Prof. Müller: Underlying level of distrust to parliament is distrust towards civil society itself

What happens when an American student of political science and philosophy from Boston University meets a leading Czech theorist of civil society? You can find out in an interview conducted by American student Emilie Lacy, who spoke with political scientist from CEVRO University, Karel B. Müller. You will learn, among other things, why the study of civil society is not as a big topic in the United States as it is in the Czech Republic, and why globalization has contributed to the erosion of civil society.

What is civil society? What led you to study it?

Civil society concept is kind of a long-lived concept since antiquity. It's also quite inspiring sometimes to look at classical literature, like from Cicero, but we mostly work with the modern Enlightenment concept of civil society, which is associated with authors such as John Locke, Adam Ferguson or Alexis Tocqueville. Civil society was being juxtaposed with war-oriented society, which was this Enlightenment idea, but it's important background nowadays too, I believe. So what it was for me–when I first  came across civil society, it was because of asking what is to be done for Czechoslovakian society to build a stable, established liberal democracy in the 90s. I was a first-year student at Charles University in 1990, and then the early 90s were imbued with the quest for civil society, or maybe even contestation about civil society, what it means, and what is to be done to support it. And that is the context of the famous Dahrendorf prediction that it will take 60 years.

There was Václav Havel, the first Czechoslovakian president and later Czech president, and he was a super-proponent of civil society, civil rights, and because one of his main rivals was actually then the prime minister, who was putting more emphasis that we only need a party system, political pluralism, rule of law, and market economy, and that's enough. So there was a bit of this kind of contestation. But I think this contestation within the European or Western context was a little bit off the tangent – I think it wasn't actually important. So for me, civil society was very much about discovering roots for liberal democratic society to function, and what these roots were within the Czech context, historically. Is there anything which should be built upon, or are we just starting from the scratch in 1990? This was the idea: civil society as a kind of political culture which allows liberal democracy to function.

And you said Václav Havel was like a proponent of civil society, and a contestation was just focusing on free market economy. Does civil society complement that? Or are they truly two separate things–are they mutually exclusive?

It's another point of contestation, but I would say, yes, they do complement historically and that's why I'm kind of equating civil society more with political culture. We can definitely define civil society in some kind of minimal sense, which usually means NGOs and social movements. So when people say civil society, they usually mean NGOs, civic associations, social movements. But as a matter of fact, a market economy has been a very important medium and environment for civil society to flourish and to grow, as well as a very important kind of bulwark against absolutism from the 18th century. Free liberal reforms already during late-Enlightenment and then later on were very important. So I incline more towards this kind of definition of civil society, where market economy plays an important role. So there are historical aspects to it.

Karel B. Müller is a Czech political scientist, civil society expert, and professor at CEVRO University. He has authored multiple books about Czech post-communist civil society, Europeanization, national identity, and active borders. 

Emilia Lacy is an American undergraduate student pursuing a degree in Political Science & Philosophy from Boston University. She was an intern at CEVRO University in the summer of 2025. 

There is also a kind of ethical aspect to it which raises the question, why should NGO representatives be considered better citizens for some reason than entrepreneurs? Historically, we know that civil society, which also overlaps with what Marx calls bourgeois society, was invoked upon claims like “no taxation without representation.” So these were people who were being active, who were able to accumulate wealth, and they were concerned about what was going to happen with their taxes. I think NGOs are important, yes, but to exclude the market economy from civil society would be a mistake, definitely in the Western context–and we could as well perhaps open the question about what kind of market economy exists in China. But that is a different story.

And when you said that civil society is about civil rights–civil rights are about how the government protects its people. Depending on the context of course, but as much as it’s something that the people fight for and represent, it's as much the responsibility of the government to ensure that civil society is possible.

This is a very general perception of civil society, and you can as well argue that civil society can't really flourish without transparent and accountable institutions. If you don't have those, then what kind of civil society exists? And if you don't have those for a long time, like in the communist era, for instance–in the 70s, 80s, there was some residue, there were some embryonic, nascent forms of civil society, but it was all underground. There were so-called "dissident underground activities,” which were very risky and the vast majority of people did not participate in those. So that was in late communism. Ernest Gellner, a historian of nationalism, argues that civil society, in a general sense, is liberal democracy where institutions are protecting freedom and civil rights. But sometimes institutions need to be overchecked, and they could be reformed upon claims coming from the grassroots, bottom-up direction, and that's as well pretty normal. But having repressive institutions for a long time and civil society doesn't really match. So I would say not just market economy, but also transparent and accountable governance is definitely a part and parcel of civil society, in the long term.

I'm an American university student and I had never heard of civil society as a field of study before I came to Czechia. Do you think that in the United States there's an ignorance of the study or a negligence of the study, even a suppression of the study, at least compared to Czechia?

That's a very good question. Scholars sometimes say as a kind of shortcut that in Europe the state preceded civil society and in the U.S. the other way around. There was enlightened absolutism in France, Germany–maybe Britain in a different form–or the Habsburg Empire. And then the state became a guarantor of civic rights and freedoms and was distributing them. So in a way, a civil society in most of Europe was born from the wish of enlightened monarchs who were very often absolute monarchs, but they were often kind of liberal in their beliefs.

In the United States it was the other way around: civil society existed first, and then civil society built a state. And in Europe, civil society was kind of born as a policy of the state. And of course sometimes due to strong, social, bottom-up pressure. But what was particularly European and very important was the pressure from the top down. Especially in Central Europe it was modernization, including political modernization, from the top-down direction. That might be the reason why Americans take civil society for granted, because it always existed – maybe not so much anymore? I mean, things are changing. But in Europe, what's always been taken for granted are monarchies: very despotic, then more likely enlightened, then constitutional, and then even liberal. And by the way, most established European democracies are still monarchies, which is interesting..

So it's like in America, civil society led to democratization. And here it's like democratization is not leading to civil society, but there's an active cultivation of it for the sake of democratization. And in the U.S., it was like democratization was for the sake of civil society.

I mean, it's a simplification of course, but we can say that. And here we're talking more in terms of central Europe of the second half of the 19th century, with an important role of nationalism, which somehow was in conflict with liberalization. So that's one of the aspects of central European development. Liberal policies and claims were somewhat undermined by nationalist claims, and that kind of led to the breakup of the Habsburg Empire as well. Whereas in France, or even in Germany, the dynamics between nationalism and liberalism was different. Ernest Gellner writes extensively on that. He's introducing the specific typology of liberalism, which is also a typology of civil society formation, in a way. But we have to realise that “nation” means different things in different languages, but civil societies are as well national societies, no matter what we mean by the word nation whether it's more political or more ethnic.

Last time we talked about how your research largely pertains to Europeanization and how civil society has a special relevance to post-communism, and a transition to democracy from communism. And at the same time, we talked about how civil society is relevant to this idea of depolarization, which I think is very timely and urgent in a place like the United States. So, it has this duality. It has these two meanings and it can apply in different ways to different systems as we see them today.

It's interesting as well to remind another context of civil society to revive the debate. And that was already in the late 70s, early 80s…in the West, that was the Cold War. And that was actually having to do with criticism of the welfare state, that it's something which is kind of weakening civil society by establishing too much dependency, too much etatism. So there has been this kind of criticism and that's as well something which differentiates Europe from the U.S.. The U.S. welfare state is not so advanced, it's not so developed for some historical reasons, good reasons. And in Europe, the welfare state was actually seen as a very important mechanism to prevent polarization, to save democracy in a way.

So this is one aspect, and the second aspect, as well, we didn't mention yet, and that was an impact of globalization, that globalization is as well somehow eroding the roots of civil society by global mobility, identity lost, erosion of nation states–most people learn democracy and  civil society within the nation states, but these are eroding.So there are these two–three contexts, if we add post-communism, as a specific concept for civil society debate revival.

And now to this depolarization. Jeffrey Alexander, American sociologist, puts this idea that civil society is about  secular belief in debate–that we can debate, that we can actually search for public interests in a debate, which is based on arguments, on some rationale, and on certain rules. So this idea of belief in formal rules in civic life, it's very simple, maybe banal, but a crucial definition of civil society, that we believe in formal rules when in our everyday life, conflicts and different affairs arise. Society is also a very important normative sociological term. Society is not a bunch of individuals, but it's a group of people who share certain discursive spaces, certain rules of how to debate, and how to manage conflicts. And therefore, what we can see now with this polarization in the U.S. and as well in Europe, is erosion of this shared discursive public space. There are these kinds of social bubbles or whatever we want to call it. But this erosion or this decay of this shared public space, it's something which really is threatening civil society. So the question is how to protect this public sphere, which would be functional and productive in order to build responsible governance.

Then there are many threats – we can just mention social media, which is in a way changing the media landscape and therefore the whole of the public sphere. And then we have many enemies as well, who are targeting our public spheres and trying, with sophisticated methods, to discredit them, trying to question people's trust in institutions and in rule of law. This is what institutions are, after all: certain formal rules so we can manage conflicts and establish transparent, accountable government. This is a big challenge of the present day.

Do you think Czechia has had a good post-communist, civil society effort? Is there anything you would change about it?

Yeah, definitely. I would change this institutional trust, if I could. Taking a step back, Czechs lived for almost 50 years in this repressive regime, where institutions were a source of repression. And that needs to change if you want to build democracy. You cannot treat your institutions only as a source of repression, as a source of fear even. There was this culture of distrust and even fear. And we know that distrusted institutions tend not to function very well and tend to be captured by private interest, by corruption, clientelism – so there's one thing I would change.

So the big question becomes how to build this institutional culture and how to build trust into these formal rules. Going back to Jeffery Alexander, the definition that civil society is based on trust in formal rules of civic life. We can prove clearly that there is a positive correlation–I would say it's an unequivocal correlation–that trusted institutions tend to work better. But it doesn't mean that we should have some kind of blind trust at the same time. British sociologist Anthony Giddens talks about active trust where trust is like a decision or investment. You invest it, and then you check your investment from time to time–not all the time, not every day, that would be crazy. Just when problems occur or even only once every four years or six years, in election time.

As said earlier, the main communist aftermath was this deep fear and distrust in institutions. In some institutions it has changed, institutional trust is being monitored and we already have this longitudinal data. And what is good now in Czech Republic is relatively high trust in the judicial system as well as trust in police and trust in army. These are really important institutions guaranteeing security, rule of law, implementation and enforcement of these. The trust in these institutions has constantly been growing in the Czech Republic, and now two thirds or even more of Czechs trust the police to protect them and judicial power, which is really good because when I was maybe your age, a little younger, jokes about police were commonplace. The police were considered dumb, funny, or ridiculous.

What hasn't changed is trust in Parliament, and that's not good because Parliament is the most important political institution. There's an interesting discrepancy between post-communist countries and most northern and western countries in Europe. There is some kind of bias that executive institutions are more trustworthy than legislative institutions in post-communist countries. For instance, in Northern and Western Europe, like Denmark and Netherlands, it’s the other way around. The average Dane trusts Parliament more than the government. It's interesting the structural difference in political culture. So I would like to change that. I would like Czechs to improve in their conflict management and in their culture of discussion. Czech Parliament lately hasn't been performing very well, especially with recent populist parties who have entered the Parliament. And other political parties have been adopting their style and adjusting, in a way. So the quality of public discourse has gotten worse. You can see the same in the U.S. in Congress. You can see how fragile democracies are.

The parliament is the most representative body of the people, right?

Plus, in Czech Republic, we have a proportional electoral system. It means that Parliament is supposed to be an assembly representing the vast myriad of interests and social attitudes in society.

So, during the communist regime, the people were repressed by the institutions. But paradoxically, now in this civil phase, the people trust less the institution that best represents them. Which is strange, isn't it? That's a paradox. People distrust themselves.

I know, you said it. There are three levels of trust. There’s self-trust, or self-confidence, then trust in others, and then trust in institutions. Many scholars including myself are suggesting that there are linkages trickling down and raising up the impacts or mutual dependencies between these three levels of trust. We have some data where people were asked, if you want to change something in your municipality, do you know what to do? Do you know how to do it? What's the likelihood that you are going to achieve it? That's about self-confidence. That's probably the deepest level of this crisis of trust where people don't believe in meaningful collective action. They don't trust that together with others, they can achieve certain changes. Yeah, you are right, an underlying level of distrust to parliament is distrust towards civil society itself, distrust to ourselves, it's a paradox.

---

CEVRO University offers quality, affordable education in law, political science, economics, security, social services management, and public administration. The programs are taught by both academics and leading experts in the field. The university offers undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate study programs.