Workshop “Civil Society in East-Central Europe”

U organizaciji Odsjeka za povijest Srednjoeuropskog sveučilišta (CEU) u Budimpešti 8. i 9. prosinca 2017. održava se radionica o političkom i javnom pritisku na organizacije civilnog društva u Srednjoj i Istočnoj Europi u suvremenoj i povijesnoj perspektivi.

 

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CEU

 

Organizer:

Department of History

PASTS, Inc.

 

Date:

Friday, December 8, 2017 – 9:00am to Saturday, December 9, 2017 – 1:00pm

 

 

Call for Papers/Presentations for academic/practitioner workshop at the History Department, Central European University, Budapest, on December 8 – 9, 2017

 

 

From the Baltics to the Black Sea and back the legitimacy of critical civic institutions, organisations and movements of civil society is under pressure. They constitute an important check on political and economic power that many in government, politics and business are willing to eliminate. Political and opinion leaders in EU member states such as Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria contest civil society participation and oversight of democratic institutions with increasing intensity.

 

 

Disrespect, intolerance and outright aggression against progressive, humanist, democratic and environmentalist values of the EU and the civil society voices that uphold them gradually become mainstream. The voices of environmental, human and gender rights and democracy advocates and their organizations are increasingly ostracized in mass media and on social networks. Pejorative hate-speech labels like “foreign agents”, “sorosoids”, “green racketeers”, “liberasts”, “EuroGays” are spreading within, and increasingly also beyond social media networks and communities. A popular discourse of denial and marginalization of entire sectors of civil society is shaped and imposed, reducing public sensitivity towards legislative and other forms of pressure against them.

 

 

But ostracizing civil society is not new in European history. Critical voices of civil society have been under pressure by non-democratic regimes throughout Central and Eastern Europe’s pre-EU past. The crucial importance of independent civic institutions, citizens’ organizations and independent journalism, for the state of European democracy has been established through important historical lessons learned during the pre- and interwar periods, the Cold War, and during EU accession.

 

 

See more at:

 

https://history.ceu.edu/events/2017-12-08/civil-society-east-central-europe

 

 

Civil Society Under Pressure Again

 

 

http://www.bluelink.net/en/novini/eu_citizenship.html