, the conviction that traditional Western multiparty parliamentarism did not guarantee a flourishing democracy...
...They created a vague and illusory consensus while slowing down the formulation of government policies...
...But it avoided high politics, rejecting the traditional radical dream of seizing state power...
...The EastCentral European dissidents inspired theorists of democracy in other parts of the world to employ the idea of civil society, including such scholars as Alfred Stepan, Guillermo O'Donnell, and Philippe Schmitter in their work on Latin America, and Andrew Arat6, Jean Cohen, and John Keane in analyzing North American and Western European democracies...
Vol. 39 • April 1992 • No. 2
