Civl society

Wolfgang Mazal / Bettina Rausch

Civil Society Today

Principles and Political Potential

edition noir

Disclaimer:

This is a joint publication of the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies and the Political Academy of the Austrian People ´s Party. This publication receives funding from the European Parliament. The Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, the Political Academy of the Austrian People ´s Party, and the European Parliament assume no responsibility for facts or opinions expressed in this publication or any subsequent use of the information contained therein. Sole responsibility lies on the authors of the publication.

Reviewed by: Sandra Pasarić, WMCES (Brussels, Belgium) & Christian Moser-Sollmann, PA (Vienna, Austria)

edition noir

Imprint:

© 2021 Verlag noir, Vienna

Verlag noir, 1120 Wien, Tivoligasse 73

Editor: Christian Moser-Sollmann, Felix Ofner, Roman Schachenhofer, Lorenz Jahn

Art Direction: B. Könighofer

Translation: Robert McInnes

ISBN: 979-3-9504939-3-1

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

I. Fundamentals and theory of the civil society

From the Community of Citizens to the Civil Society Political Participation in Antiquity and Modern Times

Simon Varga

The Civil Society and the Bourgeoisie

Ernst Bruckmüller

Fundamental Principles of the Civil Society Which Trends Do We Need to Protect Ourselves Against?

Werner J. Patzelt

The Phenomenology of the Civil Society

Manfred Prisching

The Civil Society – A (neo-?) Liberal Project

Alexander Bogner

The Civil Society – Cure-All for Democracy or Just a Sweet Dream? A Plea for a Regulatory Policy for the Commitment Society

Michael Borchard

The Civil Society between the Poles of Security and Freedom

Peter Kampits

Missing: Bridge Builders – Considerations on the Polarisation of Western Societies and How This Can Be Overcome

Benjamin Hasselhorn

Participation, Codetermination, Moralisation: How Social Movements Have Changed

Christian Moser-Sollmann

The Sensitive “I” Thoughts on an Insecure Society Between Digitalisation and Hyper-Individualisation

Johannes Domsich

The State and the Civil Society – or the Citizen Society? Casting a Glance at Light and Shade

Till Kinzel

A Community of Free and Responsible People

Bettina Rausch

The Civil Society and Artificial Intelligence – Trends and Challenges for Dealing with AI in the European Union

Julia Juen / Verena Ringler

II. Civil virtues – case studies

Civil Society: Key Activities of the Political Academy

The Social Contract in Change

Michael Borchard / Ulrike Ackermann / Andreas Jankor

The “New Civil Society”: A State that Gives its Citizens Space to Breathe

Werner J. Patzelt / Günther Lutschinger

A Civil Society in Europe? Strong Impulses from the Regions Europe and Society Start at Home – on the Effective Power of Applied, Initiated Formats of Encounter and Dialogue in the Regional, as well as Cross-border, Context

Verena Ringler / Magdalena J. Schneider

Make Austria Flourish! The Role and Potential of Active Charitable Foundations for Society and the State

Ruth Williams / Christoph Robinson

“Cooperative?” “Nobody will come!” On the Rediscovery of an Often-Underestimated Legislation and Organisational Form

Justus Reichl

Social Entrepreneurship: Attempt at a Classification within the Civil Society

Elisabeth Mayerhofer

The Civil Society – the Family as a Learning Environment

Wolfgang Mazal

A Person with Courage Inspires Courage The Example of Kolping Austria

Christine Leopold

The Protection of Life in the Civil Society

Martina Kronthaler

Lived Civil Society Needs More Trust! On the Connection Between Civil-Society Commitment, Social Welfare, and Community Service as Reflected in Regulatory Policy

Elisabeth Anselm

Emmaus – From Paris to St. Pölten Social Work Concerns Us All

Karl Langer

Authors

Foreword

In addition to the separation of powers and the liberal constitutional state, active citizens who help fashion the community are central pillars of our democracy. In this respect, citizens are not only the addressees of the state’s rules and norms, but also co-creators of precisely those norms. And, the community in a liberal state is more than government order; it is the interaction between people and their relationships to each other – in families and friendships, at work, and in organisations.

Active participation in the personal and public environment enriches many different facets of human life and, in doing so, makes our society more diverse and colourful. There can be no question that humans are political and social beings, and that their individuality can only fully develop within a community.

We find many different answers to how we want to organise our community, and our society, in democracies of the Western kind. Broadly speaking, the following differentiations can be made: Politics that are typically located on the left define themselves principally by way of the paternalistic state that monitors all spheres of life, and plans and regulates the way lives are led down to the smallest detail. In our eyes, although conservative politics relies on the state to set general parameters, it places individual freedom and responsibility at the core. It trusts the intrinsic drive in each and every citizen to want to make a contribution to a functioning community according to their abilities. This is the fundamental idea of the political concept of a “civil society” as a community of free and responsible people.

The Political Academy of the People’s Party and the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies have extensively discussed and studied just how varied and heterogeneous the concepts of the civil society are in theory and practice in its current focus of research.

The essential basis for this can be found in the image of man rooted in the Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman tradition concept of humankind with the dignity of the individual person as its foundation. However, this also includes the obligation of actively making use of one’s abilities to benefit society, as expressed in the parable of the talents in the Bible. Or, to use Immanuel Kant’s words: “Man has an individual imperfect obligation – namely, that of developing one’s own talents – for oneself, as well as for others.”

In this publication, we requested that highly-respected scientists, publicists, and practicians give their fundamental thoughts on the potential and possibilities of the civil society in the 21^st century.

Theoretical, historical, and philosophical contributions can be found here, as well as various case studies from practice. The diversity and pluralism of ideas of the contributions make it clear that the permanent voice and participation of an active public can enrich the political discourse and policy formulation of our country.

Wolfgang Mazal Bettina Rausch

From the Community of Citizens to the Civil Society
Political Participation in Antiquity and Modern Times

Simon Varga

Summary: This contribution focuses on the differences and evolution from the ancient community of citizens to the modern civil society. The question about the necessity and significance of political participation in antiquity and modern times forms the central point of this study. From the present socio-political perspective, it can be seen that the core of today’s civil society still incorporates a large section of the community of citizens. In the final analysis, this awareness calls for community-political empathy – understood as civil rights and obligations.

Introduction

At first sight, linking antiquity and the present day in political affairs might awaken suspicions of anachronism, especially seeing that political practice has already undergone many metamorphoses over the course of history, and will obviously also experience even more changes in the future. However, at second sight, a project of this kind seems to be not only historically, but also systematically, logical. Already present in the early stages of Greek political thought in its classical tradition, a question – that is still unavoidable for life in a union or community and that many modern states still struggle with – was asked and attempted to be answered, in theory and practice: that of the level and significance of the political participation of the individual in the political community.

Although it is not possible to provide a comprehensive portrayal of the many historical developments leading from the community of citizens of ancient times to today’s civil society in all its nuances, even sketching these developments leads to the – in no way surprising – conclusion that, then and now, citizen participation was and is an essential necessity for the organisation of political coexistence – and will continue to be so. However, as already indicated, this is something of a truism. The two central questions deal much more with the intensity of political participation the citizens can demand and where the fundamental differences between the ancient community of citizens and modern civil society can actually be discerned.

This essay begins with a brief depiction of the immediate ancient political practice of the so-called community of citizens, connected with a historical-political overview of political life in the classical Greek period (1). This was followed by a change in the political theory of antiquity. In it, the fundamentals of the politico-anthropological philosophy of Aristotle and his concept of political participation in the course of the “best imaginable state” developed by him are discussed (2). The transformation from the ancient community of citizens to the modern civil society – especially based on sociological observations – will, at least, be touched on in the next step (3). Taking the current global socio-political developments into consideration, the next section handles the current importance of the civil society that, in my opinion, can still be regarded to a large degree as a community of citizens – and maybe even increasingly so – without questioning the modern developments and achievements such as human rights, democracy, and civil liberties in any way (4). Finally, the last point leads to an investigation of the foundation of community policy empathy as a civic right and duty (5).

1. Ancient political practice: Organisation, participation, and dichotomy

There can be no doubt that ancient Greece occupies an important place in connection with the development and fundamental understanding of the political in Europe and even beyond its borders. This pertains particularly to the so-called Greek classical period beginning with the military conflicts between the Greeks and the Persians to the coronation of the soon-to-be Macedonian King Alexander the Great – the time from around 500 to 336 BC. In this classical period, the Greek city states (Old Greek: polis (sing.); poleis (pl.)), including Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, achieved their uniquely great historical, political, and cultural importance of global significance, which would have been impossible in this fashion without the political organisation of the polis. And that occured – surprising as it may seem – in spite of many internal political conflicts within the city states themselves, as well as those among the city states, and external military threats from other regions of the Mediterranean.

In the classical period, there were likely more than 800 settlements that could be classified as a polis; their physical appearance differed greatly although, “in principle, the inner structure of the settlement space was the same.”¹ This usually consisted of an urban centre with a political, economic, and cultural infrastructure with the economic and/or political agora, the meeting place for trade and politics in the centre, bordering on administration and cult buildings, as well as the land surrounding the urban centre that was necessary for agricultural purposes. For example, all of Attica belonged to the polis of Athens and citizens living anywhere in Attica referred to themselves as Athenians even if they lived in a village far away from the main city itself.² It seems that Athens, the most influential polis, had a population of between 200,000 and 300,000 during the classical period with the majority of the inhabitants living in rural areas.³

The ideal of the “political self-administration and government by the citizens and striving for internal and external independence” was a characteristic of the political self-image of the city states.⁴ This shows that the goals of political autarchy and autonomy, which were inseparable from the striving for permanent economic stability to be able to provide the citizens with the goods that were necessary and desirable for life at the time, stood at the forefront of the endeavours of the city states. This suggests that there was active economic exchange among many city states. However, most poleis had their own army, their own legal system as well as their own calendar, and different priorities were even set in connection with the mythical cult within the individual city states.

The political self-image of the ancient city state of the classical era was founded on two historical-categorical facts of political practice (and, to a large extent, also of political theory) that have to be dealt with in any examination of the subject of political participation in antiquity: the division of the polis into free and unfree people as well as the paradigm of the free (male) citizen within the polis. In spite of “the great variety of social and state manifestations in ancient Greece”, the separation into free and unfree must be considered “a fundamental characteristic of any ancient political system”,⁵ and the same also applies to the limitation of civic rights and duties to the free (male) citizens of the polis.

From the political perspective, the differentiation between free and unfree was an everyday normality, a common political practice. The citizen was usually considered free and could lay claim to a number of civic rights for himself: political participation, acquisition of property, etc. However, these rights usually went hand in hand with duties: military service, political participation in accordance with the valid laws, the obligation to accept a public office, accompanied by the obligation to fulfil public offices to the benefit of the polis for a specific period, etc. On the other hand, those who were considered unfree, especially slaves in the so-called “state of unfreedom”, were granted no personal and political rights. But there were social differences among the unfree members of society, and the spectrum of the different activities and obligations was rather large. On the one hand, there were state slaves (official servants, watchmen, and labourers). On the other hand, there were house slaves, maids and manservants, who carried out a number of duties in the oikos (the household or family property) where they worked as kitchen help, tutors, nannies, family physicians, etc. Women and children also had absolutely no political rights, although the woman’s position varied from polis to polis. The rights – or, more precisely, lack of rights – of guests (the metics) and foreigners (the xenoi) were also defined differently in the laws of the individual city states.

In connection with the classical Greek era, it is necessary to bear the following in mind:⁶ (i) The dichotomy of the differentiation between “free” and “unfree” was a fact that was socio-politically accepted and unquestioned to a large degree in political practice even though there were occasional discussions about the (possible) justification for this separation in literature and philosophy. (ii) The differentiation between “free” and “unfree”, the designation of the “free citizen” in contrast to the “unfree slave”, not only reflected a formal legal status but also implied an ancient political self-awareness. It is already possible to identify this trace in the works of Aeschylus where the Athenians – after the Persians had asked them for the name of the ruler over the Athenians – were described as free citizens, the slaves of no master, and nobody’s subject.⁷ (iii) On the “unfree” side, the slaves worked in a number of areas and relationships, some of them confidential, which did not change the existing legal status in any way except that of the master’s claim of ownership. (iv) Slaves were defenseless to human trafficking; they were regarded as goods, as possessions, and as tools. (v) Unfree (men, women, and children) were not only expropriated legally and politically, but also – from the anthropological-philosophical perspective – in a worse position and seen in a different way than free people.

2. Ancient political theory: Anthropology and participation in the best state

The thoughts of Aristotle form an indispensable – and, in almost all respects, important –component of ancient classical political philosophy. At the same time, he continued to cling to a fundamental differentiation between the free and unfree. In developing and presenting his practical philosophy, he nevertheless deals, in an astute and cautious manner, with the “philosophy of human affairs”,⁸ which is an inseparable symbiosis of ethics and politics as well as a concrete political anthropology, a political image of man in the broader sense,⁹ which has received a great deal of approval but also criticism in the course of the history of philosophy and political thought. The central pillars of this political anthropology will be depicted by way of three short points:

(i) In his Politics, Aristotle determines that man is a being that lives a political life by nature; in Old Greek, zôon politikon. However, according to Aristotle, this definition of man as a political being is not actually a unique feature of humans, seeing that, in his eyes, bees and other animals (such as ants, for example) also led their lives in a political manner.¹⁰ Aristotle’s definition of man as a zôon politikon is therefore, first and foremost, a biological view that applies to man and his nature – but not exclusively.

(ii) Only Aristotle’s second politico-anthropological definition describes man in a special manner. Man is not only a zôon politikon, a political being in the broader sense, but – going even further – also a zôon logon echon – a being gifted with reason and language. For Aristotle, language and reason made it possible for man to “have a conception of good and evil, of right and wrong”, be able to enter into a political exchange about this with others, and organise coexistence in this way from a political perspective.¹¹ According to Aristotle, this definition provided the sole foundation for the difference between man and (other) animals.

(iii) The Aristotelian political anthropology positioned man and his lifestyle firmly in a political way of living with other people. The human being is therefore directly dependent on his fellow man for his survival as well as for the good and successful life in different ways. From this viewpoint, man is not only a zôon politikon like other animals – living politically by nature – and also not merely a zôon logon echon – gifted with reason and language – but, going beyond that, also a zôon koinonikon – a “community being”¹² who needs the connection to his fellow man just as the individual is needed by the rest of the community. A formal, superficial (political) coexistence, similar to “grazing on the same pasture”,¹³ is impossible for the life of man according to Aristotelian political anthropology.

Aristotle powerfully records this insight – which is fundamental for everything political – of the indispensable belonging to a community in the centre of the development of his political anthropology in politics: the one – the individual person – who is either unable to participate in forms of community, or who has no need of the community with others because of his individual self-sufficiency, is firstly not part of the state (e.g. the polis) and secondly therefore either an animal or a god.¹⁴ But the wild animal on the one hand and the self-sufficient divinity on the other do not apply to humans and their nature, especially since they are dependent on different forms of community for their lives in many respects.

From an ethical-political perspective, this concept of belonging to a community demands active political involvement and the acceptance of political responsibility on the part of the citizen. Aristotle described this kind of involvement – in addition to other passages in the “Philosophy of Human Affairs” – in Politics VII and VIII where he develops his “best imaginable state”, the so-called “polis as required”.¹⁵ In the course of these ethical-political investigations, he initially deals with what he considers the desirable life of the citizen within the political community of this “best imaginable state” that inevitably includes an ethical-political foundation.¹⁶

On the one hand, Aristotle talks about the ethical, as well as political, indispensability of political participation on the part of the citizen within the political community, the politikê koinonia. The political participation is obligatory in this plan for the state¹⁷ as only the acceptance of civic duties (e.g. military, administrative, political, juridical, or cultic) could bring about civic rights – in the broader and narrower sense – (e.g. subjective legal claims, leisure, self-interest, self-responsibility for one’s lifestyle, self-fulfilment). This period of essential and required political involvement from the citizen – as well as that needed for the individual care and work for the household and farming community – was described by Aristotle as a time of “non-leisure” (ascholia) because it demanded practical activities that the citizen had to fulfil immediately. All of this was completely in the sense of the political autarchy and autonomy of the polis.

On the other hand, however, Aristotle deals with the period of the free citizen’s “leisure” (scholê ) in Politics VII and VIII. It investigates the period of the individual’s personal, meaningful way of life beyond politics and political participation. In other words: A person who honours his political civic duties in this Aristotelian “best imaginable state” and performs these duties according to the law and for the good of the polis conscientiously and virtuously merits – in the broader sense – the right to occupy himself with things outside of the political sphere. Fundamentally, this is a matter of the potential for an individual lifestyle (leisure) that can be decided on as one sees fit, but only after the period of political participation (non-leisure). This means only when the obligations in political affairs have been taken care of. And, for the leisure period, Aristotle recommends thoughtful philosophical study and education in general. Here, it would not be going too far to note that – at least in the texts mentioned – he had already thought about a kind of “educated class” of citizens.