Civil Society and the State in Africa 9781685859350

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Civil Society and the State in Africa

Civii Society and the State in Africa edited by

John W. Harbeson Donald Rothchild Naomi Chazan

RIENNER PUBLISHERS

BOULDER LONDON

Paperback edition published in the United States of America by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU First hardcover edition published in 1994 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. © 1994 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-55587-641-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments

1

Civil Society and Political Renaissance in Africa John W. Harbeson

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1

PART 1 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

2

3

4

In Search of Civil Society Crawford Young

33

Civil Society and Political Transitions in Africa Michael Bratton

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Civil Society and Disengagement in Africa Victor Azarya

83

PART2 EMPIRICAL DEVELOPMENT

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6

7

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Strategies of Accumulation and Civil Society in Bushenyi, Uganda: How Dairy Farmers Responded to a Weakened State Nelson Kasfir

103

Associational Life, Civil Society, and Democratization in Ghana E. Gyimah-Boadi

125

Rethinking Civil Society: Gender Implications in Contemporary Tanzania Aili Mari Tripp

149

Civil Society in Zaire: Hidden Resistance and the Use of Personal Ties in Class Struggle Janet MacGaffey

169

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Contents

9 The Rise of Civic Associations Among Farmers in Cote d'lvoire Jennifer A. Widner

191

PART 3 CHALLENGES

10 The Spatial Dimensions of Civil Society in Africa: An Anthropologist Looks at Nigeria Jane/. Guyer

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11 Civil Society, Democracy, and Economic Change in Africa: A Dissenting Opinion About Resurgent Societies Thomas M. Callaghy

231

12 The Interactions Between State and Civil Society in Africa: From Deadlock to New Routines Donald Rothchild & Letitia Lawson

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PART 4 CONCLUSIONS

13 Civil Society and the Study of African Politics: A Preliminary Assessment John W. Harbeson

285

The Contributors Index About the Book

301 303 312

Acknowledgments

We greatly appreciate the assistance of ldit Avidan, who was indispensible during the early stages of this project. We wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the university's Harry S Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, where the conference that formed the basis for this volume was held. Support and assistance was also provided by the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The contributors to this work and all who participated in the conference deserve our gratitude. A special thanks goes to Lynne Rienner, who demonstrated her personal commitment to this work by attending the original conference and supporting this project from the beginning. 1. W.H.

D.R. N.C.

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1l Civil Society and Political Renaissance in Africa •

John W Harbeson

African peoples stand once again on the threshold of an era of profound political change. Not since the crescendo of nationalist political movements during the twilight of European colonialism has popular demand for political transformation been so deep or widespread. In the 1950s and early 1960s African nationalist movements demanded and attained an end to colonial rule and the establishment of independent African states. Today, grassroots movements have arisen in nearly every sub-Saharan country to remove autocratic, repressive governments and empower African peoples to reclaim control over their political destinies. The pressures have forced African governments to accept broadly based national conferences that have articulated political reform agendas and, more recently, largely unprecedented multiparty elections monitored for fairness by teams of international observers. During 1992 in Zambia, voters ousted the thirty-year regime of former nationalist leader Kenneth Kaunda, and in Kenya only divisions within the opposition saved the government of Daniel Arap Moi. By mid-1993 multiparty elections were in prospect in South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and many other countries. Not yet at all clear, however, is the ultimate depth, breadth, and direction of these incipient movements for political reform. Multiparty elections do not by themselves produce or sustain democracy. They do not ipso facto institutionalize broad participation in political life. Nor do democracy and parallel transitions from state-dominated to market-driven economies necessarily peacefully coexist. Once nationalist parties took power in the 1960s, ethnic unrest, military insurgencies, and elusive economic development derailed their progress toward the proclaimed goals of political liberation and socioeconomic improvement. What has been learned from that experience that will enable contemporary movements for democracy and improved governance to escape the same fate? The hypothesis of this book is that civil society is a hitherto missing key to sustained political reform, legitimate states and governments, 1

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improved governance, viable state-society and state-economy relationships, and prevention of the kind of political decay that undermined new African governments a generation ago. The term "civil society" has crept quietly and largely unexamined into the literature on political economy in Africa, Latin America, and the newly independent states of Eastern Europe. To some extent it has also seeped into the discourse of leaders of movements for political reform in those regions. The idea of civil society has been of central importance in much of the literature of Western political philosophy since the emergence of the modern nation-state. It has reappeared at a point in history when the capabilities of existing nationstates to minimally satisfy the political aspirations of nationalities and ethnic communities has never been more in question. Is the reemergence of civil society in political discourse at this point a coincidence or unexamined prescience? Is it a critical, forgotten dimension of legitimate rule in the past whose importance to a brighter political future in Africa and elsewhere has been subconsciously remembered at a timely juncture? In this volume we explore the hypothesis that civil society represents more than yet another passing terminological fad. We consider the possibility that civil society holds a key to understanding and addressing effectively the political and socioeconomic crises in Africa and elsewhere, both on the ground and in contemporary theory. As important and path-breaking as are the prospects of free, competitive elections, they are but one finite element of the crisis of the African state, whose shape future elections are supposed to constructively influence. Multiparty elections that have occurred or are in prospect may simply prove to be one-time-only vehicles through which governing elites consolidate their domestic hegemony, snuffing out the institution of free elections and short-circuiting other elements of constitutional democracy before they can become established. As Huntington reminded us many years ago and as Callaghy does in this volume, there is nothing inevitable or predictable about the direction and merits of political change, however hopeful the signs at the moment may be. Moreover, in some instances the overthrown regime may have so weakened the political legitimacy of the state itself in the eyes of its citizens that the country may become Balkanized into smaller units or even dissolve altogether (e.g., the apparent course of events in Somalia and perhaps ultimately in Ethiopia and Sudan). A political renaissance in Africa will not, of course, occur in a vacuum. The post-Cold War international pressures on African states have not diminished. Major powers have served notice of their reduced inclination to prop up corrupt and oppressive regimes to serve what until recently they considered to be their global political and military interests. Also, African leaders are well aware that bilateral donors and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have begun to employ political and economic liberalization in some Eastern European countries as a stick.

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Africans perceive that international financial institutions tend to apply movements toward multiparty elections and market-centered economies, which are currently taking place in the newly independent European states, as conditions of aid and investment in African countries.' Guyer's chapter drops the assumption from classical political philosophy that participation in civil society is limited to a state's own citizens, to the exclusion of international actors. Moreover, as Callaghy and MacGaffey observe in this volume, the daunting economic circumstances of nearly every African country can easily overwhelm and crush the institution of multiparty elections and the broader reformation of the African state before they can take root. To this catalogue of pressures on fledgling, reformminded African states one might add the burdens of enduring interethnic conflict and environmental degradation. In the future, African countries may be increasingly buffeted by the effects of global cultural and technological change and the vagaries of international relations within the continent itself. An underlying premise of this volume is that the idea of civil society speaks to an important gap in social science theory regarding African problems of political and socioeconomic development on the ground. That theoretical shortcoming has been reflected in less-than-successful policy formation by African governments and donor development assistance agencies. The missing dimension supplied by the idea of civil society is that, in process terms, working understandings concerning the basic rules of the political game or structure of the state emerge from within society and the economy at large. In substantive terms, civil society typically refers to the points of agreement on what those working rules should be.2 From the varied conceptions of civil society in the literature of political philosophy, certain common themes can be discerned. These include the ideas that 1) the existence of civil society is inevitable and necessary; 2) consensus exists on how civil society is to function and on its substantive principles; 3) civil society is synonymous with society's conception of optimal normative bases of governance and societal organization; and 4) civil society is the blueprint and design for the structure of the state. But these normative statements imply corresponding empirical questions that must be explored in each circumstance: 1) When, how, why, and in what forms do norms about how society is to be governed emerge, function, and/or decay, and with what outcomes? 2) When, how, and why do particular forms of dissensus as well as consensus emerge over principles determining how society is to be governed, and with what consequences? 3) What are the varieties of satisficing as well as optimal norms that emerge concerning how society is to be governed, and what are their merits and shortcomings in particular circumstances? and 4) What forms and dynamics of consonance and/or dissonance are there within civil society, between civil society and society at large, and between civil society and the state? Why do they exist, and with what implications?

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The idea of civil society as an element of empirical theory offers new perspectives on state-society relations. It shifts the focus from the question of power balances between state and society to the question of the terms of their interdependence. It offers a basis for ongoing empirical investigation of the bases of state legitimacy, and it does so without presuming any necessary connection between legitimacy and democracy. It implies that the state is empirically as well as analytically distinct from society and treats the question of the nature, degree, and consequences of state autonomy as a researchable, empirical question. The state, then, in this analysis is differentiated from civil society as the de facto binding, organizing principle of the political order. "Political order" is understood here in Eastonian terms as the arena, defined by these operative organizing principles, within which processes for the authoritative allocation of social values take place.3 It follows that individuals, groups, and associations are part of the political order to the extent that they seek to participate in those processes for making binding choices on social values. Correspondingly, they are part of civil society to the extent that they seek to define, generate support for, or promote changes in the basic working rules of the game by which social values are authoritatively allocated. In spatial terms, therefore, civil society is not simply synonymous with associational life; rather, it is confined to associations to the extent that they take part in rule-setting activities. Leading voices in the history of political philosophy have reasoned that understandings concerning the nature of the political order are inextricably interconnected to the working understandings that define society at large, including its economic structures and processes. Hence, civil society's definition and functions include the design not only of the political order and the linkages between the political and socioeconomic orders but also of the structure of society itself. Each succeeding section of this chapter will address one of three key issues implicit in adapting a concept from normative traditions of principally Western political philosophy for use as an empirical theoretical social science construct. These are 1) whether civil society is as necessary in practice and in empirical political and social theory as it has appeared to be in political philosophy; 2) whether the operationalization of civil society for purposes of empirical research and policy formation is possible; and 3) whether the idea of civil society is a useful, perhaps even indispensable element in empirical theory concerning relationships between state and society, including society's economic processes and structures. First is the issue of necessity. To what extent is there a demonstrable need for improved political economy and state-society theory? The case rests in part on the at-best modest record of contemporary theory in comprehending the political and socioeconomic realities of African countries and in spawning policy initiatives to alleviate those conditions. Contemporary

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analyses of African state-society relations and political economy have appeared implicitly to identify a place for civil society without acknowledging or exploring the nature of that place and what might occupy it. At least some of these analyses have seemed to reveal unexamined boundary issues between the polity, on the one hand, and economy and society, on the other hand, yet have failed to include a variable such as civil society to address, define, and explain these issues. These studies appear to have recognized the civil society variable implicitly without specifying its nature and significance, leaving its definition and formulation inchoate. The contributors to this book help to specify issues involved in making a place for civil society in empirical theory and in analysis of African political and socioeconomic realities. Bratton and Young express some skepticism about the empirical existence of civil society as distinct from its analytical value as a part of social science theory. In part the question is one of consciousness: Do those whose activities constitute what is understood analytically to be civil society have a collective sense of being thus joined together? The chapters in this volume leave that issue for future research. Another question is whether groups within the state are explicitly engaged in attempting to define and redefine the rules of the political game. Here, the contributors provide a clear, affirmative answer. Widner examines the circumstances that lead associations to engage in such behavior. Tripp finds women in Tanzania consciously seeking to rewrite the rules of the game to make them more gender neutral. MacGaffey examines the political dimensions of the informal economy in Zaire, focusing on resistance to a regime whose popular legitimacy has nearly dissolved. Kasfir portrays Ugandan farmers' maintenance of rules of the game even in the wake of the state's near collapse. Gyimah-Boadi and Rothchild and Lawson point to the effects of state opposition to such behavior, while Callaghy fears such behavior may overwhelm the state's capacity to exert sound economic management. As shown subsequently, it is such behavior, implied but not articulated in contemporary theory, that appears to be critical to processes of constructive political and socioeconomic change. The second key issue is the possibility of implementing civil society theory. A review of the idea of civil society in the history of political philosophy suggests that the answer is complicated by the range of available alternatives-i.e., 1) varying conceptions of civil society's importance to state-society or state-economy relations, and 2) a wide range of alternative models of the role of civil society that can be derived from these varying conceptions for purposes of empirical analysis. Other streams within contemporary and postmodern political thought appear to dispute the possibility of civil society in political philosophy by questioning the existence of distinct public sections upon which the idea of civil society appears to rest.4 The essence of the argument is that the idea

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of civil society implies a degree of rationality, autonomy, and community that is belied by the pervasiveness and consequences of the exercise of power in contemporary society. Such a position would by extension appear to deny a philosophical basis for civil society in empirical theory. In this book, Callaghy is fearful that civil society will overwhelm and emasculate the public sector, whose autonomy he deems essential to the management of sound economic reform, whereas Rothchild and Lawson and GyimahBoadi note evidence of the opposite phenomenon. MacGaffey and Kasfir deal with situations where the public sector has become largely irrelevant for reasons of state collapse or illegitimacy, but both find on-the-ground evidence of determination to maintain or reestablish elements of a public sector. Guyer points to a possible breakdown of the boundary between domestic civil society and international actors influencing the shape of political life in Nigeria but not to the collapse of the public sector itself. Bratton, Tripp, and Widner describe evidence of African faith in and determination to reform and uphold the idea of a public sector. Azarya is perhaps most explicit in rejecting the postmodern critique in his reflections on the importance of established ideas of civility as a necessary and defining feature of public life. The third central issue is the operational utility of civil society theory in the real-world arena of policy formation and implementation concerning state formation, socioeconomic development, and state-society relations. More specifically and fundamentally, the issue is to what extent carving a place for civil society in contemporary theory illuminates our understanding of the interrelations of polity, society, and economy in Africa. Similarly, to what extent can an adequately operationalized conception of civil society influence state and policy formation on the ground in beneficial ways? Answers to these questions turn at least in part on two key issues: 1) whether or not civil society is inescapably bound up with Western political philosophy and practice and therefore inapplicable to African circumstances; and 2) whether or not the idea of civil society is so enmeshed in normative analysis that it can be of little or no use in empirical theory or in practice on the ground. Civil society may well help us to understand the nature of relations between economy, society, and polity, but increased empirical recognition of civil society may not ipso facto lead to outcomes that anyone would regard as beneficial. In short, the idea of civil society may be theoretically significant but empirically meaningless. Civil society may cease to exist in certain circumstances and may be fractured and anarchic in others, and its existence may account for unfortunate as well as fortunate outcomes. Although all the chapters in this volume implicitly operationalize the idea of civil society in examining developments in particular African countries, Bratton is perhaps the most explicit about the elements of that operational definition. He looks at the organizational, ideological, and material resources

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used by associations in seeking to bring about political reform in Kenya and Zambia. Widner, Tripp, Kasfir, and MacGaffey all specify the ways in which these resources are ~rought to bear on political life in Cote d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zaire, respectively. In so doing, each treats the existence, coherence, and beneficence of civil society as empirical issues rather than as a priori requirements for political change. In the balance of this chapter I outline elements and dimensions of these three fundamental issues. The chapters in Part 1 concentrate particularly on how civil society may be properly conceptualized in African settings. Those in Part 2 explore the nature and functioning of civil society in particular countries, and those in Part 3 examine some of the salient cultural, economic, and political challenges to the functioning of civil society in Africa for good or for ill. In the concluding chapter I bring together and further explore the themes arising from these analyses.

Is Civil Society Necessary?

The Empirical Case for Civil Society A review of the record of African reform efforts over the past decade supports a contention that the crisis on the ground is matched by a similar one in the state of our theory. The clear evidence is that Africa as a continent has recorded only marginal progress under World Bank/International Monetary Fund-led structural adjustment regimes, as the Bank's own data make clear.s The Bank's somewhat optimistic forecast of a possible reversal of these sorry fortunes in the near future is hardly persuasive.6 The discouraging record of structural adjustment in bringing about socioeconomic change gives ample reason to question the underlying theoretical validity of reform efforts. In the early years of the post-Cold War era, campaigns for economic liberalization have increasingly been coupled, at least by some bilateral donors, with pressures for political liberalization along Western democratic lines. The theoretical roots of Bank- and Fund-led structural adjustment in classical liberalism are unmistakable, even if rarely acknowledged. The presumptions have been that markets in Africa can be coaxed to function at least roughly in the way that Adam Smith and his disciples believed they would, that democracy animated by competitive party politics is optimal, and that market economies and political democracies mutually undergird each other. Perhaps it is still too early to gauge the impact of structural adjustment and test the empirical validity of its theoretical premises. Perhaps the problems lie primarily in the misapplication of policy guidelines or their improper derivation from theory. But the problem may also be that the theory itself is not valid in contemporary African circumstances.

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The application of classical liberal ideals to African political and socioeconomic circumstances has frequently been questioned, but only rarely have the underlying issues been carefully examined other than by Africans.7 One immediate question is the extent to which the purposes of countries seemingly committed to long-term economic and political liberalization have been alloyed by the claims of realpolitik. To what extent are measures to promote privatization of economies dictated by the indispensability of World Bank/IMF finance rather than out of intellectual commitment? To what extent do processes of democratization simply reflect a desire to replace unpopular existing governments rather than a full commitment to the principles of Western-style democracy? In this regard, African countries have clearly felt the competition for scarce development resources from the newly independent states of Eastern Europe.R A second key question is the extent to which African peoples accept as universally valid Western ideas of democracy and market economies, as international proponents seem to assume and expect. Certainly, it would not be surprising to find politically active Africans seeking to define goals for economic and political reform that, although perhaps closely analogous to Western ideas, are nevertheless infused with African cultural content. Indeed, can any reforms ultimately take root and bear fruit unless they resonate with African cultural norms? A third issue is the compatibility at every stage of market economies and multiparty democracies, an assumption sharply questioned by Thomas Callaghy in this volume. That political democracy can both undermine and be coopted by private economic interest is an idea with a very long pedigree. The proposition that democracy can be sustained while African societies remain impoverished flies in the face of some venerable empirical theory and research.9 Fourth, there is the unsupported presumption that African peoples necessarily consider illegitimate what Western observers have treated as distortions of classical liberal ideals.IO Fifth, an underlying existential and theoretical issue overlooked by contemporary campaigns for privatization and multiparty democracy is the relationship of such movements to strengthening the legitimacy of the state itself. African governments have loudly complained that the economic reforms demanded of them endanger not only their own survival but also the fabric of none-too-strong states. The implicit issue is when and under what circumstances democratization and privatization, singly or in combination, strengthen state legitimacy. At this writing it is clear that such discussions are premature in Somalia and probably in Sudan as well. Does that mean that the creation of political order, by whatever means, is a prerequisite to subsequent democratization and economic liberalization? Or are negotiations on these measures part and parcel of the process of bringing political order out of chaos?

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It is at the deeper level of state reconstruction that the importance of the idea of civil society becomes apparent. At this level the issue is not the form of the state-for example, democracy versus authoritarianism-but the legitimacy of the state itself; not the rationalization of the forms of state and society in the abstract but the basic empirical determination of 1) the true parameters of evolving African societies, and 2) the type of states commensurate with the predominant values those societies embody. The idea of civil society points to the necessity of these processes and to ways of conceptualizing them. Lack of attention to such processes both in theory and in practice may well have something to do with the continent's generally discouraging record of political and socioeconomic development to date. There is an irony in this. The campaigns for structural adjustment are in part responsible for the reemergence of the idea of civil society, in that the concept grew out of a resurgent faith in the vitality and indispensability of the private sector to a country's political and economic health.l 1 Moreover, civil society is ingrained in the very classical liberal philosophy upon which structural adjustment campaigns have been founded. But the use of civil society in such discourse has been reductionist, in effect equating civil society with the market in ways more reminiscent of the Hegelian than the liberal tradition. What is lost in such a formulation are the critical political roles of civil society, emphasized in the preceding discussion, which are rooted in liberal philosophy from Hobbes and Locke to Marx and Gramsci and, in a way, even in the works of Edmund Burke. The overlooking of these political functions of civil society, which are of primary interest here, may help to explain the weakness of reform measures otherwise grounded in classical liberalism.

The Underdevelopment of the Civil Society Variable A key empirical question is what tacit or explicit working understandings have governed the interrelationships of state and society (including the economy). To what extent and in what ways has civil society been an implicit, hidden variable in contemporary theories? Civil society may simply be an analytical concept without empirical referents, as Bratton suggests, but it may also indeed correspond-or come to correspond-to relationships of which political actors are to varying degrees conscious. In the latter case, one corollary question is how conflict over or breakdowns in those working relationships help explain the declining legitimacy and effectiveness of the state. Conversely, how might the process of reformulating new working understandings of state-society relations-i.e., of civil society-help account for instances of political renaissance, including movements for liberalization? Such empirical investigation must necessarily be grounded in theory, setting forth where one would expect to look for these linkages. A fundamental theoretical question, therefore, is why one

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would or would not expect political liberalization to take place in particular socioeconomic circumstances and how one would expect this to occur; i.e., how might one expect civil society to function in particular circumstances? A thorough review of the literature on these subjects is beyond the scope of a single section of this chapter. However, a cursory review of some recent works on state-society relations in Africa suggests implicit if often inchoate recognition of the importance of civil society in explaining how and why political and socioeconomic realms affect each other.1 2 Not every reference to the term "civil society" has conveyed recognition of its singular importance to the theoretical and empirical analysis of state-society relations. Nor do many of them address fully two fundamental empirical questions: 1) how civil society processes may be or have been affected by international pressures for political and/or economic change; and 2) what forms of political and socioeconomic structures may result from the workings of particular civil society processes. At least three distinctive but to some extent overlapping themes prevail throughout the literature analyzing state-society relations in Africa. One postulates an unfortunate degree of state autonomy from society and economy that seems in empirical terms to negate state-society mutual interdependence altogether. For example, Goren Hyden has argued that the "lack of fit between societal and state norms is at the root of the failure of the African state" because the latter continues to exemplify European conceptions, whereas African societies do so to a lesser extent. 13 He appears to call for modification of state norms to be consonant with those of society, but he leaves unclear why such accommodation is required and how it is to take place or, once achieved, be sustained. Missing is a conception of the nature and forms of state-societal interdependence in both theory and practice, of a dynamic that might bring about such interdependence, of a basis for predicting the directions that such accommodation might take, and of the influences that might shape these directions. He does not treat the actual or likely effects of international pressures on this dynamic. A second contemporary approach to the relations between states and societies hypothesizes the fact, the inevitability, and/or the desirability of the capture of one by the other. In both instances the necessity for structural interdependence is preempted either by state domination of elements of society or vice versa. Implicitly, the underlying argument in these cases appears to be that the capture of state power by those in society or of societal power by those in control of the state preempts questions of state legitimacy and the hypothesized role of civil society in those processes. Even Machiavelli, however, recognized that the prince's successful acquisition and maintenance of power depended ultimately on the outcomes for and responses by society. The presumption that the acquisition and use of power can alone determine the viability of the state and preempt formation of understandings about how political order is to be

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constructed and governed (i.e., the work of civil society) is therefore open to question. Some authors conceive of the state as the captive of parts of society. Markovitz, for example, posits the existence in contemporary Africa of a ruling group consisting of the top political leaders and bureaucrats, the traditional rulers and their descendants, the leading members of the liberal professions, the rising business bourgeoisie and top members of the military and police who come to constitute an organizational bourgeoisie. The power of this class, both cause and consequence of occupying positions of state authority, is such that the state serves its ends to the extent that the two spheres of the public and the private-nowhere really separate-have if anything become, in certain ways, at all levels more tightly bound together.l4

The hypothesis that society and state become fused in the power of an organizational bourgeoisie-a hypothesis for which one can certainly find abundant evidence in parts of the African continent-leaves us without corollary hypotheses to explain how such hegemony emerges. We need to know what sustains such hegemony and, conversely, under what circumstances not only an organizational elite's power but the state itself may be fatally weakened or undermined, even to the point of dissolution. Civil society theory thus leads us to question the assumptions that the acquisition and maintenance of organizational power is self-sustaining or that the viability of the state is unaffected by elites' presumption that such power is self-sustaining. In situations of this kind, civil society may indeed be extinguished, and the power of hegemonic rule may become profoundly illegitimate. The question then becomes the consequences not just of illegitimacy but of the weakness or dissolution of the very civil society whose function it is to define the bases of legitimacy. The nature and significance of international as well as domestic limits on self-sustaining organizational power needs also to be factored into such analysis. However, many authors place greater emphasis on the consequences of attempts to subordinate society to the dictates of the state. Joel Migdal depicts an ultimately self-defeating quest by the state to survive by accomplishing hegemony over society. He inquires why contemporary states with seemingly vastly superior resources cannot overcome the resistance of traditional local power centers. He finds his answer in what might be termed the paradox of elusive power. His central thesis is that in dealing with fragmented societies, the process of seeking to consolidate power over points of local control causes leaders to lose it. Those that try to suppress semi-autonomous power centers that may challenge central leadership, he argues, do so at their peril: "Fragmentation of social control and the difficulties in political mobilization have led to a pathological style at the apex of the state, the politics of survival. State leaders in weak states

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have taken to pulverizing the very arms of the state that could help them achieve their goal of mobilization."15 Failing "massive social dislocations," he argues, states have little choice but to reach accommodation with "local strongmen" who exercise power in particular contexts. These accommodations to the power of local strongmen implicitly acknowledge the reality of what we have termed civil society processes: "rules of the game" without specifying what those rules might be or how they might be constituted. The implicit normative equilibrium Migdal describes sheds little light on how such settlements might occur or what differing forms they might take and why. He recognizes the impact of exogenous variables, "massive dislocations," and international impacts but does not fully develop these themes. A third approach is best characterized as hypothesizing ongoing interdependence, intermediation, and parallel development of state and society. Naomi Chazan has been one exponent of this conceptualization. She has pictured fluid, changing, complex, and multifaceted relationships between African states and societies that vary widely in response to the vectors of time, place, and circumstance.J6 She has reminded us to disaggregate both variables in order to understand the range, complexity, and viability of interactions between the political and socioeconomic realms. But her analysis seems also implicitly to recognize that the actors enmeshed in such interactions may (or may need to) mutually recognize some "rules of the game" that legitimize the context in which such interchanges occur. Thus, the nature of her empirical and microlevel analysis leads us back to more macrolevel questions. The next step in the argument is to apprehend the nature of these rules of the game, how they emerge, and how they impact upon the multiplicity of interchanges between the political and socioeconomic spheres. Such inquiries are needed to explain how, why, and under what circumstances manifold interchanges between state and society in the aggregate affect the character of each party for better or for worse (e.g., the prospects for democratization and their likely relationship to hoped-for African economic renaissance). The next step in furthering the theory of state-society relations in Africa is to refine concepts of the mechanisms by which state and society influence each other's development in definable, empirically verifiable ways. Here, however, a more fundamental issue uncomfortably arises. To understand the patterns and effects of state-society interaction in Africa, it is necessary to polish our concepts of the two variables themselves: state and society. Part of the task is to understand how African states and societies may be evolving in ways different from what has been understood to have occurred in the West. Victor Azarya, for example, has observed that "the very notion of state-society relations which presupposes the state to be very different from society is a Western idea."I7 Another part of the puzzle lies in uncritical reliance upon positivist equations of the state with the institutions of government or with the

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boundaries of the politicaJ.l 8 Chazan takes the point further, contending: "Politics, the competition for access to and control of resources, takes place well beyond the narrower public domain in African countries. Power-the capacity to control resources-and authority-the right to do so-may legitimately be vested in local social structures as well. ... Political variables retain their centrality in explicating unfolding processes: they are not, however, necessarily state-centric."l9 In other words, we require definitions that are not necessarily synonymous with the activities of particular institutions in order to be able to locate and understand political behavior. The first step, then, may be to define political and social behavior in noninstitutional terms, perhaps relying on something akin to an Eastonian definition of political behavior as the authoritative allocation of social values and social behavior as that which is not in and of itself authoritative.20 Distinguishing political and social behaviors from the institutions in which they occur also points to a differentiation of the state from what is supposed to be its tangible manifestations in governmental institutions. An obvious way to delink our concepts of state and society from their conventional institutional associations is to center on the processes by which values are authoritatively allocated, specifically those by which value allocations become authoritative, thus crossing the line between social and political behavior. The implicit proposition here is that the institutions of state and society should be understood as outcomes of these processes at least as much as vice versa. For example, it may be appropriate, with Rothchild, to think of the state as the constellation of organizing principles of political life and "state formation" as the process of authoritatively distinguishing, establishing, and legitimizing those principles. Then it becomes possible to recognize that the boundaries of the "political" and the "social" may overlap with the conventionally understood institutional boundaries of government and society. The next step, then, is to recognize the existence of processes by which rules of the game are formed to govern management of the boundaries between political and social behavior. We must also acknowledge the reciprocal impact of those rules on the interface between the political and the social. This is an important dimension of civil society. For example, it is through civil society that the issue of individual rights to be protected from governmental interference is addressed. Then we need to explore the empirical questions of how and in what forms this mutual interface occurs and what its significance might be for the course and outcomes of movements for democratization and economic liberalization. Whole libraries have been written on societal control of political institutions. More recently, in the case of economic liberalization, much has been written on the advantages and disadvantages of presumptively semiautonomous governmental institutions on society and economy. Chazan points to a middle road in hypothesizing a political interdependence

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between government and society. But it is not sufficient merely to specify that societal as well as governmental institutions and their interrelationships are "political." Relying upon behavioral definitions of politics, society, and state formation, we need to understand how "political" processes in society emerge to shape and be shaped by governmental institutions. Without such an understanding we can continue to plot the covariance of indicators and governmental and socioeconomic change, but we cannot achieve dynamic analysis centering on the nature and fundamental consequences of the processes by which they mutually influence one another. Among the important practical consequences of this lacuna is that we can be left without adequate theory with which to examine the possible connection between emerging movements for political democratization and corresponding processes of economic liberalization. Thus, the proposition emerges that the idea of civil society enables us to understand more clearly the nature of the interfaces and interdependence between society and government in Africa.2 1 To advance such a claim is to depart from definitions implicit in contemporary usages in several important respects. First, civil society here is not conceived of as synonymous with or inchoately distinguished from society at large; rather it is considered a dimension of society set apart by its distinctive political functions. Second, those distinctive political functions are understood to have both "horizontal" and "vertical" aspects. The horizontal functions of civil society, those characterizing the relationships of actors within society to each other, are understood to be as important as vertical ones, those between society and government. Third, specification of the outlines of civil society carries in its train a different perspective on the nature and functioning of society at large. The idea of civil society ascribes political functions to society itself apart from, and as a foundation for, government. This outlook also necessarily bars reduction of the idea of society to its market functions alone. Fourth, specification of the nature and operations of civil society is assumed to be derived from behavioral and process-based definitions of politics, society, and state formation as set forth above. The idea of civil society thus opens the way to a new perspective not only on state-society relations per se but also on the implications of evolving state-society relations for the African development crisis. A civil society orientation shifts the emphasis of economic reform from policy change to formation of basic political values underlying such reformsi.e., their relationship to the processes of state formation and development. This new outlook helps us to recognize the fact that although policy changes calculated to stimulate an economic renaissance can be initiated externally, there are real limits to the extent that such initiatives can preempt domestic enactment of the rules of the game to which such policies must appear to conform-i.e., the functioning of civil society. Moreover,

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given the behavioral definitions of the other key variables set forth above, a civil society perspective entails thinking of economic development as a process of enhancing the material resources and productive capabilities of society rather than simply as the sum of aggregate statistical measures. This point of view implies that political reform may at least as much be a prerequisite for economic reform as vice versa. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the idea of civil society in an African context implies that processes of establishing cultural identity cannot be divorced from those of political and economic reform. Civil society, understood as the basic rules of the game and the processes of defining them, must be derivative from underlying cultural values. One clear corollary is that discerning African conceptions of state and society is neither merely a diplomatic nicety nor just an agreeable long-term vision. Rather, it is essential here and now in understanding the course of African political and socioeconomic development.

The Possibility of Civil Society Theory Civil Society in Political Philosophy A common theme running through the history of Western political philosophy is the idea that civil society consists of those processes that define the purposes and rules of government and its societal foundations-i.e., the processes of state formation and reformation. Civil society is understood by most political philosophers (with the possible exception of Hegel) to be the means by which the organizing principles of the state are harmonized with those of society at large. The contentions of this section are that a reprise of the idea of civil society leads to 1) a clearer awareness of the dimensions of civil society, and 2) a range of alternative models of civil society that can serve as bases for specifying empirically testable models. My review will address three issues: 1) the relationships between civil society and society at large; 2) the role of civil society in defining the parameters of society as a whole and of economy, government, and the state itself; and 3) the ways in which civil society may perform these functions. The modern idea of civil society originates in the teachings of Thomas Hobbes.22 For Hobbes, civitas, or commonwealth, is founded in the readiness of each individual to forgo his or her quest for self-preservation and mutually and voluntarily agree with each other to forgo that quest individually and to appoint an individual or assembly to provide security for all. Only through empowerment of a government by mutual consent can ideas of justice or law have any meaning. The creation of society and government results from both the capacity and the obligation of each individual to seek

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peace, conceived of as physical security. Political obligation is based upon the creation of this covenant. The formation of Hobbes's commonwealth requires people to covenant with each other sequentially-first, to renounce seeking self-preservation at each other's expense; second, to appoint a sovereign to fulfill that objective for all. Hobbes treats the commonwealth as the intended result of this process; he implicitly seems to recognize that the process of defining the need for bases, purposes, and functions of sovereign power occurs logically and temporally prior to the formation of the commonwealth. This distinctive process of defining the principles by which society is to be governed and the terms of governance deserves a name of its own, but Hobbes does not appear to give one. However, it corresponds to what we above have termed "civil society," the process of creating civitas. One key effect of this process is the imposition on government of an obligation to be responsible to the people who created it and to the purposes for which they created it, albeit not necessarily in a democratic fashion. Another effect is the transformation of society from one in which individuals pursue separately the fundamental objective of security to one in which they act together to achieve this objective. Locke is clearer than Hobbes about the distinction between society and civil society. Popular consent to the establishment of currency in the form of gold and silver, to the accrual of individual wealth in the form of land, labor, and capital, and to its unequal distribution signals the existence of society prior to the formation of government. Locke differentiates society in this form from one at a higher level in which people agree upon basic principles for the governance of their lives based upon the "mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, which I call by the general name property ."23 Locke distinguishes this accord from the next step, which is to define the bases of government. He wavers between the terms "commonwealth" and "civil society" to describe the first of these two accords, but he is clear that both phases involve activity distinct from simply living under government, on the one hand, or operating within society, on the other hand. That distinctive activity is one of defining both the purposes of society itself and the foundations, purposes, and structure of government. Thus, both Locke and Hobbes recognize that civil society not only differs from society per se but also defines the nature and principles of political life from which government itself results. Locke's conception of the process of civil society, like Hobbes's, implies the imputation of a common substantive purpose to society-the protection of property broadly defined-and a procedural one-the establishment of that purpose by common consent. Significantly, although the functions of society for Locke may be largely economic, his civil society defines and imputes to society at large a normative purpose, the legitimation and protection by consent of those relationships. It is the principle of consent that for Locke links the purposes of society and those of government.

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Rousseau's social contract implies a popular decision to define andrealize principles both of community itself and of its governance.24 Indeed, for Rousseau these two elements of the rebirth of politics-community and authoritative governing principles-are inextricably woven together. From this process the constitution of the state is to be derived and distilled. Thus, Rousseau also establishes a sharp distinction between society, civil society, and state, conceiving civil society as an indispensable intermediary between the other two. Moreover, Rousseau does not treat the formation of civil society as a process so incremental and drawn out as to escape the consciousness of those involved. Quite the contrary, the process is conscious and deliberate. Unlike Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau addresses explicitly the course of forming civil society. Enigmatically, and problematically, he relies upon a "Legislator" as a seemingly essential midwife in the birth of civil society, one who is apart from the people on whose behalf he acts and whoremains outside of civil society once it is created. Locke and Hobbes implicitly assume the sufficiency of human reason for recognizing and acting on the need for civil society. Rousseau, uncomfortable with the rationalist premises of the Enlightenment, postulates human agency itself, in the form of sovereign leadership, as the means necessary to the end. People themselves never cease to be sovereign for Locke, whereas for Hobbes popular sovereignty occurs only through the process of instituting rulerships and, thereafter, only vicariously through the exercise of that leadership. By contrast to both Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau sees the process of instituting normative bases of government as distinct from those of actually forming a government. His discussion raises the issue of the importance and roles of leadership in the formation of civil society. This relationship between how civil society comes into being and the bases of political life that emerge through its formation is important in empirical as well as theoretical terms. The early history of African political independence has been marked by the seemingly failed visions of some of the most prominent of independent Africa's first "legislators"-Kwame Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta, Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere, and perhaps ultimately Leopold Senghor, Hastings Banda, and Felix Houphouet-Boigny.2 5 Some of the recent literature seems to place the leadership responsibility for civil society functions in Africa on voluntary associations in Tocquevillean terms. 26 By virtue of their existence, their performance of civil society's norm-setting functions is tacitly assumed. If, however, we content ourselves with the "legislator" and voluntary association options for realizing civil society's purposes, we risk reverting to institutional formulations of civil society instead of the process approach advocated above. However, the contrast between the Rousseauian and Tocquevillean perspectives on the formation of civil society does spawn several critical empirical questions concerning its formation and functioning. These include: 1) Who belongs to civil society and on what

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john W. Harbeson

terms? 2) What functions must be exercised for civil society to accomplish its tasks? 3) How are these functions to be performed? and 4) How are these functions institutionalized and how does institutionalization reciprocally affect the way those functions are performed? For Rousseau there is a consonance between the character of civil society processes and the basic purposes of society and government that civil society defines. The political equality of those participating in civil society, from which the general will emerges, is replicated in the society that general will constitutes. Rousseau implicitly reposes the responsibility for maintaining that consonance upon civil society itself rather than upon the legislator or upon the government, which for Rousseau is a relatively passive instrument of society. In a perceptive article, Charles Taylor has distinguished what he terms the older Lockean "political society" model of civil society from another model he associates with Montesquieu. Taylor contends that Locke's civil society is a community distinct from, albeit ultimately superior to, government. By contrast he perceives Montesquieu's civil society as engaged, and in equilibrium, with government whose functions are to protect individual liberty and to preserve the virtues of moderation, trust, and reason in government.27 In this sense, the values that civil society seeks to preserve are dependent upon its capacity to stamp those values on the government it seeks to restrain. Montesquieu, too, defines civil society in terms of a singular role in defining those virtues by which government is to be guided. Taylor observes that Montesquieu does not presume a civil society logically or historically prior to the polity but treats them as coevai.28 The balance between society and polity is inevitably one of power, and the function of civil society relates more to maintaining that balance than to the formation-or reformation-of government. Nonetheless, Montesquieu confirms both the norm-setting function of civil society and the importance of preserving a congruence between these norms and the working bases of government. "They should," he said, "be in relation to the nature and principle of each government; whether they form it, as may be said of politic laws; or whether they support it, as in the case of civil institutions."29 Montesquieu's reflections add a critical historical dimension to the investigation of civil society. His accent on government and civil society being in continual interaction leads to the empirical proposition of state formation and reformation as ongoing, perhaps cyclical processes. Civil society thus is more than something that comes into play only at the point of regime change. Rather, it continually reshapes, or seeks to reshape, the definition of government and society even as it is itself shaped by them. An expansive vista of historical research opportunities thereby opens up. If we drop Montesquieu's tacit assumption that the structure and values espoused by civil society are constant, the research agenda expands still

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further. For example, we need to look again and in greater depth at how, during a period characterized by state weakness and/or collapse, processes may come into play to define and press for political reform. We need also to compare the content and form of such civil society processes with ideas held by external advocates of democratization concerning those processes. Montesquieu's orientation introduces a further element of civil society-i.e., the sometimes conflictual, sometimes collegial relations between civil society and government. Bratton's advocacy of a "neutral definition of civil society that does not prejudge the nature of state-society relations" hints at the empirical reality that civil society's sometimes adversarial relationship with government may contrast with other occasions when civil society is in fact coopted by government. Gramsci appears to have seen this possibility as the essence of the definition of civil society. De Tocqueville, for his part, recognized that associations might be instruments for the inculcation of democratic values in the citizenry on behalf of government as well as a means of restraining tyranny. Marx, of course, anticipated the opposite problem, whereby the state becomes coopted by civil society with ultimately revolutionary consequences. The possible cooptation of civil society opens up yet a further empirical proposition of considerable importance: Cooptation of civil society may ultimately undermine the state even if, in the short run, cooptation seems to sustain the government as Gramsci perceives. I have argued elsewhere that one of the factors undermining revolutionary change in Ethiopia after the dethroning of Emperor Haile Selassie I was his skill in coopting and melding into a supportive civil society of both traditional and modernizing elites.3° Institutionalization of civil society may not be integral to its definition, but it may in some circumstances be a necessary prerequisite to its effective functioning. Moreover, might not the relative influence of government and society at large upon how civil society functions have possible cause-and-effect relationships concerning the health both of state formation processes and of socioeconomic development? This brief exploration of the place of civil society in the history of political philosophy has suggested that the dimensions of its fundamental norm-setting role are more numerous, and the empirical applications broader, than is apparent if we rely solely upon Hegel's definition of civil society. Hegel's positioning of civil society between family and state as a "community of producers" serving to mediate private interests across family and kinship groupings does add an additional dimension. But his concentration on the economic aspects of civil society appears unduly reductionist by comparison to other philosophical treatments. At the same time, the Hegelian dialectic seems to position civil society in something of a symbiotic relationship with the state: The state comes into being because civil society is not self-sufficient; the state does for civil society what civil society cannot do for itself. Hegel's conception

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john W. Harbeson

brings to light the reciprocal impact of the state upon the civil society that gives it birth. Ironically, this position seems to treat civil society as a means of strengthening the state, even as his definition of civil society appears to be employed by those who would reduce the role of the state in favor of a more market-driven society. But Hegel's argument does invite us to examine reciprocal influences of government and civil society upon each other-i.e., to recognize that civil society, like government, is not fully autonomous and self-sufficient but must be nurtured by both government and society as a whole. The history of political philosophy offers not only conceptions of the nature and functioning of civil society but also assaults on the very possibility of its existence. Hegel believed it desirable as well as inevitable that the state would coopt and supersede civil society processes as defined by others. Marx thought capitalism undermined both the legitimacy and the possibility of civil society, particularly in its dissolving of the efficacy of societal norms. Marx's later disciples, however, have vigorously debated whether he excluded, or should have excluded, the importance of consciousness in shaping political and socioeconomic change. Postmodernist assaults on the possibility of civil society take the form of denials that there can be a public sector distinct from society at large. Foucault posits the ubiquitousness of power in social relationships and therefore questions what he sees as key assumptions on which the idea of the public sector is based: that debate and consensus are not always shaped decisively by power relationships, that the Habermasian project of "transferring formal rules for what constitutes a genuine consensus from the scientific or theoretical community to the sphere of politics" is possible, and that a public sphere can be specified empirically. 31 In questioning the possibility of a distinct public sector, he implicitly questions the possibility that civil society acts as a bridge between the public and private sectors. He appears also to implicitly question both Machiavelli's concepts of the "rational" use of power and Hobbes's contention that power-driven individuals seeking their own self-preservation can rationally agree to create civitas. Foucault's implicit attack on the possibility of civil society is helpful because it further clarifies what civil society can and cannot be. The idea of civil society as outlined in the history of political philosophy does not necessarily depend upon the rationalist assumptions of its advocates. In empirical terms one can easily envisage civil society as determining the purposes and rules of the political game without assuming a priori definitions of those purposes and rules. Civil society can create those rules existentially just as easily as it can purport to discover those that may be thought to exist already in some sense. To that extent, civil society is liberated from any necessary association with any particular branch of philosophy or any particular countries' historical practices. The postmodernist critique, then, simply poses an empirically researchable issue:

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whether or not, to what extent, and in what circumstances legitimized, operationally effective ideas about the rules of the game in fact exist.

Toward Empirical Models of Civil Society Several key questions about the nature of civil society arising from its treatment in the history of political philosophy help us to trace the outlines of possible models of its functioning in practice. These questions include: 1) Who performs civil society functions, and how do they acquire those roles? 2) What are the interests and motivations of those who perform civil society's functions, and how do these relate to its normative rationale? 3) How does civil society bridge the realms of society and government in practice? 4) In what ways, if at all, are civil society practices institutionalized in terms of powers, limits, and obligations, and how does such institutionalization relate to the processes themselves? 5) How does civil society form and how does it dissolve, and under what circumstances? 6) What are the modes of consensus, conflict, and division that occur within civil society? 7) What are the modes of reciprocal interaction between government, society at large, and civil society? Let us explore each of these questions briefly with a view to empirical models of civil society that may emerge from them.

Who makes up civil society? The history of political philosophy suggests a wide range of alternative, perhaps overlapping, not necessarily antithetical possibilities, from broadly based popular participation (Locke, Hobbes) to elite bargaining of one kind or another (Montesquieu) to elitecitizen-government interchanges (de Tocqueville). In some circumstances clearly identifiable individuals or groups may surface, whereas in other cases the participants and their relationships to each other may be far more diffuse and distant. The visibility and circumstances of the identifiable participants may vary greatly across time and space. There may be complicated differences between public perceptions of who the participants are and those who are so in fact. Inquiry into who has a reputation for significant involvement may be an important starting point. In this volume, very contrasting civil society configurations emerge. Kasfir's analysis of Ugandan farmers and MacGaffey's appraisal of the Zairian informal economy depict highly diffuse, inchoately organized civil societies. By contrast, Bratton identifies clear leadership of civil society in Zambia (labor unions) and Kenya (churches). Tripp identifies a segment of society seeking to become part of civil society (women), and Gyimah-Boadi portrays a constellation of associations exercising civil society functions. All the essays, however, emphasize broadly based citizen participation in civil society as opposed to the elite bargaining model implied in Montesquieu's essay. It is just such broadly based mobilization that Callaghy anticipates

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john W. Harbeson

will undermine sound governmental economic management and that Rothchild and Lawson and Gyimah-Boadi find frustrated by overbearing governments.

Interests and motivations. These may be widely variegated, changeable, and either relatively clear or diffuse and latent, depending on the circumstances, including the nature and deportment of the government of the day. What is central here is avoidance of a kind of reductionism frequently found in both liberal and more radical schools of political economy-i.e., that class interests are necessarily synonymous with, not just closely related to, the purposes individuals or groups entertain for society and the state. If, for example, the purposes of a bourgeoisie are characterized simply as economic aggrandizement, there is still a difference between that underlying interest and the task of defining purposes of society and government in ways compatible with those interests. Positing the importance of civil society carries in its train the value of analytically differentiating economic interests and societal and governmental purposes. However, real, advertised, perceived, and legitimized purposes and interests are not easy to disentangle from one another. The keys are 1) to identify those people who seem most influential in establishing the defining norms of government and society, and 2) to inquire how these norms relate to those people's pursuit of their particular interests. The essays in this volume steer away from such reductionism. MacGaffey's account of Zaire shows clearly how economic interests frustrated by a corrupt and pernicious government have resorted to overt actions to overthrow the regime and replace it with one that is more honest and benign. Kasfir's analysis of Ugandan farmers portrays their appropriation of regime norms in their dealings with each other even when the regime has nearly ceased to exist. Widner and Tripp examine the circumstances and processes that lead interest groups to become political actors bent on reshaping the rules of the political game. Civil society as bridge between society and polity. A central feature of civil society is its role in establishing bridges between society at large and government and in seeking harmonization of their respective purposes. The literature of political philosophy has suggested numerous alternative, not necessarily mutually antithetical, ways by which this key function may be performed. These include civil society as, inter alia, 1) buffer against government or society, 2) broker between government and society, 3) symbol of actual political norm setter, 4) agent of change, 5) regulator of the processes of participation in societal norm setting, 6) integrator of groups articulating political interests into a viable process for doing so, 7) representative of particular interests, and 8) midwife of regime change. The central point here is that these avenues of functioning are not necessarily ends in themselves but

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means to achieving the fundamental norm-formation purpose of civil society. However, the norms· civil society defines may reciprocally influence the avenues chosen. The circumstances that determine how civil society functions, which functions are most plausible and effective in particular circumstances, and the extent to which a particular means of norm setting becomes itself a norm are all important lines of empirical inquiry. Although the emphasis in this volume is on civil society's representative functions, the portrayals of civil society in several African countries illustrate the multiple approaches civil society may take simultaneously in pursuit of its principal purpose. The chart on page 24 is illustrative, not a definitive comparison, of the different avenues chosen by civil society in the performance of its functions.

The institutionalization of civil society. The hypotheses here are that civil society processes may be institutionalized in a variety of ways and that these may change over time in response to circumstances. A corollary is that civil society need not be assumed a priori to be synonymous with any particular kind of organization, notably voluntary associations, as emphasized by de Tocqueville. This indeed is a point fundamental to the era of behavioralism in social science. That does not mean, however, that organizational factors do not constitute important variables that shape and are shaped by how civil society functions. The portrayals of African civil societies in this book vary in the importance they attach to organizational variables. Bratton dwells at length on the factors that place particular organizations (the churches in Kenya and labor unions in Zambia) in a position of civil society leadership, and he assesses their relative strengths in performing that role. Tripp points to the importance of organization in articulating gender issues and inserting them into the debate over Tanzania's political future. Widner examines the circumstances under which organized expression of programmatic interests becomes part of lvoirian civil society. By contrast, institutional variables play a much smaller role in Kasfir's analysis of Ugandan farmers and MacGaffey's examination of the Zairian informal economy. The formation and dissolution of civil society. It is important to recognize that civil society processes may be strong or weak, inchoate or clearly articulated, in place or essentially dissolved. Events in contemporary Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan may signify situations in which civil society verges on extinction for varying reasons. How civil society emerges and gains strength, why and how it dissolves, and under what circumstances it does so are key research questions. The emphasis in this volume is on the survival of civil society (Uganda, Zaire, Ghana) and on its rebirth and growing strength (Zambia, Kenya, Zaire, Tanzania, and perhaps Cote d'lvoire) rather than on its decay, decline, or dissolution.

~

Kenya (Bratton)

Zambia (Bratton)

Buffer

Tanzania (Tripp)

Ghana Cote d'lvoire (Gyimah-Boadi) (Widner)

X

X

X

X

Broker

X

Symbol

X

X

X

Agent

X

X

X

Uganda (Kasfir)

Zaire (MacGaffey) X '0 ;:,-;:

~

X X

X

X

::r: .,...."' "'0 ;: V>

Regulator

X

Integrator

X

X

Representative

X

X

X

X

Midwife

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X X

Civil Society and Political Renaissance

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The condition of civil society: consensus, conflict, and/or division. There is a presupposition in much of political philosophy that civil society is cohesive and embodies consensus on the norms of the society and state it is supposed to define, establish, and uphold. Of course, that need not be the case empirically. Civil society processes may be conflictual and divisive. Rothchild and Lawson suggest that civil society may be so fragmented as to comprise two or more warr{ng pretenders. These divisions may also be vertical-i.e., based on class, status, and power as distinct from ethnicity, territory, or socioeconomic sector. When, why, and how these divisions appear or are overcome are research questions of considerable importance. Conflicted civil society is illustrated in this book in the case of Tanzania, where women's groups struggle for and debate their proper role in a maledominated civil society and government, and in Zaire, where class interests in the informal sector are front and center.

Reciprocity between society, state, and civil society. The literature of political philosophy emphasizes the definition of state and society as outcomes of civil society processes. But empirically it is just as likely that the causal arrows point in both directions. How these power balances are struck, how they arise, and what their consequences are are research questions of central importance. In this book Rothchild and Lawson and Gyimah-Boadi look most closely at situations where civil society may be coopted or dominated by government, whereas Callaghy worries about the consequences of civil society's overrunning government. The other essays all center principally on movements to assert civil society's norm-setting role and its corresponding influence over government in defining the nature of the state. A special case is the role of international actors in shaping the power balances between civil society and government. Guyer explores some of the ramifications of a Nigerian civil society in which the actors are not confined to citizens of the country. Callaghy hints at international actors' importance in undergirding government's ability to withstand civil society pressures in the interests of sound economic policy formation and implementation. Empirical models of civil society that evolve through exploration of the above and additional areas of inquiry may help us diagnose and prescribe remedies for African political and socioeconomic ills and improve our theoretical capacity to understand them. The underlying hypothesis here is that an important element of the African political and socioeconomic crises is an absence of legitimized norms governing how society and the state are to be constituted. Critical commentaries from African sources concerning externally based assumptions about how these norms are or must be constituted suggest the importance of grounding them in African realities. The idea of civil society suggests a theoretical as well as

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fohn W. Harbeson

practical basis for doing so, one that may contribute to decolonizing ideas about state and society as they relate to African realities.

How Useful Is Civil Society? There is a paradox implicit in employing the idea of civil society as a bridge to understanding African analogues to Western ideas of "state" and "market": Civil society itself is rooted in Western political philosophy. A central hypothesis of this inquiry is that civil society may have a better claim to universality than other elements of Western political philosophy; by definition it upholds the proposition that to be legitimate and viable, political and socioeconomic structure must be consonant with the value systems of any given people. With an end to the Cold War confrontation between Marxist and liberal ideologies on the African continent, the climate for focusing on evolving African value systems may have improved, and with it the possibility for African political and socioeconomic orders to become more viable and legitimate. There are, however, two principal objections to the proposition that the idea of civil society is singularly valuable both theoretically and practically with respect to Africa. These are 1) the difficulty of operationalizing concepts rooted essentially in normative political thought, and 2) the possibly unavoidable ethnocentrism of the concept. My argument in this essay has been that both objections can be relatively easily overcome. A major purpose of this chapter has been to demonstrate how an idea rooted in prescriptive political thought can be recast in empirical, operational terms. Indeed, the suggestion has been that normative political thought itself generates fertile and important bases for empirical research. For example, Montesquieu clearly believed from a theoretical perspective that civil society should function as a counterbalance to governments in order to inhibit their tyrannical tendencies; he also suggested that civil society actually did perform in this capacity. More generally, political philosophers have proposed that the task of specifying the governing principles of political and socioeconomic orders is itself profoundly important, empirically observable behavior. This chapter has suggested that the idea of civil society in political philosophy directs us to sets of empirical questions, heretofore largely overlooked, that may in fact be centrally important to understanding African political and socioeconomic progress on the ground. The second objection to civil society is that it is flawed by ethnocentrism because of its derivation from Western political philosophy. That argument would be valid to the extent that empirical models of civil society are prescriptive or deny the possibility of further innovation. That danger is ever-present in comparative political and socioeconomic research. However, a key point of this chapter has been that empirical hypotheses can be

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suggested by normative political thought, Western or non-Western, without being culturally biased by it. More basically, as suggested above, civil society by definition roots political values in culturally specific value systems and is thus singularly valuable in overcoming and counteracting ethnocentrism. Beyond these methodological issues, real answers concerning the utility of civil society can only come by exploring its usefulness in particular settings, as the chapters that follow undertake to do. They amplify, elucidate, explore, and test the propositions that have been presented. They explore further theoretical issues involved in the concept, its utility and applicability in particular country situations, and challenges to the realization of civil society's potential both as an analytical tool and as a key to constructive change on the ground in Africa.

Notes 1. John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild (eds.), Africa in World Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991 ). 2. Hegel's idea of civil society appears to be an exception to this generalization. His approach is considered later in this chapter. 3. David Easton, A System of Analysis of Political Life (New York: John Wiley, 1965). 4. Dana R. Villa, "Postmodernism and the Public Sphere," American Political Science Review 86, 3 (September 1992): 712-771. 5. World Development Report 1993 (New York: Oxford University Press). 6. World Development Report 1991 (New York: Oxford University Press). 7. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socioeconomic Recovery and Transformation (New York: UNECA, 1989). 8. Harbeson and Rothchild, Africa in World Politics. 9. S. M. Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1959). 10. Who is to say, for example, to what extent the kinds of state-society relations outlined in Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) and I. L. Markovitz (ed.), Studies of Power and Class in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) are distortions of underlying African political cultures in every instance? Bates, of course, has substantially revamped his views in his more recent writings. See his Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian Development in Kenya (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 11. I appreciate this being pointed out by the anonymous reviewer of this manuscript for the publisher. 12. One of the first recent discussions of civil society in relationship to Africa was in Michael Bratton, "Beyond the State: Civil Society and Associational Life in Africa," World Politics 41, 3 (1989): 407-429. 13. See his "Reciprocity and Governance in Africa," in James Wunsch and Dele Olowu, The Failure of the Centralized State: Institutions and Self-Governance in Africa (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990). In this analysis Hyden appeared

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to have come full circle from his thesis in Beyond Ujamma: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), in which he contended that economies of affection were the problem rather than the solution, that they must yield to the discipline of capitalism at least in the medium term. 14. Markovitz, Studies, p. 10. 15. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 16. See Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan (eds.), The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988). 17. Victor Azarya, "Reordering State-Society Relations: Incorporation and Disengagement," in Chazan and Rothchild, The Precarious Balance. 18. I have argued in The Ethiopian Transformation: The Quest for the PostImperial State (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988) that one could not in fact understand contemporary Ethiopian politics if one relied unquestioningly upon such assumptions. 19. Ibid. Others have made the same point. Many years ago, for example, David Easton argued this point in his Systems Analysis of Political Life. 20. Ibid. 21. Contemporary civil society literature in addition to those works already cited includes: J. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1979); Jean-Francois Bayart, "Civil Society in Africa," in Patrick Chabal (ed.), Political Domination in Africa: Reflections on the Limits of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Peter Ekeh, "Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement," in Chabal (ed.), Reflections; and John Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988). 22. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Dutton, 1950). Some analyses find the origin of the idea of civil society in Hegel, e.g., Bratton, "Beyond the State." Charles Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society," Public Culture 3, 1 (1990): 95-131, traces the concept back much further into the medieval era. The modern idea of civil society as a creation of the people appears to originate with Hobbes, who also is arguably the first to treat government as rooted in the will and interests of the people. Taylor himself contrasts two somewhat dissimilar modern concepts of civil society, those of Locke and Montesquieu, which he believes are joined uneasily considerably later than Hegel. 23. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), Chapter 9, paragraph 123. 24. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (New York: Dutton, 1950). 25. Of course, these African "legislators" departed from the Rousseauian conception in playing dominant roles in the governance of the political orders they defined and led in establishing. 26. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (New York: Vintage Books, 1945). See, for example, Michael Bratton, "The Politics of Government-NGO Relations in Africa," World Development 17, 4 (1989): 569-587. Milton Esman and Norman Uphoff, Local Organizations: Intermediaries in Rural Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984) summarize a rich literature on local organizations that underscores their role less as adversaries or buffers visa-vis the state and more as essential complements to effective state action. See also Franz Telmo, "The Role of NGOs in the Strengthening of Civil Society," World

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Development 15, 1 (1987): 121-127; David Leonard, "Analyzing the Organizational Requirements for Serving the Rural Poor," in David Leonard and Dale Marshall, Institutions for Rural Development for the Poor: Decentralization and Organizational Linkages (Berkeley: Institute for International Studies, University of California, 1982). 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Montesquieu, L 'Esprit de Lois (Hafner, 1949), p. 6. 30. The old emperor's skills in cooptation were observed by John Markakis in Ethiopia: The Anatomy of a Traditional Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) and by Christopher Clapham in Haile Selassie's Government (New York: Praeger, 1968). In my book The Ethiopian Transformation: The Quest for the Post-Imperial State (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988) I chart the effects of such cooptation on the quest for revolutionary change after Haile Selassie's departure. 31. Villa, "Postmodernism," quoted at page 717. He contrasts the Habermasian notion of a public sphere presented in Structural Transformation with Hannah Arendt's reliance on an existential, nontranscendental consensus, and postmodernist views that all this is invalid nostalgia for what once may or may not have been.

In Search of Civil Society •

Crawford Young

Whenever, therefore, any number of men so unite into one society as to quit every one his executive power of the law of Nature, and to resign it to the public, there and there only is a political or civil society. And this is done wherever any number of men, in the state of Nature, enter into society to make one people one body politic under one supreme government. -John Locke!

"Civil society" has entered core terminology in the analysis of African politics essentially in the past decade. An exploration of its nature and meanings-however contemporary the usage or currency of the termcannot escape an introductory historical excursus. Particular as may be the African circumstances that gave rise to its appropriation, "civil society" is not a neologism of the social scientific imagination but a term carrying its own intellectual history, a history that casts an inescapable shadow on contemporary usages. The search for its meaning in the context of the extraordinary continentwide rejection of once unchallengeable modes of governance must begin with a bow toward the layers of received meanings with which this term is burdened. John Locke had only an indirect-and unsavory-relationship with Africa, as a small-time slave dealer in junior partnership with his quo~dam patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury (a major investor in the Carolina plantations). In his better-known endeavors in the realm of political philosophy, Locke may serve as a useful point of departure for retracing the pathway to the contemporary currency of civil society terminology in Africa. Worthy of particular note in the prefatory citation is not only precocious usage of the term but also the particular connotations it carried.2 A sharp distinction is made between state and society, analytical touchstone of the contractarian theory of which Locke was an early exponent. A second key point is the explicitly political and public nature of civil society; indeed, "civil" and "political" in Lockean usage are interchangeable terms. Both these dimensions have application to contemporary discourse in Africa.

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The term found its way into the analytical lexicon in the late 1970s, when a deepening separation between state and society became apparent and when earlier state projects of monopolization of political space began to unravel. The Lockean social contract theories build upon an intellectual foundation that owes much to Thomas Hobbes, although the two men use the contractarian idea in very different ways. Hobbes only infrequently used the term "civil! society," but his thought contains cautionary reflections about the driving passions in human behavior that resonate in current debates. In counterpoint to the implicitly benign civil society whose consent legitimates the Lockean contract, the Hobbesian vision involves more of a Faustian pact: unlimited power to the sovereign to protect civil society from its demonic impulses. There is "a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restlesse desire of Power over power, that ceaseth only in death." A human group in its natural condition faces perpetual fear and insecurity, a condition with no industry or culture of the earth, "because the fruit thereof is uncertain .... No Arts, no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." 3 This passage, which loses none of its power through the frequency of its citation, not only points to the inescapable connection between civil society and the state but also prefigures the current dilemmas of democratizing this relationship. How can the uncivil passions of greed and avarice be restrained and societal conflict be curbed if the state sheds some of its power? After more than a century of relative slumber, civil society acquired a new layer of meanings through its Hegelian uses.4 The term is at once broadened and deepened-and inevitably rendered more ambiguousthrough its elevation as "moment" in the unfolding of the world historical spirit. Civil society is at once distinct and yet dialectically joined to the state. In the succinct summation of Pelczynski: Men are primarily concerned with the satisfaction of their private, individual needs, which they do by working, producing and exchanging the product of their labour in the market. This creates bonds of a new kind. While individuals behave selfishly and instrumentally towards each other they cannot help satisfying other men's needs, furthering their interests and entering into various social relations with them. Men are "socialized" into playing socially useful roles for which they are not merely rewarded with money but also with respect and recognition.5 We may note, as in Locke and Hobbes, the gendered vocabulary, redolent of the earlier ethical "moment" of the patriarchal household. Also critical, as Avineri reminds us, is that, although civil society is "a necessary moment in man's progress towards his consciousness of freedom," it is "subordinated to the higher universality of the state." 6

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Another important precursor was Alexis de Tocqueville. Although he does not use the specific term "civil society," his masterful portrait of U.S. democracy is permeated with the corpus of ideas that return in contemporary debates. One may note in particular the stress placed upon "the immense assemblage of associations" in transforming a mass of citizens into a body politic. According to de Tocqueville: All the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves .... They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another. If men living in democratic countries had no right and no inclination to associate for political purposes, their independence would be in great jeopardy .... If they never acquired the habit of forming associations in ordinary life, civilization itself would be endangered.?

At the same time, de Tocqueville warns of the perils of unrestrained Jacobin populism, the "tyranny of the majority." A less widely known but equally prescient injunction alerts us to the danger that particular racial or ethnic communities may be excluded from the body politic by a cultural majority; his pessimistic but prophetic passages concerning American Indians and African Americans are eloquent reminders that civil society is not automatically inclusive in its operations. 11 Civil society entered the realm of Marxist discourse in the early portions of the original corpus of this thought when Marx was preoccupied with using, inverting, and transcending the Hegelian text. Here civil society is stripped of its idealist superstructure to become the hideous embodiment of the bourgeois order, "the site of crass materialism, of modern property relations, of the struggle of each against all, of egotism" emerging from the ruins of a corporatist medieval society.9 Civil society and state remain dialectically joined as "structure" and "superstructure." However, the term "civil society" per se disappeared in later Marx. It was reborn in a powerfully influential reinterpretation in the political thought of Antonio Gramsci. In the Gramscian lecture, indispensable to charting contemporary uses in Africa, the public/private antimony is partly dissolved; civil society becomes above all defined by its structuration. It is the ensemble of "institutions, ideologies, practices, and agents ... that comprise the dominant culture of values."!O Tightly bound to the notion of hegemony, civil society emerges as the key to grasping the failure of historical process to cooperate in the dissolution of capitalism. The dominant class of capitalist society is able to postpone its demise through its capacity to suffuse its values to subordinated social formations, with the state as a primary superintendent of these processes. A civil society takes form through its organizational and ideological structures, through which hegemonical values are mediated. Thus ensnared, society becomes an acquiescent partner in its

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own subordination; the revolutionary struggle accordingly requires a counterhegemonical campaign on the battlefields of civil society itself. In this version, a civil society becomes such to the degree that this structuration occurs. In the oft-cited characterization of prerevolutionary Russia, civil society is "primitive" and "gelatinous" and thus in a state of latency. In this unformed condition, civil society is neither at the service of bourgeois hegemony nor able to resist a powerful state apparatus. The particularly pervasive influence of the Gramscian interpretation of civil society is doubtless related to the broader impact on understandings of Africa of diverse streams of Marxist analysis following its own liberation from the stultifying hegemony of Soviet-inspired orthodoxies, which in turn roughly coincided with the death of "colonial science." The 1971 English compilation of Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, preceded by only a few years the appearance of civil society as a master concept in Africa; 11 Italian editions of his writings first appeared in 194 7 but did not become widely known until the 1960s. Not the least tribute to the originality of the Italian communist theoretician is international aid agencies' unacknowledged (and unconscious) appropriation of his reading of civil society as being defined by structuration. No claim is entered that the preceding synoptic glance at the intellectual history of an analytical term is comprehensive; its only point is to suggest the library of meanings that existed at the moment in the 1980s when it crept unbidden into everyday usage with respect to Africa. My impression-it is no more than that-is that its abrupt eruption into Africanist analysis occurred through largely unconscious processes. Doubtless the appearance of "civil society" in Western academic analysis was influenced by changes in the overall ideological environment: Antistatist, promarket perspectives were ascendant. By the time of the 1986 publication of "Civil Society in Africa," the seminal essay by Jean-Francais Bayart, the term had acquired general usage.l2 The influential 1983 work by Naomi Chazan, which focuses upon the state but still embeds an implicit concept of civil society as counterpoint, does not employ this term. 13 Even though the moment of its incorporation into analytical vocabulary may have passed unnoticed, this development was by no means inconsequential. The gradual displacement of the far looser referent "society" by "civil society" has significant implications. "Society" is a term so vast in its coverage that it is difficult to ascribe to it a specific intellectual history or-without a qualifier-a precise meaning. The silent lexical shift implies a veritable paradigmatic mutation from a vision of African politics as primarily state-centered to one of state and civil society as highly distinctive realms, conjoined yet separate, in theory potentially cooperative but in the dismal empirical realities of the 1980s frequently antagonistic. After this analytical metamorphosis was already in progress, it received one final external stimulus: the collapse of state socialism. As the

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powerful solvent of perestroika and glasnost ate away the tissues of the "Soviet-type system" (or "really existing socialism," both terms also lexical commonplaces only in the 1980s), the "primitive" and "gelatinous" nature of the societies, reduced to passive submission by decades of subordination to a compulsively hegemonical and comprehensively intrusive state, stood in stark relief. Constructing a new order out of the wreckage of state socialism required building a civil society in the Gramscian (or Tocquevillean) sense, an infrastructure of corporate structuration to permit civil society to assume command of its own destiny-and, in a Gramscian irony, to reinvent a market economy whose "hegemonical" values it might mediate. The extraordinary melodrama of these events facilitated the vulgarization of an East European version of the civil society concept beyond the academic literature in the media and certainly reinforced its usage in Africa in a context with many evident parallels.I4 The essential common feature is a long-submerged and marginalized civil society in both Africa and Eastern Europe. The itinerary, however, differs, marked in Africa by the singular characteristics of the colonial state and the salient traits of its postcolonial successor. As I have argued elsewhere, the colonial state in Africa was in important respects distinct from its counterparts in other regions.I5 It shared with state socialist regimes an aspiration for a comprehensive hegemony and the ambition to remake in its own vision a society deemed irremediably flawed. Patterns established in the African colonial state's early phase proved enduring and shaped its institutions and behavior. The intensely competitive nature of the "scramble for Africa" in the late nineteenth century, as well as the rules of the game codified at the Berlin Conference requiring "effective occupation" to validate proprietary title, made urgent the creation of a skeletal apparatus of hegemony. The absence, in most areas, of established sources of revenue, coupled with the metropolitan requirement that colonial conquest and rule be self-financing, drove the colonial state into the forcible organization of the one extractable resource: African labor. Although this harsh hegemony was mediated through diverse collaborators (chiefs, religious notables, missionaries, merchants), its impact upon society was far more direct and extensive than was colonial rule in most other regions. A stable, self-sustaining, relatively low-cost framework of domination had been achieved by World War II. Although its most coercive features largely disappeared in the terminal colonial period, its command relationship with society, its quasimilitary character, its fiscal base rooted in high taxation of the peasantry, and its highly interventionist, regulatory dispositions were bequeathed to its nationalist successors. The colonial state's real capacity to impose its imagined vision (actually multiple if overlapping images, with colonial agents, missions, and colonial corporations caressing somewhat different visions of the new African) fell far short of its ambitions-as with its state socialist counterpart.

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Nonetheless, for nearly a century much of the social space within which a society might become civil was blocked. By legal concept, the colonized inhabitant was a "subject" with highly circumscribed civil and political rights. Economically, the colonial subject was a unit of labor, an homme adulte valide, to cite the evocative Belgian colonial census category for males. In religious terms, the African was a fetishiste awaiting redemption by Christian conversion (unless a secondary zone of salvation through Islam blocked the path). Culturally, the African domain required sorting and labeling through an often alien classificatory schema.t6 The radical reordering of political space imposed by the colonial partition deconstructed potential civil societies. In short, an "invented" Africa produced by an external imagination-an Africa quintessentially "the subordinated other"took shape. As Mudimbe argues, through its dominance of both physical space and discourse the colonial state "transformed non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs."l7 This pattern of dominance was often subtle and intruded into many domains. Laitin develops a possibly overstated but nonetheless intriguing case for the hegemonical capacity of the colonial state in Nigeria to create in Yorubaland, an "ancestral city," a "privileged categorization of identity" that supplied the "symbolic repertoire concerning the nature of political relations." 1H Fabian, in exploring the development of Shaba (Zaire) Swahili, elegantly demonstrates the impact of colonial power in shaping communicative codes-language. "Among the preconditions for establishing regimes of colonial power was ... communication with the colonized . . . . In the long run [verbal) exchanges depended on a shared communicative praxis providing the common ground on which unilateral claims could be imposed."l9 Unilateral claims were a defining characteristic of the colonial state; they left only furtive, marginal space for a "civil" society. In the final years of the colonial state-after World War II in most of Africa-a swiftly intensifying voice of protest emerged. At the time the rise of nationalist self-assertion appeared to herald the birth of civil society, even if that term was not employed. A proliferating web of associational life knit society together in ways that supplied the structuration indispensable for the impending nationalist challenge. Earlier the colonial state maintained strict scrutiny over African associations, regarding them as possible vehicles of subversion. Legislation requiring administrative screening for legal existence was widespread. Group activity under the paternal tutelage of mission churches, colonial corporations, and ethnic associations was seen as harmless and thus was more easily tolerated. But in the terminal colonial years the tutelary surveillance relaxed, and associational activity expanded with remarkable vigor. If one defines civil society by its organizational life, one might suggest that the decolonization era was its golden age. The crystallization of more active forms of civic action-nationalist movements and associational activity-was accompanied by swift

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mobilization of other forms of collective consciousness, reflecting the radical alterations in social structure and communal awareness produced by colonial occupation. Territorial nationalism and the subliminal vision of civil society embedded within it implied a natural oneness. But the dialectics of colonial rule interacted with transformations in indigenous society to activate often novel patterns of social consciousness, especially ethnic self-awareness, which bore witness to a multisegmented society. Internal processes of social construction of identity bore the heavy imprint of colonial policies and practices: the ethnic classifications developed by the colonial state for control purposes; the libraries of ethnicity supplied by colonial anthropology; the language unification strategies of mission societies. The regionally uneven access to social advance that characterized the colonial era everywhere, plus the volatile fuel of political competition for postcolonial power, gave formidable momentum to the mobilization of ethnic consciousness. In short, the emergent civil societies of the terminal colonial era were simultaneously becoming one and many. There can be no doubt about the exhilarating response to the liberating message of nationalism at most levels of society. However, in retrospect it would appear that the civil societies of the terminal colonial era were stillborn, aborted by the combined effect of the dominant societal projects of the nationalist leadership, the exigencies of management and reproduction of postcolonial power, and the potent legacy and logic of the colonial state, which remained embedded within its successor apparatus. The essence of the postcolonial project is well captured in the notion of the "integral state" advanced by Christian Coulon and Jean Copans in speaking of Senegal. This state, for Coulon, sought to act directly upon civil society through its "hegemonical apparatuses."2° These, according to Coulon, reflected that the objective of the dominant groups in the state apparatus is the control, the maintenance, the augmentation of surplus extraction .... The lesson of recent years is the following: the interests of the Senegalese state have won out over local private interests .... This growing role of the state, rendered concrete through the remodeling and multiplication of institutions for control of the peasantry, leads to a new policy. The Senegalese state aims more and more at a direct administrative, ideological and political control over the dominated masses, be they urban or ruraJ.21

By "integral state," then, I have in mind a design of perfected hegemony, whereby the state seeks to achieve unrestricted domination over civil society. Thus unfettered, the state is free to engage in rational pursuit of its design for the future and to amply reward the ruling class for its governance services. The integral state requires not only the autonomy from civil society achieved through comprehensive instruments of political control but also a suzerainty, if not monopoly, extending over social and economic vectors of accumulation. As a "compulsory association which

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organizes domination," in Weberian terms, the integral state, with rationality suffusing its operative logic, supplies purposive rule guided by an inspirational charter for the future.22 I must at once interject that the "integral state" is a mere incubus, images of absolute power etched in the minds of its promoters, managers, and beneficiaries. Even at its zenith, the empirical state fell far short of its extravagant designs, a point to which I return. Yet the normative model had important consequences in the political formulas adopted; the ironies of history prescribe that their failure was of a scale commensurate with the exorbitant pretensions of the design. One may note that notions akin to the "integral state" emerge in a number of monographs based on the observation of patterns of power and enunciation of ruling class projects up through the 1970s. Bayart conceptualizes the Ahidjo era in Cameroon as being grounded upon a "hegemonical project": From the moment of his accession to office, [Ahidjo] held a vision at once precise and vast of the hegemonical quest which it was his task to direct, and understood at once that he needed to transcend the clientelistic state which he inherited .... The nomination of Ahidjo as Prime Minister inaugurated in reality a process of autonomization of the state which constituted a global and coherent response, of Bonapartist stripe, to a structural crisis almost a century old. The struggle against "underadministration" ... had always been conceived in terms of encadrement of the population .... By means of the development of its structures, the territorial administration pretended, in barely concealed form, to guarantee the essence of social control and political direction of the country.23

Toulabor presents a similar portrait in his penetrating analysis of the Eyadema regime in Togo.24 The delirious schemes of "cultural revolution" in the final phases of the Tombalbaye regime in Chad perhaps illustrate the idea of the integral state, borrowed in this instance to a large degree from Mobutu's Zaire, in its ultimate absurdity. The integral state illusion was in part a product of a global conjuncture. State socialism, Keynesian theory, and development economics shared the conviction that active state management of the economy, guided by extensive planning, could produce rapid economic growth, a secular faith seemingly validated by the long era of historically exceptional economic expansion that followed World War II in most countries. The conviction easily took root that a direct relationship existed between the scale and scope of state developmental intervention and the pace of transformation. The state-so readily reduced by the structural-functional analysis influential at the time to a neutral gearbox that transformed inputs into outputs-was a beneficent, disinterested architect of change, once captured from alien hands by nationalist forces.

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To a degree little noted at the time, as Basil Davidson has recently argued, two major elements in the colonial state discourse on the African past were unwittingly internalized in the nationalist text: First, there could be no salvation by any appeal to Africa's own cultures and structures. Whatever the ancestors may have devised and recommended to living persons was now irrelevant. Africa's past achievements could be useful as food for anti-colonial argument-essentially, by this time, anti-racist argument-but could offer no usable design for political action. The second conviction followed from this. Africa's salvation from the "savage backwoods" was to be found "in the open spaces where nations are made." The future, to be worthwhile, had to be a nationalist future, a nation-state future: a time when the colonised peoples, having cast off their barbarism and original sin, would be reborn as peoples nationalised on the European pattern.25 Thus, to the imperative of accelerated development was added a second foundational principle for the postcolonial state: to remake society, to expunge "traditionality ," to serve as pedagogue of "modernity." In such a role, the state, in the eloquent analysis of Mbembe, a veritable theologian, was compelled to become one that is not only concerned with the practices concerning the distribution of power and influence, social relationships, economic arrangements and political processes. It is also a state which aims explicitly to define, for social actors, the fashion in which they must see and interpret themselves, and interpret the world. In so doing, the theologian-state erects itself as the constitutive principle creative of the language and myths of a society .... It produces at the same time the categories of perception, in short the mental equipment with which the native subject must see and express the world. The theologian-state aspires therefore, overall, to impose itself as a cultural and symbolic system.26 The policy implications of the integral state were far-reaching. The regulatory infrastructure of the colonial state was extended and deepened to include agricultural marketing monopolies, obligatory state cooperatives, administered prices in key sectors, and licensing of many economic activities and external trade. The impetus to extended control inherent in the integral state drove the parastatalization of the economy, even in states commonly considered of "capitalist" orientation (Cote d'lvoire, Nigeria). Building upon colonial jurisprudence, there was a widespread push to assert the state's ultimate proprietorship over land and its right to allocate all use entitlements in the first two decades of independence.27 However, the normative ambitions and omnicompetent claims of the integral state were swiftly discovered by its managers to fall well short of providing the quotidian devices to guarantee their own security of tenure

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or the routine operation of government. Neither the formal hierarchy inherited from the colonial state nor organizational norms of discipline, whether derived from bureaucratic deontology or from ideological rectitude, sufficed to control and motivate the key operatives in the security, political, and administrative apparatuses. The formally Weberian traits presumed in the image of the integral state-impersonality of office, uniform application of rules, predictability of behavior, rationality of organizational structure-were interpenetrated by a radically different set of patrimonial practices. In this dimension of state behavior, labeled "prebendalism" by Joseph,2 8 an office becomes a personal favor of the ruler, from which the occupant is expected to seek a "living." The officeholder needs to perform some of the basic functions of the position, above all its control aspects: maximally, to impose effective authority over those subject to its dictates; minimally, to preempt the crystallization of hostile forces within its sphere. In the process, the occupant may convert some of the role's public authority into private returns. The official is thus a personal client of the ruler; in turn, the effective management of the domain entrusted to the client induces the creation of a subsidiary prebendal network, permitted as long as it does not coalesce into a patrimonial force capable of challenging the authority of the ruler. Over time, the underlying contradiction between the "integral" and "patrimonial" states caused the demise of both and opened new political space for civil society. The fundamental opposition between integral norm and patrimonial reality was not at first apparent; only over time did it take form. The image of omnipotence projected by the colonial state and initially inherited by its successor played a part. So also did the early credibility of the transformative nationalist projects; the promissory notes of the independence campaign remained gilt-edged for several years, longer in some cases (Algeria, Tanzania). The costs of patrimonial management, however, only slowly grew. In the first years, relatively small rewards sufficed to sustain prebendal networks. But the scale of corruption necessary to fuel this mode of power management steadily expanded and became more visible. Little by little the tantalizing dreams of a more abundant life, which the integral state was pledged to achieve, vanished and were displaced by a cynical image of the state and its agents as nothing more than predators. To place the shattered illusion of the integral state in perspective, we need to recall the parallels elsewhere. The 1980s were a difficult decade for states in general and a catastrophic one for statism. State worship in its various forms-national integration theory, nationalization, development economics, central planning-suffered a series of hammer blows: Reaganism, Thatcherism, the great 1982 social retreat of Mitterand, the Berg Report, structural adjustment programs, and finally the collapse of state

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socialism. Thus, the notion of the integral state was destined for challenge under the best of circumstances. But its multiple infirmities created the worst of circumstances and prepared the way for the extraordinary challenge to its now hollow shell at the end of the 1980s: democratization demands and the multiplication of civil society doctrines. The intensifying developmental impasse, which had become apparent in the late 1970s, imposed severe hardships upon the citizenry and left the state bereft of resources to provide those basic services that had become common coin (the educational system, for example). The legitimacy of incumbents-even the tacit, passive form reposing upon resigned acceptance-shriveled to nearly nothing. The end of the Cold War was intensely felt; external patrons were no longer reliably available. This was all too apparent to restive populations, whose urban segments were at once instructed by the East European demonstration of decaying autocracies' unsuspected vulnerability to street action and encouraged by a newfound conviction that incumbents could no longer rely upon foreign intervention to sustain their rule. Enter civil society. But precisely what has ventured upon the stage? Is this truly an actor, organically constituted? Is its corporeal being only an illusion of distant perception, dissolving as one approaches? Is it merely a metaphor masquerading as a player? Is it yet another child of the anthropomorphic fertility of the social scientific imagination? Or do we spy a redemptive spirit, providentially dispatched to right a political world gone awry? In our search for meanings, we may discern Lockean, Hegelian, and Gramscian garments interwoven upon our character. In important respects, civil society is being defined on the real stage of democratization, which closely resembles a reenactment of the Lockean social contract. This is especially apparent in the "national conference" modality of transcending patrimonial autocracy. Here we find a consciously articulated quest for the "forces vives" of political society that can claim to collectively represent it: unions, youth, women, peasants, merchants, and similar corporately defined categories (often, as in Niger, sharply contested). Embodied in the intensely symbolic drama of a national conference is the dual covenant of the Lockean contract: the confirmation of a civil or political society and the benediction of a state authorized to represent and govern it upon the terms solemnly agreed to. The Hegelian cloth is found in the often inarticulate but intricately interwoven premise of "civil society" as an ethical moment. Civil society is the repository of the virtues of the human community it embodies. Although it embraces the myriad, often self-seeking economic activities necessary for everyday survival, the embrace of the world historical spirit infuses them with immanent purpose. It also stands between state and hearth; as Barkan et al. convey an everyday understanding in contempo-

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rary analysis, the locus of "civil society" is "the space that exists between the state and the household."29 The Gramscian warp and woof, which runs through most usages, resides in the organizational expression of a civil society. The various groups that constitute civil society are "those intermediary and autonomous organisations which function and sometimes flourish" in a large and loosely bounded zone falling between organized sovereign authority and the family unit.3° Absent such a network of autonomous organizations, by implication, no formal civil society can exist. Bratton takes this notion further to suggest that this associationallife "occurs in arenas beyond state control and influence"-implying that independence, not just autonomy, defines "civil society ."31 If discourse can be midwife, then civil society is well and truly born. Before we issue the birth certificate, however, a number of uncertainties concerning its identity require reflection. Probably the largest of these comes from the state, that brooding omnipresence that stubbornly refuses to disappear despite the imprecations of those challenging its "ontological primacy." 3 2 "Take the state back out," enjoins Bratton;33 a deceptive reification, argue others.3 4 Yet even where it has all but ceased to operate as a sovereign organism (Somalia in 1991) or where its empirical existence is analytically challenged as a mere artifact of the international system, enjoying only "negative sovereignty," 35 the state system continues to define territorial space-and thereby civil society. The very notion of civil society loses its meaning if severed from the state-in different ways, Locke, Hegel, and Gramsci would all nod assent to this assertion. Bayart, in the most sustained definitional essay with which I am familiar, asserts without ambiguity the conceptual nexus between state and civil society. The latter, he writes, drawing upon Robert Fossaert, is "society in its relation with the state ... in so far as it is in confrontation with the state ... the process by which society seeks to 'breach' and counteract the simultaneous 'totalisation' unleashed by the state."36 Elsewhere, he adds, "Civil society exists only in so far as there is a self-consciousness of its existence and of its opposition to the state." 37 Here we encounter an important new dimension: an opposition between state and civil society. There is evident merit to this notion. Civil society as we now know it was born as a negative other to the state created by the colonial partitionfrom the perspective of the dominated, this statement may be inverted. The retention of the territorial frame of the colonial partition-at the insistence of the nationalist leadership-engendered some resistance, although not decisive and mostly short-lived; by my count, in eighteen of the present fifty-one states separation movements of varying (usually small) significance emerged. But-the occasional Biafra or Eritrea notwithstandingchallenges to the territorial base of the African state were surprisingly few. The emergence of a vitalized civil society in the late 1980s has not

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--outside the Horn of Africa-given rise to substantial new challenges to this defining territorial framework, in spite of the new openings for "selfdetermination" suggested by the death of the Soviet Union and the fracturing of Yugoslavia. The necessary opposition to the state, then, is not to its territorial framework but to its hegemonical project; the state-defined physical boundaries of civil society are not in wide dispute (although the diverse transborder linkages of exchange, commerce, and employment fit uneasily into this picture). The relative dissolution of the exclusionary frameworks of rule in a number of countries opens the question as to whether the "statesociety struggle" will cease to be a defining feature of civil society .38 Left undefined by Bayart is the nether frontier of civil society. Does civil society occupy the entirety of the space between state and household? Or is it quintessentially public in nature and therefore exclusive of an amorphous zone of private action that goes far beyond the hearth? Does social action acquire a public nature through its formal, voluntary organization? These queries take us back to some important intellectual milestones on the road to civil society in Africa. Even before state crisis was fully perceived, Peter Ekeh raised the seminal question as to whether the moral realm defined by the state had any normative hold on society. A parallel public realm exists, he argued, of primordial linkages to society, and it is unrelated to the state, where the moral imperatives of the household and kinship structures apply; the statedefined public realm, however, is a site of amoral behavior. This conceptual severance of the two public realms postulates a more far-reaching rupture between state and society than does the Bayart definition, where the two are at least joined in opposition. If there is a large "primordial public realm," this may imply a civil society of much narrower dimensions than Barkan et al. or Bratton imply_39 Hyden, whose path-breaking 1980 work argued the "uncaptured" nature of the peasantry, would seem to place the bulk of the population beyond the reach of civil society as generally understood.40 At the same time, the gulf separating state and peasant so eloquently argued by Hyden raised an array of questions pointed in the direction of civil society theorization. The glossaries of developmental sciences poorly conveyed the real chemistry of state-rural society interactions: encadrement, mass mobilization, development administration-so many empty vessels. The "uncaptured" metaphor, many felt, went too far in implying the absence of any connective relationships. Nonetheless, it was richly evocative of a reality ill-expressed by the civil society notion: the innumerable modalities of everyday action aimed at exit or escape from the state domain. Escape, however, as Mbembe artfully argues, is never complete. The text of domination is subject to constant challenge in both symbolic and material domains. A new reading of indigenous religion supplies one such hidden passageway of indiscipline:

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The pagan genius of African society consists of carrying out independent readings of the "text" constituted by the post-colonial event. These readings tend increasingly to draw upon their own authority, have less and less need to seek legitimation from dominant religious and political modes of thought. ... It demonstrates the recalcitrant capacity of the African, a refusal to totally submit. ... As a principle of indiscipline, African paganism is nonetheless incapable of bringing domination to a complete end ... the subject prisoner of an oppressive structure which at best he obliges to make adjustments and small alterations, but which he is unable to totally subvert.41 In other terms, one may suggest that classical notions of civil society can incorporate a dimension of struggle between it and the state. A "social contract" or constitutional covenant does not end for all time a contested zone between state and civil society, although it may determine its limits. But there is less room for a fundamental and endemic estrangement between the two. Indeed, in a number of instances it is the very estrangement that joins state and society. It is the state that creates conditions in which the underground economy can thrive. The latter, as Reno persuasively demonstrates in the Sierra Leone case, transforms the periphery of the state apparatus into its clientele but nonetheless needs the state as conduit to an international public realm whose actions (structural adjustment finance, as denatured in practice) are a pivotal element in its prosperity.42 But in such circumstances the notion of civil society becomes opaque at best, and the boundary between public and private realms becomes difficult to draw. Nor is the estrangement only economic and political; in perhaps its most fundamental sense, it is cultural-society is partly estranged from itself. Here Vansina makes a powerful case, which parallels in part the Davidson argument cited earlier. A genuine and inclusive civil society, which may take a generation or two to emerge, will build upon fully indigenized Islamic and Christian religions, synthesized with precolonial traditions, overcoming the "baneful dichotomy" between Western influences and the majority tradition through absorption of portions of the former by the latter. Only then, he concludes, can sub-Saharan Africa "finally flourish."43 Pursuing this line of thought backwards, one may suggest that civil society existed in precolonial Africa but was extinguished by the colonial state. The existence of precolonial states of widely varying scale, centralization, and ideological basis implies an interactive linkage with societies. In his splendid portrayal of the equatorial polity, Vans ina captures a political tradition redolent of civil society: "a changing, inherited, collective body of cognitive and physical representations shared by their members," defining a political world of communities and big men, sometimes kings, with stable guiding principles and often contractarian practices.44

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Can state and society be culturally reconnected? The very question further underscores the fateful importance of the struggle to reshape the African state now in course from the Cape to Cairo-not, of course, for anything so trivial as the clarification of a contested concept but rather that even partial success in consolidating a democratic order could redefine the parameters within which the meanings are derived. There is ample reason to believe that the forces, domestic and external, propelling nearly all African states toward some form of political opening are of overpowering force; I will not retrace the ground covered on this point in another recent paper.45 There is equal cause for uncertainty as to the sustainability of more democratic forms of governance; the present ferment may prove a singularly evanescent "moment" in African political evolution. Among the reasons for the widespread doubts that jostle with the hopes unleashed by the possibility of a genuine political renewal, even rebirth, are the mysteries surrounding civil society. Both in the classical text and in the hopeful appropriation of the term in Africanist discourse, there is an unarticulated major premise of the innate goodness of civil society. The increasingly negative portrayal of the African state in comparative politics gave rise to a Manichean representation of the state-civil society tandem: Juxtaposed to a veritably satanic state was an angelic civil society. But society was made up of not only orderly interests but also wild passions: "ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which lead all mankind astray," in Vico's words. 46 Hobbesian demonic forces as well as Lockean beneficent ones, incivility as well as civility, may be inherent to civil society. Liberia and Somalia share the contemporary stage with Zambia, Cape Verde, and Benin. In the distance is the haunting refrain of a song sung by adolescent warriors roaming the ravaged streets of Mogadishu with their automatic weapons: "If I surrender my gun, who then will assure that I may eat?"47 A related submerged but potent connotation to civil society is an implied vocation of unity. Should one choose to view its divisions as more natural and deep-rooted than the territorial and social space that is shared, the premise of unity becomes suspect.48 Also missing is a recognition of possibly exclusionary visions of civil society, which may even achieve ascendancy through democratic processes. At issue here are not simply the gender-based exclusives so deeply embedded in both the intellectual history of civil society and social practice, nor those rooted in racism. But the vision of society embraced by the Front Islamique de Salut in Algeria remains to be tested: Will membership in civil society be restricted to those committed to an Islamic version? Perhaps a democratized political order and the absence of a significant competing religious community may leave room for the more secular-minded. But the Islamic project of the military autocrats in Sudan, if pursued, must inevitably bring the splintering of the polity.

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Let us pursue no further these disconcerting reflections. Civil society is indeed an elusive concept and a more fugitive reality. But the remarkable energies devoted to its definition and pursuit strike me as the most powerful force upon the scene. The quest for a civil society that can reinvent the state in its own admittedly idealized image is a drama of redemption whose potential nobility commands our admiration.

Notes 1. From the Second Treatise on Civil Government; John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1955), p. 160. 2. No claim is made that Locke originated the term, which doubtless bears a more antique pedigree. According to The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987, p. 77), the term emerges about 1400, referring "not only to individual states but to the condition of living in a civilized political community sufficiently advanced to include cities, having its own legal code." 3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1914), pp. xix, 64-65. 4. The Hegelian concept of civil society, however, drew important inspiration from eighteenth-century debates among French physiocrats. I am indebted to Patrick Riley for this observation. 5. z. A. Pelczynski, "Introduction: The Significance of Hegel's Separation of the State and Civil Society," in z. A. Pelczynski (ed.), The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel's Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 9-10. I have found the various essays in this volume especially helpful in interpreting Hegel's theory of "civil society." 6. Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 147. 7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 115. 8. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 264-280, 343-396. 9. Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (London: Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd., 1983), p. 73. 10. Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 70. 11. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971 ). 12. Jean-Francais Bayart, "Civil Society in Africa," in Patrick Chahal (ed.), Political Domination in Africa: Reflections on the Limits of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 109-125. 13. Naomi Chazan, An Anatomy of Ghanaian Politics: Managing Political Recession, 1969-1982 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983). 14. See, for example, the papers presented to the Conference on Relationships Between the State and Civil Society in Africa and Eastern Europe, organized by Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Prosser Gifford, Bellagio, Italy, February 1989. 15. Crawford Young, "The African Colonial State and Its Political Legacy," in Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan (eds.), The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 25-66. 16. This is not to suggest that the dynamics of identity formation were entirely shaped by the colonial state, which was only one of the forces at work distilling

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often new forms of ethnic consciousness; on this see the splendid volume edited by Leroy Vail, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 17. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Orders of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 1. 18. David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change Among the Yoruba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 183. 19. Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 3. 20. Christian Coulon, Le marabout et le prince (Islam et pouvoir au Senegal) (Paris: Editions A. Pedone, 1981), p. 289. 21. J. Copans, Les marabouts et l'arachide. Le confrerie mouride et les paysans du Senegal (Paris: Editions le Sycamore, 1980), p. 248. 22. Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," reprinted in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958). 23. Jean- Francois Bay art, L 'Etat au Cameroun (Paris: Presses de Ia Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1979), pp. 52, 222-223. 24. Comi M. Toulabor, Le Togo sous Eyadema (Paris: Karthala, 1986). 25. Basil Davidson, "The Challenge of Comparative Analysis: Anti-Imperialist Nationalism in Africa and Europe," paper presented at the Conference on Relationships Between the State and Civil Society in Africa and Eastern Europe, Bellagio, Italy, February 1989, pp. 7-8. 26. Achille Mbembe, Afriques indociles: Christianisme, pouvoir et Eta/ en societe postcoloniale (Paris: Karthala, 1988), p. 128. 27. John Bruce and Bruce Magnusson, "Land Tenure and Structural Adjustment in Africa," in Lual Deng, Markus Kostner, and Crawford Young (eds.), Democratization and Structural Adjustment in Africa in the 1990s (Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, 1991), pp. 86-94. 28. Richard J. Joseph, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 29. Joel D. Barkan, Michael L. McNulty, and M.A.O. Ayeni, '"Hometown' Voluntary Associations and the Emergence of Civil Society in Western Nigeria," Journal of Modern African Studies 29, 3 (1991): 457. 30. Ibid. See also Michael Bratton, "Beyond the State: Civil Society and Associational Life in Africa," World Politics 51, 3 (April 1989): 407-430, and Rothchild and Chazan, The Precarious Balance. 31. Bratton, "Beyond the State," p. 426. 32. Barkan, eta!., "'Hometown' Voluntary Associations," p. 457. 33. Bratton, "Beyond the State." 34. See, for example, Janice L. Roitman, "The Politics of Informal Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa," Journal of Modern African Studies 28 (December 1990): 671-696. 35. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 36. Bayart, "Civil Society in Africa," p. 111. 37. Ibid., p. 117. 38. Thomas M. Callaghy, The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 39. Peter Ekeh, "Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement," Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, 1 (1975): 91-112. 40. Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 41. Mbembe, Afriques indociles, pp. 211-212.

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42. William Reno, "Political Domination and Discipline: The Official Invasion of Sierra Leone Informal Markets," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1991. 43. Jan Vansina, "A Past for the Future?" Dalhousie Review 68, 1-2 (1989): 21-23. 44. Jan Vans ina, Paths in the Rainforests: Towards a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 259. 45. Crawford Young, "Democratization in Africa: Contradictions of a Political Imperative," paper presented to the Annual Meetings, African Studies Association, St. Louis, November 1991. 46. Quoted in Albert 0. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 17. 47. Cited by Hussein Adam, recently returned from Somalia, at a panel on the current crisis in Somalia, Annual Meetings, African Studies Association, St. Louis, November 1991. 48. Mahmood Mamdani, in his acid commentary on the debates at the February 1989 Carter Center conference, Perestroika Without Glasnost in Africa, pointed inter alia to what he felt to be a failure to confront issues of class conflict (CODESRIA Bulletin, 1989).

Civil Society and Political Transitions in Africa •

Michael Bratton

The wave of popular sentiment for political change currently sweeping Africa has thrust the concept of civil society to the forefront of political analysis. As protesters have taken to the streets of African capital cities demanding the ouster of the independence generation of national leaders, so the initiative in African politics has shifted decisively from state elites to popular forces. How can scholars understand the features of this cathartic mass social mobilization and assess any influence it may have on transitions at the level of the political regime? In this chapter I argue that the theoretical construct of civil society helps to describe popular political action and synthesize its multiple dimensions. The concept also has considerable value in helping to explain whether and to what extent popular protests result in meaningful and sustainable regime transitions. Broadly speaking, I try to answer the following question: Under what social conditions have political protests led to political transition? One plausible answer is that protest has led to reform in countries where popular forces have an independent material, organizational, and ideological base-that is, where there is a strong civil society. I will argue that key characteristics of civil society-such as the identity of the lead institution, the political alignment of the middle classes, and the aggregation of diverse interests into an alternative ruling coalition-are important explanatory variables. This is not to say that a complete account of political transitions in Africa can be given without reference to the resource base of the state, the personal political style of incumbent leaders, and the degree of political pressure from international donors and lenders. But, given the coverage of these factors elsewhere in the literature, they are only mentioned here in passing. 1 Instead, the main focus is on civil society. The first part of the chapter addresses conceptual issues. There are several dangers in appropriating a venerable concept such as civil society when trying to explain contemporary African politics. Not only did the concept evolve in distinctively 51

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European historical and cultural milieux, but its usage by political philosophers has changed dramatically over time. Pelczynski notes that "few social and political concepts have travelled so far in their life and changed their meaning so much."2 As a result, its content for purposes of comparative political analysis in the late twentieth century is highly contestable. Analysts who have tried to apply the concept to non-Western politics have found it "unwieldy"3 and "complex."4 Despite these formidable obstacles, this chapter argues that civil society is a useful formula for analyzing state-society relations in Africa because it embodies a core of universal beliefs and practices about the legitimation of, and limits to, state power. In the second part of the chapter I attempt to dissect civil society and empirically root its components in African realities, with particular reference to Kenya and Zambia. I argue that although civil society is generally underdeveloped in Africa, in some countries, such as Kenya and Zambia, citizens have begun to construct material, organizational, and ideological bases independent of the state. From these bases, opposition leaders have articulated a critique of authoritarian, one-party regimes that has helped to spawn a "popular upsurge" in favor of political change. The extent and pace of political transition-which proceeded further and faster in Zambia than in Kenya-are partly attributable to the different configurations of civil society in each country. For example, as the lead institution in civil society, Zambia's trade union movement was a more effective opposition force than the Christian churches in Kenya. Moreover, the middle classes abandoned the incumbent regime in Zambia, whereas they long remained politically ambivalent in Kenya. Finally, the opposition in Zambia united into an alternative ruling coalition headed by a unified political party. This is not to say that political transition is blocked in Kenya; indeed, it is well underway, even if incomplete. Rather, this chapter argues that political transition in different countries unfolds at least partly as a function of the institutional characteristics of their respective civil societies.

The Evolution of the Concept of Civil Society Our era has produced only a modest corpus of writings on civil society, especially in comparison to the voluminous modern literature on the state. The best starting point for analysis of civil society remains the historical work of major European philosophers. Let us trace the origins and evolution of the concept, with due acknowledgment to John Keane's and Norberta Bobbio's skillful interpretations of the liberal and historicist traditions, respectively .5 This brief review will help to define terms and identify core meanings of the concept of civil society. It will also reveal the complexity of the concept, for different writers emphasized different dimensions of civil society, whether material (Hegel, Marx, and Engels),

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organizational (Ferguson and de Tocqueville), or ideological (Gramsci and Havel). In classical political thought and in theories based on natural law, civil society was indistinguishable from the state. 6 Both concepts referred to a type of political association that governed social conflict through the imposition of rules to restrain citizens from harming one another. From Aristotle's polis to Rousseau's etat, the state expressed the "civil" form of society, born when men erect a superstructure of political authority as a means of obtaining the security and protection of all. By the late eighteenth century, liberal philosophers began to distinguish a discrete form of civil society with a quite different rationale. Far from defining the nature of the state, civil society came to be seen as a means of defense against potential abuse by' political leaders, especially given the unprecedented concentration of power at the apex of the modern polity.? Keane traced this emerging distinction between state and civil society through influential political texts written between 1750 and 1850, a period of intense democratic ferment in Europe and the New World. He cited Adam Ferguson, whose Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) recognized that the solidarity of society was undermined not only by commerce and manufacturing but also by the emergence of a centralized constitutional state. The best way to counter the corrupting influences of power and wealth and to revive a sense of public spirit was therefore to encourage the creation and strengthening of citizen associations.H Thomas Paine's radical polemic on the Rights of Man (1792) went a step further, asserting the sovereignty of the individual and regarding government as merely a "national association" of citizens. Only individuals had political rights, including the right to withdraw consent from the social contract; governments, for their part, had the duty to serve citizens in the "common interest." For Paine, common interest based on a natural human proclivity for social reciprocity was a far more effective means of consolidating collective power than a system of positive laws enacted and administered from above. 9 Perhaps the most articulate exponent of civil society in this era was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America (1835-1840) drew attention to new types of state despotism implicit in democratic rule. De Tocqueville was concerned not only with the potential tyranny of the majority but also with the inherent contradictions among democratic principles of freedom and equality. In pursuit of equality, for example, citizens empowered the state to undertake the widespread provision of public goods. But in so doing they inadvertently surrendered a measure of liberty, which ultimately could allow "the administrative suffocation of civil society" and descent into "relations of political dependence." tO As the state expanded, so civil life became ever more thoroughly penetrated and controlled. According to de Tocqueville, the state should be overseen and

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checked by the "independent eye of society," made up of "a plurality of interacting, self-organized and constantly vigilant civil associations" whose functions were to nurture basic rights, to advocate popular claims, and to educate citizens in the democratic arts of tolerance and accommodation.!! Liberal thinkers did not enjoy undisputed claim to the concept of civil society because their ideas were contested by theorists using historicist approaches. In Philosophy of Right (1821), G.W.F. Hegel clearly differentiated civil society from the state but did not assume it to represent a natural or harmonious human condition. Instead, civil society was the modern product of a long historical transformation by which a nascent bourgeoisie established a sphere of market relations regulated by civil law.t2 Located between the family and the state, civil society contained not only economic transactions but also their voluntary forms of organization, such as corporations, professional associations, and trade unions.t3 For Hegel, civil society was inherently conflictual and unstable because of the competitive interplay of private interests, especially the acquisitive urges of the commercial burger class. He argued that "civil society cannot remain 'civil' unless it is ordered politically, subjected to 'the higher surveillance of the state."'1 4 Thus, only the state could represent the unity of society and further the freedom of its citizens. And because the state sought to modify private behavior with the aim of enhancing the public good, its interventions were by definition legitimate. Using the Hegelian method, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels conceived of civil society as rooted in the material conditions of life. In The German Ideology (1932), Marx and Engels saw civil society as the historical product of the evolution of property relations under capitalism. Civil society could be fully described as a set of commodity production and exchange institutions that tilted contractual relations in favor of capitalist entrepreneurs. Its laws amounted to a sort of "unwritten constitution" for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. As the realm of economic relations, civil society was coterminous with the socioeconomic base, as opposed to the state, which was mere political and juridical superstructure. IS Thus, Marx reversed Hegel's depiction of state-society relations, seeing the state as subordinate in its relations with civil society, its performance conditioned by the interests of the dominant class. Moreover, again contradicting Hegel, he wrote that "as a coercive, particularistic and subordinate apparatus, the state is not the final phase of a historical process; it is a transitory institution to be transcended."16 The leading twentieth-century theorist of civil society, Antonio Gramsci, used Marxist categories but arrived at quite original conclusions. Civil society is the key concept and starting point of his Prison Notebooks (1929-1937). According to Bobbio, 17 Gramsci did not assume that the distinction between state and civil society mirrored that between political and economic life; nor did he consign civil society to the base, instead locating

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it in the superstructure.'8 In the Gramscian schema there are two major superstructural entities: political society (or the state), which rules directly through the coercive and juridical instruments of domination; and civil society, which promotes ethical values arriong the populace through the exercise of ideological and cultural hegemony. The former embodies force; the latter manufactures consent. Bobbio considers that "for Gramsci civil society comprises not 'all material relationships,' but all ideological-cultural relations; not 'the whole of commercial and industrial life' but the whole of spiritual and intellectual life." 19 Attention is directed to the superstructure of nonstate activity, now broadly conceived to occur not only within explicitly political institutions (such as interest associations and political parties) but also within sociocultural institutions that disseminate values through society and nurture public opinion (such as families, schools, churches, and communications media). Gramsci further reversed Marx by granting primacy to ideological factors within the superstructure itself. Citizen members of civil institutions were active subjects of history whose consciousness of material conditions "can be resolved into an instrument of action so that ... desired aim[ s] can be achieved."2° For Gramsci, ideas and values no longer served simply to justify an existing power structure but were formative forces capable of disrupting and redistributing power itself. In this sense, civil society was the ideological realm par excellence and potentially the source of either hegemonic or counterhegemonic ideas. Vaclav Havel extrapolated this approach in The Power of the Powerless, arguing that civic actors hold the key to the survival or defeat of totalitarian political regimes: Either they "live a lie" by parroting the propaganda of the regime or they "live the truth" by revealing its deliberate mystifications.21 For Havel, this confrontation does not take place on the level of real, institutionalized, quantifiable power ... but on a different level altogether: the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effective range of this special power cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers because it lies ... in human beings' repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights.22

The Core Meaning of Civil Society On the basis of this cursory history of ideas, one can discern common ground between the most recent liberal and historicist formulae. Thinkers from diverse intellectual traditions appear to share a concern with restoring civic action and state legitimacy to the center of our accounts of politics. I intend to build upon this convergence by proposing some essential definitional notions about the nature of civil society and its relationships with the state. These are as follows: 1) civil society is a public realm

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between the state and the family; 2) civil society is distinguishable from political society; 3) civil society is a theoretical rather than an empirical construct; 4) state and civil society, although conceptually distinct, are best considered together; and 5) civil society is the source of the legitimation of state power. Each will be discussed in turn. Civil society consists of public political activity that occurs in the realm between the state and the family. Although such political activity may be motivated by the quest for private advantage, it is not "private" in the sense of being confined to the domestic or household arena. Instead, it is decidedly "public" in two senses: It entails collective action in which individuals join to pursue shared goals, and it takes place in the institutional "commons" that lie beyond the boundaries of the household. By the same token, the public nature of civic action should not be confused with politics in "the public sector"-in other words, in the realm of the state. As government leaders have expanded the apparatus and prerogatives of the state, they have also appropriated and distorted the term "public" to refer exclusively to the official activities of state functionaries. When used in extreme form, the terms "private" (referring to family life) and "public" (meaning state actions) imply that no public space remains for occupancy by civic actors.23 Yet in every polity, people have shared interests that are inadequately expressed by family or state institutions. As Tandon has argued, "civil society itself is a public formation" whose purpose is to manage matters of common concern without resorting to state intervention. 24 It is the crucible of citizenship in which individuals have the opportunity to wean themselves from dependence on either family or state. As citizens, people define community needs, assert claims of political rights, and accept political obligations. In Ekeh's useful phrase, civil society is a "civic public realm" in which ordinary people probe the key questions of citizenship: How do we relate politically to each other? How do we relate to the state?25 A further distinction must be made to map the extensive institutional terrain between state and family. Alfred Stepan distinguishes the institutions of civil society-for example, "neighborhood associations, women's groups, religious groupings"-from the institutions of political society, which include political parties, elections, and legislatures.26 Specifically, political society refers to the institutions through which social actors attempt to aggregate their interests into winning coalitions and to manage political competition. Unlike Gramsci, who regards political society as synonymous with the state, Stepan locates it in society. Political society is not part of the state, but its institutions specialize in partisan contestation over state power. It also stands apart from civil society in this respect. Although actors in civil society learn the public arts of associating and expressing collective interests, they always seek autonomy from the state.

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The expression of civic interests does not extend to efforts to gain and exercise control over state power. This distinction turns out to be analytically useful, demonstrating that civil society exists, even if in defensive or underground form, under all types of political regimes. Under authoritarian rule, dominant elites either eliminate the institutions of political society (for example, by banning political parties and elections) or absorb them into the state (for example, through mechanisms such as single-party elections). As a means of regulating and preventing the growth of opposition centers of power, authoritarian leaders also attempt to coopt and control major organized interest groups. But there are always uncaptured social groupings that enjoy a sphere of autonomy beyond the reach of the state. They are too localized, specialized, or seemingly apoliti'cal to warrant or permit state intervention. Independent thinkers take refuge within this sphere when authoritarian governments outlaw open political competition. The distinction between civil and political society is also meaningful during transitions from authoritarian rule. When circumstances once again permit the formation of political parties and the convocation of competitive elections, opposition politicians soon evacuate civil society and reenter political society. Following political liberalization, the institutions of civil society revert to organizing nonstate, nonpartisan ("civic") political life. We must remember that civil society-like the state and political society-is a theoretical concept rather than an empirical one. It cannot be directly observed. Instead, it is a synthetic conceptual construct that encompasses the wide variety of forms of popular collective action that occur in the public realm. As Bayart has observed, "civil society is not necessarily embodied in a single, identifiable structure."27 It summarizes, at a macroconceptual level, microempirical actions that citizens employ for political ends in the material, organizational, and ideological realms. Although political resources, organizations, and ideas may be observed, none alone can capture the quality and complexity of civil society as a whole. Civil society is a composite concept. Its emergence depends on the establishment of linkages within each dimension-for example, among civic organizations in the organizational dimension. It also depends on synergy among the dimensions themselves-for example, when civic organizations disseminate unofficial ideas or independently generate material resources. For this reason, civil society cannot be reduced to related but always fragmentary concepts currently used by scholars of nonstate collective action. The concept of the "second economy" refers to informal private trade and petty manufacturing but neglects the dimensions of organization and ideology at the expense of material transactions.2R The concept of "associationallife" provides a partial corrective, but it tends to emphasize individual organizations rather than the linkages among them.29 Finally, although

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the concept of the "voluntary sector" gains a higher level of aggregation, it does so by narrowing the focus only to organizations that are guided by the values of not-for-profit service and ignoring the politics of the private sector.3° The concept of civil society embraces a sum of political activity that is qualitatively broader than any of these parts. Like the state itself, civil society is a heterogeneous entity. It is composed of diverse elements, not all of which hew to a normative consensus. Hegel's portrayal of civil society as an arena of unbridled dispute is probably more accurate than Paine's wishful picture of social solidarity. Civil society reflects, in political form, the cleavages and conflicts of the wider society in which it is located. In deeply divided societies where ethnic particularism is pervasive, for example, citizens enjoy few opportunities to build consensus on moral and political values or establish constructive linkages among political organizations. Civil society is thus slow to emerge. The formation of social classes, however, tends to accelerate this process. Indeed, middle classes are the main protagonists of civil society. The bourgeoisie becomes materially independent, politically organized, and ideologically assertive well before workers or peasants achieve solidarity as classes. Middle class elements are prominent in founding and leading civic organizations and in articulating "universal" values as a means of countering particularistic loyalties and building broad, multiclass political coalitions. Because civil society is a theoretical concept, it is best apprehended deductively, by deriving it in conjunction with the concept of the state. The state, civil society, and political society together exhaust the scope of public life, and none of these concepts can be fully understood in isolation from the other. For this reason, the preoccupation of comparative political theorists with "the state" has resulted in an incomplete account of politics that grants too much importance to the executive actions of official elites.3 1 One must therefore welcome the alternative approach of state-society theorists who emphasize the influence of power centers in society, the dynamics of contestation over political regimes, and the indeterminate outcomes of interactions between state and civic actors. 32 Despite a common derivation, state and civil society remain conceptually distinct. Paraphrasing Gramsci, we can conceive of the state as the realm of the politics of force (domination) and civil society as the realm of the politics of consent (hegemony). Within the state, political action is motivated by means of command backed by the implicit sanction of violence. Within civil society, political initiatives arise on a voluntary basis, either because actors perceive a material advantage or because they are motivated by commitment to an ethical or political value. Although the state may possess a legitimate claim to the monopoly of violence, it cannot claim exclusive dominion over economic or ethical life. Yet economic interest and moral values are key poles around which political activity regularly clusters. These are the province of civil society.

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Moreover, the boundaries between state and civil society are not immutable; they shift over time. Whereas the state may occupy the bulk of the available political space for a given period, it never entirely obliterates civil society. Indeed, efforts by state elites to monopolize public life induce a reaction in which social forces assert themselves through independent forms of political expression. As the center of gravity of political life shifts into civil society, so the influence of the state tails off. In turn, civic action peaks when competing forces based in society recognize the need to arrive at new institutional rules to authoritatively govern political behavior-that is, to construct states. Over the long run, therefore, the analyst should expect to encounter an alternating contraction and expansion of state and civil power.33 We therefore arrive at the last, and most important, core proposition: The alternation of political initiative between state and civil society is necessary for the legitimation of state power. With the exception of Hegel, none of the great theorists on civil society is willing to grant uncontested hegemony to the state. An aversion to state despotism and the permissibility of revolt are recurrent themes in both liberal and historicist texts. In Keane's words: Despotism ... [is] a type of political regime ... which ruthlessly crushes intermediate groups and classes within the state and forces its subjects to remain divided, ignorant and timid in spirit. ... [As] a system of concentrated secular power without limits ... [despotism] contains no guiding ideals ... [and it] thereby tends to destroy its own omnipotence and teaches its opponents to seek methods of blunting its impact on the world, encouraging them to seek refuge in a civil sphere which acts at a distance from political power.34

Bobbio confirms that Gramsci saw civil society as a source of political change: At the tactical level, "the stable conquest of power by the subordinate classes is always considered as a function of the transformation which must first be operated in civil society";35 and at the theoretical level, "hegemony aims not only at the formation of a collective will capable of creating a new state apparatus and transforming society, but also at elaborating and propagating a new conception of the world."36 One can therefore assert that civil society is sovereign. The right of any elite to exercise state power is ultimately dependent upon popular acceptance. This acceptance-the key political resource for those who wish to rule-is manufactured by the institutions of civil society. For as long as civic actors grant consent, civil society exists in a complementary relationship to the state; its social institutions serve the hegemonic function of justifying state domination. But civil society is also a fount and repository of dissent. Over time, citizens may come to perceive that authoritarian elites are abusing the power granted them. At first, a few individuals initiate a counterhegemonic

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critique, which subsequently is taken up by informal social movements and perhaps eventually by leaders of established social institutions. This discourse can vary in depth of opposition; it may criticize the foibles of particular incumbent government leaders, implicate the regime of governance that such leaders represent, or go so far as to question the structure of state power. But in all cases the functions of domination and hegemony become separated and counterposed. Pelczynski suggests, with reference to the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s, that "[opposition] ideas gained 'hegemony' over society [even as] the state's 'domination' over the economy-and, even more, the police and the army-remained intact." 37 We may thus conclude that the legitimacy of a political leader's claim to exercise state power derives from civil society.

Civil Society and Political Transition The role of civil society in sometimes reinforcing and sometimes opposing incumbent regimes is laid bare in the process of political transition.38 To date, the best account of political transitions and the contribution to them of civil society is provided by O'Donnell and Schmitter.39 They describe a "modal" path of political transition from authoritarian rule to more democratic rule in Latin America and southern Europe, the features of which will be briefly summarized and critiqued for application in Africa. O'Donnell and Schmitter identify "the layers of an explosive society" that constitute sources of political resistance to authoritarian regimes. 40 Often, artists and intellectuals take the lead by challenging the regime's claims to embody a consensus on social values. Even in an atmosphere of censorship and repression, artists can employ oblique and metaphorical forms of expression to transmit independent ideas to an audience. In the scholarly community, social criticism is kept alive by analysis of analogous experiences in other countries or in earlier periods of authoritarian rule. Exemplary individualsfor example, people in human rights advocacy organizations-may even be willing to risk personal safety to begin testing the boundaries of behavior permitted by the government. "These individual gestures," write O'Donnell and Schmitter, "are astonishingly successful in reviving collective identifications and actions; they, in turn, help forge broad identifications which embody the explosion of a highly repoliticized and angry society."41 The contours of civil society are shaped by the social groups and classes that come out openly in favor of political liberalization. There are at least three broad classes relevant in the African context: the popular classes of self-employed peasants, artisans, and marketeers; the working class of unionized employees; and the middle classes of entrepreneurs, administrators, and professionals. The process by which each is mobilized will be briefly summarized.

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The emergence of social movements among popular classes can be traced directly to the performance of authoritarian regimes. Centralized procedures for policymaking deprive local communities of a sense of control over their own affairs; at the same time, the deliberate atomization of social organization forces local communities to rely increasingly on their own resources. Often prompted by dissident outsiders-particularly priests and nuns, but also students or social workers-communities respond by forming a multitude of small, territorially based self-help organizations. However weak and transitory, these organizations prompt ordinary people to tackle problems of everyday concern in an egalitarian and participatory context. They provide a forum for popular classes to express dismay at the decay of mass public services and at the neglect of the poor in official development programs. Nongovernmental organizations may even foster leaders who give voice to an idealistic alternative vision of socioeconomic development based on popular consultation. At the very least, they help to prepare the ground for spontaneous popular protest when seemingly arbitrary policy decisions make everyday life intolerable. In the opinion of O'Donnell and Schmitter, "the greatest challenge [to authoritarian rule] ... is likely to come from the new or revived identities and capacity for collective action of the working class."42 Included within the working class and often constituting a majority are large numbers of low-ranking unionized public employees. Unlike the mass sectors, the working class usually has not been neglected by state elites but rather has been targeted for corporatist cooptation, either through the receipt of special benefits or through the imposition of limits on collective bargaining. Much depends on the workers' perception of their own well-being. If, as is common, the regime's policies undermine real wages and social benefits, then workers are readily mobilized for mass action. This may take the form of strikes in support of better pay and working conditions or explicitly political demands for freedom of association or accountability in the management of public agencies and corporations. Inevitably, the discourse of worker protest tends to be economistic. But through trade unions the working class may enjoy both formidable organization and a leadership capable of mounting a bid for political power. Ultimately, even "the privileged sectors, who were among the regime's earliest supporters and ... main beneficiaries come to the conclusion that the authoritarian regime is dispensable."43 Different elements of the middle class arrive at this conclusion for their own reasons. Business and commercia) elites abandon the regime if they perceive it to limit unduly their economic opportunities; professional elites invoke moral principles against the prevalence of corruption or the abandonment of the rule of law; and public servants resort to protest when their complaints about declining real wages fall on deaf ears. The middle classes lend a distinctive weight to claims from civil society: They provide respectability and authority to the

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discourse of opposition; a useful set of leadership, management, and organizational skills; and a degree of protection from the threat of repression by virtue of class affinities with incumbent leaders. And by crossing over to the opposition, middle class elements later help to prevent a rightist backlash against any new regime that may come to power.44 At some moment of the transition, the strata of society may congeal in what O'Donnell and Schmitter call "the popular upsurge."45 The popular upsurge is an ephemeral activist coalition through which various social classes momentarily suspend divergent interests in favor of the common goal of removing an incumbent regime. On the one hand, where formal civic organizations with well-defined constituencies are absent or weak, special interests are easily blurred into a shared vision. On the other hand, the institutionalization of an opposition coalition requires a framework of organizations and set of leaders who are able to make realistic compromises. In the process of constructing an alternative ruling coalition, the hopes of the most idealistic actors may become frustrated and dashed. The paradoxical outcome is that although "the popular upsurge performs the crucial role of pushing the transition further than it would have otherwise gone ... the disenchantment it leaves behind is a persistent problem for the ensuing consolidation of political democracy."4 6 Incumbent elites make the major political concession of the transition when they agree to convene competitive elections. Although such concessions are usually won by a popular upsurge from within civil society, "the prospect of elections brings parties to center stage in the political drama."4 7 Leaders in political society then wrest the initiative away from civic actors. Political parties, as the preeminent modern institutions for aggregating preferences around general symbols, crystallize quickly once the prospect of contesting for control of state power becomes available. At first there may be a proliferation of parties, but these are soon whittled down to a few key contenders by the pressure to assemble a majority of votes from an electorate. O'Donnell and Schmitter's contribution is very valuable, but further elaboration is needed on at least three points. The first concerns the timing of elite concessions in relation to the "popular upsurge." In their view, elite dispositions, calculations, and pacts "largely determine whether a [political] opening will occur at all and ... set important parameters on the extent of possible liberalization."4R According to this interpretation, the impetus for political change originates in disputes between hard-liners and soft-liners within the governing coalition. Only after state elites have made initial concessions by relaxing restrictions on political contestation can a generalized mobilization of political groups occur within society. O'Donnell and Schmitter portray this sequence of events as follows: "Once the government signals that it is lowering the costs for engaging in collective action ... [then] former political identities reemerge and others appear

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... to expand, beyond anyone's expectations, the public spaces the rulers decided to tolerate at the beginning of the transition." 49 This formulation depicts the relations of civil society to the state as being far too passive and reactive. Undoubtedly, opposition actors in society stand ready to exploit any divisions that emerge in the state elite and to expand any political opening provided by official concessions. But civic action, especially in the form of mass political protest, commonly comes first, precipitating splits within the ruling group and causing the government to concede reforms. Indeed, the dynamic of political transition can only be fully apprehended when the lens of analysis is widened beyond interelite relations to focus also on state-society relations. In recent African cases of political transition, "the popular upsurge" preceded elite concessions and was an important factor driving African political leaders to open the door to liberalization. Second, more needs to be said about the emergence of the multiclass alliance that sponsors the "popular upsurge." The effectiveness of civic action at propelling regime change surely depends on the precise configuration of social forces that are mobilized. One would expect, for example, that an opposition coalition that included organized labor would be stronger than one that did not. One would also expect that the entry of businesspersons, professionals, and public servants into the coalition would be influential in determining the timing of elite concessions. Indeed, the moment when middle classes finally join the opposition is decisive, marking the onset of the unraveling of the ruling coalition. Although O'Donnell and Schmitter assign the middle classes "a crucial role in the earliest stages of the transition," this is not always the caseYl Fearing political instability, business and public service elements are often slow to jump on the opposition bandwagon, thus acting as a brake on transition. Under these circumstances, professionals such as lawyers and clergy tend to take prominent leadership positions and to ally with popular forces. Finally, different fractions of the middle class possess different levels of mobilizational capacity, with business and church leaders being more effective than artists or intellectuals. We also need to know more about the shared ideas and interests that hold the opposition coalition together. For instance, the coalition may be headed by opportunistic leaders whose main objective is to remove incumbents from power in order to obtain access to power and prebends for themselves. Conversely, opposition leaders may develop a systematic critique of authoritarian rule and promote an alternative mode of governance based on political accountability. Inevitably, as the short-lived popular upsurge runs out of steam, new elites ascend to positions of power. Much depends on whether the idea has taken root that civic associations have a long-run role to play in sustaining pressure for accountable government on the successor regime, whatever its complexion.

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Finally, beyond what O'Donnell and Schmitter describe, civil society gives way to political society and is itself transformed during the process of political transition. In the early stages, before and after the first elite concessions, civil society performs as the refuge of last resort for partisan opposition groupings. The announcement of "founding elections," however, brings about a rebirth of political society and a concomitant transformation in the role of civic institutions. At this moment, political parties reclaim their rightful function of expressing societal preferences. Ideally, civic organizations, whose members usually remain committed to political change, are freed to redefine their roles in more neutral termsfor example, by taking on tasks of voter education, election observing, or human rights monitoring. Once political parties are available to promote partisan politics, civic organizations can adopt or regain roles that are truly civic. In sum, the role of civil society in political transition is circumscribed to a short-lived interlude: from the time immediately before the "opening" to the convocation of competitive elections. It is during this period, which may last months rather than years, that civil society is ascendant, in the sense that civic political actors are taking the initiatives that are driving forward a political transition.

The Dimensions of Civil Society in Africa Further discussion is best rooted in empirical cases. Let us compare two African countries that have both active civil societies and, at the time of writing, political regimes in transition. Differences in the extent and timing of transition in Zambia and Kenya can be explained at least in part by variations in the characteristics of their civil societies. Let us first document the existence of these civil societies.5I Because civil society is a theoretical concept, empirical inquiry must be confined to its observable dimensions. Along all relevant dimensions-material, organizational, ideological-conditions have supported the emergence of civil societies in Zambia and Kenya.

The Material Dimension The material conditions exist for civil society when individuals and social groups develop an independent capacity to accumulate capital. In this regard, conditions have been quite conducive in Kenya, where the government's development strategy has been to encourage the Africanization of the private sector. For example, the Kenyan government oversaw the transfer of some three-quarters of a million hectares of prime farmland in the "white highlands" on a freehold basis; Africans were enabled under the State Licensing Act to acquire wholesale and retail enterprises, including

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import distributorships; and, following the Ndegwa Commission report, African civil servants were authorized to engage in private business. By the mid-1970s, African entrepreneurs, the majority of whom were smallholders, gained effective control of the Kenyan tea and coffee industries and owned the greatest proportion of new private companies in the manufacturing sector.52 Swainson concludes that in Kenya an "indigenous bourgeoisie extended its control over the means of production."53 In Zambia the indigenous bourgeoisie was far smaller. In the late 1960s the Zambian government purchased controlling shares in all major industrial and mining enterprises;54 roughly three-quarters of formal productive capacity passed into state hands. Political appointees used public office as a means to accumulate private wealth; between 1964 and 1976, half of all cabinet ministers owned farm or business interests. 55 The economic reforms also reserved certain enterprises for citizens, and by the mid-1970s over 90 percent of the retail and liquor licenses and 70 percent of the local transport companies registered were in the names of Africans.56 Although dwarfed by state and international capital, there was a growing class of small entrepreneurs employing labor. This class became active politically, producing more than one-third of the victors in the single-party parliamentary elections and gaining policy influence by, for example, removing restrictions in the official leadership code that forbade political leaders from owning businesses.57 The major difference in material conditions between the two countries has been in economic performance. Between 1965 and 1988, the Kenyan economy expanded at an average per capita GDP of 1.9 percent annually, whereas the Zambian economy shrank by 2.1 percent per year.SR As is well known, the collapse of the international copper price led to a decline in Zambia's export revenues and a runaway public budget deficit. The government borrowed heavily on the national and international capital markets, leaving "an onerous legacy of overindebtedness and rapid inflation."59 By 1988 the country's external public debt stood at 117 percent of GNP (versus 51 percent in Kenya), and inflation averaged 33 percent per annum during the 1980s and 100 percent in the 1990s (compared with 9 percent and 20 percent, respectively, in Kenya). Yet even Kenya's purported "economic miracle" is looking tarnished in the 1990s, with declining output in the agricultural sector, growing budget deficits, and increasing numbers of urban and rural dwellers falling into absolute poverty. But the effects of economic disintegration are far more palpable in Zambia than Kenya. By 1990 the prices of basic consumer goods had risen well beyond the reach of the poorest Zambians, some of whom were reduced to eating a single meal per day. The public delivery of social services-such as health and education-virtually collapsed because of shortages of operating supplies and poor and late payment of staff. Significantly, the economic crisis in Zambia severely affected the middle classes,

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with public servants, teachers, and professionals being forced to moonlight at second jobs and entrepreneurs being forced to run productive enterprises well below capacity. This situation has led to a middle class "brain drain," with large numbers of skilled professionals leaving the public sector, or the country itself, for economic reasons. The middle classes in Kenya have been more successful at maintaining acceptable standards of living, and the few individuals who have sought voluntary exile have been motivated by fear of political persecution rather than the threat of economic deprivation. Thus, the material conditions of civil society differ significantly between Zambia and Kenya in terms of the depth of the economic crisis, leading the business and professional classes to abandon Kaunda but to cling to Moi. The desertion of the regime by the middle classes in Zambia propelled an earlier and more rapid political transition than occurred in Kenya.

The Organizational Dimension The organizational dimension of civil society refers to intermediate associations and the institutional linkages among them. For brevity, I focus on the "lead institutions" in civil society in each country: the Christian churches in Kenya and the labor unions in Zambia. The origins of different lead institutions can be traced back to the locus and form of the anticolonial resistance, which in Kenya took the form of a series of decentralized rural uprisings and in Zambia of a more coordinated, labor-led, urban campaign. In the postcolonial single-party state, each regime created an organizational vacuum by banning unofficial political parties. Although a different organization arose to fill this vacuum and lead civil society in each case-the church in Kenya and the labor movement in Zambia-both became an informal, extraparliamentary opposition. To highlight the importance of the churches and labor unions is not to imply that these are the only active civic organizations in Kenya and Zambia. In both countries there are other politically influential social groups, notably student unions and professional associations. The organized student bodies at the University of Nairobi and the University of Zambia were repeatedly at the vanguard of public protests against declining living standards, elite corruption, and foreign policy. And the members of the Law Society of Kenya and the Law Association of Zambia spoke out regularly to defend the independence of the judiciary and to protest the restriction of the franchise. But each of these organizations has shortcomings as a potential lead institution in civil society: Student unions are unstable organizations with constantly changing leaders and members with fleeting value commitments; and professional associations have, by definition, a narrow class base and an intellectual or technical orientation that precludes their inspiring mass popular movements. Moreover, because these civic organizations play almost identical roles in civil society and in state-society

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relations in Kenya and Zambia, their records are insufficiently distinct for purposes of comparison. With regard to the political role of the churches, Kenya and Zambia offer contrasting cases. In Kenya, individual clergy have fiercely questioned government policies and single-party structures from the pulpit, and the leaders of the institutional church have defended the separation of church and state when it appeared threatened. In Zambia, however, the Christian churches were for a long time quiescent, serving most often to build consensus around the "humanistic" national goals and preferring a conciliatory to a confrontational political role.60 There is also a cross-national contrast regarding labor unions. The Zambia Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) and its main institutional member, the Mineworkers Union of Zambia (MUZ), engaged in a long struggle to preserve an arena for independent political action, emerging openly in 1980 at the apex of the opposition movement to the Kaunda regime. During the same period, the parallel umbrella union in Kenya, the Congress of Trade Unions (COTU), meekly accepted President Moi 's initiative to incorporate the labor movement within the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU). Lead institutions in civil society are distinguished by their prominent size, density, and scope. The Christian churches and the labor unions are the largest independent associations in Kenya and Zambia, respectively. The church is the only formal organization in Kenya besides the ruling party with a mass following and a capacity to span clan loyalties. 6 1 Most Kenyans are Christians, and most Christians in Kenya are Protestants. The Protestant faiths are joined, along with the numerous independent African churches, in a countrywide umbrella body known as the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK). The NCCK promotes an ecumenical brand of evangelism and service through education, publishing, broadcasting, relief, welfare, and development projects. With thirty-two member churches and associations and a staff of over 370 persons at headquarters and regional offices, it is reputed to be the largest national religious fellowship in Africa.62 The most powerful nonstate association in Zambia is the ZCTU, which embraces all nineteen national labor unions in the country, including the MUZ and the Zambia National Union of Teachers (ZNUT). The ZCTU membership represents more than 80 percent of the total work force in formal employment. 63 This base has grown steadily and by 1980 stood at 380,000, almost double the ruling party's paid-up membership. The congress is financially independent as a result of labor legislation requiring a single union for each industry and compulsory worker membership and dues contributions, and it has long asserted an independent political defense of worker interests. Thus, in both Kenya and Zambia formidable membership organizations evolved in the political space beyond the state. Churches and unions

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enjoyed a considerable popular base through a nationwide network of membership cells in community and workplace, as well as international organizational and financial ties. Significantly, because they were headed by umbrella bodies at the national level, they could project the voices of their members into policy and political arenas. Yet each has different attributes as a lead institution in civil society. Churches are well placed to sponsor coalition building because their own membership usually embraces numerous social classes and ethnic groups; in contrast, labor movements, which are expressly class-based, may have difficulty attracting other elements into an opposition coalition. However, labor unions possess the orientation, solidarity, and organization to engage directly in partisan political campaigning-for example, as an adjunct to a labor party. Church organizations are equipped to undertake only more limited political roles; they tend to favor neutral mediation functions among contending factions and to avoid partisan identifications for fear of dividing their congregations. For the latter reason, the organizational structure of civil society in Zambia was more propitious for effecting the reemergence of political society. With the trade unions as the lead institution, it was easier to generate an organized political response to regime failures. In Kenya, the opposition was slow to make gains, in part because, in a civil society led by clergy, there was no national institution willing and able to organize to take state power. The Ideological Dimension

To some extent, though not deterministically, the production of ideas reflects the material and institutional contexts. Thus, the discourse of opposition in economically depressed Zambia centers on bread-and-butter issues, especially the level of wages in relation to the price of food. In Kenya, where economic hardship is less widespread but where the regime of governance is more restrictive, the ideology of protest is driven by demands for civil and political rights. Debates in both countries converge on the issue of elite corruption, with citizens attributing their economic distress to the abuse of political office. In both Zambia and Kenya, leaders used the protected platform of the unions and churches to articulate a counterhegemonic critique. In Zambia, Frederick Chiluba, elected unopposed as ZCTU chairman in 1974, earned a reputation as "a trenchant orator who is formidable in debate." 6 4 With the death of Simon Kapwepwe in 1979, 65 Chiluba inherited the mantle of the country's foremost opposition leader. In Kenya, the chairman of the NCCK, Bishop Henry Okullu of the Maseno South diocese of the Church of the Province of Kenya (CPK), and other outspoken bishops such as the late Alexander Muge (bishop of Eldoret) and David Gitari (bishop of Kirinyaga East) used Sunday sermons to advocate a return to political

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pluralism. The loose confederal structure of the CPK provided Okullu and his colleagues with considerable autonomy to speak their minds. 66 In Zambia, the civic discourse centered initially on the economy. From the late 1970s onward, Chiluba and the ZCTU protested International Monetary Fund-inspired government policies to limit wage increases and remove subsidies on the staple foods. Frustrated by the reluctance of the government, Zambia's main employer, to engage in collective bargaining or take adequate measures to reverse the country's economic decline, Chiluba spoke in more political terms. He charged that "the party structure operate[ s] like a parasite on taxpayers' money, neglecting the dispensation of basic needs to the people, while [enforcing] a 'culture of silence' under the guise of peace and stability ." 67 He argued that the support of the labor movement for the ruling party should be contingent on whether the latter took concrete steps to guarantee social justice. Since "state monopolies [in Zambia] had served to enrich the managerial class ... [and] revealed themselves to be more exploitative than privately owned enterprises," 6R workers were justified in rebelling: "We seek ... alternatives so that people and not leaders become the main characters of the game of politics. We are convinced that only when faced with possible change through competition can ... politicians especially become more responsive. It is only in [a] multiparty democracy that reciprocity as a raison d'etre of social contract is best realized."69 In Kenya, several themes can be discerned in the critical discourse emanating from the Christian churches. First, by drawing attention to the widening gap between rich and poor, church leaders prevented issues of social justice from slipping off the national agenda. They openly criticized the concentration of land ownership, the involvement of public servants in business enterprises, the practice of forcing harambee contributions, and the government policy of bulldozing shantytowns. As an alternative model, the church's development wings promoted community-based planning based upon an ideology of conscientization and popular empowerment. Henry Okullu defines the very concept of development in political terms as "autonomy-an increasing capacity to identify, analyse and solve one's own problems."70 Second, church leaders stress political ethics. Noting the corrupting effects of unchecked political power, certain church leaders condemned the idolization of leadership and the tribalization of rewards under the Moi regime. For example, the NCCK magazine Beyond revealed vote purchasing and poll rigging at election time, leading logically to a full-blown critique of the single-party state. Church leaders regard the freedoms of expression and association as the most potent antidotes to the state's monopoly of ideas and organizations and have defended dissident former parliamentarians. Again, Okullu: "The most effective way of bringing to the notice of the rulers the grievances in society is for the Church, the

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trade unions and other independent bodies to influence public opinion. Government's response to such criticisms has sometimes been disappointing. It often takes the form of the repudiation of the person without addressing the issues with objectivity."71 Indeed, Okullu's views on church-state relations express lucidly the role of civil society in manufacturing the moral consent necessary for legitimate governance. He argues that African political leaders generally lack the capacity to put forward reasoned arguments and convincing explanations of their actions. Because of the absence of "reasoning grounded in shared values,"72 citizens come to doubt and disrespect politicians. Although people may continue to comply with official injunctions, they do so mainly because they are "afraid of the consequences of withholding assent."73 In this context, "it is not the Church's duty to sit in judgement over politicians ... [but to] preach righteousness and promote goodness in society, whether this provokes anger or not." 74 In the final analysis, the role of the civil institutions, especially the churches, is to help define a "civic religion" or "shared code of moral behavior ... forming the basis of national values."75 It is this view of civil society as the repository of ultimate political values that provides the church with its mandate for involvement in politics and the state with the source of its authority. African civil societies are fertile ground for the nurturance of such ideas. Major public investments in education since independence76 have created a young generation of school and university graduates receptive to the liberal values of civic and opposition leaders. Indeed, the struggle to displace the one-party leadership usually takes on generational overtones, in which the older, undereducated incumbents make unattractive candidates for national office. Moreover, civic institutions such as the press are vital conduits in disseminating unorthodox views: Either the opposition press helps to create the pressure that forces elite concessions, as with calls for the rule of law in the Nairobi Law Monthly in Kenya, or it is one of the first beneficiaries of liberalized rights, as with the establishment of the private and independent Weekly Post in Zambia. At whatever stage of the transition it becomes activated, a plural press provides inspiration to popular resistance. Thus, civil society is activated ideologically-as well as materially and organizationally-in the African countries under consideration. But again, there are interesting differences across countries. Okullu's abstract, rights-based analysis is penetrating and thoughtful; by contrast, Chiluba's populist and economically driven message has immediate and tangible appeal and as such is a potent tool for political mobilization. In addition, the unions in Zambia became unified ideologically behind Chiluba, whereas Okullu's advanced ideas made him a controversial figure for the conservative elements within and beyond the Kenyan churches. In general, unions are capable of adopting unequivocal positions on political issues

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generating disciplined member support, whereas churches, especially ecumenical umbrella bodies, are more likely to be riven by disputes within the hierarchy or between denominations. By linking the economic plight of ordinary people to the failures of the ancien regime, the labor-led opposition movement in Zambia discovered a potent theme to unite social classes and energize a campaign for political change.

Civil Society and Political Transition in Africa Finally, we come to the effects of popular protests on political transition. This section appraises O'Donnell and Schmitter's account of the popular upsurge in civil society in the light of the Kenya and Zambia cases. Which social classes are mobilized and through which civic organizations? Do they cohere into an alternative ruling coalition? What is the timing of elite concessions in relation to the popular upsurge? What happens to civic leaders and organizations when the political initiative passes back from civil to political society? Early signs of popular disenchantment with incumbent regimes were evident in both countries. In Kenya in 1982, crowds from Nairobi's shantytowns went on a celebratory looting spree in support of an attempted air force coup; in 1986 on the Zambian Copperbelt, workers joined the unemployed in food riots to protest the government's decision to cut maizemeal subsidies. But these demonstrations were inchoate until they recurred in mid-1990 under the banner of multiparty democracy. In the interim, leaders had stepped forward in civil society to provide a counterhegemonic rationale for protest. Let us briefly review this process. In Zambia, the political confrontation between state and labor began in 1980 over reforms to decentralize administration, which would have diluted the quality of welfare services available to mine workers from their employers. Four senior labor leaders, including Chiluba, were detained for several weeks in 1981 on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government. Miners reacted with a series of protest strikes, leading the government to back down but deeply straining state-labor relations. The ZCTU adamantly refused to become a wing of the ruling party, and Chiluba rejected repeated offers to accept a seat on the central committee of the ruling party. On labor issues, the ZCTU complained of unilateral proclamation of government wage policies without prior consultation and concluded that effective collective bargaining required a change in the political context. On December 30, 1989, the ZCTU General Council resolved to spearhead a campaign to restore pluralism to national politics and to work with other individuals or institutions with similar interests. Chiluba publicly declared that Africans should abandon the one-party system, especially since the founders of the system in Eastern

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Europe had already done so.7 7 To effect a political transition, he appealed for a national referendum on multiparty competition. In Kenya, church leaders-who had declared their loyalty after the 1982 coup attempt-did not break decisively with the regime until 1986, when President Moi introduced drastic changes to electoral procedures. The ruling party attempted to increase electoral control by adopting "queue voting" for parliamentary primary polls, in which voters were required to line up publicly behind pictures of candidates. In response, the NCCK issued a press release on behalf of 1,200 pastors saying they would not participate in queue voting because it violated the principle of the secret ballot. Even the normally cautious Archbishop Manasses Kuria of the Church of the Province of Kenya condemned the system as "ungodly," and Bishop Okullu opined that queue voting should have been fully discussed and endorsed by the public before the party adopted it.?H The clerics' critique broadened following a 1990 New Year's message delivered by the Reverend Timothy Njoya of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA). He daringly attacked Nkrumah and Nyerere for inappropriately importing the single-party idea into Africa. In April 1990, Bishop Okullu raised the heat by calling for the removal of clause 2A from the constitution, which stipulated only one political party in Kenya, and for new procedures to allow for direct election of the president and a two-term limit. These ideas became rallying points for a popular upsurge. The civil unrest of mid-1990 was the most serious and widespread since independence in either country, with more than a score of protesters killed and riots spreading from the capital city to regional towns. The protests-in June in Zambia and in July in Kenya-were prompted by different immediate causes: in Zambia, the economic shock of a doubling of the price of maize-meal; in Kenya, a government ban on a rally called to promote political pluralism. In both cases, however, the protests marked the first mass appearance of multiparty slogans and symbols. In each instance security forces quelled the popular upsurge, but in Zambia it was briskly followed by an attempted army coup that again brought jubilant crowds into the streets. Who was involved? In both cases, the lumpenproletariat of the central cities made up the shock troops of the protests. But there appears to have been a broader representation of class forces in Zambia, where students instigated the riots and where unionized workers and public employees joined in. In both cases the protesters looted business enterprises in the city center, but in Zambia only state enterprises were targeted, whereas in Kenya the outburst took on a sharper tone of class warfare. The Nairobi protesters, seizing on the motor vehicle as a symbol of status and wealth, stoned motorists at random and relieved passers-by of their wallets if they refused to show the two-fingered multiparty hand sign. For this reason, among others, the middle classes and especially the business community

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did not immediately welcome or join the popular upsurge in Kenya. In Zambia economic conditions had deteriorated to the point where all but the most privileged had been victimized, but the middle classes in Kenya still had a lot to lose as a result of political instability. Conditions were therefore more favorable for the emergence of a broad-based alternative ruling coalition in Zambia. The first signs appeared immediately following the riots. A National Interim Committee for Multiparty Democracy was created in July 1990 that represented all social classes and ethnic subgroups.7 9 The committee was chaired by a businessman and former finance minister, with labor leader Chiluba in charge of organization and operations. Professionals from the Zambia Economic Society and the Law Association of Zambia filled administrative posts, and businessmen took charge of mobilizing funds and transport.H 0 This unusual coalition of middle and working class interests remained intact throughout subsequent phases of the transition, including the convocation and conduct of multiparty elections and the formation of a new party and a new government. Indeed, the results of October 1991 presidential and parliamentary elections, which Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) won in a landslide, confirmed that all classes of voters in both urban and rural areas had swung decidedly to the opposition. In Kenya, the opposition was much more fragmented. Church leaders and lawyers came together only selectively-for example, to oppose Moi 's initiatives to reduce the independence of the attorney-general and judges of the High Court. When veteran politicians such as Kenneth Matiba, Charles Rubia, and Oginga Odinga took up the multiparty cause, they did so with little reference to the church leaders who had first placed democratization on the national political agenda. And when a united opposition front known as the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD) was formed in August 1991, a year after the riots, it drew heavily on professionals and former politicians; business leaders were less well represented than in Zambia, and labor leaders were conspicuously missing. Most serious, infighting among rival personalities and ethnic factions damaged the coherence of the opposition coalition and allowed Moi to snatch a plurality of votes from the jaws of defeat in the December 1992 presidential election. 1H What about the timing of the transition? Do elite concessions precede or follow the popular upsurge? The Zambian and Kenyan cases provide somewhat divergent answers to these questions, though the evidence weighs against elite initiatives. Instead, the impetus for transition lies in civil society, with liberalization reforms representing belated efforts by incumbent elites to recapture control of a runaway wave of political change. In Zambia, the political transition from authoritarian rule began in April 1990 when President Kaunda agreed to hold a referendum on multiparty competition. This opening, which occurred by presidential decision

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and against the will of the hard-liners in the ruling party, clearly involved interelite bargaining. Because it occurred three months before the popular upsurge that started in June 1990, there is some evidence of elite initiative. But Kaunda's first political concession cannot be understood outside the context of developments in civil society: the emergence of the trade unions as a center of political opposition during the 1980s; the adoption of the referendum as the key opposition demand in December 1989; and, before April 1990, personal appeals to the president made by leaders of the unions, churches, and professions. Perhaps misguided by sycophantic advisers, Kaunda apparently calculated that the single party could win against multiparty advocates and that he could retake the political offensive by agreeing to a referendum on a tight timetable. Any such calculations were upset by the riots and attempted coup of June 1990, which laid bare the regime's loss of legitimacy. Kaunda's first response was to try to delay the referendum for a year, using his opponents' own demand for a national registration of voters prior to any polling. But he was soon faced with huge crowds in urban centers chanting the opposition slogan: "The hour has come!'' These peaceful rallies-"the first in Africa on the scale of Leipzig or Prague"-attracted a broad cross-section of Zambian urban society, including a significant number of government employees.82 At this time, the opposition dropped its demand for a referendum and called for the repeal of constitutional restrictions on party formation and an immediate transition to a competitive ballot. In this sense, the popular upsurge preceded and precipitated the major concession of the political transition: In August 1990 Kaunda agreed to hold multiparty elections. The timing of political opening as a response to mass civic action is even more clear-cut in Kenya. In retrospect, the advent of transition in Kenya was the KANU Review Commission, which was hastily convened in the wake of the July riots. The government had first mooted the idea of a national conference on "The Kenya We Want" as early as April 1990 but had never taken steps to allow free debate: Moi had limited conference membership to party stalwarts and restricted the terms of reference to discussion of party rules. Following the July riots, Moi acceded to demands from church leaders, notably Archbishop Kuria of the CPK, for the inclusion of independent thinkers on the commission, though he still balked at allowing discussion of constitutional reforms. Public pressure did the rest, as petitioners bludgeoned aside restrictions on the commission's scope. As the commission toured the country, there was an outpouring of complaints about tribalism and corruption in KANU, skullduggery at election time, and the need for limits on presidential terms of office. Civil society asserted itself, as "ordinary people ... grabbed with both hands the chance to speak, not allowing technical details to curtail them."83 As the Weekly Review commented, "the views are not new ... the difference this time is that they are being expressed by ordinary members of the public."84

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The report of the KANU Review Commission was submitted to a special KANU delegates conference in December 1990. Although the majority of the delegates were opposed to political reform, President Moi forced them to reverse themselves. He pushed through the commission's recommendations to abolish queue voting and to cease the practice of suspending nonconformists from the party. Concurrently, Moi also sponsored legislation to restore security of tenure to judicial officials. And at a subsequent party meeting in June 1991, the president announced a return to an open system of election in which anyone, including party expellees, would be able to stand on a KANU ticket for election to the National Assembly.R5 The decisive concession, however, came later: In December 1991, Moi persuaded a KANU special delegates conference to ask parliament to repeal the constitutional clause outlawing multiple political parties. Though many factors were at work-including deteriorating economies and (especially in Kenya's case) pressure from the international community-the political reforms in Zambia and Kenya directly reflected initiatives taken by the leaders and members of institutions in civil society. Demands for a multiparty referendum and election in Zambia were first voiced by-and first became central to the political program of-the trade unions. The demise of queue voting and the amendment of the single-party constitution in Kenya can be read as a vindication of the early opposition claims by individuals (and later by institutions) of the Christian churches. This constitutes clear evidence that the domination by the state had become detached from the hegemony of civil society, with the latter defining important terms and conditions for political transition.

Conclusion This chapter has proposed that civil society is a useful concept for analyzing political transitions in Africa. Civil society is a public sphere of collective action between the family and the state that coexists in a complex relationship of creative tension with the state. Although political elites use the coercive apparatus of the state to dominate society, civil society manufactures the popular consent necessary to legitimate the state's use of force. Most of the time, civil society plays the hegemonic role of providing an ideological justification for a given distribution of power; at other times, especially when political leaders neglect to legitimate their rule, civil society can become a source of a counterhegemonic social movements that occasionally are sufficiently strong to effect a regime transition. Zambia and Kenya arrived at the juncture of regime transition as part of the continentwide movement toward political liberalization that accompanied the withdrawal of superpower support for client regimes in Africa at the end of the Cold War. In both cases, political actors within civil

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society seized this opportunity to initiate calls for a renewal of state legitimacy. Recent African experiences suggest the need to modify the theoretical literature to allow that political transitions can originate in the mobilization of social forces rather than exclusively in factionalism among the ruling elite. Civil society plays a crucial formative function both in prompting political openings and in preparing the way for the revival of party politics. Although Zambia completed a peaceful election and change of government in late 1991, the outcome in Kenya was far less definitive; the incumbent regime survived a flawed election but now must confront an opposition presence in parliament. The differences in transition outcome between Kenya and Zambia derive at least in part from the characteristics of civil society in each country. Whereas Zambia was deeply mired in an economic crisis that spelled downward mobility for all classes in society, Kenya enjoyed a relatively prosperous economy that enabled the regime to forestall the political desertion of the middle classes. Whereas the trade unions took the lead in articulating dissent from within Zambia's civil society, the lead institutions in Kenya were the Christian churches; the former ultimately provided a firmer organizational and ideological foundation for the construction of a political party that could effectively contest and gain state power.R 6 Finally, the outcome of transitions depended importantly on whether opposition elements could unite into an alternative ruling coalition, a process that proved far more problematic in Kenya than in Zambia. The nature and strength of Africa's fledgling civil societies will also help to determine the prospects for democratic consolidation. Much depends on whether the lead institutions can detach themselves from partisan allegiances in order continue to play an independent role in guaranteeing political accountability. In Zambia, the ZCTU proclaimed just such a future for itself but vacillated between confronting and accommodating the new government over unpopular economic austerity measures. Churches provide a more consistent precedent. When political parties take charge of partisan politics, churches quickly revert to neutral roles by, for example, sponsoring conciliation meetings between parties or monitoring polls on election day. During and after elections, churches often introduce campaigns of civic education to encourage citizens to take an active role in consolidating democracy. In this regard the impact of civil society in the two countries could easily be reversed. Whereas the configuration of civil society favored a quicker transition from authoritarian rule in Zambia in the short run, it will more likely favor the long-run consolidation of the democratic regime in Kenya. Kenya possesses an array of voluntary organizations, religious and secular, with a proven capacity to mobilize resources in support of political and economic development and with a self-defined role as the

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guardians of civic culture. Whereas the labor-led civil society in Zambia could easily atrophy through inactivity, cooptation, or diversion into an economistic agenda, the long-term prospects for independent activism to check the political performance of incumbent governments seem more promising in Kenya. An active civil society is surely necessary because, in all African countries undergoing political transitions, veteran politicians are reclaiming leadership positions. These individuals have held office previously in the single-party state, so their commitment to the politics of democratic accountability is uncertain at best. Thus, there is a strong likelihood that political regimes will reemerge in African countries in which interelite dynamics drive decisionmaking and in which popular forces and organizations are again systematically excluded. The ascendancy of civil society may prove to be short-lived, and any popular upsurge may be followed quickly by widespread citizen disillusionment with the return of politics as usual.

Notes 1. See, for example, Stephan Brent, "Aiding Africa," Foreign Policy 80 (Fall 1990): 121-140; Richard Joseph, "Political Renewal in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Challenge of the 1990s," in Carter Center, African Governance in the 1990s (Atlanta: Carter Center, 1991 ); Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, "Popular Protest and Political Reform in Africa," Comparative Politics 24, 4 (1992): 419-442; and Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, "Regime Type and Political Transition in Africa," paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 1992. 2. Z. A. Pelczynski, "Solidarity and 'The Rebirth of Civil Society,"' in John Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State (London: Verso, 1988), p. 363. 3. Gebru Mersha, "The State and Civil Society with Special Reference to Ethiopia," paper presented at a CODESRIA symposium on Academic Freedom: Research and the Social Responsibility of the Intellectual in Africa, Kampala, Uganda, November 1990, p. 2. 4. Thomas B. Gold, "The Resurgence of Civil Society in China," Journal of Democracy 1, 1 (1990): 20. 5. Norberta Bobbio, "Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society," in Keane, Civil Society, pp. 73-100. 6. Keane, Civil Society, pp. 35-36. 7. Ibid., pp. 37-39. 8. Ibid., pp. 43-44. 9. Ibid., pp. 44-50. 10. Ibid., p. 58. 11. Ibid., p. 61. 12.Ibid., pp. 50-51. 13. Bobbio, "Gramsci," p. 84. 14.Ibid., p. 52. 15. Ibid., p. 81. 16. Ibid., p. 76.

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17. See also Leonardo Salamini, The Sociology of Political Praxis: An Introduction to Gramsci's Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 137-147. 18. Bobbio, "Gramsci," p. 82. 19. Ibid., p. 83. 20. Ibid., p. 87. 21. Vaclav Havel, et al., The Power of the Powerless (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1985). 22. Ibid., pp. 41-42. 23. Jurgen Habermas, "Legitimation Problems in the Modern State," in Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 178-205; and Rajesh Tandon, "The State, Civil Society, and the Role of NGOs," draft paper, Institute for Development Research/Society for Participatory Research in Asia, August 1991, pp. 9-10. 24. Tandon, "Role of NGOs," p. 10. 25. Peter Ekeh, "Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement," Comparative Studies in Society and History 17 (1975): 91-112. 26. Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 3-4. 27. Jean-Fran~ois Bayart, "Civil Society in Africa," in Patrick Chabal (ed.), Political Domination in Africa: Reflections on the Limits of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 112. 28. Hernando De Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); Ivan Szelenyi, Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Janet MacGaffey, Entrepreneurs and Parasites: The Struggle for Indigenous Capitalism in Zaire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 29. Larry Diamond, "Introduction: Roots of Failure, Seeds of Hope," in Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries: Africa (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1988); Naomi Chazan, "Engaging the State: Associational Life in Sub-Saharan Africa," paper presented at a symposium on State Power and Social Forces in the Third World, University of Texas, Austin, 1990; Naomi Chazan, "Africa's Democratic Challenge: Strengthening Civil Society and the State," World Policy Journal (Spring 1992): and Adebayo Olukushi, "Associational Life During the Nigerian Transition to Civilian Rule," paper presented at a conference on Democratic Transition and Structural Adjustment in Nigeria, Stanford University, 1990. 30. L. David Brown and David Korten, "The Role of Voluntary Organizations in Development," concept paper prepared for the World Bank, Institute for Development Research, 1989; Michael Bratton, "Enabling the Voluntary Sector in Africa: The Policy Context," in Richard Joseph (ed.), African Governance in the 1990s (Atlanta: The Carter Center, 1990), pp. 104-113. 31. J. P. Nett!, "The State as a Conceptual Variable," World Politics 20 (1968): 559-591; Peter Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Eric Nordlinger, "Taking the State Seriously," in Myron Wiener and Samuel Huntington (eds), Understanding Political Development (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1987). 32. Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan (eds.), The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1988); Joel Migdal,

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Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue, State Power and Social Forces: Struggles and Accommodation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 33. The same options and alternations are manifest at the regime level. Political leaders always govern according to a mix of force and persuasion. The balance of these elements in a particular regime determines whether decisionmaking is open to all voices (inclusive or exclusive) and how a government responds to criticism (repression or accommodation). 34. Keane, Civil Society, p. 66. 35. Bobbio, "Gramsci," p. 90. 36. Ibid., p. 93. 37. Pelczynski, "Solidarity," p. 371. 38. A "transition" is the interval between one political regime and another whose onset is marked by a decision by incumbent leaders to "liberalize"-that is, to permit individuals or groups to exercise previously denied political rights. 39. Guillermo O'Donnell and Phillippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), Volume 4. 40./bid., Chapter 5. 41. Ibid., p. 49. 42. Ibid., p. 52. 43. Ibid., p. 50. 44. Ibid., pp. 62-64. 45. Ibid., p. 54. 46. Ibid., p. 56. 47./bid., p. 57. 48. Ibid., p. 48. 49. Ibid., p. 49 (emphasis added). 50./bid. 51. See also Agnes Chepkwony, The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in Development: A Study of the National Christian Council of Kenya (NCCK), 1963-1978, (Uppsala, Sweden: Studia Missionalia Uppsaliensia, 1987); Alan F. Fowler, "Management at the Grassroots Level for Integrated Rural Development in Africa With Special Reference to the Churches," Working Paper No. 419, University of Nairobi, Institute for Development Studies, December 1984; Francis Kasoma, "The Role of the Press," in Klaas Woldring (ed.), Independence: Zambia's Development Predicament in the 1980s (London: Mouton, 1984), pp. 209-220; Gatian Lungu, "The Church, Labour, and the Press in Zambia: The Role of Critical Observers in a One-Party State," African Affairs 85 (July 1986): 340; Joel Barkan, "Nurturing Civil Society from Below: Local Voluntary Associations and State Response in Africa and South Asia," paper presented at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Baltimore, Maryland, November 1990; and Joel Barkan, "The Rise and Fall of a Governance Realm in Kenya," in Goran Hyden and Michael Bratton (eds.), Governance and Politics in Africa (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992), pp. 167-192. 52. Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of NeoColonialism (London: Heinemann, 1975); Nicola Swainson, The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya, 1918-1977 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); and Michael Lofchie, The Policy Factor: Agricultural Performance in Kenya and Tanzania (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1989). 53. Swainson, Corporate Capitalism, p. 290. 54. William Tordoff (ed.), Politics in Zambia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974); Carolyn Baylies, "Zambia's Economic Reforms and Their

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Aftermath: The State and the Growth of Indigenous Capital," Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 20 (1982); Marcia Burdette, "Were the Copper Nationalizations Worthwhile?" in Woldring (ed.), Zambia's Development. 55. Cherry Gertzel, Carolyn Bay lies, and Morris Szeftel, The Dynamics of the One-Party State in Zambia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 71. 56. Ibid., pp. 69-70. 57. Ibid., pp. 64-68, 72-74. 58. World Bank, World Development Report 1990: Poverty (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1990). 59. Ravi Gulhati, Impasse in Zambia: The Economics and Politics of Reform (Washington, D.C.: Economic Development Institute of the World Bank, Analytical Case Studies No. 2, 1989), p. 7. 60. The Catholic Church, the largest organized religious body in Zambia, was diverted from politics and internally divided over the claims of the archbishop of Lusaka, Monsignor Emmanuel Milingo, to be a spirtual healer. The Vatican withdrew him from Zambia in 1982. The Zambian government was probably content to see Milingo go because of his sermons on corruption and nepotism and his appeal to the dispossessed. 61. Goran Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 62. Weekly Review, January 12, 1990. 63. Excluding those in the defense forces, prison service, and police. 64. Africa Confidential, October 16, 1985. 65. Kapwepwe, a close nationalist ally of Kaunda, broke from UNIP in 1971 to form the United Progressive Party. Kaunda responded by banning UPP, detaining Kapwepwe, and declaring Zambia a single-party state. Kapwepwe's fate symbolized the banishment of the Bemba from Zambian politics. Whereas Kaunda was shouted down when he tried to speak at Kapwepwe's funeral, Chiluba's address was reportedly received with adulation. 66. The Catholic Church was slower than the Anglicans to articulate an overt critique of the government, until it issued three searing pastoral letters in 1992. 67. Frederick Chiluba in Akashambatwa Mbikusita-Lewanika and Derrick Chi tala (eds.), The Hour Has Come: Proceedings of the National Conference on the Multiparty Option (Lusaka: Zambia Research Foundation, 1990). 68. Ibid., p. 98. 69. Ibid., p. 106. 70. Henry Okullu, Church and Politics in East Africa (Nairobi: Uzima Press, 1984). See also National Council of Churches of Kenya, A Christian View of Politics in Kenya: Love, Peace and Unity (Nairobi: Uzima Press, 1983); National Council of Churches of Kenya, A Report on the Church's Involvement in Development (Nairobi: NCCK, 1984); Sam Kobia, "The National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK): The Challenges of Our Times," Limuru, secretary-general's acceptance speech, September 24, 1987. 71. Henry Okullu, Church and Politics in East Africa (Nairobi: Uzima Press, 1984), p. 135. 72. Ibid., p. 34. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., p. 136. Kenyan clergy also argue for a strict organizational separation of church and state: Politicians should not interfere with the church's appointments, finances, or external relations, and the church in turn should not seek direct involvement in governmental decisionmaking. But at the ideological level, the

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bifurcation of state and civil society is rejected, being rather "bound together in the realm of ethics ... in a dynamic, critical and creative solidarity" (Okullu, Church and Politics, pp. 63, 67). 75. Ibid., p. 135. 76. In Kenya, this includes broadening access to higher education, for example, through Moi's "8-4-4" plan to double university intake. Zambia boasts one of the best-educated populations in Africa, with a literacy rate of 76 percent, compared with 59 percent in Kenya. 77. Times of Zambia, December 31, 1989. 78. Weekly Review, September 26, 1986. 79. Akashambatwa Mhikusita-Lewanika and Derrick Chitala (eds.), The Hour Has Come: Proceedings of the National Conference on the Multi-Party Option (Lusaka: Zambia Research Foundation, 1990). 80. Notably, the church was absent from this coalition. The Catholic bishops later issued a pastoral statement deploring the lack of accountability between rich political leaders and the increasingly impoverished citizenry (Times of Zambia, July 28, 1990). 81. See Joel Barkan, "Kenya: Lessons from a Flawed Election," Journal of Democracy 4 (1993): 86-99; Bard-Anders Andraesson, Giseal Geisler, and Arne Tostenson, "A Hobbled Democracy: The Kenya General Elections, 1992," Report No. R1993: 5, Chr. Michelson Institute, Oslo, Norway, 1993. 82. Africa Confidental, October 12, 1990. 83. Weekly Review, August 3, 1990. 84. Weekly Review, August I 0, 1990. 85. Joel Barkan, "The Rise and Fall of a Governance Realm in Kenya," in Goran Hyden and Michael Bratton (eds.), Governance and Politics in Africa (Boulder: Lynne Ricnner Publishers, 1992), p. 16. 86. Zambia enjoyed continuity in leadership between civil and political society. The ZCTU provided key members of the leadership for the main opposition party-for example, when Frederick Chiluba was elected the president of MMD at its founding convention in February 1991. And throughout the subsequent election campaign, the labor unions constituted the organizational core for recruiting party members and getting out the vote at election time. By contrast, Kenya underwent an institutional break between civil and political society. The churches, after burning their fingers by sponsoring a forum for opposition parties during the 1992 election campaign, pulled back into the role of nonpartisan election monitors. For their part, party leaders lacked followings and campaign organizations outside their home districts and faced enormous challenges in establishing countrywide appeal.

Civil Society and Disengagement in Africa •

Victor Azarya

Society-Centered Research on Africa The idea of disengagement from the state seems to have gained wide acceptance in the social sciences literature in recent years. In analyses of such phenomena as black markets, smuggling, popular culture, religious cults, and local communal organization, scholars have increasingly shown how various groups and sectors in society attempt to organize their lives beyond or at the margin of state action and influence. They have advocated, as Naomi Chazan and I did a few years ago,! a more society-focused research, moving from an emphasis on state action and capabilities (or incapabilities) to an emphasis on society's response to such action and alternatives to state channels.2 Sometimes such activities have aimed at withdrawing or keeping distance from the state, which is seen as more repressive than rewarding; this we called disengagement. In other cases, the motivating factor was still an attempt to get closer to the state, be included in its network, and share its riches; this I called incorporation. I added, however, that even when the guiding wish is one of attachment to the state, many activities are conducted beyond it or at its margin, simply because the state, overwhelmed by pressure, is not always able or willing to accommodate in its sphere of action all those "knocking at the door." 3 Whether the underlying theme is incorporation or disengagement, the great advantage of looking at the society end of the "precarious balance" is that it does not take for granted state hegemony over society. It conceives of the state-society relationship as more dynamic, variable through time and new regimes, comparable across countries, cultures, and sectors of population. Not being burdened by definitional preconceptions, such an approach is more amenable to empirical research than state-centered theory. It also more easily allows for interdisciplinary work and opens itself to greater input not only from economists and political scientists but also from sociologists, anthropologists, and geographers who might be more

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interested in the local, regional, and peripheral levels. It enables the addition of a grassroots view of things to the long-dominant elite perspective. By a lucky turn of events, the society-centered approach entered Africanist literature just a few years before great events shook Eastern Europe and led to the demise of the etatist model represented by the Soviet empire. The attempt to understand those societies' revolts against their respective states, as well as the process of democratization that occurred in areas such as Latin America, propelled the society-centered approach into new global respectability. As societies tried to liberate themselves from the heavy hand of governments and attempted new ways of reconstructing public life (so far with very mixed results), the society-centered focus of study suddenly gained wider attention and applicability as an analytical tool. The reorganization of society liberated from state tutelage became a new motto, both in academic circles and among international aid institutions and their political backers in the West. Important as they were in focusing attention on society's actions beyond those of the state, concepts such as disengagement and incorporation still treated society as an undistinguished mass, a residual category, simply the "nonstate." We were, of course, aware of the pluralism and fragmentation of the societies in question, composed of a multitude of groups and communities, some primordially based, others occupational, and so on. We recognized the serious conflicts pitting such groups against each other, but we still looked almost exclusively at each group's activities vis-a-vis the state rather than each other. As Barkan rightly noted, studies of incorporation and disengagement singularly neglected the horizontal dimension within the society-i.e., the relations (whether conflict, cooperation, bargaining, etc.) among the various constituent actors of the society. 4 The reason for such neglect was that society still interested scholars not so much in its own right as in response to the state, the "significant other." The focal question still remained how the society coped with the realization that the state could not respond to expectations and in many cases made things even worse. Even though Jackson and Rosberg raised doubts about African states' ability to realize the definitions of the state, centering on the capability to exercise control over the people in the territory under their internationally recognized jurisdiction,s they still kept their focus on the state, weak and irrelevant as it may be. At the same time, Skocpol, Evans, and others urged us "to bring the state back in." They not only advocated greater scholarly attention to the state (which scholars of Third World countries had consistently overemphasized since the 1960s) but also stressed that the state ought to be seen as an autonomous actor in society, not simply an arena in which different societal groups competed for resources and dominance. 6 Looking at the state as an autonomous agent no doubt facilitated the conceptualization of statesociety relations; by the same token, though, it strengthened the vertical

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dimension at the expense of the horizontal one. The state remained the source, the core element to which all others in society reacted. It was this reaction that drew scholarly attention; the reacting agent, the society, still remained an underanalyzed category. As focus shifted to society, however, and empirical studies multiplied on informal sectors, local self-help and welfare organizations, alternative distribution channels, unlicensed housing, employment and export-import, anti-establishment cults, popular art, and so forth, scholars became increasingly aware not only of the complexity of the society but also of the lack of conceptual tools that would help analyze various societal phenomena. Above all else they felt they could not provide a general characterization of society, could not attribute to it certain properties, certain adjectives that would be used in comparison of different societies and of different sectors within the same society. What did societies really look like? What were their internal and external boundaries? How did their component parts relate to each other? What was the essence of solidarity among different groups? To whom did they attribute authority and why? How did they distinguish between private and public spheres? How did they justify collective action and responsibility? Such questions and similar others had to be raised in order to shape the contours of society and make it something more than the "nonstate" residual category. It was at this juncture that the concept of civil society made its reappearance in the scholarly discourse.

Civil Society: A Useful Analytical Tool? There is something spectacular and perhaps ironic about the way in which civil society has burst into social sciences literature in recent years after lying dormant for so long. An important component of Western political thought, the concept was neglected in the West for most of the twentieth century while it gained more common use in Marxist terminology and some of its derivatives (Gramsci used the term in opposition to the oppressive fascist state). Its new surge, however, occurred just as socialism declined and a capitalist market-oriented socioeconomic order began to spread throughout the world. Strengthening civil society has now become a deliberately designed and targeted activity of international donor organizations. The attraction of the concept is undoubtedly a result of disillusionment with the state and a vindication of sorts for society-centered approaches. It has been increasingly used by those looking for ways to reach societies more directly, circumventing state channels that proved corrupt and inefficient in the past. The existence of an "active" civil society, manifested in nongovernmental organizations that claim to represent various groups in society but also

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claim to act with some public purpose, on behalf of an entire collectivity beyond family, provides international donors and their political backers with the nongovernmental counterparts they are looking for on the recipient side. With such motivation, it also is not surprising to find a flurry of academic activity engaged in the same direction. In Eastern Europe civil society was frequently used, even before the decline of the communist state, to denote those areas of society that remained beyond direct state control. It was often claimed, for example, that the Polish state was less successful in dissolving institutions of civil society than other communist states. 7 In the postcommunist period, the concept was used again, this time as the building block of the new order. Societies had successfully risen against their states, but they were now groping for ways of reorganizing social responsibility and collective action on some new bases. Political authority, its rights, obligations, and limitations, had to be redefined. Crucial questions rose as to how to ensure societal function in a period of rapid "privatization" in all aspects of social life. Economic privatization was indeed a dominant motto, as the transition in these societies involved not only a liberation from state hegemony but also rapid passage to a market economy. It was seen as the way that would enable the emergence of entrepreneurial groups separate from the state bureaucracy, a crucial component in the development of civil society.H However, it was not clear how to prevent privatization from turning into a "peddler's capitalism" that hardly recognized the validity of public responsibility. Nor was it clear how to stop "crony capitalism," another type of privatization that, far from loosening the ties to the state, was built upon them. 9 Peddler's capitalism and crony capitalism were both economic reflections of the dominance of private over public considerations. A healthy civil society was expected to fight both tendencies and to ensure the transition to a less statist, more market-oriented economy while retaining a strong sense of public responsibility. These problems of social reconstruction were similar to those experienced by many Third World countries, even though the cultural and political background of the latter were very different. As Crawford Young noted, the new order to be constructed required an infrastructure of corporate ties that would enable society to assume command of its destiny . 10 Civil society, manifested in active forces that claim to represent large segments of society and transcend patrimonial autocracy, was expected to play a crucial role in this effort. The problem of how to allow maximum space for individual freedom, on the one hand, and establish social bonds to ensure collective action and that would prevent fragmentation, on the other, has Jed to a Tocquevillean view of a civil society formed of intermediary units acting on behalf of larger publics beyond the individual and the family and negotiating social structures in which state powers would be limited. 11

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In North America and Western Europe, too, debates have raged on the meaning of collective responsibility in an age of increased privatization. Already in the 1970s, in the context of the debate on the passage to allvoluntary armed forces in the United States, Morris Janowitz deplored his fellow countrymen's tendency to emphasize citizenship rights while evading citizenship obligations.12 In Western Europe serious discussions were held not only on the necessity of a conscript military force but also on whether or not soldiers should be entitled to form their own labor unions to protect their interests within the military organizations. The 1970s and 1980s were years of community revolts against heavy-handed state intervention in daily life, as manifested in tax revolts (Proposition 13 in California, antitax political parties in Scandinavia, etc.), the anti-busing movement, legal challenges to affirmative action, and a general tendency to prefer private, voluntary channels of service to state-controlled ones. All these events raised fundamental questions about the essence of public responsibility and the extent of permissible privatization. The term "civil society" was not used in this debate, although civil obligations were an important issue. So was "civic culture," which for a while was an important topic in social science literature.13 It is interesting to note that, with the resurgent use of civil society, very little reference is made to civic culture, as if no relationship whatsoever exists between the two. Still, issues pertaining to civil rights and obligations, public action and responsibility are central issues in contemporary Western societies no less than in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the new postcommunist world of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Although recent developments seem to have created fertile ground for the use of civil society as an analytical tool, some scholars may find it inadequate in the African context because it is too heavily loaded with Western meanings and connotations and too detached from African experience. Without assessing yet the relative merit of the concept, I would like to take issue with such cultural relativism, which could seriously impair academic communication. It is true that civil society is rooted in Western philosophy, but this is hardly the first time that a concept of Western origin would attain more universal connotations and widespread use beyond the Western context. After all, terms such as "bureaucracy," "bourgeoisie," or "democracy" are no less Western in conception. We simply cannot afford to use only ideas generic to the culture they try to explain; that would be the end of comparative study. On the contrary, we should strive to standardize and universalize our conceptual tools as much as possible. It goes without saying, of course, that concepts are cultural constructs and hence are subject to possible bias affected by their roots. We should recognize the possibility of such bias; to avert it, we should try not to define a concept too narrowly in order to retain its cross-cultural applicability. Civil society does indeed carry a heavy bag of various meanings and connotations.14 But

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if that makes it ambiguous and difficult to use, it is no less ambiguous in explaining Western social phenomena than it is in explaining the African experience.

What Is "Civil" in Society? Civil society has sometimes been used by analysts of state-society relations without any attempt to characterize the "civil" properties involved in it. I used the term myself in this context in my discussion of disengagement and incorporation a few years ago. 15 What I really meant by civil society then was simply society at large. "Civil" was added almost out of habit, as part of conventional jargon, but perhaps also because for me it carried the connotation of a nonstate realm (in interesting contrast with some later connotations that seem to stress closeness to the state). It helped specify that area of social life that was larger than and beyond state action. The term "society" without its "civil" attribute seemed too general, whereas "civil" appeared to be putting it in some kind of perspective vis-a-vis the state (though from some distance) and still not explaining what characterized that society. If civil society just means society, then we should call it society without superfluous attributes. If we insist on referring to civil society, then we have to explain what makes society "civil" or at least what part of society is the "civil" part. What then is "civil" in civil society? The approach that appears to be most dominant in academic circles today is to regard civil society as a certain area (or arena) of society, the public space between the household and the state, where groups, constituted at a level beyond family, interact with each other and with the state to pursue their interests.l6 Such a neutral definition of civil society does not prejudge the nature of state-society relations, nor does it say much about what gives that arena its "civil" nature. Trying to pinpoint such civil attributes, some scholars stress the ties that civil society maintains with the state and tend to include them in the definition of civil society. Chazan, for example, regards civil society as the segment of society that interacts with the state, and she claims that civil society should therefore be regarded as a relational rather than a locational concept. 17 Such relations can be cooperative and interdependent but also confrontational. Indeed, some scholars see little point in referring to civil society unless it is portrayed as a countervailing force to the state. Quoting Bayart: "I shall define [civil society] provisionally as society in relation with the state ... in so far as it is in confrontation with the state or, more precisely, as the process by which society seeks to 'break' and counteract the simultaneous 'totalization' unleashed by the state." IH Whether the relationship is more harmonious or confrontational, if civil society is thus defined by its ties to the state, it faces, in my view, an

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important logical pitfall that may seriously limit its usefulness as an analytical concept. Defining civil society as the arena mediating between state and society eliminates the possibility of explaining the nature of that mediation unless properties of "civilness" are defined by some other variables, yet to be proposed, that are not themselves reduced to state-society mediation. One cannot both define a phenomenon as mediation and use it to explain that same mediation. To do so would be tautological; it would use a definitional link to explain an empirical one. If we use civil society to delineate the area of society mediating with the state, we should either renounce it as an explanatory concept of state-society relations or attribute to it properties that are beyond mediation per se. If civil society is defined by its relationship to the state, all we can say is whether it exists or not or what its components are; we cannot say how it affects state-society relations. The explanatory power of the concept would then be greatly diminished in the context in which it is in greatest use. We thus face a double bind. Defining civil society simply as a certain social space or arena does not tell us much about its special "civil" properties. Relating those civil properties to ties maintained with the state, however, raises dangers of tautology. If we wish to use civil society to explain relations between society and state, it would be safer to shift the focus of civil society's definition away from ties with the state. Civil society can still be regarded as an arena of society, but we would have to find some alternative focus that would explain the "civil" attributes of that arena. Furthermore, moving away from an emphasis of ties with the state would enable us to focus more directly on the properties of the society itself, its values and structures, thus promoting further the transition to society-centered research advocated at the beginning of the chapter. What follows is an attempt to suggest such an alternative focus on the civil properties that could be attributed to society or to some segment of it.

Civility and the Legitimacy of the Public Sphere Edward Shils has offered one of the most comprehensive formulations of civil society, identifying three main components. First, it is a part of the society comprising a set of autonomous institutions that are distinct from the family, the class, the locality, and the state. Second, it is the part of society that conducts a particular set of relationships between itself and the state, possesses mechanisms that safeguard the separation of state and civil society, and maintains effective ties between them. Third, it is a widespread pattern of refined and civil manners, which we may also call "civility." 19 The first two components were already discussed, and the tautological danger inherent in the second was already mentioned. With his third component, however, Shils moves us into new ground.

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What then is civility? According to Shils, the implications of civility go much deeper than simple courtesy and good manners. Such manners mean respect for the dignity of fellow members of society. It is an acknowledgment of consideration toward "the other," beyond one's family, a recognition of dignity derived from the individual's humanity or membership in a given community. It recognizes that all people have similar rights and obligations and hence implies a readiness to moderate particular individual or parochial interests in consideration of some common good, through which others' basic rights and interests would be protected as well as one's own. Acceptance of such collective responsibility to the common good and the positive value of activities meant to safeguard it are at the core of civility and form what Shils calls the fundamental virtue of civil society.zo The recognition of the common good is inherent in seeing oneself part of a collectivity and being willing to give precedence to its interests. The existence of such collective self-consciousness does not mean that it always prevails over individual self-consciousness. On the contrary, the opposite is more frequently the case. Nevertheless, its existence has a restraining effect on relations between members of society. All societies engender some degree of such collective self-consciousness, though the extent to which it is rooted in its norms and internalized by fellow members differs widely.21 Likewise, great differences exist in the extent to which organized action promotes or safeguards the precedence of collective over individual or parochial interests. The stronger such normative internalization and the broader such organized sphere of action, the more active and entrenched the civil society. Civility, in this approach, may be a property of society. "Civil" is used as an adjective and is identified with a rooted tradition of civility, or inherent respect for each other's rights, and the social contract entered upon to ensure the optimization of individual and group needs and desires. "Civil" describes those who wait in line for their turn and follow due process, having strongly internalized the credo "not to do to others what they do not want done to themselves." Accordingly, a more civil society would be one in which such norms are more entrenched and institutions exist to protect them. Societies can be compared to each other as being more civil or less across time and place. But civility can also be regarded as the characteristic virtue of a certain area of society, and accordingly one can discuss how expanded, entrenched, strong, narrow, unstable, or weak that area of society may be. Whatever the focus, a general problem of civility is that it tends to break down under circumstances of extreme scarcity. When waiting patiently in line for a bus or for food might lead one to miss the bus (and be stranded for many more hours or days) or to starve, the result may be a disorderly free-for-all in which the acute, immediate needs of the individual or

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one's own group take precedence over consideration for the rights of others. Thus, civility in social conduct may be hard to expect in countries with acute shortages and extreme gaps between levels of aspirations and accomplishments. Indeed, the fierce daily struggles that people have to go through in those countries may engender a very uncivil culture that would value above all else private (or family) success at any cost, even at the expense of the well-being of neighbors or fellow citizens. This is not to say, of course, that only rich countries can become "civilized." Scarcity and deprivation are relative concepts, strongly dependent on subjective feelings in reference to "significant others"; hence, wealthy societies with strong relative deprivation may also be very uncivil, whereas poorer societies may have internalized more civil values. The real test is not an absolute level of affluence below which civility cannot be expected but rather a relative level of expectation below which a situation would be considered intolerable, precipitating action that would ignore civil order. Within such safe relativism, however, we can still venture the thought that in many contemporary African societies, scarcity and deprivation have reached such dimensions that civility would be especially hard to sustain. If one prefers not to stress the connotations of courtesy and good manners, one may still look for the essence of civilness in what Arato called "the emancipation of the public sphere"22-i.e., the recognition of the moral value of public action in its own right. A more civil society would be one in which people attributed greater legitimacy to activities in the public sphere and showed more willingness to take part in them. If we prefer to regard civil society as an arena or social space within society rather than a general attribute of the society at large, we can still adopt this approach and say that the greater the legitimacy of the public sphere, the stronger, more active, and more influential the civil arena of that society would be. Public, in this context, denotes what is of common concern. The essence of civil society is a sense of reciprocal obligations and expectations that prevail among groups in society, a commitment to take part in the establishment of a common order and a voluntary compliance to abide by its rules (though without relinquishing the right" to act within those rules to promote one's interests). This public domain is distinct from the private sphere but also from the state.23 It is interesting to note that the relationship between "public" and "civil" proposed here is diametrically opposed to that formulated by Fatton, according to whom "civil" constitutes a relocation of power from the public to the private arena and hence to the market.24 Fatton identifies "public" with the state and calls the entire social space beyond it "private," whereas our contention is that there is an important public sphere in society that extends beyond the state but is also inherently different from the private sphere. The recognition of such a nons tate public realm is manifested in civil society .zs

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The predisposition to attribute legitimacy to the public sphere can be contrasted with what Banfield called "amoral familism," a cultural trait that does not attribute any moral relevance to activities beyond the family leveJ.2 6 Amoral familism does not recognize the legitimacy of public activity in its own right, as it does not identify any entity besides family to which one may be morally bound to offer one's service and commitment. Public activity is therefore expected to be a means of diverting general societal resources to private (i.e., family) interests. Within the family, by contrast, the common good and honor of the collectivity have strong moral value, and family members are expected to be fully committed to safeguard those common interests. Such commitment to family as distinguished from the rest of society would, of course, apply also to larger kinship groups, clans, and extended families. When the same moral code of conduct is expected to apply within nonkinship groups, they are redefined as quasifamilies (such as Mafia families), without which there would be no moral ground on which to demand commitment. Amoral familism is the normative opposite of civil society. The stronger amoral familism is in a given society, the less civil that society will be. By contrast, it is not difficult to see the close relationship between the virtue of civility, as formulated by Shils, and the legitimacy attributed to the public sphere. Civility results from a recognition that some collective order that transcends individual desires and interests has a moral validity of its own, beyond the family level, and that public activities directed to defend, promote, or reform such order are legitimate endeavors-indeed, are expected good social behavior. Thus, a public official who resists nepotism not only would be accused of being a bad parent or relative but also would be praised for being a good citizen. The stronger such ideas of public service are rooted in a society and the more widely they are recognized, the stronger would be its civil society.

Civil Society in Africa Can civil society, in the sense of the virtue of civility or a legitimate public domain, be found in contemporary Africa? We have already alluded to the fact that civility presupposes transcendence above some acute feeling of scarcity, which might not be reached by many African countries. Regarding the legitimacy of the public sphere, it is important to remember Peter Ekeh's comparison of the primordial and civic publics and his claim that the alienation experienced during the colonial period strengthened a prevailing tendency in Africa not to attribute moral value and legitimacy to the civic public sphere beyond the primordial sphere.27 In his own words:

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In fact there are two public realms in post-colonial Africa, with different types of moral linkages to the private realm. At one level is the public realm in which primordial groupings, ties and sentiments influence and determine the individual's public behavior. I shall call this the primordial public because it is closely identified with primordial groupings, sentiments and activities which nevertheless impinge on the public interest. The primordial public is moral and operates on the same moral imperatives as the private realm. On the other hand, there is a public realm which is historically associated with the colonial administration and which has become identified with popular politics in post-colonial Africa. It is based on civil structure: the military, the civil service, the police, etc. Its chief characteristic is that is has no moral linkages with the private realm. I shall call this the civic public. The civic public in Africa is amoral and lacks the generalized moral imperatives operative in the private realm and in the primordial public.28

Ekeh's formulation is slightly different from mine, as he differentiates within the public sphere between the civic and primordial public, whereas I referred only to the distinction between public and private. His primordial public is an intermediate category between my public and private. Still, as Ekeh himself noted, his analysis of postcolonial Africa presents striking similarities to Banfield's amoral familism, which Ekeh thought was an exception to the Western conception in which private and public realms have a common moral foundation.29 If Ekeh is right, it does not augur well for civil society in Africa. Bayart seems to be echoing a similar view when he states that "most African social formations are characterized by deep cultural, religious, linguistic rifts which prevent the emergence of what Auge refers to as the 'ideologique."'30 The general literature on peasant life often stresses its guarded privacy and sometimes portrays the peasant as "a thorough unbeliever in the concept of the public good, an 'amoral familist' whose social ethics stop at his own front door."31 Others, however, have taken issue with this view and have claimed that the traditional communal tendencies and community selfhelp schemes inherent in African villages carry the basis for civil consciousness, at least at local levels.32 Referring to Sara Berry's concept of "negotiability," Catharine Newbury has stressed, for example, the important role that has been played by rural social institutions and networks in Africa, as arenas for discussions and influence capable of promoting accountability on the part of those who hold power.33 Perhaps Ekeh would have concurred and would have simply added that this capability still remains within primordial boundaries. Without entering into this general debate here, we could simply turn such claims into variables to be investigated in the field if we only knew how to operationalize them for empirical research. The question of operational evidence creates, of course, a more general difficulty in dealing with civil society. Scholars who try to operationalize

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the concept have found it easiest to draw attention to the existence of various voluntary associations as proof of an active civil society. Civil society has come to be operationally defined as associational life between the household and the state. 34 The choice of voluntary associations as main indicators of civil society is understandable, as they are relatively visible, concrete entities mediating between the society and the state as well as between different sectors of the society. It is through such organizations that individuals become acquainted with the norms and benefits of public participation that help limit the totality of state control over citizens. Moreover, solving problems through associations is assumed to be more civil than relying on informal friendship or local patronage because action is undertaken not as an individual favor but in accordance with a general commitment to some common order that transcends individual desires. Participation in associations involves overcoming problems of collective action on behalf of a principle or common good that is essential to civil society. Fellow members of the association must recognize at least some minimal common interest, and they must be willing to take some risks and invest some efforts on behalf of a larger common good. Not all associations are considered to be agents of civil society. An obvious precondition is that they should not be formed or controlled by the state; otherwise they would simply be agents of state hegemony and would undermine civil society rather than strengthen it. Although there is no disagreement on the necessity of autonomy from the state, in practice it is more difficult to determine the degree of state control over associations. With regard to the primordial bases of association, the situation is even more complicated. Many African voluntary associations are based on ethnic identity or place of origin. Should they be included or excluded from civil society? The general tendency has been to disfavor ethnic associations, perhaps in order to keep kinship and primordial ties away from the civil space as much as possible. However, there has been little consistency in this regard, especially because ethnic and local hometown associations have been so visible in the African public arena. Ekeh claimed that without proper recognition of a legitimate civic public sphere, voluntary associations would simply be agents of parochial interests and that, being an integral part of the primordial public, they would not complement the civic public but would rather subtract from it.35 Chazan also expressed uneasiness about including groups that are too parochial and too inwardoriented and whose demands have little bearing on broader societal processes.36 It could be argued, however, that even in a primordial public, one witnesses a transcendence to a larger collectivity that in most cases goes beyond family. Common action is taken and responsibility assumed on that collectivity's behalf; action is directed at achieving a common good even at the risk of individual cost. Hence one may see even in such activities a legitimacy for public action. In fact, even the family boundary

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line is far from clear, as we well know that extended families may sometimes establish quite large collectivities. The family boundary is nevertheless kept in order to maintain the distinction (and contradiction) between civil responsibility and amoral familism.3 7 Moreover, with regard to sectorialism and parochialism, trade unions, professional associations, and growers' cooperatives also defend very particular interests of specific sectors in society, no less than ethnic welfare associations or hometown organizations.38 It is not clear why the former would a priori be included in civil society and the latter would not. Religious fundamentalist movements have also generally been excluded from civil society. The argument in this case is that they are holistic associations that see themselves as total alternatives to the state and want to capture the state and institute themselves in its place.39 Civil society, by contrast, does not want to take over the state. It recognizes the state's existence, wants to be in contact with it, and tries to restrain its power. The more holistic the demands of a movement, the greater the chances that it would like to install itself in the state's place rather than influence it from within the society. That is why Chazan stressed that civil society organizations should have rather specific, partial, and limited objectives.40 The objectives of the associations should then be rather limited and specific, but they should not be too parochial and inward-oriented, to which Chazan adds that they should be located at a middle level in society, endowed with developed participatory structures and some autonomous resources.41 This is indeed a tall order for African voluntary associations to fulfill, and it is even more difficult for the researcher to determine which one in practice fulfills which condition; it helps us little in clarifying the ambiguity surrounding inclusion in civil society. A narrow focus on formal associations may also lead to a neglect of some other aspects of civil society that are no less important but are harder to concretize in organizational form, such as the activities of the mass media,42 knowledgeable people, communication, opinion formation on public events, local celebrations, mutual help activities, and more general cultural modes of conduct that encourage public involvement. Similarly, the differential effect of various literary and artistic activities on civil society should be investigated. Certain important historical events may "traumatize" societies and crystallize collective consciousness. The development of civil society may also have a stratificational aspect in that it may be linked to the growth of autonomous indigenous business classes distinct from state bureaucracies.43 Clearly, the organizational dimension in which intermediate associations manifest themselves is only one of the possible major dimensions of civil society. When we look for concrete empirical evidence of civil society in action, we understandably fall back to the most visible organizational forms. However, we also run the risk of neglecting other aspects in

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which civil consciousness and public action are manifested, especially in the non-Western world and more particularly in Africa. We may be leaving out large groups of people who do not tend to see in association formation the preferred means of solving problems. Their alternative modes of action would perhaps be an indication that civil society involves a very thin layer of population in Africa, if any at all. But as long as our focus on civil society remains only on associational life, we may not even put this hypothesis to a proper test.

Civil Society, State, and Disengagement in Africa In view of the conceptual and operational difficulties surrounding the term "civil society," it is understandable that some social scientists would be very reluctant to use it, doubting its explanatory capacity and fearing its biases. They would prefer to continue to discuss state-society relations in terms of participation, penetration, disengagement and incorporation, exit and voice. But they would still be faced with the need to characterize the society in some way and ask whether a legitimate civil-public sphere of action exists in contemporary African societies. Civil society, despite its conceptual ambiguities and operational difficulties, may still arouse our sensitivity to a measure of recognition and societal support for collective responsibility and action. In the first decades after achieving independence, postcolonial states claimed to be the main, if not only, repositories of such responsibility and hence authority. However, as realization grew that such claims were often without foundation and that societies not only failed to support such claims by the state but also looked for ways to reduce the state's relevance, a crucial question rose as to whether or not the society was capable (and if so by what means) of organizing collective responsibility and public action outside the state. This was the central question that led us to civil society. I tried to explain that regarding civil society simply as an arena between the household and the state still begged the question of the nature of its civilness. I also tried to warn against the danger of tautology involved in the attempt to characterize civilness by referring to its ties to the state. I instead focused on characteristics of civilness based on the legitimacy attributed to the public sphere. Such focus, I claimed, can portray properties of the society as a whole. It can deepen our understanding of its cultural normative bases and of the ties that its component individuals and groups maintain among themselves, not only with the state. It should finally be stressed that civil society does not just exist as a natural component of any society. It has to be constructed, tended to, protected, transmitted from generation to generation; otherwise it may wither and disappear. The task of maintaining a strong civil society may fall

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above all on the society itself, which may or may not generate internally such components as an active mass media of communication, a tradition of opinion articulation and public debate, values of public accountability and responsibility transmitted through educational and cultural channels, and voluntary associations eager to operate in the public domain. Hegel did not believe that society was able to create such civil features by itself unless guided and supervised by the state. In his view universal selfishness "turns civil society into a blind and unstable field of economic competition .... Civil society cannot remain 'civil' unless it is ordered politically, subjected to the higher surveillance of the state."44 For this reason he regarded civil society as necessarily controlled and dominated by the state, in contrast with most contemporary uses of civil society, which postulate autonomy from the state. Even if we do not agree with Hegel and wish to hold on to a view of autonomous civil society, we may still acknowledge that the state may have a role to play in the construction of civil society and may in turn be strengthened by input from civil society. A strong civil society may enhance the legitimacy of the state yet at the same time limit the scope of its power and activities. The state, in turn, may inculcate the values of public responsibility necessary to sustain the civil society. The challenge facing the state is to help create a favorable environment for the growth of civil society without overguiding the process to the point that it falls under state control. The configuration of civil society at any historical period, then, may be closely related to the characteristics of the state at that particular time. Some have claimed that the colonial period has in effect blocked for about a century the emergence of a social space in which civil society could have manifested itself in Africa.45 The colonial past is thus blamed not only for the inherent weakness of the contemporary state in Africa but also for the weakness of its civil society. The fragmentation of society into increasingly smaller segments, hostile to each other and bound either by primordial ties or by a ganglike attachment to a primary group and its leader (as we have seen in different times in such countries as Zaire, Uganda, Somalia, Liberia, Chad, etc.), is the result of the extreme weakness of both the state and the civil society. When the state is very weak, the civil society may not be able to stand against such noncivil movements as, for example, the drug cartel at some periods in Colombia or irredentist religious, ethnic, and regional movements in various Asian and African countries. In a strong civil society, by contrast, the dominant mode of action would be engagement, or participation. Adopting Hirschman's terms, civil society excels in an environment in which discontented actors prefer the "voice" option to "exit."46 Voice, in essence, is a participation option even in criticism of and opposition to the established order. It involves an engagement, a willingness to take the risk of retaliation by the opposite side.

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The risk is taken because of the belief in one's ability to make a difference and/or one's sense of responsibility and duty to try. Exit, conversely, is an evasion of such responsibility, an avoidance of the risks of involvement, a withdrawal or disengagement from public action. We have thus come back, full circle, to our incorporation and disengagement scheme. I started this essay by noting that the shift to a societycentric focus inherent in the disengagement and incorporation model was not complete because we still did not have a general characterization of the society in question. Civil society, despite all its conceptual and operational difficulties, may provide an important component of such characterization if it is based on the legitimacy attributed to the public sphere. But we have also seen that severe disengagement weakens civil society no less than it hurts the state, as it leads to the overprivatization and fragmentation of the society. The reconstruction of public responsibility on a new basis, outside the state, paradoxically also brings society closer to the state. It not only strengthens society but also is the first step in the society's new incorporation in a leaner and more effective state.

Notes I would like to thank Ofir Winshel for her research assistance and Baruch Kimmerling for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. The Harry S. Truman Research Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provided the facilities for the research that led to this chapter. 1. Victor Azarya and Naomi Chazan, "Disengagement from the State in Africa: Reflections on the Experience of Ghana and Guinea," Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, 1 (1987): 106-131; Victor Azarya, "Reordering StateSociety Relations: Incorporation and Disengagement," in Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan (eds.), The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 3-21. 2. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. xv-xvi. 3. Azarya, "Incorporation and Disengagement," p. 15. 4. Joel D. Barkan, "Nurturing Civil Society from Above: Decentralization and Democratization in Kenya, Nigeria and India," paper presented at the conference on Civil Society in Africa, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1992, p. 6. 5. Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, "Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood," World Politics 27 (1982): 6. 6. Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In," Items 36, 1-2 (1982): 2; Peter Evans, et al. (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Eric Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 25. 7. Andrew Arato, "Civil Society Against the State: Poland 1980-81," Teleos 47 (1981): 23. See also Jean-Fran