The Narrative of Civil Society in Communism's Collapse and Post‐communism's Alternative: Emancipation and the Challenge of Polish Protest and Baltic Nationalism

Civil society has been understood as a set of social relations, but it should also be recognized as a narrative of social reproduction and transformation. .This narrative; however, is not so enduring-as its ideologues might have it. Its meaning is transformed as it comes to be embedded within various historical periods and cultural fields of identity and difference. In this paper, we identify patterns of exclusion and inclusion within the labilities of the East European civil society project in the decade preceding and the decade following communism's collapse in 1989. We then identify two particularly important challenges to the emancipatory potential of civil society that are grounded in East European lifeworlds. By linking this study of civil society's lability to its normative critique, we seek to demonstrate civil society's continued significance to critical social theory, and Eastern Europe's importance for making that case. The Narrative of Civil Society in Communism's Collapse and Postcommunism's Alternative: Emancipation and the Challenge of Polish Protest and Baltic Nationalism Civil society's significance in sociology and political science as a whole appears to have increased since communism's collapse.* Withn Eastern Europe, however, civil society is not only a social phenomenon, but a discourse both shaping and useful in strategic a c t i ~ n . ~ Through its strategic invocation, civil society was critical to the emancipation of Eastern Europe from Soviet-type society. Its critical function in postcommunist society is less apparent, h ~ w e v e r . ~ By considering the abiding potential of civil society as a discourse of emancipation, we hope to contribute to the restoration of civil society to the center of critical ~ocial.theory.~ We illustrate in this paper not only why ciwil society remains an important concept for those working within Eastern Europe, but also why working within ,Eastern Europe is important for espanding civil society's critical potential. To a considerable estent, one of the problems facing critical theory is its often implicit and untheorized grounding in particular historical ~on te s t s .~ In this paper, we want to highlight the significance of working within Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for developing critical sociology, for it is here where the engagement with socialism as lived experience, and civil society as its most compelling alternative, are most palpable and consequential for imagining the significance of civil society as an emancipatoxy vision.' .. . Instead of civil society, identity and difference tend to assume center stage in cultural studies and much of cetical theory. Some of the most fruitful work in critical social theory has been in search of the engagement between the integrating visions of civil society and the emphases on difference in identity projects.8 In this paper, we seek to extend that engagement by identifjling under what conditions certain East European social practices and social actors are identified as commensurate with the civil society project, and under what conditions practices and actors are identified as antagonistic to it.' For that reason, William Connolly's recent work on the politics of becoming" is especially useful. Instead of considering a political project like civil society to be defined by certain intrinsic principles like tolerance or pluralism, we can define it relationally." In Connolly's terms, we might ask what the politics of becoming is in civil society projects, and how the vision of civil society changes as it comes to be associated with different sets of power relations. In this sense, we approach civil society differently than many others who focus on solely its sociological limitations. Rather than emphasize civil society's organizational weakness or inadequacy before the challenges of the "transition" from communist rule to democratic capitalism,'' we focus here on the shift in civil society's framing and normative penumbraeI3 in the transformational politics of Eastern Europe. Clearly, civil society's normative power was much greater in the 1980s when it was viewed by the East Central European democratic opposition and their Western allies as a politics based not only on the condemnation of communist moral failing,I4 but also the legacy and distinction of East Centrol ~urope." Is there another way in which critical theorists might recover the politics of civil society for an emancipatory project that deepens, rather than limits, the democracy of postcommunist capitalism? Our approach to civil society also reflects a very differentakind of discursive,location for civil society within Eastern Europe. In and from the USA, civil society can be treated as a longstanding discourse in which one can identlfy a deep and durable structure opposing democratic and antidemocratic actors, relationships and institutions.I6 Eastern Europe, by contrast, has been racked by the labilities of its cultural formations." The elements of dominant and subordinate discourses have themselves been unstable and the criteria for recognizing . threats and promise within and across them have been altered radically over time. In this paper, we suggest broad patterns of and exclusion in the labilities of the East European civil society project, and how the substance and mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion have varied over historical periods and national spaces.'' Simply put, before communism's collapse, civil society tended to be an expansive discourse iwwhich its meaning was expanded as it included ever more types of action as consistent with its vision. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has tended to become a consolidating vision, in which its principal strategic function has been to identify who is part of the emancipatory future and who is part of the past to be transcended. .In its common rhetorical terms, who wants to become part of the West and Europe, and who must be leA behind in a socialist east? In Part I of this paper, we identify why civil society theory must be an intrinsic part of any critical theory of East European social transformations. We begin this paper by considering why civil society endures as a fundamentally important concept in the theory and practice of East European social transformations. We turn next to consider how it became so locally meaningful. We suggest that its power was not only conferred by its putative logical or political opposition to communism, but through a social process. This social process began as an intellectual praxis, in which intellectuals identified a wide range of autonomous activities as consistant with communism's alternative. In turn, these intellectuals were then inscribed as civil society's representatives when communist authorities and Western powers identified them as reasonable partners for negotiating communism's end. To conclude Part I, we consider how civil society alters its ideological function in postcommunism. We explain how civil society establishes its new hegemony by subtly including and excluding fonns of activity within a larger affirmation of certain kinds of power centered on political society and the state (civil society's guarantor and antithesis) and the market (civil society's Lockkan manifestation). In Part 11, we turn to civil society's challenge for critical theory. To be sure, civil society cannot simply function as a vehicle to 'clarify the struggles and wishes of the age'. It has lost its qualities as an expansive emancipatory vision and has been transformed into a defensive consolidating vision (perhaps explaining thereby its growing appeal for neofunctionalism and those who would celebrate or explain, rather than deepen and interrogate, democracy). Nevertheless, civil society remains necessary to critical theoretical work in Eastern Europe. As postcolonial studies seeks to recover a form of community denied by a nationalism that claims to embody that c~mmunity, '~ critical sociology out of Eastern Europe ought to elaborate that potentially emancipatory civil society now denied by the hegemonic contest behveen liberalism and fundamentalism, or individualism and collectivism. In this essay, wve offer a sociological method to elaborate that emancipatory potential. This method has three steps. In the first step, one should identify particular contradictory moments in the elaboration of the civil society project. Contradictory moments are those in which past expressions of civil society's potential are subsequently identified as their nemesis. Here we focus on two: labor movements and nationalist movements. In the second step, one should turn to particular manifestations of these contradictions, and explain how they have been constructed, by participants and by interpreters, as consistent or inconsistent with the civil society project. Here we focus on Polish Solidarity 1993-94 and post-Soviet Baltic nationalisms to illustrate the dilemmas of an " u ~ e a l socialism" and the "small nation" in the discourse of civil society. Finally, one returns to the critical civil society project itself, to consider what presumptions allow exclusions and what theoretical recasting might expand, rather than consolidate, the vision of civil society. PART I: THE NECESSITY OF CIVIL SOCIETY CIVIL SOCIETY AS POINT OF DEPARTURE In many East European countries, the gap in ideological commitment to civil society between formerly communist parties and newly liberal parties is not so great, and the fundamental importance of civil society might easily be forgotten. But the continuing contest within Russia between a vision of a great imperialist Russia and a more democratic Russia helps remind critical theorists that civil society is still a political accomplishment and not an evolutionary inevitability." Some authors even consider the return of another imperial type of Russia to be well within a realm of pos~ibility.~' Because what happens in Russia has terrif