There has been a quiet revolution in Eastern Europe for the past fifteen years - the explosive growth of the nonprofit sector. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Eastern European governments have done their fair share of shuffling as they attempt to adapt themselves to Western styles of capitalist democracy. One of the most basic challenges of this shift is privatization. Under Communism the government administered darn near every conceivable form of industry - from banks to arts. This led many Eastern Europeans to wonder what would replace this system after communism. As Kevin Mulcahy put it in an issue of the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, one of the chief concerns of Eastern Europeans was if Karl Marx would be replaced with Walt Disney.

The new nonprofit sector in Eastern Europe has emerged for a variety of reasons. In some cases it helps lead the way into democracy through education and political thinking, in others, such as in the arts, nonprofits fill the gap left by a form of government that once encompassed everything. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, literally thousands of NGOs have popped up all across Eastern Europe with entirely new sectors emerging in individual countries. And they are making a significant impact on how societies adapt to capitalism.

If You Build it, They Will Come

Prior to the fall of communism, the state provided social goods. When the state left many of these goods to the common market, individuals and communities had to step into the vacuum. While for-profit businesses satisfy certain needs, community goods such as the arts, literature and charity are not obviously driven by a profit motive. Non-profits tend to better provide many social goods. Western democracies are awash in nonprofits that make available such goods and services (e.g. this website). We've had decades to develop a successful nonprofits industry. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, has had only a few years to develop this industry, but already social entrepreneurs have stepped in to create it.

Under Communism the government administered darn near every conceivable form of industry - from banks to arts. This led many Eastern Europeans to wonder what would replace this system after communism. Would Karl Marx be replaced with Walt Disney?

"As these countries crawled out of communism, institutes formed to help advise their governments in transition," Colleen Dyble, of the DC-based Atlas nonprofit, told aWorldConnected. Communism had no need for nonprofits, or at least no tolerance for them, because the government controlled all aspects of society. The nature of communism, however, did not lead to most of these things being run efficiently. It lent itself instead to cronyism and widespread government corruption. These are in fact some of the very issues that Eastern European think tanks now find themselves grappling with.

Their goal, says Dyble, is "changing the intellectual climate of their countries. In Eastern Europe there are still a lot of strong state, old communist ideas. They make recommendations to infuse the intellectual climate, using ideas rather than politics." The FA Hayek Foundation in Slovakia, for example, has been very influential in tax reform in that country. There are a number of nonprofits in Prague involved in corruption studies. All over Eastern Europe, think tanks suggest practical ways to best transition from the institutions left behind by communism.

The arts as well are finding a great deal of support in the nonprofit sector. "What will happen to cultural life?" wondered Lord Dahrendorf in the Gentleman in Warsaw. "Do we have to read and watch trash now that we are free and no longer have inexpensive books and subsidized quality films?" The logical outcome of the collapse of communism brought widespread privatization of the arts, now that subsidies were being removed. This shift led to the shutting down of many cultural centers in the region. Though many of these industries were privatized, the growing nonprofit sector has begun to play a large role in the administration of the arts. As George Mason University professor Stefan Toepler argued, "The future of the nonprofit sector in the provision of the arts and culture in Central and Eastern Europe will become increasingly difficult to overlook."

Come Together

The NET EcoSchool in Romania, according to Coordinator Calin Rudeanu, exists to "change the local mentality towards the environment". The EcoSchool is a nonprofit learning center for young people from farming communities. Here children are taught typing, computer use and English while they collect and translate articles that teach environmentally sound farming methods. Communism frequently did not lead its citizens to take ecological concerns into close account. "Our intent," Rudeanu told aWorldConnected, via email, "is to keep the local community informed about the ways other people took action in recycling their wastes."

Civil society is filling the vacuum left by the all-controlling state. This process has been aided by the fact that the Internet was just beginning to get off the ground when the Berlin Wall fell. As the number of NGOs grew exponentially in the following years, so did their use of technologies that had previously been unavailable to them. Nonprofits in their infancy seem to need that kind of a community.

The EcoSchool exemplifies the growing trend of the nonprofit sector in Eastern Europe largely because of their interest in establishing a community-based exchange of ideas that comes from the Internet. EcoSchool students surf the net, looking for information on the environment that will benefit the people in their community. This is a far cry from the days when Eastern Europeans interested in distributing this kind of information typed on seven carbon copies at once or simply wrote them down with a good old pen and paper. Occasionally, children were even recruited for the task of helping their parents write the copies. People didn't have ready access to photocopy machines or printing presses, let alone the internet. What else were they going to do?

It just so happened that the Internet was beginning to get off the ground when the Berlin Wall fell. As the number of NGOs grew exponentially in the following years, so did their use of technologies that had previously been unavailable to them. Nowadays, nonprofit homepages and databases like the EcoSchool's are commonplace. One such site, Changenet, calls itself a virtual community for nonprofits in Slovakia. It doles out free email addresses and web space to smaller NGOs and serves as a large base of information about all things useful to nonprofits: services, job openings, law texts, environmental literature… The list goes on and on.

Nonprofits in their infancy certainly seem to need that kind of a community. The aforementioned Atlas Foundation provides the same kind of service to nonprofits worldwide. Colleen Dyble, an Atlas coordinator, describes it as an info hub for think tanks that advises, mobilizes and supports free market philosophy in developing countries, particularly in Eastern Europe. "Sometimes," she said, "think tanks and institutes working in the same Eastern European city don't even know about each other." There is a strong willingness to work together and share ideas, she says, and slowly but surely, these NGOs are using the net as a way to accomplish that synergy.

The rebirth of civil society in Eastern Europe is happening, but it is far from complete. Nonprofits are certainly playing a vital role in the change. "As different state-owned organizations are privatized," Dyble says, "people don't exactly know how to run things properly. Think tanks are able to give them insight. They are looking at the role of government, and how the market can take the place of government."

The Berlin Wall is long gone, but the intellectual climate of communism is still being removed, brick by brick. As capitalism takes its place, nonprofits are moving to the forefront of civil change in Eastern Europe.




Sam Wardle is a journalist and freelance writer in Asheville, NC. Reprinted with permission from A World Connected.

To read a Global Envision article about the burgeoning civil society movement in another part of the world, see Chinese Civil Society Comes of Age.



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