THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507280628
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM WARHOVER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 140 lines
Igor Nagdasev read to his fellow Russians some statements from people upset with the way government works:
``We just feel like we have no control over our politicians.''
``The whole process is corrupt.''
``Everything is special interests.''
The Russians mostly agreed with what they heard.
The statements were not made by Russians. They were expressed in Richmond, Seattle and Des Moines. They came from a study of how politics works in ``Main Street'' America.
But they spoke volumes to the people Nagdasev met on the streets of Moscow.
``We as a nation are losing common ground,'' said Nagdasev, who heads the Center for Citizenship Education in Russia. ``It's getting more and more frustrating that we can't talk. People can't work together to achieve some goal.''
Nagdasev is not alone. His problems are our problems.
Last month, more than 350 participants from 52 countries gathered in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. The goal of the ``Civitas'' conference was to explore ways to strengthen citizenship and civic education.
The participants came from civic foundations, from teachers groups, from government bureaucracies and from universities in the emerging democracies of Romania, Poland and Lithuania, and in the centuries-old democracies of England, France and the United States. Their stories were unique; their concerns were strikingly similar.
Germany is dealing with a rise in xenophobia, Hungary with violence against Gypsies. In Bosnia, ethnic conflicts and rising nationalism continue to feed a civil war. Palestinians and Jews in Israel, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, struggle to converse with words instead of guns.
In the United States, a bomb goes off at a federal building in Oklahoma City, exploding American myths about terrorists abroad. Across the country, racism, our version of ethnic conflict, continues to divide. The gap between the haves and the have-nots grows.
Intolerance is in vogue in many forms - the attitude that ``if you don't support us, you are the enemy.''
Across the world, the great experiment is not about communism, or fascism, or any other ``ism'' these days. ``Democracy,'' says Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago, ``is on trial in our times.''
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The Civitas participants met in the former Czech parliament. Now it's the headquarters of Radio Free Europe.
A block from the parliament building is Wenceslaus Square, where, from the balcony of one of the buildings, the speeches of Vaclav Havel inspired the Velvet Revolution in 1989 that led to this new democracy. The statue of St. Wenceslaus in the square is where every Czech revolution has begun.
Across from the statue, a McDonald's beckons.
The signs of new ways of governing are evident across Europe.
In the past decade, the Berlin Wall collapsed. The Soviet empire died. Communism became passe; democracies swept over Eastern Europe.
The U.S. government worked to help emerging democracies create free elections. It helped them develop constitutions. It helped create free-market economies.
But people like Russia's Nagdasev have begun to realize that adopting a bill of rights or selling Levi's and Big Macs may represent the outward shell of democracy. It doesn't create or support one.
What's missing is the culture, the place where citizens say: This is my country, this is my problem, together we need to solve it.
``Many people are accustomed to wait for the answer to the question,'' says Nagdasev, ``not look for the answers themselves.''
``People are fed up with politics,'' says Istvan Kavacs, who runs the Teachers' Democratic Union of Hungary.
``It's all stupid negotiations without end. It's the competition; it's the feuding.''
His answer? Not to throw the bums out but to throw the citizens in.
Kavacs says it's not enough for teachers to give lesson plans about long-dead democratic leaders. He wants to replicate civics in the classroom. He envisions schools in which teachers excite their students to deliberate on common problems of the present and common solutions, for Hungary. Teachers, Kavacs says, can't teach democracy unless they live democracy.
Nurturing a democratic culture is the idea where Americans and others across the globe come together. It's the place where we meet as equals.
Without a civil society, says Penn Kemble, deputy director of the United States Information Agency, democracy is ``like an organ transplant that won't take hold.''
A civil society - the sum of a country's religious groups, community organizations, associations, nonprofit institutions and others - is the link between the private and the government sectors.
The quality of citizens, not leaders, makes democracies better, says Benjamin Barber, chairman of the political science department at Rutgers University.
Democracy, he says, is the fruit of costly local struggle. It's something to be won, not given; it's not exportable. And it's not built by the marketplace, which sees people as consumers.
What we need, Barber says, is less talk about consumers - the private ``me'' - and more talk by and about citizens - the ``we'' in any democratic society.
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It is the ``we'' in each country, and around the globe, that the Civitas conference hoped to nurture.
A declaration at the end described the ``crucial role that civic education plays'' in the international community, including national and international stability and economic development.
It also created a forum on the Internet for trading ideas about building civic networks. Promises were made for exchanges of ideas.
But ultimately, as Barber said, democracies are created and sustained by local people doing local work.
People like Hungary's Kavacs, trying to change the way teachers think about democracy.
People like Sophia Dobreva.
Dobreva lives in Sliven, Bulgaria, a country with ``a bouquet of ethnic groups.'' The trouble is, the Gypsy population doesn't always smell so sweet to other Bulgarian groups.
Most Gypsies, she says, suffer from high unemployment and low education. They ``like to live free,'' Dobreva says, to sing and to dance when others only see only potential pickpockets and petty thieves.
So Dobreva has held a series of discussions with lots of ethnic groups. The goal is to learn how to communicate with each other - to talk and to listen - before ethnic violence erupts. She also is planning an ethnic festival to allow Bulgarians to celebrate the great mixed bag of people that make up that country.
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Michael Gillette, a state Supreme Court justice in Oregon, listened in wonder as a participant from one of the Balkan states described a movement to teach civics in basements and churches after the teachers union was disbanded in his country.
Gillette had heard about one participant who fled the fighting in Sarajevo to be at the conference. Another had been in prison for six months in a former Soviet province before arriving in Prague.
Others, like Dobreva in Bulgaria or Kavacs in Hungary, told of being considered ``the enemy'' because they didn't ascribe to nationalist fervor as they talked about how democracy might work.
Gillette started to shake his head. He leaned over, and whispered:
``You know, we're sitting here in a room full of heroes.'' ILLUSTRATION: SAM HUNDLEY/Staff
by CNB