Reclaiming the Public: A Reflection on Creating Civil Society in Romania

East European Politics & Societies

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 1990, Pages 393-438

  Kligman, Gail ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84970656902     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: 15338371     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325490004003002     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. See, for example, Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Romanian Identity, Intellectuals, and the Politics of Culture (University of California, in press).
2. The “ten years, ten days” notion was also suggested by Timothy Garton Ash to Vaclav Havel: “In Poland, it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days” (“The Revolution of the Magic Lantern,” New York Review of Books, January 18, 1990). The point, regardless of the referent or time, is self-evident.
3. I spent 1975—76 and 1978 doing field research in Romania. The first stay, based in Bucharest, involved work in the southern areas (Kligman, Căluş: Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Ritual, Chicago, 1981);
4. the second (Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics and Popular Culture in Transylvania, Berkeley and London, 1988), in Maramure§, in the north of what is now Transylvania. In subsequent summers I spent time in Bucharest (which was much more difficult) and in Maramure§.
5. Havel, The Power of the Powerless, p. 5.
6. See P. Medvedev and M. Bakhtin, “Study of Ideologies and its Immediate Tasks,” in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Baltimore, 1978).
7. See Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, on the “dictatorship of ritual”.
8. For a recent work on Ceauşescu's rule, see Mary Ellen Fischer, Nicolae Ceauşescu: A Study in Political Leadership (Boulder and London, 1989)-
9. See Jeffrey Goldfarb, Beyond Glasnost: The Post-Totalitarian Mind (Chicago, 1989), especially the chapters on totalitarianism and newspeak.
10. This brings to mind the rewriting of the Tiananmen events by the Chinese authorities whose skilled editors' attempts at ideological interpretation of these events failed to convince the world which had watched. (This is not meant to deny the editorial work done by reporters.) It is still not clear who in Romania was responsible for the gruesome pictures of tortured dead bodies that were aired shortly after the Timişoara “massacre”. These bodies were not obvious recent casualties, but were reportedly dug up from the public paupers' cemetery. The “propa-ganda” effect of the media with respect to manipulation of the tortured body calls for critical analysis. See Mick Taussig, “Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin's Theory of History as a State of Siege,” Social Text (Fall/Winter, 1989), pp. 3–20.
11. See also Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead.
12. This article was written during and about the initial period of “transition” in which the Provisional Government prevailed. Just as I am about to send it off, the FSN has been elected the majority party, and Ion Iliescu, President of Romania (May 20, 1990).
13. See Gail Kligman, The ‘Wedding of the Dead, 1988.
14. Dinescu, noted surrealist poet, in an interview given to Liberation in 1989 for which he was honored with house arrest, noted that God had turned his face away from Romania. Dinescu is now President of the Writers' Union.
15. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago, 1987).
16. “Communism” resonates harshly against popular sentiments, and is heavily demonized. On demonization, Michael Taussig's work is relevant and stimulating. In addition to the above-noted book, see The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill, 1980).
17. The literature on totalitarianism is extensive and varied. See, for example, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, 1967);
18. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (New York, 1968);
19. Carl Friedrich, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, 1954);
20. Jeffrey Goldfarb, Beyond Glasnost;
21. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, 1986).
22. Objectification of the state, particularly of totalizing states, gave rise to emphases on “top down” rule. Little attention was given to social and/or popular cultural practices in these states, or to the subjectivities of individuals, workers, etc. See, for example, Miklos Haraszti, A Worker in a Worker's State (New York, 1978);
23. Gail Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead;
24. S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1980 (New York, 1983).
25. The role of the intellectuals negotiating their positions in the production of culture/politics has fared somewhat better: Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present (London, 1988);
26. Gyõrgy Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York, 1979);
27. Katherine Verdery National Ideology under Socialism (in press).
28. Havel, The Power of the Powerless, pp. 46–47.
29. See Charles Taylor, “Invoking Civil Society,” in Greg Urban and Benjamin Lee, eds., Working Papers and Proceedings of the Center for Psychosocial Studies (Chicago, 1990), p. 1. The Rousseauian “romantic” tone in this characterization of civil society reminds the anthropologically minded of a related “romanticization of the savage”.
30. See, as representative of the diversity: Andrew Arato, “Civil society against the state,” Telos 47 (Spring, 1981);
31. Andrew Arato, “Revolution, Civil Society and Democracy” (Paper presented at a conference on Civil Society held at the University of Texas-Austin, April 21–22, 1990);
32. Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen, “Social Movements, Civil Society, and the Problem of Sovereignty,” Praxis International 4,5 (October, 1985);
33. Thomas Gold, “Party-State Versus Society in China” (Paper draft circulated in Berkeley, 1989);
34. Alvin Gouldner, “Civil Society in Capitalism and Socialism,” in his The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York, 1982), pp. 355–73;
35. Antonio Gramsci, “State and Civil Society,” in his Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York, 1971), pp. 206–76;
36. Helsinki Watch, Reinventing Civil Society: Poland's Quiet Revolution 1981–1986 (New York, 1986);
37. Helsinki Watch, Toward Civil Society: Independent Initiatives in Czechoslovakia (New York, 1989);
38. Gail Lapidus, “State and Society: Toward the Emergence of Civil Society in the Soviet Union,” in Seweryn Bialer, ed., Gorbachev's Russia: Politics, Society and Nationality (Boulder, 1988);
39. John Keane, Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London, 1988).
40. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, 1989).
41. Command economies structurally necessitate the growth of second economies, variously described as informal, parallel, hidden, gray. On Romania, see for example: Horst Brezinski and Paul Petersen, “The Second Economy in Romania,” in Maria Los, ed., The Second Economy and its Control in Marxist States (New York, 1988);
42. Steven Sampson, “Rich Families and Poor Collectives: An Anthropological Approach to Romania's ‘Second Economy’,” Bidrag til Ostatsforskning 11:1 (1983), pp. 34–43. The second economy is not a legitimate partner in the public sphere although it benefits from this sphere through corruption, pilfering, etc. The second economy in Romania, as elsewhere, thrived, although it increasingly fell victim to the excesses of corruption, or to the necessity of supplying basic subsistence goods. The “second economy” operates as an illegal or quasi-legal market. The “transition” involves the formalization through regulation of these already established relations.
43. For example, see Havel, The Power of the Powerless, pp. 79–81;
44. and Elemer Hankiss, “The ‘Second Society’: Is There an Alternative Social Model Emerging in Contemporary Hungary?,” Social Research 55:1–2 (Spring/Summer, 1988), pp. 13–42.
45. I note the “transition” with a certain skepticism, recalling the Sweezy-Bettelheim debates. These “ideal typical” forms are, again, realized in practice, and practice does not readily conform to the “ideal”. See also Istvan Rev, “Uncertainty as a Technique of the Exercise of Power: An Approach to the Question of Transition” (Paper presented at Stanford University, 1990).
46. Clifford Geertz addressed “transition” more anthropologically in “The Integrative Revolution,” in Clifford Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States: The Quest For Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York, 1963), pp. 105–57.
47. See also Giuseppe Di Palma “Transitions: Puzzles and Surprises from West to East” (Paper presented at the Conference of Europeanists, Washington DC, March 23–25, 1990).
48. This interest is not novel, having been prevalent in the interwar years. That it occurs in another period of destabilization is not surprising either. See Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism (in press).
49. I would suggest that Timothy Garton Ash's indignant remarks about exhaustion from “experimentation” should be slightly more tempered (New York Review of Books, April 26, 1990, p. 19). Almost everyone in Eastern Europe wants rule by law, a free press, local self-government, and “democracy” in some form. But some western capitalists, for example, are more interested in their own profits than in the democratic aspirations of East Europeans. East Germany is replete with problems of property at present, with former owners wanting to move in and “make a killing” on development. As the euphoria of liberation is moderated by time, citizens east and west are raising more cautionary concerns than this article reveals. They are legitimate concerns. Palmer's example in Budapest, however well-intentioned, has similarly raised eyebrows.
50. Walesa's recent outbursts against Solidarity intellectuals (New York Times, May 10, 1990) is indicative of this historic divide; it is also a political tactic that discursively manipulates this problem.
51. See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
52. and, for a critical elaboration on women and the public sphere, Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988).
53. See Craig Calhoun, “Tiananmen, Television and the Public Sphere: Internationalization of Culture and the Beijing Spring of 1989,” Public Culture 2:1 (1989), p. 70.
54. Andrew Arato, “Revolution, Civil Society and Democracy”. This statement is an example of the perils of reified understandings of “the state/civil society”.
55. On Romanian protochronism, see Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism (in press), chapter 5.