State and Civil Society: Relationships in Flux [antikvár]

Foreword The Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences organized a workshop on 'The Changing Relationship of the Modernizing State and the Civil Society" between 7 and 9 September, 1987, in Budapest. It was a modest affair, with half a dozen foreign participants and about a dozen or so Hungarians. The idea behind the workshop was that a small group of researchers of the Institute had been engaged in the study of the various aspects of modernization for several years, concentrating mainly on theoretical issues and regional case studies in the Third World, while not forgetting about the Central European countries either, and inevitably they had come across the issue of the relationship of the state and the citizen, the society as actors and subjects of the highly complex process. It was increasingly felt that the concept of modernization as such revealed nothing about the society, and how its memt^rs received and reacted to the changes, if any, brought about by the state. The question has become all the more marked as the long drawn-out world economic crisis had hampered and deformed modernization in many regions of the world, including our own, thus revealing the true nature of the crisis, involving much more than the economic sphere. It has become quite clear that the existing institutions of the society are also in a critical situation and it was the state in particular, with its intricate functions and dysfunctions that has removed itself from the society it was supposed to serve. The state, however, presents a number of crisis phenomena in the various parts of the world, irrespective of the political setup, and even of relative economic success. There is the growing inefficiency of the state, its incresingly repressive nature, its inability to stop and reduce the growing social inequalities and injustice. The Keynesian welfare state in a number of Western societies, and the socialist one, once promising to look after the weaker sections of the society and to guarantee an equitable redistribution at the least, have both been pulling out of these spheres, abandoning the roles undertaken in employment, public health, education, social security, and so on. The crisis of the state has produced symptoms that are very similar in the capitalist, as well as the socialist societies. Thus the question arose of what were the causcs of the failure of the state in the post-industrial, as well as in the socialist societies, thwarting the hopes of growing segments of the society and even of entire generations. Obviously the rapid and highly uneven industrialization of the world, the almost complete interdependence of the national economies, particularly