MYTHS AND REALITIES
OF CIVIL SOCIETY
Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik
Grzegorz Ekiert is professor of government at Harvard University, director
of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and senior
scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.
Jan Kubik is professor and chair in the Department of Political
Science at Rutgers University.
Among all the changes that have swept Central and Eastern Europe
(CEE) since 1989, those involving civil society are perhaps the least
understood. Prevailing wisdom holds that communism wiped out traditional
civil societies and rendered them largely helpless to aid the rise
of democracy and markets or to block authoritarian reversals. When it
comes to democratization, this theory goes, top-down reforms backed
by potent international actors have done the heavy lifting while civil
society has sat enfeebled on the sidelines.1
The “proof” that postcommunist civil societies are uniformly weak
and ineffective comes mainly from the World Values Survey and similar
cross-European attitude polls. This bias in favor of cross-national
surveys is surprising since there is a large body of other easily found
evidence—including national-level surveys on volunteering and membership
in civil society organizations, registers of organizations, expert
assessments, protest-event analyses, and case studies—that sheds light
on CEE civil society and allows us to assess its condition and activities
across the region with greater precision than cross-national surveys of
attitudes alone.2
In postcommunist countries, civil societies were not built from
scratch. While the CEE countries did not inherit from communism a
civil society properly so called, they did inherit a comprehensive and
solidly institutionalized associational sphere. This included powerful
trade unions and professional associations, churches, and organizations
representing various groups and interests including young people, farmers,
veterans, consumers, women, and ecologists. There were also sports
Journal of Democracy Volume 25, Number 1 January 2014
© 2014 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
The Legacies of 1989
47Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik
clubs, along with recreational, cultural, and leisure organizations and
the like. Memberships were large, as were resources. Official associations
boasted national offices in capital cities as well as local branches,
and associations employed professional staffers with serious organizational
skills.
To be sure, associational life under state socialism was politicized,
bureaucratized, centralized, and comprehensive—it was used to help put
the “total” in totalitarianism—but it also recognized and institutionalized
a certain diversity of interests. After the 1960s, communist-controlled
mass organizations in the more pragmatic and reformist countries
such as Hungary and Poland became less ideological and began to
act as “interest groups” that could lobby the party-state for economic
concessions. In orthodox-communist Czechoslovakia and East Germany
or semi-totalitarian Romania and Albania, by contrast, these organizations
still served almost exclusively as regime “transmission belts.”
Beneath the common institutional form of communism, every country
was different, which helps to explain the broad range of post-1989 civil
societies in the region.
In Poland after 1956, for example, the diversity and pluralism of associations
gradually increased, but always within the boundaries marked
out by the communist state. A number of political crises brought about
mobilization on the part of workers, students, intellectuals, peasants, and
Catholics, culminating in the 1980 appearance of the massive Solidarity
movement. This led to the expansion of organizational capacity outside
the state-controlled organizations. As Poland began to move away from
communism, therefore, the country could boast an associational landscape
that consisted of much more than just a bunch of centralized mass
organizations. Some precommunist civil society traditions and even organizations
(mostly in the realms of leisure, education, and culture) survived
under communist rule, especially at the local level. They served
as semi-official carriers of local traditions and provided a modicum
of public space somewhat sheltered from direct political interference.
Moreover, Poland’s powerful Roman Catholic Church secured considerable
autonomy and supported various movements and organizations.
Thus, by the mid-1980s, Poland had an “incomplete” civil society with
relatively dense organizational structures both formal and informal at
various levels and in all functional domains. The incompleteness flowed
from a lack of autonomy and legally delineated public space guarded
by enforceable rights and liberties. The Baltic states, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, and Slovenia had smaller dissident sectors (filled by political,
religious, and cultural groups) alongside the communist-controlled
formal associations.
After 1989, many associations that had been under communist control
reformed themselves in light of the new democratic conditions. Many
lost members and resources, split up into smaller groups, and changed
48 Journal of Democracy
their names, leaders, and agendas. Yet many survived and kept most of
the resources that they had possessed before 1989.
Communism’s fall (combined with generous foreign aid) touched off
an organizational revolution in CEE civil society. In the midst of mass
political mobilizations associated with regime change, scores of new
movements and organizations burst onto the public stage. Some faded
fast, but others stayed. These newcomers mostly appeared in sectors disallowed
under communism (such as NGOs, charities, or foundations),
but quite a few entered the existing sectors and began competing directly
with the inherited organizations. Since 1989, the number of civil
society organizations has grown rapidly across the region. In Poland,
every year sees the registration of about four-thousand new NGOs and a
thousand new foundations.
Yet the differences among civil societies across the region remain
considerable. Countries that saw early and successful transitions to
democracy are, not surprisingly, far friendlier to civil society. In the
most harshly authoritarian postcommunist countries, by contrast, the
associational revolution’s footprint is tiny: Belarus has fewer than
2,500 registered NGOs while Uzbekistan has 415 and Turkmenistan
boasts barely a hundred.3
In those countries where civil society has flourished, the revamping
of legal regulations has been key. In the 1990s, all CEE countries
overhauled their laws on the rights to assemble and associate as well as
financial and tax regulations, with the goal of making room for an active
civil society. In authoritarian countries, by contrast, legal rules are
used to restrict public space and curtail what civil society groups can do.
Russia’s recent tightening of registration procedures and restrictions on
financing from abroad are a case in point.
Much like their counterparts in Europe’s older democracies, the CEE
civil societies are dense, diverse, and free. Differences between them
and the rest of postcommunist Eurasia are striking. In Belarus (which
is often called “Europe’s last dictatorship”), the inherited associational
sector dominates and organizing new groups is deliberately made difficult.
Unlike the highly institutionalized civil societies found in consolidated
democracies, authoritarian and hybrid regimes typically feature
civil society groups that operate more as parts of a “dissident” social
movement that springs into action—as in the so-called color revolutions—when
the powers that be steal an election, violate legal norms, or
try to make existing regulations more authoritarian.
The side-by-side processes (moving slowly in some countries, more
quickly in others) of reform within the inherited associational sphere
and the rise of new organizations and sectors outside it have given the
CEE region “recombined” civil societies. These vary from country to
country according to the shape and pace that democratization assumed
there, not to mention specific institutional incentives and historical
49Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik
traditions. There is no truth to the claim that postcommunist civil societies
had to be created from scratch in all their dimensions.
One or Many?
As far back as 1999, Jacques Rupnik noted that “the word ‘postcommunism’
has lost its relevance. The fact that Hungary and Albania, or
the Czech Republic and Belarus, or Poland and Kazakhstan shared a
communist past explains very little about the paths that they have taken
since.”4
This observation applies to postcommunist civil societies as
well. They differ from country to country depending on how communist
authorities used to treat the associational sphere, how much energy
went into the building of new organizations after communism fell, how
historical traditions vary, and how current political conditions line up.
Postcommunist civil societies can range from assertive and robust to
anemic and tightly state-constrained—they are certainly not all of one
type.
Expert evaluations back up this picture of staggering variance across
the postcommunist region. The World Bank Governance Index shows
that in the new EU members—especially Estonia, Poland, and Slovenia—civil
society’s organizational composition and role in providing
citizens with voice and a way to hold governments accountable are not
far behind West European standards, and ahead of Greece and Italy.5
The 2012 U.S. Agency for International Development report on the
sustainability of civil society organizations awards good marks to the
ex-communist EU members, with Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic
topping the list. The Eurasian countries (Russia and the other
ex-Soviet countries outside the Baltics and Central Asia) run behind,
while the five post-Soviet republics of Central Asia bring up the rear.6
Similarly, Freedom House’s Nations in Transit 2013 study (which rates
the strength of civil society on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being strongest)
gives new EU members an average score of 1.95, with Poland achieving
the best result (1.5). For the Balkans, the average score was 3.04. For the
Eurasian states it was 5.28, with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan sharing
the dubious privilege of carding a worst-possible 7 each.
In short, a systematic comparison of really existing postcommunist
civil societies shows different patterns of transformation, diverging
paths of organizational expansion, uneven influence on policy making,
and growing intraregional disparities.
These civil societies differ from one another along at least three
crucial dimensions. The first has to do with the “constitution of public
space.” The most important single factor in determining how a given
country’s public space is constituted is the type of relationship that
civil society has with the state (which includes the degree of access
that civil society organizations have to the policy-making process).
50 Journal of Democracy
The state and its agencies define the public space by making laws,
by building (or failing to build) institutions, by protecting (or disregarding)
rights and liberties, and by implementing policies that either
empower or constrain civil society organizations. On the actions and
inactions of states, therefore, hinge the health, composition, and capacity
of civil society. States vary across the postcommunist space,
and therefore so do civil societies.
Although no postcommunist state seeks to ban all activity by autonomous
civil society groups, Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan come
close. As in the CEE region during the communist 1970s and 1980s, civil
society faces severe repression. To the extent that it does exist, it tends
to be incomplete and “dissident” in nature—again, not unlike what one
would have seen in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland before 1989.
In another, less severely authoritarian set of postcommunist countries,
civil society is treated less harshly, but must cope with tangles of
restrictions. Some organizations, especially new NGOs, are marginalized.
Others (often with communist pedigrees) receive favors, including
public money. The norm is a mix between state corporatism and a
regime of arbitrary limits on registration procedures, funding, types of
activity allowed, and international contacts. In Russia, to name a prominent
example, such restrictions have grown in severity as many civil
society groups have angered the Putin regime by organizing the protest
movements of the last few years.
In a third set of CEE countries—the new EU members—the rule of
law guards civil society, whose organizations are free to take foreign
help and receive support from both their own government’s and the
EU’s funds. Here we catch sight of a picture that differs in no essential
manner from what we see in the established liberal democracies of
Western Europe. Moreover, in new member states civil society organizations
often have formal roles in policy making and governance, especially
at the local level. They may also lobby and use contention, though
their effectiveness seldom if ever matches that of their West European
counterparts.7
Forms of Organization
Although laws and institutions—the former to guarantee (or threaten)
rights and liberties and the latter to furnish (or deny) a predictable,
friendly environment—explain why some civil societies flourish more
fully than others across the CEE region, differences in forms of civil society
organization and levels of institutionalization matter as well. The
CEE countries all began their respective transitions away from communism
with associational domains based on centralized, state-controlled
trade unions and professional organizations. As noted above, the crux
of the post-1989 change was the transformation of this old associational
51Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik
sector combined with the emergence of a diverse NGO sector and other
social organizations prohibited by the old regime, including religious
and nationalist movements. The pace and extent of change varied across
the region, with state corporatism quickly withering away in some countries
while remaining influential in others.
A major part of the process has been the waning of trade unions. In
postcommunist countries, unions have seen their membership drop even
more steeply than have their counterparts in Western Europe and the
United States. The leading cause in the CEE region is “system-specific”:
State socialism made membership in unions automatic (they served as
tools of labor control and as channels for handing out in-kind benefits).
In a sharp break with that past, postcommunist states turned toward capitalism
and many have been moving away from corporatist (i.e., unionreliant)
approaches to interest representation.
Yet unions have not vanished across the CEE region, nor is corporatism
dead. Instead, after the deflation of the artificially oversized communist-era
unions, the share of the workforce that is currently unionized
differs to no drastic degree from the European average.8
Unions now
draw their political influence not from mass memberships, but rather
from effective organization, from traditional links to the state, and
from ties to political parties. Unions in Poland (the CEE region’s leastunionized
country) are small and divided, but they are vocal in opposing
many changes to government welfare or labor policies. In other countries,
unions’ political effectiveness varies and does not always depend
on unionization rates. Again, the most significant dividing line within
the postcommunist world runs between the CEE’s new EU members and
the majority of post-Soviet states, even if labor unions in Russia may be
more effective than is usually assumed.9
In short, there are two general patterns in relations between civil societies
and the states in which they reside: pluralist and corporatist. The
distribution of these patterns in the region is not a matter of political
geography: State–civil society relations in Poland are mostly pluralist
while those in Hungary and Slovenia are largely corporatist. Further
east, corporatism prevails. Whether a country is corporatist or pluralist
will shape how fast or slowly organizations grow, the types of organizations
that are privileged, and the form (as well as the intensity) of contentiousness
within civil society.
Another source of differences among postcommunist civil societies
is the level of institutionalization. Civil society under an authoritarian
regime will typically feature a larger share of groups that are informal
in nature. Under such a regime, social movements and sporadic popular
mobilizations will be the most consequential form that civil society
activity assumes. In postcommunist democracies, by contrast, formal
organizations (NGOs, unions, professional groups) dominate. Additionally,
many postcommunist civil societies, particularly in the new EU
52 Journal of Democracy
member states, are decentralized both organizationally and in the way
they behave. Although such decentralization may be more a general feature
of contemporary civil societies than a trait specific to postcommunism,
it does set today’s CEE apart from the historical pattern observable
in the development of West European civil societies.
In yet another dimension, identity politics penetrates postcommunist
civil societies unevenly. In countries with ethnic and religious divisions,
collective-identity questions are likely to be salient. Groups with sectarian
or nationalist agendas will be more prominent, and there may be
high-profile conflicts among them. As with the distribution of unionization,
moreover, the distribution of identity-related conflicts does not
follow subregional divisions.
As the foregoing suggests, there is no one model of postcommunist
civil society. Instead, we see a diversity of civil societies across the region
and also over time. Many factors are at work, but the key one is the
type of political regime. The landscape today in authoritarian Belarus,
for example, looks much as it did during communism’s posttotalitarian
phase: There is an official sector of state-controlled labor unions and
other mass organizations, and there is a dissident civil society struggling
against the nondemocratic regime. In the newer EU members, civil society
is diverse and vibrant and looks much like civil society in the older
EU members, albeit with less centralization and more informality.10
Although civil society’s activities are often structured differently
than they are in the West and may escape the attention of some Western
observers, there is no truth to the common claim that postcommunist
civil societies in the CEE region are passive and organizationally ane-
mic.11
Behavior Patterns
In order to understand civil society’s role in a given country, examinations
of public opinion or volunteerism must give way to studies
of politically relevant actions such as lobbying and protest. Instead of
measuring civil society’s “strength” by counting the number of organizations
per capita or recording what people say in response to survey
questions, we need to assess how and how often civil society gets
involved in political and public life. We also need to look at the links
between civil society groups and other players in the polity, asking how
effective these links are. Focusing on contentious politics is one way to
do this. In some countries, groups are readier to challenge officials and
to use contentious forms of behavior to pursue their interests. In others,
cooperation between the state and civil society is extensive and often
institutionalized, while the level of political contention by civil society
groups is lower. Institutions clearly play a role here, and so do history
and tradition. Viewed from this vantage, civil societies can be classified
53Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik
as either “contentious” or “accommodating.” During the first decade
of Poland’s transformation, the country had a contentious civil society,
while most of its CEE neighbors and near-neighbors had lower levels
of contention. In recent years, this trend has flipped, however, leaving
Bulgaria and Hungary more contentious than Poland.
What causes a civil society to go from accommodating to contentious
or vice-versa? The key seems to be regime type (authoritarian,
semi-authoritarian, or democratic) plus specific features of the polity
such as the structure and nature of the party system. Where parties work
well to aggregate interests and pressure the government, civil society’s
political role will be mostly complementary to that of the parties. Where
the party system is unstable, civil society tends to become supplementary.
Postcommunist civil societies are mostly of the latter sort: Parties
are unstable and declining across the CEE region (new EU members
included), just as they are throughout the rest of Europe. Civil society
groups have stepped in to fill the gap, advocating particular policies in
contentious disputes with the government. In the authoritarian and semiauthoritarian
settings of Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia, parties do a
poor job of interest representation and often find themselves overshadowed
by periodically active protest and oppositional movements.
The CEE civil societies are no strangers to political involvement, but
today their interventions rarely have an “antisystem” character: Clear
alternatives to a market economy and political democracy are simply not
there. Instead of being “against the system” and in favor of replacing it
with something else, civil society engages in what we have called “contentious
reformism.”12
For about a decade and a half after the Berlin Wall
was torn down, CEE civil societies were, by and large, liberally minded
and moderate, both in what they demanded and in how they went about
trying to get it. In authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes, the bulk
of “dissident” civic actions have aimed at securing political freedoms
and expanding the public sphere in which citizens can (safely) engage
their governments. In democratic countries, most civil society organizations
have supported liberal democracy and markets while focusing on
better governance and representation.
Several countries of the region, particularly those with autocratic or
weak democratic regimes, experienced waves of popular political mobilization,
triggered by outrage at corrupt politicians, rigged democratic
procedures, inept administrations, and sluggish economic growth. By
far the most spectacular wave of protests was the set of so-called color
revolutions that swept across Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan
between 2000 and 2005. In Russia more recently, protestors have challenged
Putin’s regime in the name of “honor, decency, dignity, and con-
science.”13
Since 2006, reformism anchored in a neoliberal consensus has been a
fading force in the CEE countries. Parties and movements that are dis-
54 Journal of Democracy
tinctly populist and sometimes radically right-wing have become more
visible. Growing numbers of people have been turning to them not only
for ideological explanations, but for organizational vehicles that can
convey the rising discontent and frustration many feel amid public-corruption
scandals and a lingering period of worldwide economic woes.
This turn to the right is well documented.14
Yet it is worth recalling
that the embrace of right-wing, populist ideologies is highly uneven
across the postcommunist region. Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, and
Ukraine have the largest potential far-right support pools (relative to
population) of any countries in Europe. Estonia, Poland, and Slovenia,
by contrast, seem to be more moderate, with rates of far-right support
that are actually lower than what one finds in Italy and Portugal.15
Our
own work on protest politics in Hungary and Poland provides additional
evidence for significant disparities. Both countries have heard more
right-wing rhetoric and seen more far-right protests since 2008, but such
phenomena remain more common and more widely supported in Hun-
gary.
Many CEE countries have been witnessing a rise in right-wing radicalization
on the basis of slogans about national purification, opposition
to the EU, and a return to “true values.” But antisystem and antidemocratic
organizations have remained marginal in most places, while civil
societies have stuck by and large to the path of moderation. Despite the
social and economic costs of the postcommunist transformations and the
post-2008 economic crisis, extremisms of right and left alike have been
surprisingly subdued. Nowhere is a “Weimar scenario” likely.
Setting the Record Straight
There are three persistent myths about post-1989 civil societies in
former communist countries. We challenge them all. First, as we have
shown, postcommunist civil societies were not built from scratch. To
a significant degree, they sprang from associational spheres that were
inherited from the old regime, as well as from organizational traditions
that pre-dated communist rule.
Second, some comparative analyses suggest that a new type of civil
society has emerged in postcommunist countries. It is said to be a fresh
variant, different in kind from the Continental, Anglo-Saxon, or Nordic
types of civil society. Its roots supposedly lie in the shared communist
past and in the specific nature of the revolutions against communism
that broke out between 1989 and 1991.16
We think this is wrong, and
argue the opposite. There is no convergence on a single model. On the
contrary, postcommunist civil societies are becoming more divergent
from one another, whether in sectoral composition, behavior, normative
orientations, or predominant modes of relating to state authorities.
These differences reflect not only the historical traditions of various
55Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik
subregions within the old Soviet bloc, but also the contrasting outcomes
of postcommunist transformations and the new divisions created across
the European space by the EU’s successive enlargements.
The third and last myth that we wish to challenge is the one that paints
postcommunist civil societies as chronically weak. While strength and
weakness are not very useful categories, we have shown above that some
civil societies in the region have dense and comprehensive organizational
structures, operate in a friendly institutional and legal environment,
and have some capacity to influence policy making on local and national
levels. In other postcommunist countries, especially those that have reverted
to various forms of authoritarian rule, civil societies are often
organizationally weak and politically irrelevant. Civil society actors are
shut out of routine consultation and governance and come together to
influence politics only in extraordinary moments of rage triggered by
economic downturns or gross state violations of laws and constitutional
provisions, as witnessed recently in Ukraine.
Two questions dominate debates on civil society: 1) Is civil society
necessary to undermine authoritarian rule and bring about regime
change? 2) What impact does civil society have on government policies
and democratic quality, particularly after regime change? The experiences
of postcommunist countries shed light on both.
In general, we agree with Philippe Schmitter that civil society’s role
in precipitating regime change is insignificant.17
Apart from Poland,
there is no convincing evidence that organized civil society contributed
to the communist collapse, although the defections of various associations,
particularly at the moment of power transfer, were important. In
1989, several CEE countries experienced cascading cycles of mobilization—manifestations
more of spontaneous rather than organized civil
society—that tipped the balance against communism. That said, we hasten
to note that several CEE countries (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Slovenia, the Baltics) had consequential civil societies around the
time of regime transition. Comparative study, moreover, shows that the
stronger a country’s civil society was around that time, the more likely
that country was to achieve a higher quality of liberal democracy, to enjoy
a faster and stronger recovery from the transition’s economic dislocations,
and to feature a lower level of social inequality years later.18
Yet
not all forms of civil society mobilization under nondemocratic regimes
help the rise of democracy, particularly if racist or radically nationalist
activism is at the forefront (as in the former Yugoslavia).
The postcommunist experience as a whole, however, attests to the
positive and important role that civil society can play in democracy’s
consolidation. After twenty-five years of massive transformations, postcommunst
civil societies have built often-impressive amounts of organizational
capacity and political influence. This may be exerted through
contention, voluntary activities, assorted consultative arrangements, or
56 Journal of Democracy
all three. For example, Polish unions and farmers’ groups have been
able to defeat or delay many proposed economic and social reforms that
they did not like. In other countries, including those that have had color
revolutions, civil society organizations have resisted authoritarian reversals
and uses of electoral fraud, holding even authoritarian rulers at
least partly accountable. Case studies and anecdotal evidence suggest
the significant impact that civil society organizations have had on the
design and implementation of specific policies dealing with labor and
the environment as well as rights for women and minorities (to say nothing
of human rights more generally).
What is most striking, however, is the disparity of paths and outcomes.
Under authoritarian regimes (Belarus, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan), independent civil society organizations are thin on
the ground, persecuted, and poorly institutionalized, often resembling
the incomplete “dissident” civil societies of the years before 1989. In
semi-authoritarian regimes (Russia and Ukraine), the state harasses and
interferes with independent citizens and their NGO activities, but social
movements make a mark on public life via waves of public protest.
Many authoritarian governments have learned to coexist with and manage
their (often truncated and not very consequential) civil societies.19
The democratic civil societies of the CEE region may not be able to
match their West European counterparts in numbers and influence, but
CEE civil society’s growth has been impressive nonetheless. And when
it comes to transnational networking or the legal architecture of the public
sphere, there are CEE civil societies that not only match Western Europe
but are ahead of such states from Southern Europe as Greece, Italy,
and Portugal. People in Hungary, Poland, and Romania are more likely
than EU citizens generally to tell pollsters that they “share the values or
interests” of civil society organizations and “trust them to act in the right
way to influence political decision making.”20
These same respondents
also report the belief that civil society organizations significantly affect
policy making in their respective countries.
The political and economic problems that have swept the world since
2008 have fostered tenser relations between civil societies and hardpressed
states. Large swaths of the former have found themselves drawn
to contention and right-wing populism. Béla Greskovits once marveled
at how patient Central and East Europeans were while in the grip of
massive and often painful political and social changes.21
Looking at the
recent waves of intense protest in some CEE countries, we wonder: Is
their patience giving out? One can only say: “It depends.”22
But recent
protests in Poland (the CEE country that has been least affected by Europe’s
economic crisis) may foreshadow a new cycle of popular mobilization
triggered by the reduced capacity of states to satisfy public
expectations.
If CEE publics may be in danger of losing their patience, are CEE
57Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik
civil societies at risk of losing their moderation? The recent upsurge of
political radicalization, extremism, and aggressive rhetoric in the region
is undeniable. But these developments are unevenly distributed throughout
the postcommunist world. While some CEE countries record the
highest intensities of right-wing sentiment in all of Europe, others deviate
hardly at all from typical Western levels.
In conclusion, many postcommunist civil societies have made considerable
progress—often under far-from-ideal conditions—in building
autonomous institutions and securing a public role for themselves.
NOTES
For their help in developing many of the ideas in this essay, the authors wish to thank Michael
Bernhard, Roberto Foa, Béla Greskovits, Sunhyuk Kim, and Micha³ Wenzel.
1. Ralf Dahrendorf, “Has the East Joined the West?” New Perspectives Quarterly 7
(Spring 1990): 42.
2. Following Larry Diamond, we define civil society as “the realm of organized social
life that is open, voluntary, self-generating, at least partially self-supporting, autonomous
from the state, and bound by a legal order or set of shared rules . . . it involves citizens
acting collectively in a public sphere to express their interests, passions, preferences, and
ideas, to exchange information, to achieve collective goals, to make demands on the state,
to improve the structure and functioning of the state, and to hold state officials accountable.”
See Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 221.
3. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, NGO Law Monitor, 2013, available
at www.icnl.org/research/monitor.
4. Jacques Rupnik, “Eastern Europe a Decade Later: The Postcommunist Divide,”
Journal of Democracy 10 (January 1999): 57.
5. See the World Bank’s voice and accountability measurements at http://info.world-
bank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home.
6. U.S. Agency for International Development, The 2012 CSO Sustainability Index for
Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia, 16th
ed. (Washington, D.C.: USAID, 2012). A
lower score indicates stronger sustainability.
7. Anna G¹sior-Niemiec, “Lost in the System? Civil Society and Regional Development
Policy in Poland,” Acta Politica 45 (2010): 90–111; Velina Petrova, “Civil Society
in Post-Communist Eastern Europe and Eurasia: A Cross-National Analysis of Micro- and
Macro-Factors,” World Development 35 (July 2007): 1277–1305.
8. There are some discrepancies in the existing reports. We calculate, based on our 17
November 2013 consultation of www.worker-participation.eu, that for the early 2010s,
the average level of unionization in the postcommunist member states of the EU was
19 percent of the labor force. In the West European countries (without Scandinavia)
this level was 29 percent. The averages do not tell the whole story, however. While
the level of unionization in Portugal and Spain was 19 percent apiece, and ran as low
as 8 percent in France, the percentages in Romania, Slovenia, and Poland were 33, 27,
and 15, respectively. See also Jelle Visser, “Union membership statistics in 24 countries,”
Monthly Labor Review 129 (January 2006): 38; available at www.bls.gov/opub/
mlr/2006/01/art3full.pdf.
58 Journal of Democracy
9. Rudra Sil, “The Fluidity of Labor Politics in Postcommunist Transitions: Rethinking
the Narrative of Russian Labor Quiescence,” in Gerald Berk, Dennis Galvan and Victoria
Hattam, eds., Political Creativity: Reconfiguring Institutional Order and Change (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
10. Jan Kubik, “What Can Political Scientists Learn About Civil Society from Anthropologists?”
in Myron J. Aronoff and Jan Kubik, Anthropology and Political Science: A
Convergent Approach (New York: Berghahn, 2013).
11. Grzegorz Ekiert and Roberto Foa, “The Weakness of Postcommunist Civil Society
Reassessed,” Harvard University, CES Papers—Open Forum, 2012.
12. Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik, Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and
Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1999).
13. Leon Aron, “Putin versus Civil Society: The Long Struggle for Freedom,” Journal
of Democracy 24 (July 2013): 64.
14. In relation to the evidence of greater identification with rightist ideologies found
by the World Values Survey, see Petr Kopecký and Cas Mudde, eds., Uncivil Society?
Contentious Politics in Post-Communist Europe (London: Routlege, 2003); David Ost,
The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2005).
15. “Back by Popular Demand: Demand for Right-Wing Extremism (Derex) Index,”
Political Capital Policy Research and Consulting Institute, Budapest, 11 June 2010, available
at www.riskandforecast.com/useruploads/files/derex_study.pdf.
16. Edith Archambault, “The Third Sector in Europe: Does It Exhibit a Converging
Moment?” Comparative Social Research 26 (2009): 3–24.
17. Philippe Schmitter, “Twenty-Five Years, Fifteen Findings,” Journal of Democracy
21 (January 2010): 17–28. See also Stephen Kotkin (with Jan T. Gross), Uncivil Society:
1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Random House,
2009).
18. Michael Bernhard and Ruchan Kaya, “Civil Society and Regime Type in European
Postcommunist Countries: The Perspective Two Decades After 1989–1991,” Taiwan
Journal of Democracy 8 (December 2012): 113–26.
19. Ivan Krastev, “Paradoxes of the New Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 22
(April 2011): 5–16.
20. European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer 373: Europeans’ Engagement in
Participatory Democracy, March 2013, 9, available at http://ec.europa.eu/public_opin-
ion/flash/fl_373_en.pdf.
21. Béla Greskovits, The Political Economy of Protest and Patience: East European
and Latin American Transformations Compared (Budapest: Central European University
Press, 1998).
22. Compare Mark Beissinger and Gwendolyn Sasse, “An End to Patience? The 2008
Global Financial Crisis and Political Protest in Eastern Europe,” in Larry Bartels and
Nancy Bermeo, eds., Mass Politics in Tough Times: Opinions, Votes and Protest in the
Great Recession (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).