Coming to Terms with Civil Society

The cover of this book bears a photograph of Boris Yeltsin addressing an exuberant crowd in Moscow, August 1991. The last page of the text assures us that with 'consistent material and moral support from the liberal world community there is every reason to believe that the development of civil society in the former communist countries will occur sooner rather than later'. Within these brackets of optimism, however, the general outlook of this collection of essays is considerably more cautious and sober. Is 'civil society' indeed taking hold in the former (and present) communist world? Answers are mixed. The contributors are all members of the Australian academic community, and all but one are attached to the Australian National University. The idea for the volume was first raised in early 1989, we are told, initially to explore the Gramscian notion of 'civil society within the bosom of totalitarian systems'. Events of that year and the next, however, rendered the original project largely irrelevant, and its focus eventually shifted to civil society as a potential precursor and bedrock of a new, post-communist order in Europe and Asia. Following a brief introduction by editor Robert P. Miller, the volume includes essays on the USSR (T.H. Rigby), China (David Kelly and He Baogang), Poland and Hungary (Janina Frentzel-Zagorska), the German Democratic Republic (Leslie T. Holmes), Yugoslavia (Miller), and Vietnam (Carlyle A. Thayer). The editor provides a concluding essay. The essays on the former Soviet Union and China provide striking contrasts in focus and tone. Rigby is concerned with 'vestigial elements of civil society' activities relatively autonomous of the command structures of the state, which managed to survive and ultimately thrived as a kind of 'shadow culture' under 'mono-organisational socialism'. Because of these long-term developments, he argues, civil society acquired considerable legitimacy over the years and is now positioned to assert itself. Despite several major obstacles, Rigby concludes, 'the prospects for freedom and democracy within a modern civil society seem almost unprecedentedly bright'.