CSF publication - Civil Society Forum - CEE Trust

Who represents the citizen in CEE in 2009?Colorrevolutions- goldendays of civilsociety?New actors andtechnologyCompetitionon the publicsphere -decline of civilsociety?there was also an advancement of the idea of civil society, and the enormousimportance attached to civil society, because of the international communityand the strategy of democracy and human rights promotion by western statesassociated this very much with the process of globalization as well. We have bigthe international organizations - Human [Rights] Watch, Amnesty International,Doctors without Borders and so on, which were playing a very important roleand this somehow was a manifestation of the rising importance of the internationalcivil society as a concept.The next steps - and I would say the summit of the popularity of the conceptit - came with the color revolutions. Once again we are back in our region inthe larger sense of the term, of course [including] Serbia in 2000 and the roleof the youth in the organization [of the anti-Milosevic movement]. AfterwardsGeorgia’s rose revolution and the importance of youth organizations in Ukraineduring the orange revolution in 2004, and we had the much bigger Kirgiz caseof 2005 - and it seemed that we really had some progress of democracy andhuman rights assured by grassroots’ initiatives. There was a feeling of rising powerof NGOs and of soft power [in general]. Information and new means of informationplayed an enormous role, before there were two types or ways ofinternational organizations: multinational organizations, corporations and theRoman Catholic Church which played a really important role. Protests weremuch more decentralized. Now that we have new types of NGOs and diminishingcost of information, internet has played an enormous role. Also in popularizationof these color revolutions, these countries influenced each other verymuch, and there was a fear in Russia and other not very democratic countriesthat this model will be introduced [in other places].The last case was Iran – I remember very well that I was together with AdamMichnik invited to Iran, practically to talk about what to do (although it wascoded language as an “intellectual meeting”) what to do to put in questionthe mullah’s regime. Actually the organizer was arrested afterwards and accusedof trying to organize a color revolution in Iran, so this is the measure of theimportance of the phenomena. To the point where their appearance was conceivedby others as a threat to power, NGOs were really considered as a worldsuperpower. Maybe NGOs contributed to democratization in certain countries,especially to those I mentioned, [at least they] contributed very much tochanges and pluralization.Then about the negative and the problems. I mentioned once already thatcivil society was a great myth and this myth has been put into question, a firstsign is the real situation of civil society in our countries, the second is that everybodyhas escaped from that minimal or moral civil society that we knew duringopposition time to politics. All big names of Polish opposition as well as Slovak,Czech, Hungarian went into politics. The minimal or moral civil society was asubstitute in times when direct opposition was impossible, and all those people[have since] left. Of course there is also a competition [for people, ideas, attention?]in different sectors - the political society, the economic society, themarket and the church, especially in countries where the church is very strongPoland Lithuania, to some extent Slovakia.There is a second problem, that of donors. Civil society after 89 was built withgreat generosity and help of western donors, most of all American donors. We12