Download Civil Society, the State, and Political Culture

Selected Papers from the 2003 SVU North American Conference, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 26-28 June 2003
Civil Society, the State, and Political Culture
Mojmír Povolný, Appleton, Wisconsin
My first encounter in the Czech Republic with the issue of civil society took place on the
occasion of a Sunday noon program on Czech TV called „Debata.“ I was in Brno on that day
but I do no longer remember the year. The subject of the debate was civil society. There might
have been some four or five participants in the debate but the principal discussants were President
Václav Havel and Prime Minister Václav Klaus.
Havel was the first to speak and in a brief statement advocated the development of a civil
society as a task facing the nation after the fall of the communist regime. Klaus dismissed the
idea of a civil society, proclaimed it to be an artificial construction, and opposed to it his concept
of democratic society in which the individual was related to the state through the intermediary of
political parties and free elections. Since I do not recall the year of that debate I do not know
whether it took place before or after Havel had elaborated his view of a civil society in his „New
Year’s Address to the Nation“ on January 1, 1994 (see Václav Havel, The Art of the Impossible:
Politics and Morality in Practice, trans. by Paul Wilson and others. New York: Alfred Knopf,
1997, pp.142-151). Besides its political significance this speech is probably the most elaborate
statement of Havel’s theory of a civil society. Against Havel’s insistence Klaus would argue that
he used the notion of a civil society as a society of citizens as opposed to a society organized on
the grounds of ethnicity or on the grounds of social classes with all the consequences for the
nature, structure and functioning of the state.
Civil Society
Blackwellova encyklopedie politického myšlení, ed. David Miller (Brno: CDK
Proglas/Iota, 1995. str. 341-342) presents a summary history of the development of the idea of
civil society. In the Rome of Cicero’s time the notion of “civilis societas” related not only to the
state but to the conditions in a civilized political community -- its legal systems, citizens’
participation in the manifold “civil” life. John Locke postulated a civil society as one
transcending both the society in the state of nature and the society organized under paternalistic
authority. Both G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx regarded a civil society (buergerliche
Gesellschaft), each from his own philosophical perspective, as an evolutionary stage in the
history of mankind: Hegel as a loss of original solidarity, Marx as a structure serving the interests
of the capitalist bourgeoisie. It is, however, surprising that the contributor of the item on
“občanská společnost” (civil society) in this encyclopedia concludes his text with the following
statement: “For authors in Hegel’s and Marx’s tradition the concept of a civil society has
acquired the meaning of social, economic, and moral organization of modern Western industrial
capitalist society which they consider apart from the state. In general the use of the concept of a
civil society has lost its moral dimension and refers to nonpolitical aspects of the contemporary
social order and hence it is for instance discussible whether there is any conflict or harmony
between civil society and the state”. This ambiguous conclusion sides with both Havel and Klaus
on the one hand but on the other hand its vagueness misses the essential point of the complex
relationship between a civil society and the state, and contemporary political science would add
the relationship of the two to political culture.
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Selected Papers from the 2003 SVU North American Conference, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 26-28 June 2003
In essence and without elaborating in great detail on the structure of a civil society, it is
represented by a network of voluntary associations that are independent of the state. They carry
with them the Ciceronean element of “civilis societas” and the Lockean prerequisite of
independence from some superior authority. It is a network of interaction and exchange created
by individuals asserting their right to satisfy their specific needs and interests in their own way.
The State
This summary definition of a civil society raises the question of the relationship between
a civil society and the state. Irrespective of what definition of the state we use, the principal
element and characteristic in it will be the Weberian “monopoly of legitimate use of force” -legitimate enforcement of decisions applied to the entire community.
This assertion takes me back to the discussion that we had in a panel at the last SVU
Congress in Plzeň in 2002. The two participants from the Demokratický klub in Prague, Zdeněk
Pavlík and Jan Friedlaender, held two opposite views on the relationship between a civil society
and the state. Pavlík maintained that a civil society as defined above not only can but does
coexist with any kind of state – democratic, aristocratic, authoritarian, totalitarian. I shared and
share Friedlaender’s argument that a civil society can exist only in a state guaranteeing the
freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. The absence of these
guarantees precludes a priori the emergence and the development of the essential elements of a
civil society. Moreover, the existence of a civil society is not only the question of these
guarantees. As Petr Pithart on one occasion of exchanges with Klaus and Havel in his above
mentioned address asserted, a civil society prospers if the state not only tolerates a civil society
but supports and cultivates, philosophically and politically and materially, the relationship
between the elements of a civil society and its own institutions. The best form of the state and
the regime that can best meet this requirement is democracy. On the contrary, to Klaus, in whose
eyes democracy is defined by the citizen being directly related to the state, democracy depends
on a civil society and a civil society depends on democracy.
Czechoslovak dissidents understood this political precondition of a civil society when the
communist totalitarian state defined the relationship of its institutions and the individual citizen
only in terms of those associations that were controlled or tolerated by the Party. The Party stood
for the state and the state used these associations in Stalin’s terms as levers and transmission belts
of its power. Václav Benda, one of the leading dissidents, opposed to this absence of a civil
society in Communist Czechoslovakia his concept of polis which asserted that open and
functional coexistence between the state and a civil society in our time is possible only in the
framework of a democratic state as we understand it today.
Political culture
If the state is the legal order and institutions endowed with the authority of enforcement, a
civil society is individuals voluntarily associated with each other for the purpose of satisfying
their material, spiritual or moral needs and goals. But it is still the individual that a civil society
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Selected Papers from the 2003 SVU North American Conference, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 26-28 June 2003
depends on. The individual is its essential building block. What is then important in this respect
are the attitudes and orientations of the individual towards and about both himself and the
political order in which he lives -- in technical terms, his political culture.
In the Czech discussions about political culture, those among people who are not political
scientists or political sociologists, like the journalists, commentators, politicians, the usual
translation of this term is politická kultura to designate whether the politicians speak and behave
kulturně (that is, in a properly cultured fashion). Instead, they should be using in this case the
expression kultura politiky – culture of politics.
In the discussion of the relationship between a civil society, the state, and political culture
the obvious question is what political culture is the most conducive to the development of civil
society and in what kind of political culture will it flourish best. In other words, what kind of
individual political orientations are its backbone and the engine that drives it? The ideal
conditions for a civil society in this respect are threefold. On the cognitive side, in the domain of
what citizens know about public life, the most favorable conditions for a civil society obtain if
the citizens are informed, not only about local conditions, institutions, and interests but well
informed, and if they seek information about the entire community, their state and its
government. On the ethical side lies the capacity of the citizens to pass moral judgment on those
who are responsible for the conduct of what falls into the public domain. The more positive are
those judgments and the more prevalent they are, the more will a civil society be supportive of
the state and the more effective will the state be. Finally, the relationship between the individual
in a civil society and the state and those who stand for the state is not only cognitive and ethical.
It is also affective. If the citizens love their country and their state, if they appreciate their state’s
institutions, and if they have affectionate feelings towards the individual actors in their public
life, the relationship between a civil society and the state will be one of cooperation and mutual
support and instead of tension and conflict.
A Brief Note in Conclusion
President Václav Havel was right and Prime Minister Václav Klaus was wrong in the
debate about a civil society some ten years ago. Klaus was wrong theoretically because a
democracy and a civil society go hand in hand together. One without the other is inconceivable.
He was wrong historically, the movement toward a constitutional and relatively liberal monarchy
in Austria-Hungary was accompanied by the relatively rapid development of a civil society in the
historical lands of future Czechchoslovakia. And he was wrong politically, because the interwar
Czechoslovak democracy was supported by the flourishing civil society as we identified it above.
There is no question that the Communists after the February 1948 coup d´etat destroyed
the civil society of prewar Czechoslovakia, because contrary to Zdeněk Pavlík´s argument a civil
society and a communist dictatorship cannot coexist within the same society and state.
Therefore, it was no local or historical accident when a new civil society began to grow in
Czechoslovakia after the revolution of November 1989. However, the rebirth and the evolution
of civil society in the Czech Republic has been slow and strenuous, for three reasons. First,
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Selected Papers from the 2003 SVU North American Conference, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 26-28 June 2003
because a civil society cannot be created overnight na zelené louce (just out in some old field),
but is a product of natural growth, both for the individual and the society. Second, because of the
fatigue of the citizens or their excess ambitions, both provoked by the lifelong deprivations
inflicted on them by the Communist regime. And third, because the people of Klaus´s persuasion
have been disinclined to support it. But a civil society is, nevertheless, there, and it is new and
growing. Havel´s encouraging statement of 1994 is as inspiring now as it was then: „Everything
new and good that is beginning to flourish around us we need to cultivate with great care, to ware
it daily and watch it closely.“
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