Azra Džajić-Weber

Twenty years after the epoch-making change in 1989, which affected the post-Yugoslavian space in a way entirely different from other former “real-socialist” European countries, this study is an effort toward an analytical view on the past two decades of development of civil society in the western Balkans. The author, Srđan Dvornik from Croatia, is among those who know the subject well.

Therefore, I am proud that I also played a part in motivating him and, with support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, can make possible the realization of the study.

My connection with Srđan Dvornik comes from 10 years of professional cooperation and friendship during my work as the director of the Regional Office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for southeastern Europe and after. For the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a German political foundation, relations with civil society are of particular importance. Owing to its close ties with the Alliance 90 / Green Party, the Foundation has deep roots in the area of civil society; the attitude of active and responsible citizenship is also the cornerstone of its selfunderstanding.

The cooperation with civil actors and support for civil society are central to the Foundation’s activities all over the world, where we cooperate in political education and development. My work in the Foundation’s office for southeastern Europe is aimed at achieving a harmony between the concerns and approaches of a German foundation and the involvement in local relations, in order to create a fruitful relationship that would contribute to a stable peace and democratization of the region.

Srđan Dvornik represented the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Croatia from 1999 to 2004 as the head of its office there; he was an ideal, so to speak natural partner for that venture. In his person he connected knowledge of theory and practice of civil society, including internal and external factors of its emergence
and development in the last two decades, both in Croatia and in the wider region of southern Europe.

He is a sociologist and activist from the earliest days of civil society in Croatia, continuously concerned with reflection of society and politics, as well as sociopolitical position and meaning of one’s own activism. In the late 1980s he took part in the early steps of the civil political commitment; he was among the founders of the Association for Yugoslav Democratic Initiative (UJDI). When the war broke out in the early 1990s, he took part in founding the Anti-War Campaign in Croatia. He followed the transformation of organizations of civil society from civil activism to professionalization.

He worked for the Soros Foundation in Croatia, where he also ran the activities of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in his country. After that he returned to the “civilsociety” side, this time as the director of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for human rights. Throughout this period, he was also active as a translator of literature in philosophy and social science.

Therefore, it is not an accident that theory and practice – together with the internal and external relations of the development of civil society – are intermingled throughout the content and structure of this publication. From the standpoint of activities of the civil society actors and their effects, the principal question is that of the social context wherein those activities have been unfolding in the last twenty years.

As Dvornik argues in the first part of the study, this is the first question that needs to be answered.
The development here, as a consequence of the Balkan wars that befell the post-Yugoslav region in the 1990s, does not correspond to the theoretical outlines of the democratic transition or transformation. The primary reason lies in the fact that in socialist Yugoslavia, like in other societies of the “real socialism” in the East, the relation between state and society substantially differed from this relation in capitalist societies, where the theories of transition originated.

Secondly, the reasons lie in the specific authoritarian-nationalist “transformation” of the relations in the countries that succeeded Yugoslavia. This difference in the relation between state and society, as Dvornik points out, had a decisive impact on the emerging civil societies; the impact was twofold: Firstly, it had a strong impact on self-understanding of the great number of activists and their activities in their own social environment. Secondly, the difference determines a negative impact of international donors on activities of civil society, as presented by the author’s disillusioning analysis.

Many among the “democratizers,” with their programs, orientation on projects, approaches to “empowerment” or “capacity-building,” and other steps in training and education brought also their own normative understanding of civil society from an entirely different, Western social context, including a wrong understanding of – and misguided involvement in – the local relations. That had an indirect impact on the local civil actors.

Taking over the external (Western) ways of comprehension and the corresponding mental patterns led, however, to a loss of touch with their own society, which Dvornik shows on several cases. The external supporters thereby unconsciously contributed to a conformist powerlessness of the local actors. They were
less able to face the ethno-nationalist ideological homogenization of society in the conditions where the possibilities of action were limited.

What could be added to this analysis – which is central to the publication’s argument – is the thought that the conformist acceptance of western normative ideas of civil society among local civil actors also works as a feedback that supports a schematic perception in the international community about the social and political developments in southern Europe.

These theoretical and empirical insights give a special quality to the summary evaluation of the development of the civil society activism and its sociopolitical influence in the region. They are not negative, but differentiated, particularly with regard to the political upheavals in Croatia and Serbia at the beginning of the decade; the future outlook seems positive.

Altogether, this study is an important contribution to the hitherto insufficient discussion about the possibilities and limits of the actors of civil society in the (post)authoritarian societies. At the same time, it offers a lesson that instruments of Western politics of democratization still have a long development ahead
before the point where their current organizational and political potentials are exhausted, thereby enabling more appropriate responses to the challenges set by the new world (dis)order in the last two decades.

Berlin, October 2009
Dr. Azra Džajić-Weber
Head of department for Southeastern Europe,
Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus in the Heinrich Böll Foundation