1 Transformation as modernisation
Sociological readings of post-communist lifeworlds
Sub-cultures of sociological activism
Shortly before the collapse of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia recognition grew among social scientists that socio-cultural networks at the micro-level were an important site for the generation of social capital and civic potential. ‘Makeshift’ institutions, a ‘second’ economy and ‘second’ society, together with a ‘private’ public discourse were elements of state socialist society with part-functional, part-disfunctional consequences, depending on the timescale of observation. Such ‘islands of positive deviation’ met social needs which the system failed, and compensated in some measure for the ‘hollowing out’ of the meso-sphere of civil society. Whereas practices sustained and/or promoted within the ‘official sphere’ had problematic implications for the process of democratisation, it seemed plausible, on the cusp of the post-communist era, that some of the structures and modes of behaviour developed within the ‘second society’ could become a reservoir of energy for the recolonisation of civil society or the emergence of new social actors substantially interested in democratisation and marketisation (Machonin and Tuček 1996: 15).
By naming and locating these positive and negative potentials, Czech and Slovak sociologists in the 1980s had formulated a critique of the prevailing system, without explicitly committing themselves to a competing macro-social or macro-economic regulatory principle (such as capitalism). Róbert Roško's reflection on the second congress of the Slovak Sociological Society in September 1989 — ‘a retrospective reading of the congress materials gives me a good feeling that we didn’t overlook any of the urgent transformational and modernising tasks which ailed Slovakia on the eve of the November [regime] change’ (Roško and Macháček 2000: 6–7) — is largely valid.1 In particular some Czech and especially Slovak sociologists had begun to define themselves as activists for a process of social transformation:
An ‘activist’ sociology is starting to take shape, closely connected with a sociology of everyday life, with creativity, with advisory activities, and with the orientation of local and collective social movements in authentic structures. New social movements are emerging on the basis of various institutions, developmental phenomena and needs — work initiatives, interest-based cultural and recreational activities…. The success of such movements and innovatory social changes demands the ability for self-organisation, [and thus] creates a wide space for sociologists’ creative involvement.
(Bunčák 1987: 345)
Following its rehabilitation as a discipline after the 1950s (when it was labelled a ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’ and temporarily banished from research and teaching institutes) sociology was formally recognised as a science which could contribute towards maximising the functionality of the social system. Thus from the early 1970s sociologists were dispatched to medium and large enterprises to devise means of influencing the social development of work collectives, deal with labour relations, absenteeism, recruitment and personnel policy.2 Ironically it was precisely the development of enterprise sociology, and other ‘branch’ sociologies such as agricultural, health and urban sociology (Stena 1988: 361) which, by providing academics with experience of practical problems in the real world, informed the formulation of a self-critique of sociology's service role under communism — of its complicity in the central planning approach, where respectability was bought by the production of policy-relevant, ideologically suitable output. In practice this had meant serving and bolstering the interests of the state, as the assumed personification of an all-societal interest, while neglecting partial social interests.
More and more practitioners held that sociology should instead acknowledge the variability and contradictory nature of social interests; should broaden its orientation towards end-users other than the state and official directive organs, working instead with various social groups and movements (ibid.: 360) or, in the case of enterprise sociologists, joining in the life of work collectives (Musil 1989:110); that it should seek to involve local actors as participants in social change, because the social and cultural capital of specific communities would in any case affect the success or failure of social programmes (Krivý 1988: 422); and should engage in a dialogue with the public and citizens in order to tap ‘a broader and cultivated reservoir for the generation of adequate approaches and decisions’ (ibid.: 420). This conception was in contradistinction to ‘sociotechnika’, promoted as the social scientific equivalent of applied natural science (Pichiia 1988). Responding to Pichňa's paper at a 1987 workshop on the subject, Helena Woleková argued:
Despite the close similarity of sociotechnika and engineering as a type of professional human activity they are qualitatively different processes of putting science into practice. [The difference] has to do with the self-regulating abilities of the working [of social systems]. The process of sociotechnical invention (unlike engineering) must therefore imply the active involvement of the object — people or social groups — through participation and social control.
(Woleková 1988: 358)
Thus the elaboration of ‘sociological activism’ represented a reorientation away from concern with regulation (of society, social organisations, social progress) to concern with self-regulation (of social organisms).
The most sophisticated explication of a specific methodological approach was undertaken by a team led by Fedor Gál, later to become the leader of Public Against Violence (see Gál 1989). Papers by Gál and his collaborators refer to Alain Touraine's concept of sociological intervention, the influence of which is obvious. They define the role of the sociologist as the initiation of social movements through facilitating a ‘moderated dialogue’ among the interested parties of a given social problem.
The task of problem-oriented sociological investigations… [is] to articulate interests, cultivate and mobilise the activity of all interested parties – including the lay public – for the purpose of [finding] a qualified solution to the social problems which concern them, or should concern them…. People… should themselves become the ‘sociologists’ of their own lives. The task of the professional sociologist is then to enable them to do so.
(Frič et al. 1988: 75)
These were not just noble intentions: sociologists did actually attempt to facilitate something like Gál's dialogue or ‘multilogue’ in a variety of concrete situations, for example by initiating and supporting self-help groups among out-patients. The immediate aim in this instance was to meet the needs of a more educated citizenry dissatisfied with bureaucratic health provision, who wanted instead to take responsibity for their own health (Melucci has written of similar trends in advanced capitalist societies as one source of energy for new social movements (Melucci 1989). The broader aim, however, was the creation of a space where roles, practices and modes of communication could be learned which were potentially transferrable to other spheres of an emerging civil society:
Group-based self-help can prepare people for the missing social role of individuals helping others… [can] overcome feelings of powerlessness and uncover hidden reserves of human potential…. In the framework of self-help groups some individuals find the meaning and sense of their own life…. It's a matter of releasing the latent creative energy of individuals and groups.
(Bútora 1988: 345–6)
Separate but related developments occurred in various sociological ‘subcultures’, usually those that dealt with social milieux overlooked by the dominant branches of the communist social scientific establishment. For example in the early 1980s a working team at the Prague Sportpropag institute undertook a series of experimental studies of sporting organisations, clubs and informal groups which sought to explore the social ecology of a ‘group universe’ in its temporality and spatiality, and to intervene in the reproduction and mobilisation of each group's internal resources as a participant observer and facilitator, often using interactive communicative games as a research technique (Kabele et al. 1982a, 1982b; Kabele 1983a, 1983b; Kabele and Vovsová 1983). Social ecology, viewed as a ‘bourgeois science’, had briefly found an institutional home in the Institute for Landscape Ecology (1971–5) until its abolition. Pseudonyms such as anthropoecology or ‘the psychology and sociology of time and space’ were later invented, under cover of which Bohuslav Blažek and colleagues were able to develop research projects based on diagnostic techniques such as games (Blažek 1982), working more or less freelance, sometimes hired as consultants by teams of architects and town-planners, and simultaneously carrying out private research on the social ecology of children, families and the disabled (Blažek 1998: 25–30).
Although some social ecologists such as Miroslav Gottlieb were not able to pursue their academic interests between 1975 and 1990, the directions in which they then struck out flow from a diagnosis previously formulated: ‘the sociology of the totalitarian era suffered from a severe illiteracy. It was unable to read an intricate text written by small, marginal groups. It ostentatiously dismissed their attitudes, living values and philosophies’ (Lapka and Gottlieb 2000: 18). Hence the motivation for a longitudinal research project begun in 1991 on small-scale family farming, which made use of dialogical techniques based on in-depth, informal communicative exchange with the subjects studied (understood as partners and end-users of the knowledge produced) and conceived explicitly as ‘practical participation, practical assistance’ to a social group ‘about which virtually nothing had been known for fifty years’ (ibid.: 19, 13), as it sought to re-establish the conditions for its existence. The authors do not disguise their normative belief that the revival of private family farming could play a key role in the renewal of life in the Czech countryside because of an ‘ecological consciousness’ they attribute to the peasantry (resting partly in religiosity) and because of its historical role as a rural middle class with a strong commitment to democratic values (ibid.: 16–17).
In all these cases the active exploration of densely narrativised social worlds (whether recreational affective communities, traditional village life-worlds or intimate family circles) was part of a search for alternative narratives of development, and closely paralleled developments in ‘dissident’ Czech philosophy, where Jan Patočka and after him Václav Havel identified the potential for spiritual renewal in a return to the ecological consciousness of the countryside, or, in Havel's case, in the ‘stories’ he read as an implicit challenge to ‘totalitarianism’ in the autobiographies of his fellow prisoners (Havel 1988a). According to Illner (1992) examples can also be found in urban and land-use sociologies from the 1960s to the 1980s of approaches which focused on the intrinsic functioning of local communities, looking at issues such as territorial self-identification and developmental preferences, which, he argues, are very useful for investigating the local democratic potential of communities in the post-communist era.
These sociological sub-cultures have three things in common. First, they all occupied ‘islands of positive deviation’ both in their isolation from the mainstream of Marxist social science, which afforded them a measure of immunity from ideological pressures, and in their instinctive recognition that marginal social phenomena could be interesting as the carriers of alternative normative systems. Urban sociologists, for example, were not incorporated into architectural design teams for housing developments, but it was precisely this formal exclusion that enabled informal cooperation with certain architects to develop in such a way that sociological ‘outputs’ need not be formulated in the sociotechnical forms demanded by planners (‘Beseda’ 1984: 339); enterprise sociologists, because they represented a completely new profession within manufacturing firms in the early 1970s, found themselves with substantial freedom to determine their own job description, as well as freedom from the structuring of their outputs by routinised planning processes. Second, their understanding of the role of the sociologist broke the mould of the disinterested observer and committed them to an active engagement with social reality (as a process unfolding in time and space) and to a cooperative exchange with a diversity of local end-users such as social organisations, trade unions, local authorities, architects, economic organisations and self-help groups. Although practical applications were limited, sociologists had begun to reflect critically on the identity of end-users of sociological knowledge and the forms of partnership this could involve. This was most urgent in the sphere of enterprise sociology, where the climate of suspicion which greeted the first sociologists to be appointed to manufacturing firms in the early 1970s impelled them to seek allies among the various actors within an enterprise by offering genuinely useful cooperation; often they became activists for expanding forms of worker participation, or even aides to the formation of a worker interest (Suňog and Demčák 1982; Woleková 1981), establishing relatively open fora for the expression of workers’ demands and opinions which were more acceptable than official ‘production conferences’ (Uram 1982: 108). Third, redefining the sociologist as someone who intervenes in social reality necessitated a radical methodological innovation involving a turn away from both number-crunching empirical surveys and structural analysis towards the social-psychological and moral dimensions of society implicated in the cognitive transactions of real social actors. The result (or at least the proposal) was an increase in reflexivity which welcomed feedback from society and thereby allowed sociological discourses to be affected by the ‘natural’ modes of narrativisation of communities, families and other (relatively) autonomous collective actors which had sustained considerable self-regulative capacities in opposition to ‘totalitarian’ pressures towards uniformity and regularity. The logical outcome of these trends, in many ways, was Sociological Forum, an initiative of sociologists affiliating to Civic Forum in 1989–90, as a platform for their own engagement in post-communist transformaion (see Sociologický časopis no. 4 1990).
Sociology and modernisation
Since sociology as a science has its origins in a theory of modernisation or ‘social progress’ it is not surprising that Czech and Slovak sociologists also took great interest in modernisation theory both before and after November 1989. What arguably made the concept particularly appealing was the challenge which the reality of state socialism presented to common assumptions in Europe and America that modernisation is a ‘one-way street’ (Možný 1999a: 85). In theoretical treatises modernisation is attributed an extensive conceptual range, as a process which implies the mobilisation of ‘human potential’, the self-organisation of society, the articulation and diversification of the interests and identities of social groups, the establishment of human actors as autonomous historical subjects, and the mobilisation of social movements. At the heart of the concept is a dynamism — a process of becoming rather than merely being (Bunčák 1990: 245). Moreover, since assessments of the ‘modernity’ of prevailing value systems and social norms in Czechoslovakia and its successor states before and since 1989 have tended to produce conclusions that have been ambivalent tending towards pessimistic (see Roško 1987; Boguszak et al. 1990; Machonin 1997; Rabušic 2000) modernisation in this context possesses a strong normative thrust.
Its genesis is to be found in the 1980s critique of the conservative-technocratic ‘modernisation’ associated with the extensive mode of economic development pursued by the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Informed by normative assumptions of a civilisational movement towards a post-industrial, informational mode of development, that regime was understood as de-modernising. The real socialist mode of development failed to mobilise society's social and cultural capital, and in many cases deliberately dismantled it: it suppressed the self-regulative faculties of civil society by destroying horizontal patterns of social integration, delegitimising feedback from society to the state (Stena 1990: 289–90; Krivý 1989: 344); it also suppressed individual initiative and reinforced paternalistic or communitarian forms of socialisation (Krivý and Szomolányiová in Bunčák 1990: 247–8; Turčan 1992: 51); it cultivated an ‘institutional mode of thinking’ symptomatic of the failure of official organisations to represent real social interests (Zich and Čukan in Stena 1990: 295–6); it resuscitated ‘archaic’ patterns of social relations and symbolic interaction based on status rather than contract, ritualised rather than negotiated legitimacy and clan-like social networks (Možný 1999a: 84).
Even in Slovakia the impact of central planning could be classed as anti-modernising notwithstanding its superficially positive quantitative influence on economic development, industrialisation and urbanisation. One of the strongest critiques of socialist central planning was developed by Slovak urban sociologists, alarmed by the deleterious impact of urbanisation programmes on the social and natural environment. According to Ivan Kusý the very origins of an urban sociology in Slovakia (from the mid-1960s) are linked to diagnostic reflection on the visible problems of the expansion of Slovak towns (‘Beseda’ 1984: 331). However in the mid-1970s this critique was tentative, extending only to recommendations that planning should be reoriented towards the identification and functional integration of urban(ised) territorial units rather than simply supporting continued concentration of social and economic activities into the largest cities, a change in conception which was presented in terms of a modernisation of urbanisation itself (Kusý 1976). One of the leading protagonists of the critique which later developed could nevertheless still champion urbanisation as a means of intensifying economic and social life and liberating the individual from the place-boundedness of local communities (Pašiak 1976: 116–17), claiming that ‘Slovakia still has the chance to avoid all the known negative consequences associated with the concentration of populations in cities’ (ibid.: 120). A decade on the tone had changed, and he specified these consequences as the destruction of rural community life on the one hand and, on the other, the creation of monofunctional residential estates in the expanding cities, lacking adequate social amenities and cultural resources, and characterised by an absence of neighbourhood and spontaneous social control (Pašiak 1985: 165–6; 1990: 309). Earlier critiques (Francu 1976; Kuhn 1976) were formulated as contributions to the improvement of planning procedures; later these very procedures were attacked for the exclusion of local democracy, self-government and civic participation from land-use planning, which therefore failed to recognise the ‘social potential’ embedded in territorial communities with their ‘genius loci’ (Pašiak 1985:172–3). As in health provision, positive trends were identified outside formal institutions, for example among ‘more active residential communities [whose] self-help solutions in organising clubs, playing fields and collective social events… indicate certain possibilities for the improvement of the lived environment in terms of the development of neighbourhood relations’ (ibid.: 166); or in the ‘activisation of informal associations in defence of their housing and living conditions, in defence of the ecological qualities of the lived and natural environment, in defence of unique architecture and monuments etc’ (Falt’an, in Pašiak 1990: 313). Even unashamedly Marxist accounts which defended the achievements of the first phase of the ‘building of socialism’ began to criticise the continued reliance of territorial and economic planners on extensive developmental models and administrative decision-making which reduced the ‘adaptability’ of rural communities by suppressing traditional and spontaneous aspects of village life (such as small-scale cultivation on private plots), imposing urban living standards or failing to take into account the way territorial systems are integrated into a ‘space of flows’, a discourse which enabled them to argue for the ‘eco-logisation’ and ‘ruralisation’ of towns as a process complementary to the urbanisation of the countryside (Slepička 1984). The normative use of concepts such as ‘space of flows’, ‘city regions’, ‘agglomerations’ and other terms associated with the current deconcentrated or post-industrial phase of urbanisation amounted to a critique of the blockages and deformations to social and economic modernisation which were attributed to central planning. Essentially this is the same interpretive framework adopted today by Czech sociologist Karel Muller, who, referring to the ideas of Beck and Giddens, attempts to explain the ongoing social transformation as a shift from ‘simple’ to ‘reflexive’ modernisation, delayed by twenty or thirty years in comparison with advanced western societies (Muller 1998: 72–3).3
The post-communist transformation can thus be conceived as a return to an interrupted or deformed process of social and cultural modernisation. Both Machonin (1997: 114) and Szomolányi (1999: 13–15) adopt this interpretation and direct attention to the effects on society's stock of social and cultural capital, and the potential to mobilise these resources. In this paradigm transformation policies are to be judged by criteria of mobilisation rather than short-term economic or social ‘effectiveness’ (Havelka and Muller 1996). Mobilisation is required to overcome barriers deeply embedded in micro-level structures (Muller and Štědronský 2000: 10, 14) and the onus is on actors with high human potential to initiate a process of disembedding social actors from traditional (anti-modern, pre-modern) institutional arrangements (ibid.: 106–7).4
These principles can also be seen in a number of policy-relevant sociological initiatives throughout the first decade after November 1989. According to these, the state itself could and should take up the role of mobiliser or enabler, managing the risks associated with a modern society but not dampening or eliminating the interest and activity of other agents of social policy, and respecting the principle of subsidiarity in its formulation and implementation. Thus in early 1990 seven Czech and two Slovak sociologists wrote to President Havel:
The social sphere is where the use of the potential hidden in our nations is being decided, and without its activisation even the best intentions of economists and politicians will remain unfulfilled. It is the ground on which individuals’ and families’ everyday life is played out, on to which big historical changes and society-wide processes are projected.
(‘Prohlásení sociologů’ in Potůček 1999: 238)
The same basic modernising aims of activising human potential in both the formulation of public policy (by initiating wide-ranging public debate on issues like education or health reform) and its implementation (by devolving rights and responsibilities as far as possible to actors in civil society and different forms of self-government) have been present in civic initiatives in which sociologists have played a key role during the 1990s in the Czech Republic, such as OMEGA and Impuls 99, as well as in the proposal for a national ‘social doctrine’ published more recently (‘Návrh sociální doktríny České Republiky’ 2000: 3–4).
Human potential has become a keyword for a number of Czech and Slovak sociologists interested in problems of transformation, especially for those who locate modernisation at the heart of that process. It is understood as both a precondition and a result of human actions and interactions within civil society, linking the institutional realm (where it co-determines the opportunity structures within which actors operate) and the self-creative realm (where it defines how actors embedded in particular cultural milieux articulate their identities and coordinate mutual relations). Martin Potůček, both in his original 1989 paper on the idea, and in a 1999 book where he reintroduced the concept, uses human potential essentially to theorise society's and individuals’ capacity to manage radical change. It is thus a concept genetically linked to transformation, which it renders an inherently ‘path-dependent’ process. In both his pre- and post-1989 elaborations of the concept Potůček is interested in how an exogenous impulse towards change is conditioned by the choices actors make deploying the resources given them. Likewise the policy recommendations5 offered on how to increase human potential (in both eras) are geared towards enhancing society's and individuals’ competence and initiative in managing change.
One of the most innovative attempts to utilise the concept of human potential in a study of social transformation was the project led by Róbert Roško at the Sociological Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences called ‘Formation of civil society in Slovakia’, which was commissioned shortly before November 1989 and completed in 1994 (Roško 1995). Roško focuses on that aspect of human potential seen as most strongly suppressed by the communist system, and which would be key to successful completion of the modernisation of Slovak society — what he calls ‘civic potential’. Following Potûček, Roško disaggregates civic potential into several sub-components pertaining to different citizenship roles, namely democratic potential, ‘consciousness’ potential (how informed a citizen is about the workings of political systems), action potential, associative potential and delegative potential. Thus disaggregated the concept formed the basis for an empirical research project to ‘measure’ the civic potential of Slovak society and differentiate between different social groups. The concept is adapted by Slosiarik in this volume and applied to the comparative study of two small rural communities.
Other authors formulated prognoses about post-communist developments based on a similar philosophy: Stena, for example, pinpointed a critical moment of the transformation in the emergence or non-emergence of ‘social self-regulation’, when people react to the changing situation ‘by means of civil society… using the feedback mechanisms given by social innovation’ (1991: 14). Arguing that neither the free market nor political democracy can compensate for the missing modern meso-structure of social life, he predicted (accurately) anti-reform mobilisations as well as escapist responses and accordingly pointed to the ‘norm-creating process’ as a key arena in which the success of social transformation will be decided (ibid.: 17). Hopes were invested in renewed self-government as a forum for the realisation of latent civic potential (Sopóci 1991a and Sopóci 1991b), and the continuation of a relatively centralised public administration following the passage of laws on municipal administration and municipal property in 1990–1 was interpreted as an institutional barrier to the proper development of a local citizenship in Slovakia (Sopóci 1992b:43). But there were also warnings that power decentralisation in conditions of low civic potential and social demobilisation could facilitate the emergence of ‘local totalities’, merely providing scope for locally influential and organised actors to secure their particular interests6 (Sopóci 1992a: 452; Slosiarik in this volume). Hopes were also placed in trade unions and the emergence of an organised employer interest, if they could re-establish themselves as subjective actors rather than systemic agents and thereby help overcome the major source of the former system's inefficiency — its inability to learn, due to the deliberate blocking of feedback channels between state and civil society (Čambáliková 1992: 64).
One assumption shared by each of these authors is that individual and collective actor-formation, and in particular the cultivation of a modern, democratic citizenship – rather than institution-formation in a narrower sense — will be determining in the democratisation of social and cultural life, and that this process will take place predominantly within the affective communities where day-to-day lives are lived, drawing on the discursive resources reproduced by small-scale socio-cultural practices and communicative networks. Macro-level institutional reforms can be facilitating or inhibiting, but not the decisive factors. On the other hand democratic or ‘citizenocratic’ actor-formation will scarcely be possible without public education, and thus a key role is envisaged for opinion-forming elites and intellectual activists, ‘deepening the connection between theory and the [actual] patterns of civil society’ (Fibich 1999: 92).
Civil society: operationalising a concept
Although civil society is a major theme of the literature on post-communist transformation inside and outside the countries affected, the concept remains enigmatic. If many commentators were initially concerned that the dominance of social movements such as Polish Solidarity, Czech Civic Forum and Slovak Public Against Violence could block the development of societal and political pluralism (Lewis 1994: 18) or hinder interest articulation and party formation (Pakulski 1995: 421), more recently concern has shifted to the possibility that political society has been so firmly established as the dominant arena that civil society is demobilised, and references to a ‘second phase’ of democratic consolidation urge the reestablishment of civil society as a relevant issue (Ágh 1998: 17). The account offered by Hungarian political scientist Attila Ágh strikes a chord with the Czech and Slovak approaches outlined above in that he connects a (desired) substitution of actors on the ‘stage’ of democratisation (civil society organisations replace political parties – which had initially ‘run amok’ – as the key actors of democratic consolidation) with a rehabilitation of the concept of modernisation, as ‘a middle-level abstraction, indicating slow and evolutionary changes… continuous adaptation and innovation within the given polity,… practice-oriented [and] “earth-bound”’ (ibid.: 212). Yet Ágh's account can be seen as expedient in its acceptance of the necessity of the initial dominance of institutional-political reform, followed only afterwards by actor-formation as the culmination of the transformation process: a modern, interest-based, participative politics presupposes the prior emergence and continual reconfirmation and adjustment of actors based upon reflexive identity-formation in a relatively autonomous civic sphere. ‘Overparticisation’ and ‘overparliamentaristion’ – the pathological traits of the political transition in East Central Europe according to Ágh (1998: 50) – are unlikely to recede until processes of actor-formation within civil society become normalised in social practice at all levels, which is hardly likely to be encouraged by political actors which still regard organised interests as rivals.7
This debate about the sequencing and complementarity of different levels of the transformation process relates to a key dispute surrounding the concept of civil society. Commentators have been divided between those who view civil society as a spontaneously developing sector and those who link its development to macro-level institutional reforms. The concept of civil society therefore needs to be more thoroughly problematised if it is to be a useful analytical tool. It assumed greatest analytical power when applied to authoritarian contexts (see Keane 1988 and Keane 1998): it has even been suggested that revival of interest in civil society is due substantially to its having been embraced by activists in Eastern Europe and Latin America to conceptualise a struggle for democracy, either explicitly, as in Poland (Cohen and Arato 1992: 31–6), or intuitively as in Czechoslovakia, through related concepts such as ‘anti-(non-)political politics’ and ‘parallel polis’ (Havel 1988b; Benda 1990). In both cases the concept was understood reflexively as a shorthand for self-creative initiatives existing outside and in opposition to the state sphere. In Czechoslovakia they existed mostly in private rather than public spaces, which hints at problems in mobilising such social capital for the formation of the type of civil society associated with a late modern capitalist democracy. Social self-defence mechanisms against the intrusive power of communist state institutions led to the revival of familial and other traditional, highly localised identities and solidarities, which in turn ended up colonising the state. This social capital can play a similarly ambiguous role in democratisation and marketisation — resisting the socially atomising logic of market forces, whilst also hampering the construction of ‘spontaneous sociabilities’ at a level between the state and the family (Možný 1999b: 30–1; Ryšavý 1999: 32–3). Machonin, who conceives the second society in terms of interests (poorly represented by the communist state) rather than identities, also detects its legacy in ‘hybrid’ social institutions which cannot categorically be labelled pre-or post, pro-or anti-transformation (1997:106).8
In late modern democracies civil society can be defined normatively as a public space fulfilling a range of mediatory functions through institutionalised channels connected to the political system, while still allowing independent self-creative activity to thrive (Castoriadis 1997; Melucci 1989: 227–30; Melucci 1996: 10). This presents problems of coordination, which can be illustrated by glancing at the condition in which Italian society found itself in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘propel[led] beyond industrial society without an institutional modernization of the society at large having taken place’ (Melucci 1996: 276). Such a situation was characterised by the ‘under-representation’ or, conversely, the ‘hyper-politicisation’ of identities and interests in civil society, at precisely the moment when deeper civilisational changes were provoking an unprecedented diversification of identities and interests and their primary expression as various forms of collective action. The predictable result was the degeneration of social movements into residuality, marginality or ‘integralism’ (clinging dogmatically to a fundamental identity), manifest as withdrawal into sects or expressive violence. What Italy lacked was a sufficiently modernised political system to mobilise (representatively or delegatively, by creating and securing spaces for self-determination) the potential for social innovation embodied by the diversity of forms of collective action constantly emerging in complex societies — potential which has a short shelf-life, and will be rapidly consumed (or at least reduced to purely cultural innovation) if it is unable to be channelled and institutionalised so as to produce tangible policy outcomes (ibid.: 259–83). Thus despite the ‘internal richness extant in civil society’, ‘the Italian political system was unable to absorb protest and harness its modernizing thrust’ (ibid.: 279,274).
Some analagous problems — in terms of a failure to cope with modernisation in its full complexity, in which the main shortcomings relate to blocked political modernisation — undoubtedly exist in contemporary Czech and Slovak society. As Myant points out in the following chapter, the Czech debate on civil society typically still clings to a simplistic dualistic understanding of the term (according to him both the Klausist and Havelian versions are open to criticisms of reductionism) which has limited relevance to societies characterised by ‘diverse centres of power’. With this in mind, one way of reformulating the post-communist ‘problem’ is to focus normatively on a shift between different types of civil society: from the almost privatised expressions associated with the ‘second society’, through the mobilised forms which opposed communist regimes in 1989 towards socially integrative, semi-institutionalised forms associated with democratic regimes, yet without succumbing to post-revolutionary tendencies towards an extreme demobilisation (Linz and Stepan 1996: 7–9). The goal is a civil society capable of sustaining and balancing two complementary processes — the articulation or reproduction of collective identities and their political representation; or, as Castoriadis puts it, the operations of the ‘instituted’ society and the work of the ‘instituting imaginary’, through which actors constantly make and remake the former at the same time as it makes them (1997: 271). The issue is how existing sources of social capital and human potential can be recombined, via forms of political representation sophisticated enough to mobilise and channel rather than thwart and marginalise their innovatory impulses, in order to generate movements towards that goal.
Notes
1 Czech sociologist Miloslav Petrusek expressed a similar sentiment in his opening speech at the 1998 conference, Česká společnost na konci tisíciletí, stating that ‘the most complete and systematic analyses of totalitarian regimes and their social and psychological consequences were provided by sociologists’ (Potůček 1999b: vol. 1:13).
2 In 1980 there were around forty-five enterprises in Slovakia employing sociologists. For a summary of the post-war development of sociology in Slovakia see Szomolányiová 1990: 367–82 and 1995: 158–62. On enterprise sociology see Woleková 1981 and Suňog and Demcák 1982.
3 The independent cultural activities which existed beneath the surface of normalisation-era Czechoslovakia could also be construed as a direct reaction to the anti-modernising effects of the ‘nomenclature’ system imposed on art and culture. Snopko saw the essence of the cultural policy of the state in an attempt to return culture to the role and status of a ‘court painter’ (Snopko 1996: 201). Thus the task of artists rejecting such a service role was in effect to rediscover modernity, in this case its individualising moment.
4 According to Ágh, the modernisation approach was also a significant critical discourse among Polish and Hungarian social scientists in the 1980s, but its popularity had faded by the end of the decade, ‘its role and place taken by a more ideologically oriented democratization approach with its exclusive practice in basic macro-political changes’. By the mid-1990s, following the completion of the most important institution-building processes, the modernisation approach made a return as social scientists found they lacked a theory to deal with ‘more complex socio-technical changes’ (1998: 212–13). This periodicity is not so clear in Czech and Slovak sociology, where the modernisation approach has remained strongly represented from at least the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s.
5 In one paper Potůček refers unashamedly to the ‘doctrine drawing on the theoretical concept of the cultivation and application of human potential’ as an alternative transformation strategy to the ‘neoliberal political doctrine’ (1994: 44, emphasis added).
6 Ironically this was one of the arguments used by the Slovak government to justify the decision to return only a narrow range of property to municipal authorities and thus perpetuate local councils’ financial dependence on fiscal transfers from central government (Sopóci 1992b: 40).
7 In his chapter, Myant notes the superficially puzzling adoption by former Czech Prime Minister Václav Klaus of an anti-communist rhetoric in contradiction to the pragmatism which flowed from his belief in the free market. One explanation is that for him it represented a necessary myth which sustained a dependency relationship between society and a centralised state manned by a narrow political elite. The moment when the mode of narrativisation was to shift from the domination of such meta-narratives to more participative discursive processes accessible to actors at lower levels would represent a threat to the types of post-communist elite epitomised by Klaus's Civic Democratic Party with its disdain for civil society.
8 These authors thus concur with Stark and Szelenyi among ‘western’ analysts in understanding social transformation in terms of ‘recombinations’ rather than the classical concepts of revolution and evolution, and they likewise diverge from classical sociology, ‘the thrust [of which] was to argue that modern capitalism was so all encompassing that it erased its origins’ (Burawoy 2000: 4, 12). However the sociological paradigm which I am suggesting can be discerned here also has common points with the revisionist ‘postsocialist’ account of state socialist societies’ potentialities — particularly the potentialities embodied in localised subaltern life-worlds, revealed by ‘ethnographies of everyday life’ -which Burawoy calls for (2000: 24, 30).
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