東歐的市民權與市民社會

Citizenship and Civil Society in Eastern Europe

林信華(Hsin-Hwa Lin)

《國際論壇》 1期 (1998/07) Pp. 79-103

https://doi.org/10.7072/AJIS.199807.0079

並列摘要

Eastern Europe after 1989 did not easily transform into a democratic social system, contrary to the expectations of many people. But the democratization and reformation of their economies forced the Eastern European countries into some transformation from the traditional style of society and the institutions of communism. In this process of transformation, the civil society (burgerliche Gesellschaft) has been embodied in Eastern Europe, because of the effects of the democratization and economic reformations, particularly in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary since 1994. Civil society is a key concept with which to understand the political self-fashioning of many political participants, and the actual process of social transformation. For J. Habermas, civil society means something like the social basis for a vital form of public communication, operating between state and economy as a medium that preserves citizenship itself. In Eastern Europe, the structures of civil society are so completely the mirror image of the panoptic state apparatus that, while they do emerge during the first stages of the state's decay, they also disappear along with it. In Western societies, the new social movements have an entirely different basis.
Therefore, it is arguable that, after 2004 the Eastern Europe countries will witness a semantic shift with the concept of 'civil society', as they converge at least in the direction more or less of Western societies. That is, the German meaning of 'burgerliche Gesellschaft' shifts to the English meaning of 'civil society' or the French meaning of 'société civile'. At the same time, the concept of 'citizenship' has undergone a similar shift. The question of civil society and citizenship for the Eastern Europe countries will not be a political and lawful struggle against the state in the Marxist tradition. More likely, it will be structured by two issues. The first concerns the nature of social membership in highly differentiated societies, where the authority of the nation-state appears to be under question. The second range of issues concerns the problem of the efficient and equal allocation of resources. In general, citizenship is essentially about the nature of social membership within modern political collectives. That is, the problem of citizenship as national identity or citizenship as human identity is central to the whole modern problem of global identities.