The discourse of civil society and the self-elimination of the party

Árpád Szakolczai

Agnes Horváth

pp. 16-31

in: Paul G. Lewis (ed), Democracy and civil society in Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992

Abstract

In explaining the revolutionary changes that occurred in Eastern Europe during 1989, one often encounters a discourse centring upon the resurrection of civil society. This seems all the more plausible as the concept of civil society was revived and used in East Central Europe extensively throughout the decade of the 1980s in a normative sense of promoting organisation and gathering support for the change of the system. Nothing seems to be more natural than to claim that, after all, events proved the correctness of the strategy: the resurrected civil society defeated the totalitarian system — to use another concept that became much in vogue in the last decade.