Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy

366 Pages·2000·16.108 MB·English

by  Andrew Arato

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
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Copyright © 2000 by Rowman & Littlefield
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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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