Cultivating Civil Society

One of my colleagues at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy once came up to me and said, “I’m teaching Introduction to Political Science. How do you define civil society?”

“Well,” I answered, “you know all those books written on the subject, but a good short course answer might be a set of groups, institutions, and interests independent of the state and capable of influencing the state.”

It means more, of course. It also requires, as German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has pointed out, a theater of communications independent from the state so that such groups can constitute themselves and form a truly deliberative democracy (nobody has quite achieved this yet), in which reason will ultimately prevail in political discourse. It requires a set of rules to keep things, well, civil. In a country only a decade or so from Communism that actively set out to destroy civil society by having the Party-state take over or destroy everything traditionally outside it, this is not easy and much more difficult than in countries that have been working on it for centuries, but beginnings have been made — far from sufficient, but the sprouts are there, and various programs are aimed at cultivating them. The fact is that you can have the best Constitution and laws on the face of the earth, but without a civil society to impel the working of the political process supposed to be governed by those rules, they will not create a Western style representative self-government. After all, as de Tocqueville understood in the 1830s, if we are all equal, this simply means we are all equally helpless before the Leviathan state. What brings the state to heel, he saw even then, was the associations of all those individually helpless individuals in associations capable of trying to defend their interests against each other and the state. It was never perfect, and even America had some unpleasantness called the Civil War, the era of robber barons, some other stupid wars, and imperialistic throwing its weight around, but like an old Chevy van it has rattled and banged its way to what everyone today sees as success. Other countries of the First World, to which Ukraine and other post socialist states seek admission, have made their own modifications on the what the British and Americans pioneered, and they have also prospered. But the basic thing is not the form and structures of official politics: it is the forces outside government that govern how the official structures of government work. This is why Madeline Albright has joined the chorus in favor of building civil society in Ukraine and why non-governmental organizations have become the focus of most Western aid programs here. Without a vibrant civil society this country and people will never be what it hopes and deserves to become. The elections, which are coming, are great, but without civil society, elections in and of themselves cannot make a First World state.