Boom and Consolidation: The Nonprofit Sector in Hungary

Abstract

Hungarian discussions on the terminology of the voluntary/nonprofit/nongovernmental/third sector and its organizations are dominated by the civil society concept and the much more pragmatic notion of the nonprofit sector. The Hungarian version of the civil society concept has been an intellectual outcome of a long and painful “muddling through”-type (Anheier and Seibel, 1993) transition from communist dictatorship and centrally planned economy to some less centralized, more market-oriented and much milder state-socialist economic and political system. The open society concept that is quite widespread in Eastern Europe (where the political changes were much less motivated by indigenous social movements, thus the collapse of the Soviet empire created a general sensation of opening up) has not had much influence in Hungary. The civil society concept was developed — partly as a political program, partly as a conceptualization of the spontaneous social movements — by the democratic opposition. Though most analysts utilize a slightly different definition, there is a rough, tacit agreement that “the modern civil society is constituted and developed by the various forms of civic initiatives and self-organization and is institutionalized by a legal system (especially the basic citizens’ rights) respecting social diversity” (Arató, 1992: 55). The civil society organizations mediate between the citizen and the state, the citizen and the economic power.