Ingrida Geciene (PhD student at GSSR, Warsaw)
Pitfalls and weaknesses of direct application of Western social theories to the
study of post-communist societies: critical assessment of middle class and civil
society concepts
This paper is devoted for the exploration of the particular dangers for a direct
application of the Western social theories to explain the transformation process in
post-communist countries. Sociology of these countries suffers greatly from a lack of
deep theoretical analysis of social reality because most of the sociological researches
hold pure descriptive character. In the best cases there are attempts to use or rather to
strain Western social theories in examining of observed social facts. One of the
arguments for such tendency is that our societies after the collapse of socialist regime
have the direction towards the shape of Western countries with their developed
democracy and economy, etc., therefore their theoretical basis must be as an
analytical guide for social scientists. However, these theories were developed for
different and relatively stable social environment, thus there is a risk to neglect
distinct contexts and especially different cultural patterns in West and East European
societies. I would like to illustrate these arguments by the two examples of
questionable application of Western social theories, namely theories of middle class
and civil society.
‘Middle class’ theory in post-communist countries
From the early beginning of transformation there is a great debate on middle class in
post-communist countries based on the idea that there is a need of a large social group
within a society with relatively stable pro-capitalist and pro-democratic attitudes in
order to achieve a sustainable democracy. Despite the critics of middle class approach
in Western countries (for instance, that predisposition of middle class for preserving
of status quo can be not only positive but also have a negative effect for development
of democracy), there are many attempts to use such rhetoric and to prove an existence
of such social group. Nevertheless, the empirical data shows the absence of middle
class both in terms of the lack of material resources and the unclear political attitudes
frequently far from the support of democracy at all.
The idea that the middle class is the core of a modern industrial democratic
society with a role to stabilize it and to decide the direction and dynamics of its
development is rooted in social theory since the first observations of great social
changes during the industrialization process. For example, Bell states that these
changes created a society, which first of all is characterized by the two fundamental
resources – ‘technology and knowledge’1. The heart of such post-industrial society is
a class, whose main capital is not a property as in previous stage of capitalism, but its
skill attained by the higher education. This class is primarily a professional class and,
according to Bell’s definition, is made up of four estates: the scientific, the
technological (applied skills: engineering, economics, medicine), the administrative,
and the cultural (artistic and religious)2.
Therefore, the space between the bourgeoisie and the workers started being
filled with a growing number of new groups, later assigned by a common label of the
‘new middle class’. This new middle class category encompasses representatives of
professionals, managers, top and middle officials, teachers and specialists of all kinds.
The new middle class is a middle class not because of its similarity to the petty
bourgeoisie (sometimes called ‘old middle class’) but because of its place in modern
capitalism – ‘the dynamically developing new middle class is characterized by skills
and knowledge rather than by the ownership of any means of production’3. Frequent
estimates place the middle class in the most developed societies at over 50% of the
population and the petty bourgeoisie constitutes only a marginal percentage of this
figure and is increasingly distinct from the rest of the middle class.
The very idea of creating of such a new social group within the social
structure soon after the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe found great
numbers of ideological enthusiasts. The development of the middle class became
often treated as the most important goal. However, in these countries “middle class”
refers more to ‘small private owners’ than to the ‘new middle class’ in earlier
mentioned sense. In this line, the idea to stimulate the development of middle class
1
Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1973),
p. 212.
2
Bell, p. 223.
3
Edmund Mokrzycki, A New Middle Class?, in Democracy, Civil Society and Pluralism, ed. by
Bryant Christopher G. A. and Mokrzycki Edmund (Warszawa: IFiS Publishers, 1995), p.222.
justified all programs of privatisation and re-privatisation4. But, as Mokrzycki
noticed,
it is a misunderstanding, resulting from the mixing up of correlate and cause,
that the middle class is being promoted and stimulated in its development in
order to support market reforms. The middle class, in all its meanings, even as
the petty bourgeoisie, is just as much a creator of the market as its product5.
Thus the middle class is first of all the product of the capitalist system and in essence
performs a role as a secondary reinforcement of the system.
The tendency to attribute middle class position to people with higher amount
of property or at least with high incomes is prevailing not only among officials but
also among almost all population of post-communist societies. The repeated surveys
of subjective evaluation of one’s own position (socio-economic status) in society
show that half of respondents in Lithuania identify themselves with groups of lower
socio-economic status. Those who identify themselves with the higher steps of the
social ladder are few – less than 1%. Despite some effect of age and education
differences for such identification, a higher degree of self-estimation is influenced
mostly by incomes6.
Not only a big gap between the well-of and majority of people with low
income serves as an argument against real existence of middle class in postcommunist societies. Another argument deals with the political attitudes that are not
significantly different between members of ‘middle class’ and the rest of population.
If to take into account only ‘small owners’ as the representatives of middle class, then
most researches emphasize that this social group in Central Europe has no
sociological characteristics of a class, not to mention a class capable of a grassroots
support for social reforms. Rather, it is a group, which is deprived of an inner bond,
an ideological platform and political representations. It is a ‘class’, which is unable to
articulate its interests and it does not show any particular preferences for liberal
values7.
4
Mokrzycki, p. 223.
Mokrzycki, p. 236.
6
Danute Tureikyte, Identification of Residents with the groups of Socioeconomic Status, in Changes
of Identity in Modern Lithuania, ed. by Taljunaite Meilute (Vilnius: Institute of Philosophy and
Sociology, 1996), p. 336.
7
Mokrzycki, p. 237.
5
If to include into middle class ranks such social groups as managers and
professionals (following the ‘new middle class’ definition) despite of the lack of
financial resources, then picture would be quite different. These two groups in most
post-communist countries have more liberal and democratic political preferences. For
example, in 1999 European values survey, the managers and professionals were least
likely to vote for the left, preferring more right wing and centre parties (especially
professionals), while political preferences of routine non-manual and especially
workers are not so clearly expressed. Besides between these two groups there is
significantly higher percent of those, who specified that they would not vote.
Nevertheless, the differences are not so evident and proportion differs quite
significantly from one election to another. Some researchers blame economic and
political anomie for absence of impact of socio-economic status on voting behaviour
or other political attitudes8. Others state, that such situation is close to the tendency
that have recently gained prominence in the electoral politics of the advanced
industrial democracies that the patterns of electoral choice in many new democracies
may be based on the same short-term factors – candidate images and issue positions9.
Despite different political attitudes within ‘new middle class’ in postcommunist societies, there are more factors that put in doubt the homogeneity of this
class. Small owners, entrepreneurs and to some extend managers are likely to have
diverse interests in comparison with professionals or, in more traditional terms, – with
intelligentsia. Therefore these groups tend to form two separate segments of new
middle class. First of all entrepreneurs and intelligentsia still are quite dissimilar in
their world perception, cultural consumption and life style. If for entrepreneurs the
aim to improve their financial situation and to accumulate economical capital is more
distinguishing trait of entrepreneurs, for intelligentsia, according to Wesolowski, counts ‘the acquisition of important positions by means of expanding their knowledge
and improving their expertise’. The most valuable forms of intellectual improvement
are ‘the creation of new knowledge and its application leading to technological
8
Paul Nieuwbeerta and Merove Gijsberts, Do Socio-economic Cleavages exist in Post-communist
Politics?, in The Middle Class as a Precondition of a Sustainable Society, ed. by Tilkidjiev Nikolai
(Sofia: LIK Publishing house, 1998), p. 138-157.
9
Russel Dalton, Political Cleavages, Issues and Electoral Change, in Comparing Democracies.
Elections and Voting in Global Perspective, ed. by LeDuc Lawrence et al (Sage Publications: 1996).
inventions, the improvement of social institutions and the enrichment of society’s
spiritual culture’10.
Nevertheless, entrepreneurs, small owners, managers and intelligentsia (or
new emerging knowledge class) are the most potential agents to form the new middle
class in Central and East European countries. However, it can be supposed that they
will have different interests and will form at least two separate segments of middle
class. In this respect it is difficult to speak about middle class as a real ‘class’ with the
common interests, consciousness and prevalent capital resources. It seems that it is
more theoretical concept to mark the space between upper and lower class, or, as
Mokrzycki has noted, it is more ‘ideological artefact’ or ‘a statistical category’11.
The weakness of civil society approach
Another example of doubtful application of Western social theories deals with similar
ideas about necessity of civil society for the growth of participatory democracy.
However, the culture of civic initiatives in Western countries can count many years of
successful development, while all post-communist societies suffer from the heritage
of previous political regime when civil society was almost entirely destroyed. Of
course, the last decade is marked by the boom of numerous non-governmental
organizations, but, there are several serious problems: first of all these new
organizations seem to be artificial, created from above thus not rooted in the public
tradition. Another difficulty is that this sphere or the third sector (as NGO’s frequently
are called) is occupied predominantly by the highly educated people, thus there is a
problem of mobilization by these organization of larger segment of society and
representing the interests of less educated people.
The notion of civil society that will be used in this paper is based on the
sociological view on it. According to Gouldner, this view tries to distinguish civil
society as a separate sector from sphere of pure economy as well as state politics.
Thus, this perspective combines both the ‘anti-individualism (critique of competitive,
market individualism) and anti-statism as rejection of dominance of society by the
10
Wladislaw Wesolowski, The New Beginnings of the Entrepreneurial Classes, in Polish Sociological
Review, no. 1 (113), (1996), p. 94
11
Mokrzycki, p. 232.
state’12. Therefore, the sociological concept of civil society refers to ‘a space or arena
between household and state, other than the market, which affords possibilities of
concerted action and social self-organization’13.
Similarly to the ‘middle class’ rhetoric, civil society building is also one of the
main goals for ‘social engineers’ of new societies in Central and Eastern Europe.
Thus, one of the most popular arguments among social scientists is that the
development of civil societies in these countries suffers mainly from the heritage of
previous political regime when civil society was almost completely destroyed.
According to Rose, such situation was caused by the attempts of communist regimes
to take over all major institutions of society in an effort to control organized opinion
and mobilize support for the party-state14. Whatever remained of it was ‘pushed
underground’ and became the ‘civil society in conspiracy’15. Therefore, in reaction,
people turned to informal networks of friends and family, creating form of society in
which individuals insulated themselves from distrusted formal organizations.
Different theorists disagree about the presence of civil society before and
during the crucial events of the ‘velvet’ revolutions. Arato claims, that Lewin, who
first introduced the notion of civil society to the study of social change in the Soviet
Union, considers ‘a slowly developing and expanding civil society in the midst of
modernization to be responsible for the Gorbachev phenomenon’16. But Arato himself
is more sceptical to this conclusion because of the absence of independent social
movements and initiatives during this time. However, Tart would not agree with such
argument by the simple reason that during the whole soviet period (and especially
during the last decade) at least cultural resistance existed as a specific form of civil
society with its different values, practices, discourses and etc. did exist17.
12
Alvin Gouldner, Civil Society in Capitalism and Socialism, in The Two Marxisms: Contradictions
and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 363.
13
Christopher Bryant, Social self-organization, civility and sociology: a comment on Kumar’s ‘Civil
Society’, in British Journal of Sociology, vol.44, September (1993), p. 399.
14
Richard Rose and Doh Chull Shin, Democratisation Backwards: The Problem of Third-Wave
Democracies, in British Journal of Political Science, no. 31 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.
344.
15
Piotr Sztompka, Mistrusting Civility: Predicament of a Post-Communist Society, in Real Civil
Societies, ed. by Alexander Jeffrey C. ( SAGE Studies in International Sociology 48, 1998), p. 193.
16
Quoted in Andrew Arato, Social Movements and Civil Society in the Soviet Union, in Perestroika
from Below: Social Movements in the Soviet Union, ed. by Sedaitis, Judit B., and Butterfield, Jim (San
Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, Boulder, 1991), p. 198.
17
Aini Tart, Culture and the Development of Civil Society, in Nationalities Papers, vol.23, no. 1.
(1995), p. 157.
It can be noticed that opinions differ mainly between the Western and postcommunist scientists: if the former reject the existence of civil society in socialist and
even post-socialist countries, the latter - insist that ‘recovering’ of civil society and its
opposition to the authoritarian state was the main precondition of all fatal changes in
the region. Thus, if Western scientists are determined by the traditional notion of civil
society and refer it to the more or less stable democratic contexts in Western
countries, the scientists of former socialist sates interpret the concept of ‘civil society’
in a more flexible way by adapting its principles to the different contexts.
Following Tart’s point of view, the only legitimate form of associations other
than Communist Party and party related organizations was pure cultural
organizations, the network that involved the ‘art societies, associations of horticulture
and apiculture also a wide-scale movement of regional studies and folk music
collectives’18. It is not, of course the civil society in classic sense because
demonstration of any kind of civil dissent was unthinkable in those years. However,
such a semi-legal nation-centred public sphere, according to Tarts, developed its ‘own
solidarity and value concepts with sign systems to express them, as well as direct or
indirect institutions to channel this collective mind’19.
Taking into account that the sources of a self-maintaining social order
grounded in shared moral values and beliefs20 or Arato’ argument that essential
dimension of civil society are norms, practices, relationships, forms of dependence or
a particular angle of looking at this world from the point of view of conscious
association building and associational life21 - this cultural type of society (even if it is
not classic) can be accepted as a specific form of civil society or at least the strong
pre-condition of it.
The collapse of communist regime was celebrated also as disengagement of
civil society sphere. Moreover, it the crucial role of civil society in the achievement of
true democracy was proclaimed. But several problems immediately appeared: the
most evident of them - the extremely low participation in the non-governmental
organizations. Comparing the percentage of respondents who belonged to
18
Tart, p. 157.
Tart, p. 157.
20
Alvin Gouldner, Civil Society in Capitalism and Socialism, in The Two Marxisms: Contradictions
and Anomalies in the Development of Theory, (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 370.
21
Andrew Arato, Social Movements and Civil Society in the Soviet Union, in Perestroika from Below:
Social Movements in the Soviet Union, Sedaitis, Judit B., and Butterfield, Jim (Boulder, San Francisco,
Oxford: Westview Press, (1991), p. X.
19
organizations, associations or groups in 1990 and 1999, it appears that only percent of
people who belong to religious, sports and farmers organizations increased during
nine years22. In general, only from 10 to 20 per cent of respondents report
membership in some kinds of voluntary associations23, thus the preconditions for civil
society are rather weak.
One major reason for the small number of civic association memberships in
the post-socialist countries is that people simply have no confidence in the new
institutions. This distrust is deeply rooted in the previous experience of socialist
system, where membership was at best only semi-voluntary, or voluntary but
ideologically necessary for personal safety. The result of this pervasive intrusion into
every corner of society was massive popular distrust of institutions that ‘repressed
rather than expressed people’s real views’24.
This ‘syndrome of distrust’25 was transferred into the new democratic order,
where it is evident not only in low trust towards governments, parliaments and various
political parties, but also towards institutions of civil society: church, mass media and
independent trade unions. Especially low level of trust is observed in case of trade
unions mainly because of full discredit of these organizations during socialist times.
Moreover, the interpersonal distrust is also widespread, so that it creates even more
obstacles in developing healthy civil society, because ‘people need to have
interpersonal trust for them to be willing to form and participate in “secondary
associations”, which make democracies work’26.
Other reason to call the civil societies in post-socialist countries ‘illusory’ is
rooted in a fact, that despite of quite large number of NGOs they are regarded by
‘both the political class and the “people” as a blend of hobby and philanthropy’ 27.
Besides, almost all newly established NGOs seem to be too artificial, created from
above, thus not rooted in the public tradition. Usually most of them consist of five and
22
Arturas Valionis, Socialiniu ir politiniu vertybiu kaita Lietuvoje 1990-1999 metais: adaptavimasis
fragmentiskoje tikroveje [Social-Political Value Change in Lithuania in 1990-1999: Adaptation in
Fragmented Reality], in Kulturologija [Cultural Studies], ed. by Matulionis Arvydas., vol.6, (Vilnius:
Gervele, 2000), p. 339.
23
Valionis, p. 345; Rose, 2001, p. 344.
24
Richard Rose, Post-communism and the Problem of Trust, in Journal of Democracy, (1994), p. 19.
25
Piotr Sztompka, Trust and Emerging Democracy: Lessons from Poland, in International Sociology,
no. 11, (1996), p. 46.
26
William M. Reislinger, Political values in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania: Sources and implications
for democracy, in British Journal of Political Science, vol. 24, (1994), p. 206.
27
Edmund Mokrzycki, Democracy in a Non-Democratic Society, in The Paradoxes of Unintended
Consequences, ed. by Dahrendorf Lord et al (Budapest: CEU Press, 2000), p. 66.
less persons and effect of their activity is minimal and self-oriented. However, such
lack of participatory tradition can be overcome only after substantial time period.
Other difficulty deals with the fact that the space of civil society is
predominantly occupied by the professionals and intellectuals. More than 35 per cent
of these social groups actively participate in some form of voluntary organizations,
while in other social groups there are less than 5 per cent who refer to such activity28.
Therefore, as Szacki has observed, ‘the civil society paradigm that had been
hammered out much earlier by Western political thought disintegrated in Eastern
Europe. The citizen of Eastern Europe is not a bourgeois’29.
Preoccupation of civil society by highly educated people is rooted in postsocialist countries, as Bernik claims, on key characteristic of this social group - ‘civil
society ideology’. Non-conformist intellectuals during socialist regimes understood
themselves as the ‘vanguard’ of resistance; their avowed aim was to create a free
space in which different social interests could express itself spontaneously in the form
of different social movements, forums, and initiatives30. However, after decade of
democratic development such elitist stance rises a problem of mobilization by nongovernmental organizations of larger segment of society and representing of less
educated people’ interests. But, according to Alexander, such situation is also painful
issue within Western civil societies, where ‘scientific and professional power has
empowered experts and excluded ordinary persons from full participation in vital civil
discussions’31.
To sum up, ‘middle class’ and ‘civil society’ theories show doubts about
positive effect of ‘import’ of Western social theories for examining the postcommunist societies with different historical, economic, political and socio-cultural
context. Both these approaches and concepts appear more as ideological tools for
legitimising of particular economic or political interests and policies. If to use them as
pure theoretical tools for analysing of social reality it is evident that such phenomena
28
Ingrida Geciene, Intelligentsia and Entrepreneurs in the Transformational Society of Lithuania, in
Post-communist Transformations, ed. by David Dornish and others (Warsaw: IfiS Publishers, 1998), p.
22.
29
Quoted in Mokrzycki, 2000, p. 65.
30
Ivan Bernik, From Imagined to Actually Existing Democracy: Intellectuals in Slovenia, in
Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe, ed. by Bozoki Andras (Budapest: CEU Press, 1999), p.
108.
31
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Civil Society I, II, III: Constructing an Empirical Concept from Normative
Controversies and Historical Transformations, in Real Civil Societies, ed. by Jeffrey C. Alexander
(SAGE Studies in International Sociology 48, 1998), p. 11.
as middle class and civil society are hardly existing in such form as they are in
Western countries. Thus these two examples illustrate the danger of the manipulation
with theoretical assumptions and to exploit them as quite artificial models for the
construction of correspondent social structures or at least simulacrum of them from
above. Therefore, such negative effects induce to look critically towards a direct
employment of any Western theory and inspire to find or create the more adequate
theoretical approaches and concepts for social reality of these countries.
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