ABSTRACT
The strongest impetus for a renewed interest in civil society came from the fall of communist one-party states in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the South African apartheid state. Oppositional movements such as the Polish Solidarity movement and the African National Congress had been obliged to develop strong non-state institutions and practices while they were an officially outlawed opposition, and looked to these institutions to provide the basis for a renewed democracy after the fall of these regimes. In the West, interest in civil society has been triggered by dissatisfaction with bureaucratic, statist and top-down solutions to economic and social problems. It features in both theories of radical democracy as a key to promoting the ‘democratic imaginary’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Keane 1988), and in theories of the ‘Third Way’ that point to renewal of social capital as the basis for community development (Giddens 1998). Both of these latter uses have operated in the Asian context, with civil society discourses being sometimes promoted by those opposed to authoritarian states, and in other cases, such as Singapore, being promoted by the state as a means of broadening and deepening citizen involvement in nationbuilding projects (Lee 2001).
