Programska knjižica - Hrvatsko filozofsko društvo

DRAGICA VUJADINOVIĆ
Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade, Serbia /
Pravni fakultet, Sveučilište u Beogradu, Srbija
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
AND IN THE NEW-ESTABLISHED COUNTRIES
Processes of development of both theory and practice of civil society in
the former Yugoslavia will be considered as an important dimension of pluralization
and modernization of the society and state in SFRY, which to a certain
extent and in a controversial way contributed to the break-up of the common
federal state and to processes of transformation of the “real-socialist” Yugoslav
republics into independent liberal-democratic states in status nascendi.
The comparability, similarity, and recognizability of phenomena related
both to the development of civil society and to the obstacles to its development
in Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, have their roots in their common
history during the existence of the First and the Second Yugoslavia. The important
common experience of the former SFRY during the 1970s and 1980s
is linked to modernization processes – under the influence of the West – in its
economy, culture, family, and education. It should be noted straight away that
this modernization experience represented a counterweight to traditionalism,
patriarchalism, the dominant collectivistic ideology of initially communism
and then nationalism (more precisely, ethnic nationalism), which marked the
process of abolishment of the common state. What is even more important,
the “counterweight” mentioned above was insufficiently articulated without a
strong social fulcrum, while the democratic deficit in the field of institutional
solutions and in the area of civil society resulted in a bloody dissolution of the
common state.
The abovementioned modernization processes and influences resulted in
the appearance of the initial elements of civil society in most of the republics
of the common state (particularly in the most developed Republic of Slovenia,
partially in Croatia and in Serbia), in the form of social movements, dissident
activities, manifestations of civil disobedience. The discourse and practice of
the “suppressed civil society” (Pavlović, ed. 1996) were used beyond and in
spite of borders between republics within the common state, as a tool for fighting
the authoritarian communist (Titoist and post-Titoist) régime.
At the time of the disintegration of the former SFRY, a differentiation,
realignment and contextual redefinition of the language of civil society and its
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