ABSTRACT
This volume presents a series of studies of associational culture in a variety of European and in one North American environment. Voluntary associations have taken a central place in the discourse and debates around the concept of civil society. This concept re-emerged in the 1980s and 1990s with a number of intellectual and political objectives. The first was to understand and direct the nature of political change in Eastern Europe and the then Soviet Union and then more generally in a variety of totalitarian and dictatorial regimes.1 The concept was then employed to explain the relative stability of particular liberal, pluralist democracies and the relative success of specific societies in making the transition from totalitarian regimes as well as in studies of the governability of complex societies in general.2 The concept has been employed in the search for conflict resolution and more recently in the effort to build regimes favourable to a world of liberal capitalism.3 Related to this has been
1 Jan Kubik, ‘Between the State and the Networks of “Cousins”: The role of civil society and non-civil associations in the Democratization of Poland’, in Nancy Bermeo and Philip Nord, eds., Civil Society Before Democracy. Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 181-208; Krishan Kumar, ‘Civil Society: an inquiry into the usefulness of an historical term’, British Journal of Sociology, 44 (Sept 1993), pp. 335-95; Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart, ‘Old Legacies, new institutions, hegemonic norms and Institutional Pressures: explaining political and economic change in post Communist Eastern Europe’, Comparative Political Studies, 28 (1995), pp. 171-99 discusses this in terms of the ‘imperatives of liberalization’.
