Civil Society Under Other Forms of Government

Virtually all nations have a civil society of some sort. In nations such as the U.S., which allow wide latitude to citizens' interests and rights, civil society is comparatively, broad. Under some other forms of government, in which the state plays a larger role in society, the sphere of private organizations may be somewhat smaller. Only a few years ago, only a small number of political scientists and sociologists were familiar with the term "civil society." Now many citizens around the globe consider the creation of a healthy civil society, which can provide the essential middle ground between public and private, state and economy, society and individual, as one of the keys to building and maintaining a free, open society.

Many citizens of the communist societies of the Soviet Union and the so-called people's democracies of Eastern Europe keenly felt the lack of a healthy civil society. In the 1970s and 1980s, opponents of those communist governments often claimed that the creation of a civil society would contribute to the fall of totalitarian regimes. In fact, the Soviet Empire disintegrated primarily as a result of its internal economic weakness, rather than as a result of pressure from opponents who had created alternative attachments and bases of activism and power within civil society. Now that the Soviet Empire no longer exists, the creation of civil society ranks among the most important tasks confronting citizens of Russia and Eastern Europe.