From Opposition in Private to Engagement in Public: Motives for Citizen Participation in the Post-1989 New Democracies of Central Europe

Introductory Remarks IN these brief comments, I would like to take off from where Elena Zdravomyslova landed in her very challenging and informative paper in this volume. I will explore the most important motives that are behind the surprisingly rapid diffusion of the practices of democratic participation (and also the major causes for nonparticipation) that manifested themselves immediately after the collapse of the communist regimes in the countries of the former “Soviet bloc.” I will discuss these new developments in the context of those widespread social experiences that had accumulated in informal communities before 1989, and argue that the decade-long “learning process,” in tacit opposition to the prevailing order under communism, had a decisive role in shaping people’s democratic skills. While demonstrating the strength of these earlier informal learning processes, I will also point to those fault lines of social development that, despite formally guaranteeing equal political rights in the new democratic order, have created insurmountable obstacles for the genuine participation SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring 2002) From Opposition in Private to Engagement in Public: Motives for Citizen Participation in the Post-1989 New Democracies of Central Europe BY JÚLIA SZALAI of a well-defined part of society: the poor. The presentation of some of the fundamental confusions surrounding the concepts of social and economic rights hopefully will reveal that any further expansion and strengthening of the public domain of the new democracies require serious efforts on the part of the new states to establish legal and institutional guarantees for a certain minima of economic and social participation for all. Democratic Practices in the Underground Opposition under State Socialism Following the dominolike collapse of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, most Western commentators expressed astonishment at the rapidity at which the societies in question introduced and started to use in a “customary” way a whole set of democratic institutions, the development of which took decades, if not centuries in their place of origin—the West. The surprise had some grounds: after being deprived for 40 years from the full exercise of fundamental human rights, great numbers of people in these societies proved their aptitude and competence in the ready-made construction and day-to-day manipulation of their new institutions. The question arises: where and how did people acquire the necessary skills? Although the answer requires a country-by-country detailed historical analysis, it can be stated in general terms that the new competence was rooted in those practices of widespread opposition that had evolved under the later periods of communism. People’s opposition to the regime rarely took the form of open confrontation. However, to a certain degree the political momentum of withdrawal from the direct control of the authorities through the informal networks of family-based production and self-protection characterized the social landscape. Over the decades, indirect forms of political participation through involvement in these informal networks provided fertile soil for the development of 72 SOCIAL RESEARCH small-scale political practices at the level of local communities, the latter becoming the strongest constituent of the new democratic orders after 1989. The key issues of this process and its consequences for the comprehensive change occurring during that time can perhaps best be highlighted through empirical evidence drawn from the Hungarian case. Although the choice is influenced by personal motives (as someone who was born and lives in Hungary, my knowledge is obviously deeper and more refined about this country than any other neighboring societies), theoretical considerations are also in the background. First, because of the lasting impact of mass involvement in the 1956 revolution, Hungarian social and political development in the late decades of communism concluded in an unnoticed erosion of statesocialist structures that opened the way for widespread informal activities by the citizenry. In turn, civic activities—even if lacking the attributes of institutionalized power—exercised indirect control over the daily work of the party-state, and ultimately contributed to its collapse. Second, the “liberalization” of the classical top-down administration of society was most complete in state-socialist Hungary. As a result, the post-1989 transformation process could build on a great deal of expertise when it came to...