ESC Annual Lecture - Beyond Civil Society: Renewing the traditions of reform in Europe

On the 30th of May 2023, the European Studies Centre hosted its Annual Lecture. This year’s speaker was Charles S. Maier, the Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. Maier studied at St Antony’s from 1960-61 between his bachelor’s and PhD at Harvard. He had published a number of influential books, including Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975), Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (1997), and the Project State and its Rivals (2023). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations and has received the Commander’s Cross of the German Federal Republic and the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and the Arts. The ESC’s director, Othon Anastasakis (St Antony’s College, Oxford), chaired the event.

Maier’s lecture was entitled “Beyond Civil Society: Renewing the traditions of reform in Europe.” Interrogating the historical record, he argued that the fashionable slogans of governance and civil society need to be rebalanced by a renewed agenda for state/EU political institutions.

Maier began his lecture by reflecting on the political changes that have taken place in Europe and around the world since 1989. Transformations of political language, he said, provide a good window into analysing how politics have changed. The key concept in the Europe of 1989 was “civil society.” The term denoted a far more intense engagement with democracy than, for example, the phrase “parliamentary democracy.” Václav Havel famously said that traditional parliamentary democracy could not protect freedom without the help of a thriving civil society.