Analysis: Civil Society: The art of uniting in order to defend free association

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Analysis: Civil Society: The art of uniting in order to defend free association By J Brooks Spector parkhurst1

For many, perhaps most people, the term and the very idea of civil society came along recently, a function of the globalisation of ideas, spontaneous mass movements, the internet, and even the greater democratisation of Eastern Europe, post-Soviet domination. Instead, the tendrils stretch back much further, and the intellectual foundations reach back to the beginnings of Western civilisation. Let’s examine this tradition.

But let us go to that “Ur moment” in discovering the principle of civic organisations as key to building democratic states and institutions, and thus turn to Alexis de Tocqueville.

The earliest years of the civil rights revolution did not spring automatically as an effort to address the great wrong of entrenched segregation and legal discrimination. Organisers studied tactics, techniques, and strategies carefully, trying to come to grips with the best methods to encourage broad social participation and popular support to move public opinion and government.

By the 1960s and ’70s, social and community organisers like the legendary Saul Alinsky and his volume,, among other organisers and their works, provided much of the template for the anti-Vietnam War activists’ efforts, who often drew upon a reach back through to the ideas of disciplined civil disobedience as earlier refined by Rev Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Henry David Thoreau.

Now, of course, electronic media has become that much more ubiquitous and sophisticated, so that civil society communications can reach millions in a virtual heartbeat. It has allowed for much broader international communication and coalition building, even as it can also make effective leadership and coordination problematic.

But this targeted largesse has encouraged some governments such as the one in Hungary to allege that any opposition to the populist, but near-authoritarian leadership of JerzyOf course, the question of the aims of funding organisations does need to be considered by recipients. Civil society activists are becoming more conscious, however, of the need to understand the motivations of funders and would-be funders, to ensure their respective values are in alignment as funding agreements take place.

 

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