Democracy without Civil Society?

REVIEW BY STEPHEN WELCH

Department of Politics, University of Durham, United Kingdom

The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe. By Marc Morje Howard. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 220 pp., $60.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-81223-2),$24.00 paper (ISBN: 0-521-01152-3).

To better understand the foundations of democracy has been a goal of perennialinterest to political scientists. It is a question, however, that assumes even greaterurgency at times when the construction of democracy is high on the internationalagendaFsuch as after the Second World War, after the collapse of the Communistregimes in Europe, and after recent interventions in the Middle East. It is also atopic that allows more introspective political observers to reflect about the quality ofdemocracy in their own countries. Nowhere is this more the case than in the UnitedStates, a country in which democracy has become the core political value. Theseconsiderations form the background to Marc Morje Howard’s highly readablebook: The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe. In it, Howard inves-tigates the foundations of democracy in post-Communist Europe, but he ap-proaches that case with a toolkit of arguments from a wide range of other empiricaland theoretical contexts. As such the book makes both a narrow and a broadcontribution to the field, and even though it will be of primary interest to studentsof post-Communism, it also has much to offer theorists of democracyFespeciallythose scholars with an interest in the concepts of civil society and social capital.

Howard’s argument consists of three main theses: (1) that among the foundationsof successful democratic government, civil society is crucial; (2) that civil society is asyet weakly developed in post-Communist Europe and has, if anything, becomeweaker during the post-Communist period; and (3) that this weakness is explainedlargely by the Communist experience itself, which produced distinctive behavioralpatterns and dispositions common to the post-Communist countries.

A prerequisite of this argument is that the concept of civil society be adequatelyspecified, and herein lies one of the strengths of the book. Howard devotes agenerous amount of space to a discussion of the nature and significance of civilsociety and the various approaches that have been used to study it. His treatmentcontrasts favorably with the rather etiolated conceptual preambles that one some-times encounters in empirical and especially quantitative work in political science.Howard does not succumb to the error of thinking that statistics speak for them-selves. His survey of approaches to civil society is useful in itself, apart from itscontribution to the later phases of his argument.

That argument is conducted primarily through the use of statistical materialderived from the World Values Survey, supplemented by a survey of post-Com-munist populations. The focus of The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-CommunistEurope is not, however, on values but rather on behavior. Howard’s operational-ization of the concept of civil society makes use of survey questions that ask re-spondents about the extent of their membership in organized groups. Thefindings, which are presented both in a digestible graphical form and through amultivariate regression analysis, are unequivocal. Civil society is less developed inpost-Communist countries than in a selection of older democracies or in such

r 2004 International Studies Review.PublishedbyBlackwellPublishing,350MainStreet,Malden,MA02148,USA,and9600GarsingtonRoad,OxfordOX42DQ,UK.

International Studies Review (2004) 6, 306–308

post-authoritarian countries as Spain and South Korea. Memberships (to be moreprecise, the number of group types in which a person holds membership, based on atypology of groups presented in the World Values Survey) are drastically lower inthe post-Communist countries, where memberships average 0.91 per person, com-pared with 2.39 and 1.82 in the other two categories of countries respectively (p. 62).

At the individual level, Howard sets out to investigate statistically the argumentthat it is the experience of Communism that produces this characteristic patternof nonparticipation in groups. His social-psychological perspective is that bothchildhood and adult experience cumulatively cause individuals to perceive andevaluate new experiences in distinct ways. Specifically, the experience of involun-tary participation in Communist mobilization efforts, the experience of informalnetworking that occurred as an adaptive response to the difficulties of life underCommunist regimes, and the experience of disappointment that followed the eu-phoria of the collapse of these Communist governments, has culminated in anoutlook of skepticism toward organized participation that endures in the post-Communist period.

Howard’s statistical analysis is supplemented in a chapter that presents findingsfrom indepth interviews with citizens of eastern Germany and Russia, two cases thathe argues bracket the European post-Communist experience. A lack of method-ological dogmatism is evident in the use of these materials, although it must benoted that it is the statistical analysis of the preceding chapters that sets the agenda.The interview materials are largely used to illustrate already established arguments.

The influence of Ken Jowitt can be seen in the conception of behavioral patternsas an adaptation to the exigencies of Communism, a view that Jowitt (1974) relatedto the concept of political culture. It is a stimulating idea, but it needs furtherspecification regarding the extent to which the resulting adaptation becomes a fixedquality of individuals or of a society, and of the reasons why this should occur.Political culture has always been seen as the product of the historical experience of asociety, which is difficult to change rapidly (see, for example, Brown and Gray1977); but political culture research has never fully explained, beyond a somewhatuncritical appropriation of the thesis of childhood socialization and formative ex-perience, what prioritizes among the myriad of experiences that a person has, whynew experiences do not displace the old ones, and whether and under what con-ditions experience may be radically reevaluated, which presumably happens in thecase of revolutionary upheaval. It has not, moreover, adequately questioned theconceptualization of experience itself (Scott 1991). The experiential perspectiveadopted by Howard, suggestive though it is, raises many of these same questions,and it certainly leaves room for further analytical work.

Another question on which The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europesays too little involves the linkage between civil society and democracy. Howardshares the widely held view that the former is a foundation or prerequisite of thelatter. He discusses two important perspectives on how this linkage works: that ofsocial capital theorists like Robert Putnam (2000), who see nonpolitical associationsas a training ground for political activism, and that of institutionalists like ThedaSkocpol (1999), who argue that the policy constraining and influencing effect offormal groups is the key to democracy. Howard makes no attempt to evaluate or toadjudicate between these two perspectives, accepting them both. But, despite theirvenerable lineages (the first stems from de Tocqueville, the second from the plu-ralist theory of democracy), it is not clear that either approach really rests onsubstantiated causal mechanisms. Their plausibility arguably arises instead fromtheir normative compatibility with our ideals of democracy. Accepting such claimsas assumptions, Howard is able to avoid investigating the political implications ofweak civil society in any detail. A vague feeling that something is rotten in the stateof post-Communism is created, but resources for isolating the problem or predict-ing its effects are not provided.

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Howard does not see any prospect for rapid change in the pattern of widespreadindifference or hostility toward formal group participation that he describes soconvincingly. A final chapter envisages only two mechanisms of change: (1) gene-rational replacement (although even this he says is impeded by parent-child cul-tural transmission), and (2) a transplantation of democratic practice based on thesuccessful model of postwar reconstruction of German democracy (although theexistence of a vibrant prewar civil society in Germany, as well as the disruption anddiscrediting of prevailing norms brought about by the war itself, reduce the ex-portability of this model). But if the establishment of a strong civil society in post-Communist Europe will be postponed as long as Howard suspects, it will be worthgiving more thought to the idea that post-Communist democracy is a distinct andviable political form, which may require a reevaluation of the concept of civil societyitself or of its presumed foundational character. In this vein, it may also be worthgiving serious thought to what unanticipated shapes postintervention democracymight take, and how durable these might be, in such countries as Afghanistan andIraq. Howard makes informative use of our basic assumptions about democracy,but in so doing he also raises doubts as to just how adequately they help us accountfor and control the political world around us.

References

BROWN, ARCHIE, AND JACK GRAY, EDS. (1977) Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States.London: Macmillan.

JOWITT, KENNETH. (1974) An Organizational Approach to the Study of Political Culture in Marxist-Leninist Systems. American Political Science Review 68:1171–1191.

PUTNAM, ROBERT D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York:Simon and Schuster.

SCOTT, JOAN W. (1991) The Evidence of Experience. Critical Inquiry 17:773–797.SKOCPOL, THEDA. (1999) How Americans Became Civic. In Civic Engagement in American Democracy,

edited by Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

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