ABSTRACT
The concept of civil society reached Latin America in the course of the 1980s in two guises. The first was through its appeal as a normative ideal to social actors living under repressive and military governments. The second, which appeared somewhat later, was as a concept of liberal governance for those concerned with postdictatorship institution building. During fragile transition processes, civil society remained conceptually unelaborated; ‘civil society’ against the ‘state’ appealed to all who sought to end authoritarian rule at a time when the fragility of the process required some unity of purpose. Sociologist and later Brazilian President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso points out how in Brazil ‘everything which was an organized fragment which escaped the immediate control of the authoritarian order was being designated civil society. Not rigorously, but effectively, the whole opposition…was being described as if it were the movement of Civil Society’ (Cardoso 1989:319).
