Summer's Best Reading:
"Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy"
In late June and early July, CCSI leadership took part in a seminar in Boston on the theme of "Democracy, Development and Civil Society," held at sociologist Peter Berger’s Institute for the Study of Economic Culture. It was a lively experience and particularly useful in clarifying a framework within which to see projects - not only those in the NIS - that work at building democracy and civil society in historically non-democratic or only semi-democratic nations.
The most interesting reading done for the seminar was Robert D. Putnam’s, "Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy" (Princeton, 1993), which has garnered prestigious prizes and wide acclaim, deservedly so.
The Vibrancy of Associational Life
Putnam’s book is a fascinating study - at the same time historical, comparative and quantitative - which finds that the "vibrancy of associational life" in a society has a direct bearing on the strength and responsiveness of its political and economic institutions. For those working to build such institutions in the NIS, three points in Putnam’s work are perhaps most relevant:
- Parliaments and the rule of law are fundamental to democracy, but widespread patterns of trust, reciprocity and civic engagement must exist in order for such institutions to work.
- These patterns are best instilled through citizen participation in networks of local associations and community organizations characterized by an egalitarian ethos.
- The development of such forms of "vibrant associational life" takes a long time. Patience is in order.
Or in Putnam’s words:
- Where institution building (and not mere constitution writing is concerned), time is measured in decades. This was true of the German Länder, it has been true of the Italian regions . . . and it will be true of the ex-Communist states of Eurasia, even in the most optimistic scenarios.
This article is from the July/August 1994 issue of
Civil Society ... East and West
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Last updated: October 8, 1996
