Volume 68, Issue 2

The authors examine the development of the civil society sector in Slovenia and its role in the country’s welfare system. They emphasise the ‘boom’ in the growth of civil society organisations, notably in the legal form of associations during the 1980s and 1990s. They argue that although civil society organisations rapidly proliferated at this time, they did not become more professionalised or financially stable. In the 1990s, a relationship of complementarity between the public/state and civil society sectors was established in Slovenia’s welfare system, though civil society organisations exerted little influence on public policies directed towards the provision of social protection and other contributions to people’s welfare.

Challenging the received view that the Western world is the authentic cradle of associations, with the United States often epitomised as the ‘nation of joiners’, this article interprets voluntary associations in East Central Europe (ECE) as variations from the Western model. New studies on associational life in ECE suggest that well-established theoretical dichotomies like state-non-state or governmental-civil need to be overcome and argue that voluntary associations always actively interacted with the political context and contributed to shaping it. The article revisits these theses by focusing on the role of volunteer fire departments, which in ECE have existed almost uninterruptedly since the mid-19th century. It focuses on the period of double transition in Slovenia around 1990—to a democratic system and to an independent Slovenian state—and argues that the volunteer firefighters were able to negotiate the inevitable changes also because they were recognised as associations of Slovene national substance.

The author analyses the transformation of youth voluntarism in Serbia on two levels: 1) institutional, i. e. by tracing the changes in organizing structures of the Young Researchers of Serbia organization from 1980 to 2000, from a coordinated network of organizations to a postsocialist civil society organization; and 2) personal, i. e. by analysing personal experiences of the volunteers in the last decade of the twentieth century. Following the methodological approach of discourse analysis, the study relies on sixteen semi-structured interviews with volunteers engaged in the first postwar and post-sanctions voluntary workcamps in Serbia and internationally, as well as with some of the leading officers from the organization and former workcamp leaders. Particular attention was paid to the period of the Yugoslav wars (1991–1999), the collaboration with the antiwar movements in the region, and the process leading to the foundation of the Southeast European Youth Network.

Building on the example of Kosovo, the author explores the fluctuating boundaries between voluntary associations and the political realm. She is inspired by recent scholarship on voluntary associations in Southeastern Europe, which highlights the political aspects of associational volunteering. After the mass dismissals of Kosovo-Albanians in the health sector during the 1990s, the Mother Teresa Society, one of the largest Kosovar associations at the time, set up alternative healthcare centres throughout Kosovo, relying on the involvement of reportedly more than 7,000 volunteers. However, the Society and its volunteers did not merely fill the gap in medical care, but also participated in political decision-making through their close relationship with actors in the Kosovo-Albanian ‘parallel structures’.

The author analyses volunteering in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on women’s activism in connection with values associated with the concept of civil society, such as solidarity, equity, and reciprocity. Civil society in Bosnia and Herzegovina generally suffers from fragmentation, donor-driven approaches, insufficient transparency and low trust among the general population, all of which present obstacles to voluntary work, as does a legal framework which is certainly not conducive to volunteering. Unlike organizations that do no more than promote the interests of their members, or groups connected to or controlled by political parties, women’s organizations are often seen as undertaking genuine activism. The author reveals differences in attitudes to volunteer work among individual women in organizations of varying sizes, explaining that those differences depend to some extent on women’s locations, ages or experience. Both inter-group and intra-group dynamics, including women’s networks, provide additional insights into voluntarism, especially with regard to the value of solidarity.

Voluntarism is typically understood as action taken by individuals who voluntarily join collectives or take action to contribute in some way to social welfare. Voluntaristic forms vary widely depending on social context; however, a theme in recent sociological work is the possible withering away of voluntary practices in the forms that have previously existed. In this article, the author considers how the legacy of radne akcije , the working campaigns once coordinated by the Yugoslav state, is used to frame recent episodes of voluntarism, including the efforts of volunteers during the 2014 floods in Serbia, and charitable donations via SMS. She argues that previous forms of voluntaristic praxis have been fundamentally transformed following a shift in the fiscal and social resources of the state. However, while novel forms of voluntaristic practice and organization reflect the state’s present neoliberal ethos, participants remain wedded to a rhetoric echoing the past socialist collective dynamic.

The author comments on the political and economic options in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic that started at the beginning of 2020. She revisits responses to the crises of the First World War, the Great Crash of 1929, and the Second World War, sorting them into ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ responses, and outlining their respective consequences.