Civic Culture in Western and Eastern Europe

A              in the social sciences is that civic traditions are more salient in Western Europe than in Central and Eastern Europe. Among the scholars who subscribe to this view, there are many who have located the origin of the difference in the pre-modern past. Typically they see the appearance of autonomous cities in many parts of Western Europe in the late Middle Ages as the key factor (Bloch ; Chirot ). These cities prevented the Monarchy, the Nobility and the Church from exerting a stifling absolute rule and provided shelter for a growing class of entrepreneurs, merchants, craftsmen and clerks, who through their various forms of association and cooperation, in which they participated as equals, developed the attitudinal and behavioural patterns associated with civic culture. By contrast, Central and Eastern Europe, it is argued, lack a history of strong independent cities, and therefore the classes seen as supporting civic culture could not mature there to a sufficient degree. The rise of the absolutist state in this region (Russia, Prussia and Austria) actually exacerbated social inequalities as the aristocracy imposed ever more restrictions and duties on the peasant serfs to compensate for the imposition of central taxes needed for the institution of a permanent army (Anderson ). Only by brutally suppressing the occasional peasant revolts could the militarized states of the East maintain a fragile and stagnant social order. Under these feudal, violent and hierarchical conditions, which lasted up to the (late) arrival of modernization, civic culture could not flourish. Neither could modernization bring about a change of values as its specific brand in Central and Eastern Europe was too top-down, too artificial or too much imposed by foreign forces to be able to cultivate the civic-democratic patterns of Western Europe. Barrington Moore (), for instance,