Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy PDF
Preview Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy
Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy Andrew Arato ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham· Boulder· New York· Toronto· Plymouth, UK ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2000 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arato, Andrew. Civil society, constitution, and legitimacy I Andrew Arato p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 13: 978-0-8476-8772-5 1. Europe, Eastern-Politics and government-1989- . 2. Post-communism-Europe, Eastern. 3. Civil society-Europe, Eastern. 4. Constitutional history-Europe, Eastern. 5. Democracy-Europe, Eastern. I. Title. JN96.A58 A68 2000 321.09'094-dc2 99-055368 Printed in the United States of America @TMThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American ::-.;rational Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z.39.48-1992. To My Hungarian Friends Contents Preface ix 1 Interpreting 1989 2 Civil Society, Transition, and the Problem of Institutionalization 43 3 Revolution, Restoration, and Legitimation: Ideological Problems of the Transition from State Socialism 81 4 Dilemmas of the Power to Make Constitutions in East Europe 129 5 Constitution and Continuity in the East European Transitions 167 6 Refurbishing the Legitimacy of the New Regime: Constitution-Making Endgame in Hungary and Poland 199 7 Forms of Constitution Making and Theories of Democracy 229 Notes 257 Index 335 About the Author 351 VIi Preface The studies in this volume are products of almost ten years of reflections on the meaning and consequences of the democratic eruptions of 1989. They are not products of value-free social research. The author takes his stand on the side of those seeking to introduce liberal and democratic institutions in Cen tral and East Europe, and specifically those friends and colleagues in Hungary who have contributed so much to the almost miraculous outcome: a more or less consolidated, on the whole well-functioning parliamentary democratic regime. The book is dedicated to these friends, above all to Janos Kis, the leader of the Hungarian Democratic Opposition in the 1980s. Written at a time of great change, the chapters, and even more the book as a whole, have a developmental character. Most noticeably they document a shift in interest from the problem of civil society to that of constitutional pol itics. My abiding interest in the concept of civil society is expressed in chap ters 1 and 2. In the first of these, dealing with Western interpretations, I focus on the absence of the concept of civil society or its particular use as the most important clue to the inadequacy of the analyses I criticize. My critique of the so-called theories of transition requires going beyond such a limited frame work of criticism, owing to the unusually ambitious nature of the relevant conceptions. In the second chapter, I reconstruct the career of the politics of civil society in Hungary and Poland from about 1976 on, squarely facing the issue of implosion stressed by many theorists of transition, but avoiding the diagnosis that demobilization must mean obliteration or even "normaliza tion." Recognizing the empirical phenomena of the depolitization of civic ini tiatives and social movements at the time of the Round Tables and the first competitive elections, I was nevertheless deeply concerned about the neglect of autonomous associations and publics in the emerging political designs and in the policy-making process. I came to the conclusion, however, based on my differentiation between civil society as movement and as institution, 1 that civil IX
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