On the "Civil" in Civil Society. Culture Wars of Liberalism and Conceptual Change

In the contemporary culture wars of liberalism, particularly in the right-wing rejection of the liberal Zeitgeist in Europe, civil society is invoked both as a path for the future of democracy and as a peril for national cohesion and cultural values. The question, then, is: what does the “civil” in civil society mean in this ongoing political contestation? In political theory, civil society refers to citizens’ autonomous networks and self-organized associations that constitute a counterweight to the power of the state. The “civil” characterizes the engagement and responsibility of citizens in political and social matters. In the wake of the 1989 revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe, the plurality of civil society associations was celebrated as a precondition for a vibrant liberal democracy and democratic innovation. Today, however, this image of liberal democracy is waning and under attack from the perspective of “illiberal democracy,” which claims to represent the will of the sovereign people and the values of family, homeland, and Christian civilization. On the one hand, civil society is invoked as the communal ties that bind society together due to church, family, and homeland. On the other hand, civil society organizations defending and promoting human rights and liberal tolerance are considered foreign agents undermining national self-determination. The aim of this paper is to analyze the conceptual change of the “civil” in civil society in the contemporary culture wars of liberalism, and the implied contested conceptions of civility, political engagement, social belonging, the relationship between civil society, democracy, and the state and the political dynamics of opposition, resistance and support. The archive will consist of political speeches invoking civil society for example, by former Czech president Václav Havel in the 1990s and by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in the last decade. The political theories of liberalism and its critiques, studies of illiberalism, and diagnoses of a post-liberal order constitute the conceptual and reflexive reservoir for the analyses.