Between National Politics and International Influences: Revisiting Transactional and Participatory Activism in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The problem of political participation has been constantly recurring in the case of Central and Eastern European civil societies, which have been regarded with great expectations towards the democratization of the regimes in the region since the early 1990s on. After the color revolutions in CEE, which proved the presumptions of an apathetic civil society in the region, today we can see a contradiction between the low individual participation in protest events on the one hand, and the relatively large number of civil society organizations on the other. Reaching back to the concepts of transactional and participatory activism (Petrova and Tarrow 2007), initial tendencies have showed that that CEE civil societies are more efficient in the former, i.e. mobilizing inter-organizational networks rather than citizens on the local level. The prevalence of transactional activism is often explained by Western influence and NGO-ization including both donors and transnational networks, as well as the European Union’s project-based funding scheme, which have led to the dominance of professionalized organizations focusing on projects and lobbying rather than on organizing protests and citizen’s actions. However, more recent research has shown a much more complicated relationship between foreign influences and local mobilizations. In this panel, we would like to reconsider the role of civil society in promoting democratic values and an active political engagement in Central and Eastern Europe, through empirical case studies. We would especially like to reflect on the contradicting empirical evidence regarding the influence of transactional activism and the question whether it has indeed facilitated a low level of local activism in the region, as expected according to literature on NGO-ization and projectification. Looking at opportunity structures, however, various studies have shown, that foreign-funded organizations can be more active in organizing protests than locally funded organizations (Císar 2010), while some at other cases, new strategies of localism appear to emerge). Furthermore, with the extensive de-democratization processes and the rise of the so-called “illiberal states” in Hungary and Poland as well as the disappointment in the political elite in Czechia, we experience the rise of protest activities and the participatory activism of professional civil society organizations. Thus, our panel seeks to revisit the explanation of the prevalence of transactional versus participatory activism in Central and Eastern Europe. In doing so, besides the role of international donors and networks, we focus on the role political and discursive opportunity structures on the national and local levels. Císař, O. (2010). Externally sponsored contention: The channelling of environmental movement organisations in the Czech Republic after the fall of Communism. Environmental Politics, 19(5), 736–755. Petrova, T., & Tarrow, S. (2007). Transactional and participatory activism in the emerging European polity: The puzzle of East-Central Europe. Comparative Political Studies, 40(1), 74–94.

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