“Today, having abandoned the promise of social engineering, virtually all serious observers understand that liberal political and economic institutions depend on a healthy and dynamic civil society for their vitality. ‘Civil society’—a complex welter of intermediate institutions including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.

A strong and stable family structure and durable social institutions cannot be legislated into existence the way a government can create a central bank or an army. A thriving civil society depends on a people’s habits, customs, and ethics—attributes that can be shaped only indirectly through conscious political action and must otherwise be nourished through an increased awareness and respect for culture.

Beyond the boundaries of specific nations, this heightened significance of culture extends into the realms of the global economy and international order. Indeed, one of the ironies of the convergence of larger institutions since the end of the cold war is that people around the world are now even more conscious of the cultural differences that separate them….

The increasing salience of culture in the global order is such that Samuel Huntington has argued that the world is moving into a period of ‘civilizational clash,’ in which the primary identification of people will not be ideological, as during the cold war, but cultural. Accordingly, conflict is likely to arise not among fascism, socialism, and democracy but among the world’s major cultural groups: Western, Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, and so on.”.... pp. 4-5

“Perhaps one of the most devastating consequences of socialism as it was actually practiced in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was the destruction of civil society that took place there, a destruction that has hampered the emergence of both working market economies and stable democracies. The Leninist state set about deliberately to destroy all possible competitors to its power, from the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy down through the innumerable farms, small businesses, unions, churches, newspapers, voluntary associations, and the like, to the family itself.

The extent to which the totalitarian project succeeded varied from one socialist society to another. The destruction of civil society was perhaps the most thorough in the Soviet Union. Russian civil society before the Bolshevik Revolution, weakened by centuries of absolutist rule, was not strong. What existed, such as the small private sector and social structures like the peasant commune, or mir, were ruthlessly eradicated. By the time of Stalin’s consolidation of power in the late 1930’s, the Soviet Union exhibited a “missing middle”: the complete dearth of strong, cohesive, or durable intermediate associations. That is, the Soviet state was very powerful, and there were many atomized individuals and families, but in between there were virtually no social groups whatsoever. The ironic consequence of a doctrine designed to eliminate human selfishness was that people were made more selfish. It was a common observation, for example, that Soviet Jewish emigres to Israel were much more materialistic and less public spirited than Jews who had come from bourgeois countries. Virtually everyone in the Soviet Union had become cynical about public spiritedness as a result of a state that constantly hectored and coerced them into “voluntarily” giving up their weekends for the sake of the Cuban or Vietnamese people or some other such cause.” pp. 54-55.


“Civil Society in Central Asia,” S. Frederick Starr. Civil Society in Central Asia. Eds. M. Holt Ruffin and Daniel Waugh. Center for Civil Society International, The Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and University of Washington Press. Seattle, 1999. pp. 27-28.

Until fairly recently, the notion of “civil society” was something one encountered in textbooks on political philosophy. The standard view in the English speaking world was that civil society is a state or condition that exists when a people is ruled by law, when freedom of speech and association prevail, when a multitude of voluntary groups work freely to foster civic ends, and when people consider themselves to be citizens rather than subjects. This definition, dating from the late seventeenth century in England and Scotland, infused the American Revolution and the system to which it gave rise.

A quite different perspective was introduced by the German philosopher Hegel in the early nineteenth century, namely, that civil society is not the entire body politic but only that part of society that organizes itself voluntarily to promote the common good. Unlike John Locke and his British contemporaries, the Prussian philosopher Hegel juxtaposed state and society and confined the “civic” element to the latter. Such an approach reflected and reinforced the tendency, widespread in authoritarian societies, to see social life as a struggle between “us” and “them.” In this dialectic guise the idea of civil society entered Marxism and gained popularity also in Latin America and other places where nascent civic impulses came up against entrenched bureaucracies of state.

The term NGO (“nongovernmental organization”) is often used synonymously with civil society—the NGO as the quintessential institution of participatory democracy. An NGO in this understanding suggests the spirit of civil initiative of voluntarism, of collective work for the common good. This is what Tocqueville celebrated in ‘Democracy in America’ and it is the spirit which characterizes countless local, national, and international nonprofit organizations in the United States and elsewhere. Examples of these “classical” NGOs include religious institutions, Scouts, Rotary Clubs, hobby groups, advocacy groups, and humanitarian relief organizations such as the Salvation Army. They are truly independent organizations, expressing the values of their members or supporters in society. They provide services which government either cannot provide (e.g., religious worship) or cannot provide as well (e.g. blood banks); seek changes in protection, civil liberties, and a myriad other causes. Such NGOs pursue the ideals of their founders, members and supporters, often without large financial resources. They do not typically shape their mission to fit grant opportunities or government RFPs (request for proposals).

The late twentieth century has seen the development of a different type of NGO—one which, in effect, contracts with either a government agency or a foundation to carry out certain work. These modern “grant-based” NGOs may provide important human services and engage in social and political advocacy, but they do not have the same grassroots, civic character as the classical NGO. Their activities necessarily express goals and values of those in control of the budgets they depend upon, representatives of government or philanthropy.

In most cases both types of NGO benefit society. But it is the classical NGO which better embodies the idea of civic society—of citizens taking voluntary action for causes that concern them deeply.

In practice, some NGOs may share aspects of each type; and it is perhaps such hybrid NGOs which the externally-funded “civil society” assistance policies that the West has pursued in recent years in Central Asia have sought to create. But if the growth of NGOs is to be interpreted as an indicator of the growth of civil society in Central Asia, it makes a difference which kind of NGO we mean.

“Nothing, in my view,” wrote Tocqueville, “more deserves attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America. American political and industrial associations easily catch our eyes, but the others tend not to be noticed. And even if we do notice them, we misunderstand them, hardly ever having seen anything similar before.” Democracy in America, J. Mayer, ed. (Anchor Books, 1969), p. 517.

How to instill “democratic values [that] live in the hearts and minds of all citizens”? The problem is that in some fundamental way such values must be self-generated and self-discovered. They cannot be imported or implanted. But democratic values are more ubiquitous than we, who are privileged to have been born and to live in democratic societies, sometimes think. In this regard, Civil Society in Central Asia is more than a status report on the development in post-Soviet Central Asia of those values and institutions associated with the idea of civil society and democracy—i.e., the growth of voluntary associations, a free media, respect for the rights of women and minorities, etc. It is, in a sense, confirmation that the same struggles are taking place in Central Asia that have preceded the establishment of democracy and the rule of law in many other nations….

To be sure, whatever forms Central Asia’s institutions take in the future, they are unlikely to mimic the West and very likely to reflect the strong influences of Islam, as well as other factors and traditions indigenous to the region. This points to the final issue: the need for citizens of the United States and the West to develop a much better understanding of Islam and the Islamic world and to engage with the latter considerably more closely than we have to date. …

For whatever form civil society takes in the region, it will reflect some synthesis of long-established Central Asian values, such as hurmat (meaning “deference” or “respect”), with classical Western values, such as that of equality before the law. In a recent essay titled “The Feeble Breath of Democracy,” Anthony Hyman, an associate editor of Central Asia Survey, concluded:

"Some disillusioned observers have virtually written off Central Asia as a region where civil society concepts are too alien to make progress. Such judgments ignore that the almost total isolation of the Soviet era has been broken down, and the post-Soviet years have brought valuable exposure to ideas from the outside world. But it would be unrealistic to expect any rapid or straightforward transition."

Hyman’s challenge to Western disillusionment with Central Asia is valid. So is his suggestion that whatever form the region’s transition takes, it is likely to surprise us. Whether it is a pleasant surprise, as we are inclined to believe, or a less-appealing one, much will depend on the themes analyzed and the organizations described in the pages that follow. pp. 23-25.


Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World, Benjamin R. Barber. Ballantine Books, New York, 1995, p 279.

Specialists seem persuaded that to construct a new democracy, whether for Russia, Somalia, or for the whole planet, requires nothing more than the export of prefabricated constitutions and made-to-order parliamentary systems. Joshua Muravchik is a perfect exemplar whose problems begin with the very title of his new book: Exporting Democracy. Fed Ex the Federalist Papers to Belorussia; send a multiparty system to Nigeria by parcel post; E-mail the Chinese the Bill of Rights; ship the U.N. a civilian-controlled, all-volunteer, obedient but conscience-sensitive peacekeeping force from a country with a high tolerance for casualties and no interests of its own … and in all the flash of a laser beam: democracy! For global government, do exactly the same thing, globally.

Not quite. Democracies are built slowly, culture by culture, each with its own strengths and needs, over centuries …

A people corrupted by tribalism and numbed by McWorld is no more ready to receive a prefabricated democratic constitution than a people emerging from a long history of despotism and tyranny. Nor can democracy be someone’s gift to the powerless. It must be seized by them because they refuse to live without liberty and they insist on justice for all. To prepare the ground for democracy today either in transitional societies or on a global scale is first to re-create citizens who will demand democracy: this means laying a foundation in civil society and civic culture. Democracy is not a universal prescription for some singularly remarkable form of government, it is an admonition to people to live in a certain fashion: responsibly, autonomously, yet on common ground, in self-determining communities somehow still open to others, with tolerance and mutual respect yet a firm sense of their own values. When John Dewey called democracy a way of life—it is the idea of community life itself, he insisted—rather than a way of government, he called attention to its primacy as an associated mode of living in a civil society. A global democracy capable of countering the antidemocratic tendencies of Jihad and McWorld cannot be borrowed from some particular nation’s warehouse or copied from an abstract constitutional template. Citizenship, whether global or local, comes first.