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Searching for the Origins of civic community in Central Europe: Evidence from Eastern and Western Germany

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13510340500378308

1743-890X

Louise K. Davidson-Schmich,

Social and Cultural Dynamics

Abstract Although many scholars stress the importance of a civic political culture for a functioning democracy, there is little consensus about where such a culture originates. The 'bottom-up' approach argues that the civic culture has centuries-old, enduring roots that in turn shape political and economic institutions. The 'top-down' approach implies that political culture itself can be shaped by political institutions. Both schools of thought, however, stress the interrelatedness of civic behaviours; voluntary group membership, newspaper readership and voting are all expected to be high in civic cultures and low elsewhere. In contrast, this article argues that these three components of 'civicness' are differently influenced by contemporary political institutions and are therefore less interrelated than previous scholars have hypothesized. Germany and other German-speaking areas of Central Europe provide excellent cases for investigating these conflicting hypotheses about the origin of the civic community. If the 'bottom-up' approach were correct, there would be no differences in the level of civic community between the eastern and western parts of Germany and Central Europe because they were separated by the Iron Curtain for only four decades. If the 'top-down' approach were correct, 40 years of communist rule would have indeed reduced the level of civic community in eastern Germany and eastern Central Europe. Instead, the article finds marked differences in voluntary group membership across the former Iron Curtain, but much less divergence in terms of newspaper readership and voter turnout. Keywords: civic communitycivic culturepost-communist political culturevoluntary associationsGermany Acknowledgments Earlier versions of this article were presented at meetings of the Council for European Studies, the Southern Political Science Association and the University of Miami Latin American Political Economy Niche Group. Thanks to all discussants, audience members and to anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful feedback. Thanks also to Ralf Winterbauer for research assistance. Notes 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947); Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little Brown, 1965); Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Robert Putnam with R. Leonardi and R. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 2. Max Weber, 'The Social Psychology of World Religions', in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 267–358; Ronald Inglehart, 'The Renaissance of Political Culture', American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 4 (1988), pp. 1203–30; Tom W. Rice and Jan L. Feldman, 'Civic Culture and Democracy from Europe to America', The Journal of Politics, Vol. 59, No. 4 (1997), pp. 1143–72. 3. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); Richard Rose, 'Mobilizing Demobilized Voters in Post-Communist Societies', Party Politics, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1995), pp. 549–63; Marc Morje Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Stephen E. Hanson, 'The Leninist Legacy and Institutional Change', Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1995), pp. 306–14. 4. Putnam (note 1). 5. I remain agnostic about whether Germany's long-term past suggests a high level of civic community (as the peaceful revolutions of 1848, 1918 and the Weimar Republic might suggest) or a low level of civic community (as the militancy of Prussia, the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust might suggest). It might also be that, because Germany only became a nation state in 1871, civic community differs along regional lines. Again, I remain agnostic. What is important here is that such regional variation would not be expected to take on East–West lines along the Cold War division of Germany nor does this hypothesis expect mixed indicators of civicness within any one region. 6. It might also be that although Germany once occupied parts of its present-day neighbours, and although they may have German-speaking minorities, these countries have national patterns of civicness distinct from Germany's. What is of importance here is that if this were indeed the case, we would not observe significant East–West differences in civicness nor, according to the conventional wisdom, mixed indicators of civicness within countries. 7. Putnam (note 1), p. 115. 8. Ibid., p. 91. 9. Ibid., p. 92. 10. Ibid., pp. 93–95. 11. Tocqueville (note 1) 12. Quoted in Putnam (note 1), p. 92. 13. Putnam (note 1), p. 93. 14. Ibid., p. 177. 15. Inglehart, 'The Renaissance', p. 1203. 16. Putnam (note 1), pp. 181–3. 17. Inglehart, 'The Renaissance', p. 1215. 18. Ibid., p. 1228. 19. Rice and Feldman (note 2), p. 1159. 20. Ibid., p. 1162. 21. Howard (note 3), p. 6. 22. Ibid., p. 16. 23. Ibid., p. 156. 24. Ghia Nodia, 'How Different are Postcommunist Transitions?', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1996), pp. 15–29; p. 26. 25. Essay appears in Jowitt (note 3), p. 55. 26. Ibid., pp. 86–7. 27. Markus Freitag, 'Wahlbeteiligung in westlichen Demokratien. Eine Analyse zur Erklärung von Niveauunterschieden', Swiss Political Science Review, Vol. 2, Winter (1996), pp. 101–34; Robert W. Jackman and Ross A. Miller, 'Voter Turnout in the Industrial Democracies in the 1980s', Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 27 (January, 1995), pp. 467–92. 28. Jörg Steiner, European Democracies, 4th edn (New York: Longman, 1998), p. 58. 29. For a discussion on eastern Europeans and 'freedom from' see Rose (note 3), pp. 557–9. For a discussion on post-communist political apathy see Nodia (note 24). 30. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 62. 31. Newspaper Association of America, 'Daily Readership Trends'. Available at: (2004). 32. Eckhart Hellmuth and Wolfgang Piereth, 'Germany', in Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (eds.), Press, Politics, and Public Sphere in Europe and North America: 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 69–92. 33. Thomas Remington, 'The Mass Media and Public Communication in the USSR', The Journal of Politics, Vol. 43, No. 3 (1981), pp. 803–18. 34. Jeffrey J. Mondak and Adam F. Gearing, 'Civic Engagement in a Post-Communist State', Political Psychology, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1998), pp. 615–34. For a discussion of this hypothesis and mixed empirical evidence see Christopher Marsh, 'Social Capital and Democracy in Russia', Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2000), pp. 183–99. 35. The Euromonitor marketing agency, which tracks print media sales in East Central Europe, confirms that the number of newspapers in Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia rose dramatically, during the 1990s with changes in government regulations, privatization of state monopolies and increased foreign investment. Euromonitor Global Reference Database, World Consumer Lifestyles 2000. Available at: . 36. Rainer Weinert, 'Internediäre Institutionen oder die Konstruktion des 'Einen'', Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Vol. 35 (1995), pp. 237–53. 37. This view is articulated most clearly by Howard. He also argues that East Central Europeans' personal networks and disappointment with the transition to democracy reinforce this legacy. 38. Joyce Marie Mushaben, 'Auferstanden aus Ruinen: Social Capital and Democratic Identity in the New Länder', German Politics and Society, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1997), pp. 79–101. 39. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Marilyn Rueschemeyer and Björn Wittrock, 'Conclusion: Contrasting Patterns of Participation and Democracy', in Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Marilyn Rueschemeyer and Björn Wittrock (eds.), Participation and Democracy in East and West (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 266–84. 40. Or they will have distinct national patterns that will not necessarily fall along East–West lines. 41. Putnam (note 1), p. 6. 42. Volker Kunz, 'Einstellungen zu Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in den alten und neuen Bundesländern', in Jürgen Falter, Oscar W. Gabriel and Hans Rattinger (eds.), Wirklich ein Volk? (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2000), pp. 509–38, 514. 43. Jan Delhy and Petra Böhnke, 'Über die materielle zur inneren Einheit? Wohlstandslagen und subjektives Wohlbefinden in Ost- und Westdeutschland', Working papers from the Social Reporting Group at the Social Science Center Berlin, 2000. 44. Kersten Sven Roth, 'Wie man über den 'Osten' spricht: Die neuen Länder im bundesdeutschen Diskurs', Paper presented at the Conference on Transformationsprozesse in den Neuen Bundesländern. Goethe-Institut, London, UK, 24–25 April 2004. 45. Manuela Glaab, 'Viewing the 'Other': How East sees West and West sees East', in Jonathan Grix and Paul Cooke (eds.), East German Distinctiveness in a Unified Germany (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2002), pp. 75–98, esp. 82–3. 46. This measure is obviously not an accurate measure of the number of people reading a daily paper as more than one person can have access to and read a copy. A more precise measure of newspaper readership involves surveying the population to determine newspaper reach, or the percentage of the population that actually reads the paper on a given day. Such surveys are common in Western Europe, but no source could be found that systematically collects this measure for the East Central European countries. Other scholars have encountered similar difficulties: one student called his search for systematic studies on eastern European newspaper readership 'going exploring in fog'. Michael Schmolke, 'Pressemarkt Ost – keine Aussicht auf eine Wien-Prag-Budapest Renaissance?', in Walter A. Mahle (ed.), Pressemarkt Ost (Munich: Verlag Ölschlager, 1992) pp. 157–65, quote from p. 157. 47. Stephen Padgett, Organizing Democracy in Eastern Germany: Interest Groups in Post-Communist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Bernhard Boll, 'Interest Organization and Intermediation in the New Länder', German Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1994), pp. 114–28; Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, 'Problems with Democracy in Eastern Germany after the Downfall of the GDR', in Frederick D. Weil and Mary Gautier (eds.), Political Culture and Political Structure: Theoretical and Empirical Studies, Vol. 2 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1994); Howard (note 3). 48. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann and Renate Köcher (eds.), Allensbacher Jahrbuch der Demoskopie: 1984–1992 (Munich, Germany: K. G. Sauer, 1993), p. 309. Interestingly, in 1991 East Germans were considerably more likely to be a member of a gardening club. Many East Germans held small plots of land on the outskirts of cities and were thus likely to join garden or animal-raising clubs. The tradition of having a Kleingarten is not unique to East Germany and garden colonies were also prevalent in West Germany. However, given that East Germans faced a shortage of fresh produce in grocery stores, limited opportunities to take vacations abroad, prevalent spying in the workplace and public areas of apartment houses and did not often own their own homes with yards, they were especially prone to take refuge in their 'dacha'. This involvement is an excellent example of the 'top-down' creation of civic community; over decades of communism, the SED regime was able to significantly shape the associational life of its citizens, dampening it in most areas but causing it to thrive in private niches such as garden colonies. 49. Werner J. Patzelt, 'Ostdeutsche Parlamentarier in ihrer ersten Wahlperiode: Wandel und Angleichung', Historical Social Research, Vol. 22, No. 3/4 (1997), pp. 160–80. 50. This way of counting ignores the (very likely) possibility that a single individual might be a member of more than one sports club, for example one for soccer and one for swimming. However, because I am more interested in comparing across countries than in assessing the exact number of athletes in a given country, I believe that this method of counting is merited. 51. Barbara Geddes, 'A Comparative Perspective on the Leninist Legacy in Eastern Europe', Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1995), pp. 239–74; Andrzej Rychard, 'Institutions and Actors in a New Democracy', in Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Marilyn Rueschemeyer and Björn Wittrock (eds.), Participation and Democracy in East and West (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 26–50; Michal Illner, 'Local Democratization in the Czech Republic After 1989', in Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Marilyn Rueschemeyer and Björn Wittrock (eds.), Participation and Democracy in East and West (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 51–82; Ferenc Miszlivetz and Jody Jensen, 'An Emerging Paradox: Civil Society from Above?', in Rueschemeyer, Rueschemeyer and Wittrock, Participation and Democracy in East and West, above pp. 83–98. 52. Robert C. Tucker, 'Culture, Political Culture, and Communist Society', Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 2 (1973), pp. 173–90. Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds.), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London: Macmillan Press, 1977); Archie Brown (ed.), Political Culture and Communist Studies (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1984); Henry Krisch, 'Changing Political Culture and Political Stability in the German Democratic Republic', Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1986), pp. 41–53. 53. A recent volume by Ekiert and Hanson makes a similar argument in terms of post-communist political and economic systems. The contributors also stress the influence of pre-communist legacies as well. Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson, Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2003). 54. See Grix and Cooke (note 45). 55. William Mishler and Detlef Pollack, 'On Culture Thick and Thin: Toward a Neo-Cultural Synthesis', in Detlef Pollack, Jörg Jacobs, Olaf Müller and Gert Pickel (eds.), Political Culture in Post-Communist Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 237–56. 56. Thomas R. Cusack and Bernhard Weßels, 'Problem-Ridden and Conflict Riven: Local Government in Germany Five Years After Unification', Discussion Paper FS III 96–203 (Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum, 1996); Max Kaase and Petra Bauer Kaase, 'German Unification 1990–1997: The Long, Long Road', (unpublished manuscript, 1999); Susanne Pickel, Gert Pickel and Dieter Walz, Politische Einheit – kultureller Zwiespalt? (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999); Detlef Pollack and Gert Pickel, 'Die ostdeutsche Identität – Erbe des DDR-Sozialismus oder Produkt der Wiedervereinigung?', Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, Vol. B41–42 (1998), pp. 9–22; Richard Rose and Edward Page, 'Germans' Responses to Regime Change: Culture, Class, Economy, or Context?', West European Politics, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1996), pp. 1–27; Helmut Wiesenthal, 'Post-Unification Dissatisfaction Or: Why Are So Many East Germans Dissatisfied with West German Political Institutions?', Arbeitspapiere AG TRAP (Berlin, 1996). 57. David P. Conradt, 'Changing German Political Culture', in Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba (eds.), The Civic Culture Revisited (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989), p. 255.