Читать книгу Civl society - Группа авторов - Страница 19

Today, when one speaks about the civil society or citizen society, one usually means the involvement of people in a great variety of areas outside of actual “politics” as well as their family and professional spheres. This involvement expresses itself in many ways in local, regional, and superregional initiatives in the fields of culture, the environment, the third world, care and support for asylum seekers, etc., but “civilian initiatives” can also have influencing politics and the administration as their goals. In authoritarian states, the civil society can even develop into a powerful movement to change the political system.¹ It is worthwhile remembering the občanské forum (citizens’ forum) in the Czech part of what was once Czechoslovakia that was established on 19 November – only two days after the beginning of the Velvet Revolution in Prague.² The terms “bourgeois society” and “civil society”, as well as občanské forum, are oriented towards mature, actively interested citizens who are prepared to become involved.

The following considerations deal with the question of the extent to which former concepts of the bourgeoisie and “bourgeois society” of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries have anything to do with the modern manifestations of the civil society. In modern democratic constitutional states, civil-society activity usually takes place within the framework of the legal possibilities achieved by “bourgeois” visionaries, pioneers, revolutionaries, and politicians. The central freedoms of the civil society include the right to personal freedom, the right to carry on a business, the freedom to practice a religion and express oneself, freedom of the press, freedom of association and assembly, and the right to petition. These are complemented by the protection of the private sphere (domiciliary right) and confidentiality of correspondence – although this is something that most of our contemporaries have voluntarily done away with by using the internet.

However, there is a conceptual problem in German that most other languages are not aware of. The German word “Bürger” denotes both the (fully entitled) inhabitant of a pre-modern city and the (fully entitled) citizen. French, on the other hand, differentiates between “citoyen” (citizen of a state) and “bourgeois” (inhabitant of a town, with its root in “bourg” that can mean a market or – in the form of “fauxbourg” – a suburb). English recognises the “citizen”, as well as the “burgher” (city resident), and, in Italian, we have the “cittadino” and the “borghese”. It is obvious that they have their roots in the Latin “civis” and the “civitas” connected with it, and the Germanic-late-Latin “burgus”, which originally only meant a fort but was later expanded to include “civil” settlements, markets, and cities.³ Slavic languages also differentiate between the citizen (“državljan” in Slovene) and town resident (“meščan” in Slovene – and very similar in Russian).

However, “zivile”, with its roots in the Latin “civis”, has remained alive in German alongside the local word. It was originally used as a contrast to the military but soon came to denote a certain – “civilised”, non-violent, equitable – behaviour when dealing with other people. Borrowed from the French “civil” (from the Latin “civilis”) in the 16^th century, it meant middle class, patriotic, national, and public.⁴ During the Enlightenment in the 18^th century, “zivilisiert” – in the sense of enlightened, non-violent, good behaviour – was added although the old bourgeois concept of “Ehrsamkeit” (respectability) and its inherent factors of being of legitimate birth and upright behaviour still resonated.

The behaviour required a juridical standardisation: In 1789, the great Austrian enlightener Gottfried van Swieten (1733–1803, son of the famous doctor Gerard van Swieten) defined the “bourgeois society”, as opposed to a “horde of wild people”, by “those principles of their affiliation” that there can be “no right without obligation, and no obligation without right.”⁵ The “civil society “(= society of citizens) therefore needed a “civil law” as a basis. This was codified at the time and came into force as the “General Civil Code” (ABGB) in the year 1812.⁶ The term “citizen” was first encountered in legislation during the reign of Joseph II. The ABGB also assumed a common citizenship of the residents of those Habsburg (Austrian) countries in which the ABGB was put into effect (but not in Hungary!).

But was society – not only in Central Europe but throughout the continent – so advanced that it could be interpreted as a society of people with equal rights? Feudal dependencies actually still existed in most regions. In no way could those living in rural areas, who made up the majority of the population at the time, be considered as being members of this new general bourgeois society. In 1789, the French Revolution asserted the abolishment of all feudal bonds in Europe with the victory of its slogan of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. A few years previously, Joseph II had at least done away with serfdom in his “Austrian monarchy” (from 1781, first of all in Bohemia), but the farmers still had to rely on the manorial lords for their land and property. This dependence continued in the Austrian Empire until 1848; it was considered a component of the “state constitutions”, meaning that these conditions were not included in the AGBG (they were not regarded as a lease!)