This issue of the journal offers a thematic collection of articles, representing revised versions of the best of the papers prepared for the Fifth VOLUNTAS Symposium, which took place at Charles University, Prague, in October 1999. The symposium was timed to mark the tenth anniversary of the many far-reaching changes that took hold of the region in the fall of 1989, when, constitutionally, liberal democracy replaced “really existing socialism.” In the context of the fundamental reorganization of economy, polity and society that has taken place since then, we sought to explore the role that nonprofit organizations have been able to play over the last decade. Expectations had been high that, freed from the suffocating embrace of the nomenklatura, civil society would have room to flourish, although it was to be anticipated that it would be a difficult and immensely time consuming process (Dahrendorf, 1990, 1997). Moreover, different countries had contrasting pre-transition and even pre-Communist institutional inheritances upon which to build, suggesting considerable variation was to be anticipated in the ease with which the desirable patterns of behavior and organizational forms could be established and nurtured (Anheier and Seibel, 1998).

This paper analyzes both the political discourse and the reality of Czech civil society. It describes how the concept of civil society has emerged in a difficult ideological context, and sets out how policy towards it has developed, also highlighting its economic role. Recent empirical evidence on the existing range of citizens’ activities and their attitudes toward aspects of civic society and organizations within it is marshaled in order to estimate the potential for citizenship in the Czech Republic.

This paper presents an analysis of nonprofit organizations—the organizational infrastructure of civil society—in East Central Europe, from one important respect: by placing them in the context of the comparative historical sociology of the region’s widespread informality. This involves two steps: (1) summarizing an argument about the role of informality in East Central European capitalism today in order to (2) outline its implications for the study of post-state-socialist nonprofits. Most of the empirical examples come from Hungary. These examples serve illustrative purposes and are intended as devices to provoke new analysis. They are meant to open, rather than close, discussion.

This paper examines the role of social proximity (nonprofit) organizations in the process of professional innovation that involved a transfer of human service technologies from Western Europe and the United States to Poland during the 1989 political-economic reform. To explain that role, the paper introduces a theoretical model that posits the existence of elective affinity between the social proximity form and occupational interests of service providers. As the existing system of professions is no longer sufficient to legitimate expert services and curb competition among different types of providers, the social proximity form bestows social legitimacy on novel or controversial types of services, and is thus instrumental in marketing those services. The proposed model is supported by quantitative data and in-depth interviews. Theoretical implications are discussed.

How do international nonprofit organizations influence political party formation in new democracies? Despite recent analyses of external influences on economic-restructuring, less attention has been paid to international assistance to political parties. Contrary to the scholarly literature stressing preexisting socioeconomic cleavages, I argue that new parties may emerge around political cleavages during rapid change; international assistance may encourage new parties to adopt organizational forms and issue areas lacking historical precedent, which are subsequently adapted to mobilize domestic public support. To demonstrate this claim, I contrast assistance by U.S. political party affiliates to parties in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where similar revolutionary movements emerged in the name of “civil society” in 1989 but diverged, with a Western market-oriented party in the Czech Republic and populist semidemocratic party in Slovakia winning subsequent elections. The divergent paths highlight the limits to applying Western models of party organization across contexts and the need for democratic actors to be strengthened beyond founding elections.

This research note addresses issues, concerns, and opportunities for teachers and researchers of the third sector in Central and Eastern Europe, drawing on experiences in Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, and Hungary. The paper briefly outlines the development of the third sector in the aforementioned countries, and describes the current state of third sector teaching and research there. It then frames the challenges for the region’s teachers and researchers, and proposes an appropriate role for the West, commenting upon the West’s relevance within Central and Eastern Europe.