CSF publication - Civil Society Forum - CEE Trust

Who represents the citizen in CEE in 2009?Correlationdemocracyand civilsocietyintervention from outside contributed very much to democratization. The rightto intervene and the obligation to protect, in a way it was the summit of internationallaw institutionalization, carrying a policy of an open world overcomingthe traditional concept of sovereignty. These problems are much biggernow because of China, now we have a competitive model which shows thatit is not true that you need a democracy to have development, or you needcivil society to have development. China is a country which at least until nowis extremely centralized, where there is no space for political privileges and nospace for civil organizations, and this model is extremely successful in terms ofdevelopment up until now. A big part of the world, also due to old antiwesterncomplexes, is now turning towards china. Even a big part of the left, because ofanti-western, anti-capitalism, anti-liberal attitudes, in the re-directing of themselvesare observing attentively what China is doing.There is also a new discovery which is quite chocking, and this is the discovery inour countries that democracy and civil society is not so correlated as it used tobe according to Toqueville’s thoughts. We have in our countries democraciesthat are not perfect, far from perfect, but which are quite decent democraciesalong with very weak civil societies. This is also a problem to discuss: what is reallythe relation between civil society and full-fledged deep democracy, not onlyformal democracy from the point of view of elections, but defined as a cultureof pluralism? Of course [a culture of pluralism – democracy in its broad terms]needs civil society, but this is a long historical process apparently and it appearsthat we can have [some form of basic] functioning democracy without civilsociety. We have very interesting internal critique of civil society in our countries– one famous example is Vaclav Claus which considers civil society “HumanRight-ism”, a post-socialist collectivist discourse against the liberal individualistdemocratic society. We have also critique from the quite opposite camp, fromPolish influential ex Prime Minister Jaroslav Kaszinski, violent critique against civilsociety that this is against the state [and contribute to] weakening of the nationstate. [Similar to] the Jacobinian vision which is very negative, that civil societyis a way of doing politics by people who are not able to form political parties.There is also critique of civil society concept from the left – e.g. in the article byAgnieszka Graff – [she claims] that civil society is an antipolitical concept andwe should instead try to build a true pluralist political system with clear positionsand clash of ideas, because the best democracies can function only with sucha concept. I will finish without conclusions, because there are no conclusionjust questions, which I hope will be not only negative but can contribute to ourcontinued discussion.Is democracyworking?Wawrzyniec Smoczynski (moderator): The purpose of this session is tosee what lies behind the concepts that are used to describe our political andsocial realities in the region. Because I think that there is an increased sense thatthese concepts are not really describing what we are living in. I would like tostart with Ivan Krastev and a slightly strange question: if you were to put yourselfin the position of Alexis de Tocqueville and instead of going to America wouldmake a travel around Central and Eastern Europe 20 years after the fall of communism,what would you think would be his diagnosis? What kind of politicalsystem have we come up with, would he at least describe it as a democracy?Ivan Krastev: First I was asked to replace Darina [Malova] which is alreadydifficult, and now you are trying to put me in Tocqueville’s shoes which is slightly14