CSF publication - Civil Society Forum - CEE Trust

Who represents the citizen in CEE in 2009?No commonobjectiveInstrumentalizationand the EUAleksander Smolar: First of all I don’t think we should formulate an objectivefor civil society. Civil society has no objective, this is the reality of interconnectedpeople acting together in a spontaneous or organized way. [Individual] NGOsthey should have objectives, but these NGOs are only a part of civil society. Ourway of thinking has to be different. It is exactly Tocquevillian, [at this point] therewasn’t a place for NGOs, they didn’t exist at that time. The problem of interconnectedness,civil society is interconnected in a spontaneous way, and I wouldsay that Europe is much more integrated on the level of civil society than on thepolitical level today. This is a spontaneous process.The third question is very interesting, that of European Union and instrumentalizationof civil society. It is very interesting to watch the World Bank and theInternational Monetary Fund, when they are writing about civil society they arewriting in instrumental terms. How civil society can solve the problems of thedeveloping world for example. That they are often more efficient e.g., which isok, but [although] it is very well that NGOs are taking care of it, it also shows thedanger they are in of becoming just cheaper subcontractors. The problem ofinterdependence of people [is that] there must be a certain tensions betweenindependence and at the same time [someone?] executing very importantpositive role for the community, national or international.Wawrzyniec Smoczynski: As a final note, I would like to come back to theinitial question and ask who speaks for the citizen in 2009.Slawomir Sierakowski: Of course the big capital. And reacting to what IvanKrastev said, he wants to be realistic and we live in a world where god is dead,socialism is dead, and even as Foucault said, humans [humanism?] are dead.I am thinking if this realm of cynical reason is the end point of politics or a realstarting point where you can reinvent values? Another answer could be thatwe still have some kind of structural problems, like ecological problems e.g. thedanger of intellectual property - it may be that in some time, our communicationwill be a property of someone like Bill Gates. These are structural [problems]to which we will have to find a collective answer, we have to reinvent politics.Clash ofexperiencesIvan Krastev: They are not speaking they are singing these days, throughYouTube. The basic problem is different, when we say that there are commonproblems and you are going back to the same things you were fighting. If yougo to places like India or China, you are going to hear that all these environmentalthings are coming from the west and are just new ways of globalizationand colonalization, trying to deprive the Indians and the Chinese of their right todevelopment. I don’t think we will have the clash of ideologies in the same wayas before, but there will be the clash of frameworks and a clash of experiences.In this world the problem of who speaks for who is going to be very difficult,because there are going to be contending speakers all the time articulatingdifferent experiences.A battlefield ofrepresentationMilla Mineva: I can only agree with Ivan and as Rayna said in the beginningof this session, we have shifting consensuses and divisions. Shifting entitiesspeaks for citizens in different moments, the problem is whether citizens recognizethose speakers themselves, and this will be the new battlefield.25