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Vol 2, No 11
20 March 2000 |
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From Teachers to Learners Thomas Carothers Ten years ago, most observers thought of civil society aid to Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in terms of quick-acting doses of support to expand the envelope of freedom during the initial hump of transition away from Communism. Yet a decade later, civil society aid is still very much on donors' agendas. With economic and political transitions advancing slowly in most countries, new hopes are being pinned on civil society aid, hopes that it can be the key to unblocking stagnant or failing transitions over the long term. In the political domain, civil society development is now deemed crucial to stimulating the public pressure and participation necessary to force poorly functioning state institutions to become more responsive and accountable. In the social and economic domains, a more diverse, active civil society is now held out as necessary to cushion the effects of restructuring, to ensure public understanding and support for market reforms, to ensure that privatization does not lapse into cronyism, and to connect newly empowered local governments with citizens. As donors deepen and broaden their objectives in promoting civil society, they would do well to assess carefully what the past ten years of such activity have produced and to take a sober look at the challenges ahead. Transitions The experience of transition in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been so varied that the very concept of post-Communism is now almost useless. To say that Poland and Turkmenistan are both post-Communist countries is to say very little. It may well be time to bury the concept. In the excitement of the early 1990s, many people both outside and inside the region assumed that, once launched, economic and political reforms would naturally move forward. People imagined that transition would be akin to placing a boat in a rapidly moving river and then simply steering it along. But, as it turns out, reforms can and often do get captured or blocked at every step of the way. A small number of countries, mostly with relatively small populations, have made substantial progress with both democratic and economic transitions: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) and Slovenia. But these are very much in the minority. A larger group of countries are doing badly on both fronts and have authoritarian or semi-authoritarian governments and statist economies. These include all the Central Asian countries except Kyrgyzstan, as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Serbia and Croatia. But the largest category of countries, with 11 members, are those hovering uneasily between success and failure. Some are stuck in a halfway state between democracy and dictatorship and between statist and market economics, others are drifting backwards, and a few are creeping ahead. This is a broad category that spans better off countries such as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Macedonia and Romania, and worse off ones such as Ukraine and Albania, as well as Russia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Bosnia. Simplistic though they are, these categories help us see that 20 of the 27 countries in the region are either in a transitional gray zone or really not doing well at all. For many people in these 20 countries the basic conditions of life have worsened significantly in the past ten years. In the former Soviet Union, for example, GDP per capita has declined on average more than 40 per cent since 1991. GDP per capita in Russia, one of the richer countries of the former Soviet Union, is now well below that of Mexico, a country one associates with classic Third World poverty. Incubator of democracy The West has generally been a tremendously important influence in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in defining the basic endpoints to which transitions are pointed, but of only moderate importance in most of the former Soviet Union. The fact that it is generally a positive influence has not, however, removed a sense of disappointment about the Western role. After the bubble of excitement that surrounded the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West never really seized the historical moment. Western societies were quick to move on with their own preoccupations, expecting former Communist countries, essentially, to either get into line or go away. Nor has Western aid to the region been on the grand scale that many suppose. Aid to Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was somewhere between USD 50 billion and USD 100 billion in the 1990s, depending on how one defines and measures aid. This amounts to USD 100 to USD 200 per person over the decade or USD 10 to USD 20 per person per year. This is proportional to the amount of Western aid to many parts of the developing world and is not an especially intensive effort when compared, for example, to the surge of US aid to Central America in the 1980s, when in the cause of combating the spread of leftist governments the Reagan administration committed aid of over USD 100 per person per year in some countries. The first phase of Western aid to promote civil society development in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was the short, heady, idealistic time of the early 1990s. This was when Western private foundations and the few official aid agencies involved in civil society aid made their first contacts with new independent civic groups and civic activists in the region. Time seemed to be of the essence, and small amounts of support to the right groups promised to make a great difference. Providers of civil society aid focused on the newly emergent groups devoted to public interest advocacy - human rights groups, environmental organizations, election monitoring groups and civic education associations - as well as the new independent media, especially newspapers and journals. The idea was to help nurture those people and groups fighting to assert the new freedoms, to support a core of nonpartisan but politically committed civil society that would serve as an incubator of democracy. Best practices The second phase, from the mid-1990s onwards, involved a broadening of civil society aid. Aid providers still interpreted promoting the development of civil society in terms of supporting nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), but the range of NGOs and of NGO aid was expanded considerably. Aid began to go to a wider circle of groups than in the initial wave, beyond the politically oriented advocacy groups to service delivery NGOs working in children's welfare, public health, tenants' rights and many other fields. Aid providers began to support centers for NGO training and development, as NGO sectors grew rapidly and soon encompassed thousands of organizations of all sizes. As NGO sectors mushroomed in the recipient countries, a number of issues and problems related to civil society aid began to emerge. Out of the numerous studies, reports and conferences on NGO assistance, a set of lessons, now commonly held out as "best practices" for aid donors, began to accumulate, which urged donors to:
These lessons now have the feel of well-worn conventional wisdom, at least among veterans of the many conferences on civil society aid of recent years, which is not to say that they are consistently followed in practice by most aid providers; for many, they remain aspirations. Nevertheless, five years ago, they were not so old hat but had to be identified one by one in response to shortcomings on the ground. A new phase? The second phase of civil society aid has peaked and a third may now be starting. The backdrop to this is the failure or faltering of the political and economic transitions in so many countries, a plateauing of the initial surge of interest and enthusiasm for NGOs within the region, along with the fact that Western aid for civil society is shrinking, as USAID, the European Union, the Soros foundations and other major sources of aid in the 1990s are pulling out of some countries or shifting priorities. The possible shape that this third phase of civil society assistance may take is as yet unclear. The task now is to identify the core challenges that lie ahead. One critical challenge for providers of civil society aid is that of relating civil society promotion to political party development. Throughout most of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and for that matter in most politically transitional countries, political parties are a disaster. They are poorly organized and poorly run personalistic vehicles. They attract mediocre individuals and have especially weak appeal for young people. Their funding bases are often narrow and corrupt. They have no stable constituency and poor constituency relations. For years, providers of civil society aid have encouraged their NGO recipients to steer clear of political parties and to cultivate the ideal and the practice of nonpartisan civic engagement. There have been good reasons for this approach, but it is no longer a viable one. Simply stated, parties are being left behind by NGOs. In many countries of the region there are quite a few NGOs that are well-run, relatively well financed organizations with highly capable staff working next to parties that are badly run, badly financed and badly staffed. This is an unhealthy situation; for democracy to work, these countries need a talented, dynamic political class as well as a talented, dynamic civic sector. This does not mean that providers of civil society aid should directly aid political parties or push for direct ties between civil society groups and political parties. But it does mean not ignoring the political party domain. One example of an area for possible program development is party funding. Providers of civil society aid have given extensive attention to the question of funding for civil society organizations. They could expand their conferences, legal studies, training and other efforts to take on the critical issue of how parties should be funded, in order to interest civil society in this issue (rather than leaving it in the hands of political parties) and to see if insights from the civil society sector could be relevant. A second challenge, which is related to the first, is how to go beyond promoting NGOs to promoting civil society. Providers of civil society aid have been focused on helping NGOs for various reasons, including their appeal as "clean" technocratic groups full of Westernized young staff members who are willing to operate according to the rules and practices that fit the bureaucratic demands of Western funders. But aid providers have gone from favoring NGOs as recipients of aid to equating NGOs with civil society itself and assuming that the growth curve of NGO proliferation is a good measure of civil society development. A fully developed civil society in an established democracy has many other types of organizations than just advocacy NGOs and service NGOs. Civil society includes professional associations, religious organizations, unions, educational institutions, cultural organizations, sports groups, hobby clubs, ethnic associations, community groups, farmers associations, business associations and many others. It is time for donors to rethink the privileged place that NGOs have had in their civil society portfolios. Providers of civil society aid also need to come to terms with the challenge of trying to foster civil society development in semi-authoritarian countries, where the regimes have adopted the institutional forms of democracy, including regular elections, yet manipulate the political process and the amount of political liberty enough to ensure that their basic hold on power is not threatened. These regimes are trying to carry out a political balancing act: allowing enough democracy to gain international legitimacy and to relieve domestic political pressure, while keeping hold of the levers of political power. They typically permit some space for civil society to organize and operate and permit foreign donors to provide support. Donors hope that the gradual development of civic ideas and practices will build the long-term base for democracy, but this is more a matter of hope than experience. Providers of civil society aid need to develop their thinking about what kinds of civil society development are most likely to be productive in such semi-authoritarian contexts. Former USSR A fourth challenge is the former Soviet Union. One major lost opportunity of the early 1990s was the failure of the United States and the main European powers to seize the moment of the break-up of the Soviet Union and commit a dramatic quantity of resources to help Russia with its transition and to set Western-Russian relations on a genuinely new footing To a great extent, Western providers of civil society assistance have treated their work in the former Soviet Union as an extension of their efforts in Central and Eastern Europe. It has become clear, however, that the challenges of political and economic development are qualitatively different, and harder. The reasons for this are fairly evident: the fact that most of the former Soviet republics face the challenge of forming national states for the first time, the deeper, harsher legacy of Communism in the former Soviet Union, the greater distance from Western traditions and influences, and so forth. But in the first half of the 1990s, the dominant idea of "post-Communist transitions" tended to blur these differences. Western supporters of civil society must commit the energy and resources to match the daunting challenge of bolstering civil society in the former Soviet Union. They should view the trend towards reducing civil society aid to Central and Eastern Europe as an opportunity to increase it proportionally to the former Soviet Union, rather than assuming that this downward trend will extend further east. It is obviously hard to make a second big push for aid after the initial push of the early 1990s, but this is much needed for the former Soviet Union, a region in serious trouble. Finally, there is the challenge of the former Yugoslavia. The settlements of the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo are tentative at best and will require extensive Western involvement if they are to hold. The recently introduced idea of a Western-funded Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe is an appealing one but will require a high degree of effort and commitment by many Western governments and private organizations if it is to take on some weight. Renewed civil society development will have to be one element of a long-term path towards stability in former Yugoslavia. Extensive, innovative aid for civil society will need to be an integral part of the Stability Pact package. Staying to learn When Western aid providers rushed out to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the former Soviet Union, they were infused with the idea that they were going to teach. Yet when they arrived, they discovered not only how little they knew about the transformations under way but also that the learning was going to be more mutual than they had anticipated. My summation of ten years of Western civil society aid to the region thus boils down to a rather modest conclusion: they went to teach; they stayed to learn; they're learning still. Thomas Carothers is vice president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC and author of the book Aiding Democracy Abroad: The learning curve (To order, contact Brookings Institution Press ; tel.: +1 800 275 1447 or +1 202 797 6258, fax: +1 202 797 6004, e-mail: bibooks@brook.edu). This article is based on a speech given on 5 November 1999 at the Grantmakers East annual meeting in Berlin (published in full in East European Constitutional Review, Fall 1999) and was first published in Alliance, vol 5, no 1 in March 2000. For more on the often murky and misleading concept of post-Communism "transition," see last week's article "'Transitology': Global Dreams and Post-Communist Realities" by Rudolf L Tőkés.
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