Left Unintended? The Ambiguous Nature of the Slovak Civil Society’s Origins

Transactional and participatory activism in Slovakia in the post-communist period had been influenced by the vast amount of factors, most of which could have been observed to a certain extent within the Central European civil societies’ imposition as well. However, Slovakia’s liberal democratic discourses had to deal with rather particular features that have shaped the very perception of the public space while allowing the national politics to basically eliminate the political struggle for the very nature of the transformation process itself. I would argue the results were mainly twofold, concerning the activism in general. On one hand, the chance for competing interpretations of what the civil society actually meant were practically non-existent, or, perhaps, obfuscated by the thorough rejection of any kind of continuity with either reforming or strictly anti-regime movements, such as the attempts of young communists to reform the regime or the ecological activists who utterly failed to build up on their democratic cause respectively. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the Slovak national politics establishing process had strongly promoted the binary perception of the public space, within which, there had been little to none opportunity to develop the very understanding of the possible multiplicity of the civil society activism, thus narrowing the participatory efforts to their constrained version and at the same time limiting the international influence to rather a curbed set of causes, such as supporting the vision that civil society is something aimed to defy rather than strengthen the state. In my paper, I will attempt to examine the late socialist roots of the aforementioned features present in Slovak civil society. Furthermore, I will analyze the discourses that have shaped the understanding of the civil society as well as the different forms of activism that have eventually occurred in Slovakia, within the peculiar framework of 1990s establishing processes. Moreover, as the title ‘Left Unintended’ outlines, I would try to position the Slovak case in comparison with other Central European countries, mainly Czech Republic, while particularly focusing on the then establishing liberal discourse. In doing so, I will attempt to make a case for pointing out the problematic relation between nationalist agenda on one hand, and the liberal promotion of the civil society on the other, which, in addition, had ultimately ‘left’ the political struggle over the very nature of civil society participation ‘unintended’, while at the same time rendering it a mere political agenda of the liberal discourse agents, such as political parties or particular NGOs. Eventually, such a narrow frame has made it yet more complicated for a discourse on transactional and participatory activism to flourish.