Civil Society – Indispensable Element of Contemporary Constitutional Democracy

Abstract

Coming into practical contact with any social-political and social-economic phenomenon, the issue of civil society is present in almost all areas of society’s activity, having a tangent with all spheres of social life - philosophical, social, economic, political, legal, etc.

“Civil society is one of the three pillars (economic opportunities - civil society - political freedom), on which democratic society is based and can effectively solve many problems” (Darendorf, 1996, p. 229). Of course, such a wish is also current for the new democracies.

Civil society was disputed in the past and continues to be disputed today. On the one hand, this moment demonstrates the heuristic potential of the phenomenon, and on the other hand, it is possible that the “idea of civil society” and the search for ways to achieve it have not been conceptually developed sufficiently [Grajdanscoe, p. 8].

The genesis of civil society is one of the most complicated problems. The topicality of its investigation is determined by the fact that it can become the necessary foundation for the deep study of the interaction of state power with social institutions, currently in full transformation process. On the other hand, we must specify that for our scientific approach, the issue of civil society is more important under its aspect of general framework, a determining phenomenon of the existence and activity of NGOs. Or, in other words, the impossibility of the existence of NGOs in the absence of civil society and vice versa, leads us to enter the sphere of close ties between these two phenomena, in order to elucidate their particularities and the legalities that maintain them.