"Civil Society Is the Society of Citizens"

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Apr 02, 2014
by Alex Jackson
"Civil Society Is the Society of Citizens"

The more active citizens we have the stronger and better civil society and the country at large will be Vyacheslav Bakhmin, Maria Kanevskaya and Masha Lipman open the Salzburg Global Russian Civil Society Sympoisum

In his book The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Vladimir Voinovich tells of the Nazi Germany invasion of Russia: When news of the troops crossing the border reaches a town not too far away, the citizens of the village rush before the town hall to await an announcement regarding the impending arrival of enemy forces.

The local communist party agree that they should host a spontaneous meeting of the village people. But when hearing that the townsfolk had already assembled out of the town hall, the mayor became enraged. ‘How am I supposed to have a spontaneous meeting if everyone is already here?’ he asks. ‘A spontaneous meeting must be planned and controlled; only in this way is it spontaneous.’

The anecdote was shared during the opening of Salzburg Global Seminar’s Russian Civil Society Symposium held last week and reflected a palpable sentiment at the event: the Russian government has become a totalitarian system that controls all elements of Russian image, from civil society to publically available information, and, ultimately, the very idea and perception of free will in the country. In order to achieve this sociological monopoly, the government has rid itself of opposition, and not only political: the independent media effectively silenced and even civil society – which considers itself to be working for the good of the Russian people – is viewed by the public with suspicion and fear.

Society at large does not comprehend or understand the role of the civil sector in developing human rights and its role in improving quality of life in different fields. They have come to be regarded as something marginal, non-conformist, and more increasingly, are labelled as ‘foreign’.

‘Foreign’ remains a term with heavy connotations of something suspicious, alien, or other. It harks back to Soviet Russia, and the idea of the foreigner as promoting politics or ideas that are non-traditional and non-conformist. In an environment that still embraces Communist paternalism, people believed to be operating as foreign agents are harassed and vilified by all methods of campaigning, discreditation and humiliation that the state can produce. With an increase in patriotic euphoria in the light of de facto annexing Crimea last month, this sort of victimisation shows little sign of abating soon.

Thanks to a series of restrictions imposed over the past five years, it has become almost impossible to dispel this overriding view. The political agenda has made it so that the only NGOs that are able to survive are those who become, essentially, an extension of the government, offering much-needed social services and carrying out approved projects in alignment with Duma policy—but never those who advocate for rights or can be seen to be ‘political’. For those not toeing the Duma line, there is a very real threat that the organisation’s funding will be cut: be that cuts to their state-given funding, or private donors scared off by the state. Without secured assets, it is difficult to launch ambitious and transformative schemes.

Vladimir Putin has openly said, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune.’ Putin has essentially blacklisted the majority of foreign investors via the controversial ‘foreign agent’ law (currently undergoing further reviews to tighten loopholes) which demands enterprises and charities receiving donations from companies outside the country declare their assets and the intended use of any money received (albeit the law is currently very patchily applied). These organisations are subject to tighter controls, more regular reviews of their work and severe delays in processing requests, or even complete freezing of their assets.

The most widely available alternative is government money, but that comes with strings attached to it; breaking down the barriers between the government and the civil society sector and jeopardising any claims to independence. This limits many NGOs to only operating on small, regional levels, with little options of wider social impact; yet they stay silent to avoid suspicious treatment from the state.

State control is only not limited to the development of the most obvious branch of civil society – non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – but has restricted all autonomy of the press too. After a brief period of media self-sufficiency in the early 1990s, there has been a complete reversal by which most outlets have now become a mouthpiece for this type of discrimination and vilification. Media, the last bastion in promoting civil causes, is in fact no more at liberty to voice their opinion than those working in the NGO sector.

Yet the magnitude of social injustice is not fully realised by the Russian people. The majority of the population, 90% of which claim to primarily access their news through state-run media, do not consider themselves an autonomous force by any means. There is no tangible sentiment of ‘we the people’ as a social engine. Concerns are not voiced beyond closed, immediate circles. In a poll by the Levada-Center, over 80% responded that ‘nothing depends on us’, opting for adjustment within social limitations than activism beyond these boundaries. Civic society is not at all civically minded.

So entrenched is this passive stance to the government control that in another Levada-Center poll, 72% of people said that it was okay if, in the pursuit of the country’s interests, the government withholds information; 54% also believed it was acceptable for the government to skew or distort the information that it does release.

Within this ecosystem, there is no organic environment to foster a change in human nature. But, without too many negatives, participants of the Salzburg symposium drew comparable conclusions with other historical civil rights movements. Widely held social attitudes do change over time. The US civil rights movement, for example is now heralded as an avant-garde moment of the 60s. Of course, it has not completely eliminated racial prejudice from society, but it ensured the realisation of core human rights, the end of many statutory discriminations and the prevailing attitude of American society towards its minority populations.

There is a similar moment emerging in the realm of LGBT rights in Russia now. Thanks to an increased Western acceptance of gay marriage, Russian groups are pushing for similar recognition. However, this is an issue that took some 30 or 40 years to manoeuvre in the West and pressurising social transformation in Russia has generated further resentment and distrust of LGBT rights groups, the West and Russian LGBT citizens at large. Yet the vocalisation of minority groups grants a foothold to tackle further social issues. The milieu is ripe for a social reprise and regeneration, but only if there is a strong enough will behind the protests; you cannot create good, sustainable services if you do not care about the success of those services.

But for the general populous the fact remain that many people are simply not prepared to stand up for their civic rights and do not realise their potential for galvanising change. Ultimately, one Salzburg Global Fellow pointed out, they do not understand what it means to be a citizen: that authority should in fact derive from the consent of the governed people, not from the threat of force. To achieve this, citizens need advocate for their rights: but there is a lack of cohesive language and open space in which to deal with the issue en masse. A revolution of the language used to tackle these social problems will be the only way to tackle something of such scale; to rebrand the civic sector as something for which they have control and responsibility that should be recognised.

Russia is by no means the only place where these questions are being asked or these challenges being faced – there is a resonance beyond the borders today. There is a cruel irony that the people tackling these mammoth topics in Salzburg are quite often slandered as traitors in their own country, and an all too clear paradox that whilst the population supports the rights proclaimed by the government in a broad and generalised context, they are not invested in their own compatriots’ displays of civic activism.

‘Civil society is the society of citizens—but citizens are not just those who have a passport but who actively work to make a country better,’ declared one veteran Russian ‘citizen’ at the Salzburg symposium. ‘The more active citizens we have the stronger and better the country will be.’