Constructing civil society? Green money in transition Hungary.

Abstract.

This paper examines the construction of green money, a

civil society-based initiative in Hungary. As a case

study of the ‘institutional’ approach to transition,

which argues that meso-level institutions need to be

developed within civil society to facilitate transition,

the paper points to problems in building new civil

society institutions in Hungary either through trans-

national green networks, or through east-west policy

transference. The paper argues that while some of the

difficulties encountered were technical problems that

reflect the poor performance of green money as a

development tool, other problems reflect more structural,

political and cultural problems of transition in

East/Central Europe and in its specifically Hungarian

context. While not going as far as agreement with

pessimistic analyses that argue that the construction of

civil society is impossible – it builds up over centuries

(Putnam 1993), or at best takes decades (Dahrendorf

1

1990:96) - the paper argues that over-optimistic

conceptualisations of the potential of civil society and

mutual aid in the facilitation of inclusive transition

need to be more cognisant of the difficulties in

constructing civil society.

Key words: Hungary, transition, mutual aid, civil

society, local currencies.

2

I Introduction: Green money and civil society.

‘Green money’ schemes are essentially trading

networks using a community-created currency which have

emerged over the past 15 years in countries as far apart

as Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, Canada and the

US, continental Europe, and Japan. They range from

Local Exchange Trading Schemes (UK), to Time Dollars

(USA), Green Dollars (New Zealand, Australia, Canada),

and 'Talents' (Germany). The international Green

movement has been at the centre of the development or

green money, which they see as an important tool for

developing localised, sustainable alternatives to

capitalism from below, building community, and providing

mutual aid (Dauncey 1988; Lang 1994; Douthwaite 1996;

Croall 1997).

Activists from Hungary’s Green movement wanted to

explore the usefulness of these ideas in the context of

transition, feeling that marketisation was destroying

communities. As the Greens were one of the key social

3

movements, along with youth movements, with whom

Hungary’s negotiated transition was carried through

(Láng-Pickvance, Manning et al. 1997; Pickvance 1997;

Szirmai 1997; Pickvance 1998; 1998), local money found a

ready audience in Hungary among Green activists.

Experiences of building green money networks in Hungary

is of interest both to students of environmentalism and

social movements in east/central Europe, and has wider

implications for our understanding of development through

the post-Washington Consensus focus on civil society and

social capital.

4

II Civil Society and the (post) Washington Consensus.

Studies of transition economies are emerging from

the shadow of the now much criticised neo-liberal, ‘big

bang’ approach to the creation of market economies. These

approaches argue that if the economic fundamentals are

got ‘right’ as quickly as possible, market relations,

seen as ‘natural’ to human beings, will emerge

spontaneously once ‘superfluous’ government-induced

restrictions and market distortions are removed – e.g.

see Gray (1991). In academic analyses, the poor economic

performance of transition economies in the early 1990s,

the Russian and East Asian financial crisis in the mid

1990s, and the economic collapse in Argentina in 2001-2

now show the neo-liberal agenda to have been doctrinaire

and over-economistic, paying no attention to the social

and cultural processes that lead to the creation of

markets. While some transition economies were eventually

restructured such that performance at last met or

overtook that of 1989 (Poland, Slovenia, Hungary) this

entailed much unnecessary pain for those on the sharp end

5

of restructuring. For too many it did not even deliver

what it promised, as Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’

led not to the market nirvana, but to a catastrophic drop

in economic performance; for example, Georgia or

Moldova’s GDP was 25% of that of 1989 in 1999 (Gyynne,

Klak et. al 2003:134). Wider problems included a

collapse of social cohesion, hunger, collapsing services,

public health crises and the emergence of ‘gangster’,

‘crony’ or ‘wild’ capitalisms (Smith and Swain 1998;

Freeland 2001; Stiglitz 2002; Dunford 2003; Gwynne, Klak

et al. 2003).

Consequently, the post-Washington Consensus

‘institutional’ approach to transition economies stresses

the importance of the construction of mediating institutions

within civil society such as the rule of law, trust,

property rights to ensure that those previously seen as

the ‘objects’ of development – local people – feel they

have some form of ownership and participation (Fine

2000). The construction of civil society can be seen as

an end in itself, part of the post 1989 ‘End of History’

6

thesis that sees the culmination of human development as

democracy and markets, with communism and fascism having

‘failed’. In this model, civil society institutions will

provide mediating institutions between the citizen and

the government and connect citizens with each other

(Cohen and Arato 1992; Osborne and Kaposvari 1997; Arato

1999) through democratic cultures that develop open,

transparent governance processes and trust as a de

Toquevilleian guarantor against despotism, and which

facilitate the ability of citizens to influence their

political future from below.

Secondly, civil society institutions will help

citizens navigate their way through the changes happening

to them, driven by processes that they cannot control, may

not like and perhaps do not understand. Welfare

services, self-help groups, micro finance, and job

brokering and business development agencies will smooth

the path of transition for those at the sharp end of

economic changes in the creation of market economies

(Kuti 1997). Civil society institutions that strengthen

7

social capital will help them to develop the ‘loose ties’

that enable them to negotiate through an uncertain future

(Putnam 2001), and help reconcile the tensions inherent

in capitalism between individual accumulation, leading

people to act selfishly to maximise their success; and

needs of social cohesion. Advocates of social capital

argue that by examining the interrelationship of families

and other networks, trust, and markets, markets will work

both more effectively and inclusively (Howell and Pierce

2002:28). Thus it is increasingly understood that dual

political and economic transition requires the active

development of political and economic institutions. It

will not happen spontaneously, as in neoliberal

discourses, and consequently, the creation of civil

society has become a major focus for development.

Critics doubt whether such social engineering is

possible, either exogenously or from within. For

example, Ralf Dahrendorf (1990:96) argued that meaningful

civil society would take decades to construct, while

Putnam’s (1993) study of Italy points to centuries of

8

civic engagement. He is doubtful that it can be

constructed. Others argue that Putnam is circular – the

existence of strong civil society leads to strong social

capital, and and strong social capital leads to strong

civil society (Howell and Pierce 2002:47). If it is

possible to construct social capital, some challenge the

value of so doing. The fundamental objection is that

without economic emancipation political democracy is at

best a stage in human development or at worst a fraud and

an illusion also applies to civil society (Kaldor

2003:27). For Tarrow (1996, quoted by Howell and Pierce

2002:29), ascribing a lack of economic success to an

absence of civil society or social capital is attacking

the symptoms, not the causes of problems such as

oppressive power relations and a lack of resources.

Howell and Pierce (2002:28) also argue that the poor

economic performance in the Mezzogiorno identified by

Putnam might be due to its colonial dependence on the

North, not the lack of association.

9

Consequently, some critics see a strategy of

constructing civil society as part of wider processes of

neoliberalisation (Kaldor 2003:88) which overemphasise

the importance of non-state actors and markets (Howell

and Pearce 2002) and implicitly downgrades the state as

an agent of development (Fine 1999). For Hann and Dunn

(1996) this is a Eurocentric or imperialistic conception

of development that assumes that Western-style democracy

and markets are the best or only development option

(Kaldor 2003:106), ignoring the role of the state in

development in East Asia (Gwynne, Klak et. al. 2003:91-

108). Left critics see strategies for the development of

civil society as a cover for the destruction of state

provision of welfare in favour of what will always be an

inadequate para-statial welfare net provided by voluntary

agencies (North 2002). Civil society organisations by-

pass the state, reducing rather than enhancing the rights

of citizens (Kaldor 2003:92-94). Thus they act as the

‘handmaidens of capitalist change’ destroying local

economies, marketising what was once provided through

non-monetised mutual aid or community-production in an

10

extension of market principles throughout society. (Fine

2001; DeFilippis 2002).

These processes of neoliberalisation distort the

roles of Non Governmental Organisations, the very

organisations that should benefit. Delivery of services

by NGOs involves their political incorporation into

neoliberal governance processes, leading them to limit

their critique of funders upon whom they are dependent

(Kaldor 2003:92-94). Agendas will be set according to

Western agencies’ prejudices, and will not necessarily

reflect local conditions or the views of local people

(Cooke and Kothari 2001). Well-funded international NGOs

displace local grassroots organisations, and their

leaders facing the option of penury or making deals with

perhaps unsavoury authoritarian rulers. NGOs begin to

represent the new structures within which the ambitious

locate themselves to get on. Competition means

marketisation of a sector that should work according to

need and through co-operation. NGOs need to compete for

funds, and to do this they need to find a brand or a

11

market niche to differentiate themselves from other NGOs.

Fundraising becomes a means in itself, the project a

means to earn funds, and the problem itself fades from

centre stage (Kaldor 2003:94). Through interaction with

neoliberalisation, civil society becomes tamed.

III The promise of radical civil society - the legacy of

1989.

But there is another legacy of civil society: - that

of 1989 (Arato 1991). A radical conception of civil

society aims not at facilitating neoliberalism, but the

development of a polity that is deeper, more inclusive

and more conducive to fulfilling human happiness than a

veneer of elite pluralism upon on a neoliberal economy

with the inequalities, wasted lives and environmental

degradation this implies. For Arato (1991, 1999), the

vibrancy of civil society-inspired self-limiting social

change is the element of the post-1989 democratisations

in Eastern and Central Europe with the most hopeful

legacy for social theory. Given doubts about the

12

continuing salience of the proletariat as the agent of

social change in the move from industrial, to post-

industrial society (Touraine 1981), theorists began to

look for new agents, and some found them in the new

social movements that argued for radical democracy,

participatory economics and autonomy against technocratic

society or winner-takes- all capitalism (Cohen and Arato

1992). Inspired by Gramsci, the state was seen not as an

artificial structure that could be felled in revolution,

but part of a wider edifice that included wider trenches

and ramparts that made capitalist rationalism seem

‘normal’, ‘rational’, and ‘commonsense’. Civil society

was one of these ramparts, along with mass culture, the

church, forms of industrial organisation and the like. A

new radical project, then, would require a cultural war

to develop alternative forms of rationality and

organisation such that capitalism no longer seemed

natural, inevitable (Howell and Pearce 2002:33; Kaldor

2003:9). This conception of civil society drew on a

legacy that went back to mediaeval guilds, through

anarchist theory to what Howell and Pearce (2002:69-71)

13

call “a broad, mixed and undertheorised group of ideas

that reject both statism and the unrestrained capitalist

market.” which challenges both neoliberalism, and focuses

on the development of new forms of economic organisation.

Development should promote co-operation, not

individualistic accumulation (Howell and Pearce 2002:31).

This radical conception of civil society inspired

leftist critiques of eastern European state-capitalist

development from intellectuals in Solidarnosc, the DDR’s

Civic Forum, and Hungary’s environmental movement. These

activists wanted not the neoliberalism that they got, but

a humane revitalised, pleural socialism. Kaldor (2003:56)

quotes Hungarian dissident Konrad who argued that the

‘anti politics’ that inspired the movements of 1989 was

about pushing the state out of everyday life but to get

freedom, not a new economic slavery. They wanted more

than parliamentary democracy: democracy in the workplace

and in local communities, "especially in those areas

where we meet face to face and can look in the eye those

14

people who make decisions in our name and ask us to carry

them out." (Kaldor 2003:58).

Arato (1999:226) argued that "the transformation of

dictatorships (in Eastern Europe was) based on the idea

of the self-organisation of society, the rebuilding of

social ties outside the authoritarian state, and the

appeal to an independent public sphere outside of all

official, state or party-controlled communication." It

was inspired both by Arendtian critiques of dictatorship

and de Toquevillian liberal democracy, but also by a neo-

Marxian radical bottom-up strategy for developing counter

power to centralised control, be that Stalinist or

capitalist, against a Communist Party or the IMF. So

while in the neoliberal conception of development civil

society is an integral part of capitalist development;

civil society and capitalism are not analytically

intertwined. In Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, the

promise of civil society therefore reflected the hopes of

1989 rather than marketisation and mutual aid for the

vulnerable in transition. This paper therefore explores

15

these dilemmas through a discussion of on product of the

1989 social movement effervescence that later also began

to be seen as a tool for mitigating transition: green

money in Hungary.

IV Civil Society in the transition to capitalism in

Hungary.

Civil society had a strong legacy in Hungary. For

centuries, Hungarians living in villages have practiced a

form of mutual aid they call Kaláka; a word not directly

translatable into English, but means basically ‘doing

things together’ (Hollos and Maday 1983). Houses would

be built for young married couples, children looked

after, and crops gathered in through complex reciprocal

arrangements often based on blood ties. In a largely

rural country, these arrangements were not disrupted by a

communist regime that largely left the villages to fend

for themselves (Sik and Wellman 1999:225). A large

‘second economy’ was also tolerated as a pragmatic

solution to problems of state planning and limited

16

resources. Workers in state owned companies in urban as

well as rural areas would work in their own co-operatives

in their own time, with the toleration of the employers

and the state, often using the equipment from their first

job (Hann 1990; Swain 1992). Like their rural

compatriots, they would also work on their own vegetable

plots, and build houses together (Kenedi 1981). As long

as the fundamentals, the supremacy of the Communists (the

Hungarian Socialist Workers Party - MSZMP), the position

of the Soviet Union, and Hungary’s place within COMECON

were not challenged, economic liberalism, foreign travel,

a measure of free speech (but not the right to organise)

and levels of consumer consumption above their neighbours

were possible for Hungarians (Pickvance 1997; 1998).

This ‘goulash communism’ led to Hungary being known

as the ‘happiest barracks in the camp’. Kaláka in the

villages, co-operative housebuilding, and the ‘second’,

entrepreneurial economy took off some of the pressure

caused by the failing state economic planning system; but

Hungarians also lived a schizophrenic existence in a

17

state that was that was formally committed to state

planning while not acknowledging either its shortcomings

or the state repression required to keep Hungary in the

Soviet orbit. The result of this two-track existence,

Swain (1992:12) argues, was a dual morality and dual

society as Hungarians developed two sets of values; one

for public display indicating conformity with socialist

values, and one private when working in the second

economy and with the family, which recognised that it was

only through individual or family-based efforts that

people would survive, let alone get ahead. The slippage

between public ideology and everyday reality led not only

to a loss of confidence in the system and a crisis of

legitimacy, but to atomisation, passivity, a decline in

altruism and values of social solidarity, and a

perception that violation and evasion of official norms

would be rewarded materially through the second economy

(Korosenyi 1999:13).

However, from the early 1980s, university-based

intellectual clubs mushroomed to discuss current issues

18

and problems of the day. The late 1980s saw a

mushrooming of peace, ecological and young people’s

movements (Arato 1999). The ecology movement had a

particularly strong impact given the mass of

environmental problems besetting post socialist Hungary,

examples including a major mobilisation against a Danube

dam project as well as a variety of locally based

discussion clubs, demonstrations, petitions, and moves

for the recall of politicians. They initially rejected

overt, party politics, but focused on building

associational life - civil society. These movements

together effectively won the battle for an independent

public sphere when free association was legalised in

January 1989. Hungarian civil society deprived the

communist regime of legitimacy at the exact time it was

internally losing confidence and when the Soviets made it

clear that they would not intervene.

But at a deeper level, transformation was negotiated

from above, not forced through from below as in the DDR.

While there were significant levels of organisation from

19

below in the 1980s in Hungary, reformers in the communist

SZDSZ who, by the 1980s had lost confidence in the

command economy (O'Neil 1998) negotiated pluralism from

above in a formal ‘round table’ process with

representatives of civil society organisations.

Hungary’s transition was consequently peaceful, but many

activists felt this was yet another example of a long-

term trend of changes being imposed from above. The

‘demobilisation thesis’ (Arato 1999) also holds that

social movements in Eastern Europe were less active after

1989 once they had ‘won’ and complex society was emerging

to meet needs they were formerly arguing for. New

political parties emerged, populated by actors from civil

society, and drawing away many of the sectors’ best

activists.

From the perspective of elites, civil society needed

to be demobilised for agreements to be made on a new

system of governance and to make the hard choices around

issues such as Hungary's debt, 'over generous' social

security, and unemployment. For Offe structural

20

adjustment required a holding back on democratic demands to

facilitate original accumulation and the building of a

market economy (Offe 1995 quoted by Adam 1999:1).

Bartlett argues that in Hungary, a relatively weak

democracy helped facilitate the quick establishment of a

market economy as activists were channelled into “the

electoral arena, where the segments of East European

society most vulnerable to economic adjustment were least

well represented in the early post communist years.”

(Bartlett 1997:38, emphasis in the original). Transition

also led to the break down of mutual aid and second

economy relations built around employment as state-owned

factories were privatised and then closed. Kaláka

networks built on kinship relations broke down as people

increasingly had to work harder and travel further for

increasingly hard to come by work.

Into the later 1990s the situation was not that

improved. (Bartlett 1997:256) argues that Hungary is a

‘quasi democracy’ where poor links between the political

parties and the grassroots and lack of a civil society

21

meso-level add to feelings of powerlessness and of the

poorest being left behind with little support. Economic

performance did not reach pre-transition levels until

1998. A new neoliberalised NGO sector emerged that saw

itself as part of a 'modern' three-sector mixed economy

of welfare provision, a sector more in tune with the

changes than the more radical movements of the 1980s who

were demobilised after transition. (Kuti 1997; Pók 1997;

Széman 1997). Hungary then displays quite a legacy of

civil society development such that it might be thought

of as one of those societies historically blessed with

strong networks, in Putnam’s terms. However limited by

communism, civil society flourished in tolerated networks

that did not challenge the state and were limited to

mutual aid. The paper will now go on to examine in more

detail the experience of one such CSO, green money under

transition.

22

V Green Money in Hungary: Talentum and Kör1.

Green money networks are formed around a network

that creates a form of currency that members agree to

accept from each other, which they back by their

agreement to provided goods and services reciprocally to

the network. Hungarian Greens knew about green money

from international links and arranged for the translation

of environmental literature on green money into

Hungarian. An Austrian NGO Hilfe that worked with people

with disabilities linked up with Greens to organise a

number of conferences on ecological issues, at which the

idea was promoted. The first group, Budapest Talentum

was established in 1994, and grew to 102 members in 1999.

An ecologist working in a Steiner school in Gödöllõ, a

small town just outside Budapest then established the

country’s second scheme. He captures the spirit of those

early days:

1 The author undertook research in Hungary in 1999, 2000 and2003. Thanks to the many Hungarian colleagues who helped me withthis research, but Éva Izsák needs special mention for her hard workorganising visits and her excellent support with translation. Thanksto the British Council and ‘Local Economy’ journal for funding theresearch. The usual disclaimers apply.

23

“I looked at the political changes, … there are

great troubles with currency fluctuation, currency

movement and how it circulates between people, there

are many obstacles: there is enough money, but not

in the right places, money doesn’t work. There are

different powers in people, different abilities,

they can do anything. Other people need things, but

they don’t meet each other because the currency … is

not able to circulate. I was so interested in

different, alternative currencies and I felt that

there’s no way to start a scheme which at

governmental level changes everything, in currency

system, so I thought that OK lets start it at a

community level”. Gábor, organiser, Gödöllõ

Talentum.

The civil society institutions that began to emerge

were increasingly supported by western aid agencies to

develop a civil society infrastructure as part of dual

transformation, and developed institutional links with

24

western NGOs to import ideas that might help address some

of Hungary’s problems. The poor economic conditions in

the early and mid 1990s, high levels of unemployment, and

a feeling that social solidarity was breaking down in the

face of hegemonic neo-liberalism led the Association for

Nonprofit Human Services for Hungary (ANHSH) to look for

ways to strengthen community. They felt that the

revitalisation of mutual aid could be a way of helping

those affected by the economic changes, and to take up

the gaps caused by IMF-induced cuts in welfare in 1994.

One such solution to these problems might be green money.

As part of a commitment to strengthen the managements of

civil society organisations, from 1998 to 2000 ANHSH was

funded by the British Council to develop local money

schemes in Hungary. The British Council saw green money

as “a self help and mutual aid tool and multiplier for

communities and the voluntary and non-profit sectors.”

(British Council 1999, personal communication). ANHSH

were not looking to supersede the ‘home-grown’ Budapest

Talentum, more to use green money to develop the capacity

of the Hungarian NGO sector and to work throughout

25

Hungary, at a scale that Budapest Talentum was neither

capable of nor interested in doing.

ANHSH brought a study group composed of members of

Hungarian NGOs to the UK in 1999 to learn from UK

experience of local currencies. On their return to

Hungary, green money ‘circles’ were started (in

Hungarian, ‘Kör’2) in the cities of Szolnok and Miskolc in

the relatively deprived east of Hungary, and the village

of Tiszalúc near Miskolc. Kör was seen as a 21st century

manifestation of the now ailing Kaláka tradition,

specifically as and “idea or practical method which helps

to build, enrich and develop their community”, as a

method of “developing a sense of community among large

families”, “exploiting the ‘hidden’ resources of

villages, and implementing self-help methods” and as a

“self help system” (ANHSH 1999). The Hungarian

Telecottage Association3 circulated material and a scheme

2 KÖR is an acronym for Közösségi Önsegítõ Rendszer, Community Self-Help Scheme/System.3 Telecottages are information technology centres in rural areas. Typically they will provide internet connection, computers, scanners,fax services and the like to those likely to be excluded from the ‘knowledge economy’.

26

was established by a telecottage in the small village of

Bordány, near Szeged.

Thus we see both sides of the debate on the role of

civil society in transition represented in Green Money.

The original, endogenously-developed Talentum schemes in

Budapest and Gödöllõ were the offspring of 1989. They

saw green money as part of a green alternative to

neoliberalism, a mutually agreed currency that does not

circulate out of the local area and is thus felt to be

economic localiser that benefits local production over

that brought in from outside; interest free (thus more

sustainable as economies do not have to grow to pay

interest on money borrowed); building strong communities;

and more reflective of a community’s real needs and

skills than artificially scarce money (for a fuller

discussion, see Dauncey 1988, Douthwaite 1996, Lang

1994). In contrast, Kör, introduced by the

Association, was seen as a mutual aid system, a community

builder as a response to the pathologies of

transformation, but not going beyond capitalism into free

27

economic relations, the hopes of radical civil society in

1989. What does their experience say about the efficacy

of these two conceptions of civil society?

VI Constructing civil society: the experiences of Kör

and Talentum.

Experiences were mixed. Budapest Talentum, and

Szolnok and Bordány Kör survived through to 2003 while

Gödöllõ Talentum; and Miskolc and Tizalúc Kör were all

discontinued when progress was felt to be insufficient.

While some of the successes and failures were due to

technical problems with green money systems - issues

encountered by similar programmes elsewhere - others were

more generic problems that illuminate political, cultural

and systemic problems around constructing civil society,

be that endogenously through connections to transnational

activist networks, or exogenously through NGO and donor

activity. The table below summarises the six schemes:

28

Insert table one about here

The most successful of the Hungarian green money

networks, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Talentum in

Budapest. By 2003, it had 150 members, but only a small

number were active. The main items traded were basic

services like gardening, window cleaning, computer work,

teaching English, babysitting, but also more esoteric

services such as bio farming. Also fairly successful

was Szolnok Kör, established in 1999 by members of the

Civic Regional Association, an NGO, who had taken part in

the UK study tour. Membership grew to 300 members at its

height, who met at fairs. Most exchanges were of

clothes, and when traders asked for a place to store the

clothes between fairs space was found in an empty flat on

a housing estate that then developed into a charity

clothes shop. As trading through the directory did not

take off, their local money, Green Forints, were used

overwhelmingly to lubricate the exchange of clothes

deposited and bought at the shop. By 2003 the shop had

29

200 members, but the exchange of services beyond clothes

was minimal (three or four a month).

Bordány Kör was established by the telecottage

organiser who wanted to reward volunteers who worked for

the village “Association for Cultural and Leisure

services” writing articles for and distributing the

community newsletter, setting out the chairs for the

community cinema, distributing flyers for local

businesses, helping run a youth summer camp, and looking

after clients at the telecottage. In 2003 there were 76

members, all from Bordány, and aged 10 to 30. The

currency, the Bordány Crown, was linked at parity to the

Hungarian Forint. Accounts were kept on computer and

local money accounts were electronically linked to the

telecottage’s payment system, enabling fees to be paid

automatically in crowns. The scheme was moderately

successful in that it involved many of the village’s

young people who spent the crowns they earned getting

discounts for use of the computers in the telecottage.

They used the Internet, played computer games, or used

30

services like photocopying or sending faxes, but elderly

people did not join. In both Bordány and Szolnok, then,

while Kör survived, the extent that services were being

traded was limited.

The other three schemes did not last. Gödöllõ

Talentum had more than a hundred members at its height in

2000 out of a city with a population of 25,000. An

average months trading was November 1999 when 150

transactions were recorded with a turnover of 15,000

Green Forints, which is equivalent to 45,000 Hungarian

Forints (£121). Interpersonal services traded that month

included use of a taxi, English lessons, a haircut,

baking, babysitting, bread making, plumbing, dentist

services, and clothing, while market trades included

selling slippers, herbs, honey, and pumpkins. The scheme

was closed in 2000 when the key activist failed to

sustain interest in a programme that, while working, did

not fulfil his political goals. Miskolc Kör was

established by another ANHSA contact who went on the UK

trip on a housing estate in a part of Miskolc in 1999.

31

It grew to about 40 people, but only 10-15 of them were

ever active. However, after a year this key activist

then moved to another part of Miskolc and stopped running

the Kör, which then faded away.

Tiszalúc Kör was, for a time, more successful.

Tiszalúc is a small village of about 5600 people in

Miskolc district. The Kör was set up by an NGO, the

Association of Large Families in early 1999, again by an

activist who participated in the trip to the UK. By

December 2000, there were seventeen members exchanging

services in the village with a currency called the Kör

point, based on hours. Members met in each other’s

houses twice a month in what they described as a nice

friendly atmosphere involving new members and their

children who were mostly incomers to the village. The

members of Tiszalúc Kör who took part in a group

discussion in December 2000 gave a feel for the sort of

people who join networks like Kör. The group included an

unemployed man who used to be a police officer. He

joined to make friends in the community, and traded

32

services such as repairing cars (which he also did for

cash). He traded seven or eight times a month, with two

or three people and he described himself as one of the

most active traders. He felt that the greatest success

was getting together a strong, small community who cared

about each other, and share and solve problems. He

wanted ten more people to join in the year, and be able

to trade garden produce, luxuries like a televisions or

expensive goods like winter coats.

Another Tiszalúc Kör member was a mother with four

small children who had been at home for 14 years, and in

the village for 11. She joined to meet a friendship

circle, and offered babysitting and use of her home for

meetings. She used kitchen supplies and household goods,

and traded with other families to get things that she

otherwise would buy. She felt that Kör was like a big

family, a good group of friends, and a larger group to

call on that still has a family feeling. A strength was

that it had a large percentage of people who had moved

into the village. A third member described himself as a

33

full time ‘mother’ who looked after three children at

home. The family moved here from Budapest as his wife’s

parents lived in Tiszalúc, but he felt like an outsider.

He joined to make friends, and offered agricultural

produce such as honey, sour cherries, and paprika as the

family produced more food than they needed in their large

garden. He also drew pictures and book illustrations. He

needed use of a car, and friends for advice in solving

problems. He got things delivered by car.

A final example was a man who moved to Tiszalúc six

years before, joined to make new friends, and offered

cutting glass, wood, welding and joining, but as he

worked twelve hours a day, he had little time. He hoped

to make a boat and was looking for help with this. He

could sew, paint and described himself as just the sort

of person a small network needs as he can do a bit of

everything. He wanted the circle to be bigger as the

needs that people had were greater than the circle could

fulfil. He found the circle useful because as a state

employee his salary was very low and his wife had health

34

problems so it was good to get support from a network

which would be hard to reproduce in any other way as,

working long hours, he did not have time to build

friendships. Kör built a network for him, and provided a

structure based on reciprocity.

However, while the network seemed healthy when

visited in December 2000, Tiszalúc Kör did not last. The

key activist moved away, and the members gradually

decided that in this small village the currency was

getting in the way of building friendships, and kaláka-

like mutual aid. Green money networks in Hungary, then,

remained small.

VII Building civil society through Kör and Talentum.

All the networks were small, but that does not

necessarily mean that they were ineffective as mutual aid

mechanisms as networks are important in negotiating post

communism. In their study of house building, academic

and managerial networks in the transition from communism

35

to capitalism, Sik and Wellman (1999:225) argued that

under post communism “the permeability, fluidity and

uncertainty of post-communism have fostered even greater

reliance on networks.” Consequently, “everyone invents,

develops, or copies strategies and tactics to cope (to

protect against threats) or grab (to make a fortune)”.

Social capital, then, becomes fundamentally important for

survival in transition economies and people who do not

have them, perhaps as they have moved, might be expected

to be attracted to a network that provides connections.

Gödöllõ Talentum found this to be the case:

“lonely people (joined, people) in a special

situation, for instance a crippled old lady who had

a shortage of social contacts, other people, women

divorced … retired people. … So people who had a

shortage of social contacts. … Immigrants from

Transylvania who also looked for social contacts …

(thinking) ‘Ok. This is a nice group of people. I

feel good, good music; maybe we will look what comes from

this. Good contacts with people, maybe useful contacts in business or

36

in help getting a job or something like that’.“ Gábor, organiser,

Gödöllõ Kör, my emphasis.

In Tiszalúc, Sándor the organiser joined to meet new

friends on moving to the countryside.

“I moved from Budapest to Tiszalúc and did not have

local relations. I’m a community person, like

organising and was there for a year, just saying

hello, no relatives. I joined the Association of

Large Families … and heard about Kör from the

Association. I decided I wanted to join a group but

there was no group so we started with four people. …

The next six months six or seven more people, seven

or eight more families.” Sándor, organiser, Tiszalúc

Kör.

Incomers did join these networks, seeing them as ways

that could provide social capital, established (activists

called them ‘conservative’) residents did not trust what

they saw as untested new gimmicks.

37

The new networks people joined were effective at

solving those sorts of problems that can be addressed a

neighbourhood scale given the limited resources available

at the network. In Tiszalúc, Sándor argued that “if you

worked actively you could get ten per cent of your needs

through the circle and it could have stayed like that if

we had got new members. Then people could feel the

economic benefit. Could see it.” This finding is

perhaps due to Tiszalúc’s rural location in an

impoverished part of Hungary where many members had

gardens, and as a result food was available on the

network. Unemployed people had time, and people lived

close to each other. In Szolnok, the charity shop

developed into a contact point for the solving of wider

problems:

“(I) provide other help … for example give the name

and address of a dentist who is five times cheaper

than the others and other good services, and I do

that as its good to do something for people. …. We

38

have a member who has four children and she’s at

home with the youngest who is two months old and …

she makes sewing for a living and there is another

member she came to the shop and took her clothes but

there was sort of a problem that needed to be fixed,

and I gave the contact of the sewing machinist to

that lady.” Erika, organiser, Szolnok Kör.

“People don’t just come to get clothes here, but

also to meet with others, discuss things, and also

get other help from the shop.” Ferenc, organiser,

Szolnok Kör.

Secondly, the two Talentum groups operated as clubs

for the ecologically minded who could experiment with

green money, between themselves, without worrying about

more widespread usage – let alone attempting to solve

problems of transition. For those with experience of

repression just being able to freely participate was

enough and the size of the group was irrelevant. This is

not a criticism: their attitude mirrored that of Polish

39

dissident Jacek Kuroń: “in the light of what has been

accomplished, I look back in astonishment. It was all so

simple then. What we wanted was to read books, talk to

each other freely, to collect money for people needing

help: the simplest human actions. Yet one can organise a society

around these simple actions and goals, and this very fact is like a time bomb

ticking away under totalitarianism.” (quoted by Kaldor 2003:53 my

emphasis). Talentum members enjoyed the freedom that

they had won for themselves in 1989.

In fact, some key activists were more concerned that

the group should keep its environmental ethos and

anticapitalist critique, and not become a large self-help

programme thereby implicitly facilitating the economic

changes they did not approve of. Gábor in Gödöllõ argued

that the network that Talentum made visible was “a very

good point and an advantage, a great achievement, it

brought together those people who earlier were

disconnected and so on. But, you know, it was indifferent

that I made … an alternative currency or just a yoga

course or vegetarian group. It did not matter.”

40

Consequently, he did not maintain engagement with

something that did not interest him. He wanted a

radical, anticapitalist green money scheme, not a support

network to facilitate transition.

Green money then did work, to a limited extent, in

connecting the unconnected to new networks through which

they could get help with those general problems solvable

within the resource constraints of the group; meet

specific needs the network was designed to facilitate,

and meet new people. Nevertheless, the extent that this

happened was limited as trading levels were so low. In

Budapest, given a membership of 150 spread across a city

of over 1.8 million, the mutual aid element of the group

was less important than the politics. György, an

organiser, Budapest Talentum felt “Talentum is not big

enough to be a real group, a real community. It’s an

interest group for likeminded people. It does not

provide security.” Why, then, did green money not grow to

a greater extent?

41

VIII Problems of creating civil society: Why did green

money not take root?

The first problem activists reported was of

credibility. The unconvinced saw the attempt to recreate

the traditions of Kaláka as a romantic throwback to a

mythical, happy past idyll that could not work in the new

conditions of transition economies, in a complex society

like modern Hungary:

“I explained that when people help each other in the

villages that’s Kaláka and its similar to that ….

They knew about it but they are not using it, only

neighbours and relatives are helping each other out,

lending things to the others and the difficult thing

was for them to think about how it could work in a

wider circle, and how they could get their

investment back … in towns it’s more usual that

people don’t have those close relationships anymore.

Everyone is just watching TV, they don’t have strong

contacts with each other anymore, it’s an atomised

42

society, so neighbourhood was another thing in the

town that was not very, sort of, developed.”

László, organiser, Miskolc Kör.

“Traditionally we have, we have traditions of self

help or helping each other like the Kaláka and

people say that that’s a good thing, it worked ….

(but) they don’t really feel that the circle could

replace Kaláka.” Ferenc, organiser, Szolnok Kör.

In social capital terms we can analyse this as people

trusting the ‘bonding’ networks they already had, to

their friends, and ‘bridging’ networks to likeminded

people (for example, the Greens attracted to Budapest

Talentum); but they did not trust Kör as a ‘linking’

network to people they did not know unless they were

incomers who lacked networks (Field 2003:65).

This might be because they did not understand Kör,

or understood it very well, but rejected it as not

meeting their needs. A second set of problems centred on

43

prospective member’s inability to understand how to use

mutual aid networks, or to visualise what the

possibilities could be if the network were bigger. One

legacy of communism was that older vulnerable people

found it hard to negotiate, to ask for help, to work the

network. They were used to Hungary’s paternalist system

where there was a kind of safety in return for political

conformity. Working the new networks required skills

that those on the sharp end of transition did not have,

and Kör did not build them:

“Within the group, when they made trades, they

couldn’t really discuss and argue about the value of

it. Negotiating skills, but not just the price but

also the services that I need that you can provide

me with … they couldn’t really use it, they didn’t

have practice. … in the communist era, they got

used to that there is one opinion provided by the

Party and they couldn’t have their own opinion,

their own ideas, act according to their own ideas,

so they just didn’t have the skills to deal with it.

44

… the new system requires new skills but they don’t

have it. Everybody had a job under the socialist

era. People were told where they have to go, for

example if they didn’t get a job they knew where

they are supposed to go …but now its very different,

now you have to look for the opportunities and now

you don’t have these skills.” László, Miskolc LETS.

While youngsters used Kör in Bordány, older villagers did

not join the scheme as the telecottage was seen as a

place for young people, and rather public for carrying

out business affairs. Secondly, while young people

joined and did help each other out with schoolwork,

fixing bikes and motorbikes, helping out in each other’s

gardens and the like, but they didn’t exchange crowns for

this.

A third set of problems focused on the problem when

people did understand Kör but it did not meet their

needs. While ecologically minded people used the network

45

to meet like-minded people, as ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’

capital that connected them to similar people, green

money did not work so well as ‘linking’ capital, that

connects to different, unconnected people who have

resources that vulnerable people want (Field 2003:65).

People did not feel that they needed the sort of support

that green money provided. Two Transylvanian incomers to

Budapest Talentum, Csilla and Otto, felt that their new

Hungarian neighbours saw themselves to be relatively

wealthy, not needing help:

“I still speak as an outsider. My experience with

Hungarian people is that … its not a very high

level of life, but they act as if … it’s a real

shame to be poor. In Hungary it feels if something

is old you throw it away, you feel ashamed to use

it. In Romania people are much poorer than here, and

they got used to it. I’m poor and you are poor, most

of the people. Here people think, ‘I’m not that

poor, I don’t need that, I don’t need to make

transactions like this”. (Csilla)

46

We do not know if those of which Csilla spoke were

in need of help, despite their self-perception as

relatively wealthy when contrasted with Romanians. It

could be that the unconvinced felt that green money was a

network, but the wrong kind of network. Green money

activists felt that the organic, blood relationship of

families with little social connection outside small

isolated villages had been replaced with Sik and

Wellman’s ‘grab’ networks: more diffuse, private,

invisible networks that allow those that have them to get

ahead. To make them visible, to codify them, as is the

case (and a claimed advantage) of green money networks is

to remove the specific ‘club’ advantage (DeFilippis 2001)

members of the network have over their economic

competitors in an ever changing, unpredictable

environment. If everyone can access the network, it

ceases to provide advantages to those ‘in the know’, so

people tend to keep their networks close to their chest,

not publicise them:

47

“Under goulash communism we had this blood relation.

It was quite a strong relationship among people. I

think that the situation is different as after the

changes, (as) those people who have got some

talents, have entrepreneurial skills, they started

to build relationships with those who are above

them, …. with those who are in higher position than

they are, and they didn’t really care about their

previous relationships. They just acted according

to their interests and tried to … build

relationships according to their career.” László,

organiser, Miskolc Kör.

Networks were required, but not networks like Kör,

fuelled by green, localising agendas. The services

Hungarians wanted, access to jobs, contacts, business

support, a ‘grab’ network, a ‘get ahead’ network, not a

‘get along’ one (let alone an anticapitalist one!). This

was not available in a network of post materialists.

Those who did not have these networks found it hard to

construct them, and while the green money networks did

48

act in ways their enthusiasts hoped, that is provide a

way of formalising hidden networks and making them available

to those outside them, the networks formalised were of

greens, not those with new resources.

Activists consequently commented on the way Kör did

not resonate in Hungary’s materialist post communist

environment, a condition they bemoaned, if they

understood.

“I think that the main problem is that what we got

from the West, the commercialisation that we got

here, the materialistic point of view, is ‘getting …

the money’. It’s the money at the end that works.

People feel that’s what they can get, reach, they

will get more money and then they will be able to

buy everything for the money.” (Otto, Budapest

Talentum).

Environmentalist and money reform enthusiast Gábor, from

Gödöllõ, felt that Hungarians wanted insertion into the

49

world market: “people trust in the national currency,

people trust in the world economic system, so very few of

them who feel that something has to be changed.”

Hungarians wanted what critics would call the ‘dark side’

of social capital, those exclusive networks of Bordieu

that confer specific advantages on their members; not the

open networks of Coleman and Putnam (Field 2003): 11-39,

74-81).

A fourth set of problems centred around a lingering

distrust of the new, of small groups. Kör activists in

particular found that the legacy of dictatorship

lingered, especially for those who were politically

active or conscious in the communist era. Many of the

driving forces of Budapest Talentum were former

environmental or religious activists who had first hand

experience of the communist era distrust of non-party

organisations, and the repression this entailed. They

reported a residual fear that joining a group was a

dangerous thing to do. In the communist era, small

groups of trusted people were acceptable, but newcomers

50

might not be what they seem. Activists therefore found

considerable scepticism about new, untested groups and

their effectiveness:

“It’s the historical situation. I was born in 1951

so I have lived most of my life in the socialist

period. Then, it was dangerous to join a group and

organise a group. So people have not got used to

joining a group. … No independence until recent

years. These experiences are built into your genes,

so you have to take a deep breath before you do

anything like join a group …. For six years I had

no passport as a penalty for organising youth camps

to understand the countryside, and ideological

camps.” György, organiser, Budapest Talentum.

These findings echo Hann’s ethnographic study of

Hungarian villages which found close, bonding networks

that distrusted outsiders and which had considerable

nostalgia for a more secure, if less free, past (Hann

1992).

51

A fifth set of problems, perhaps unsurprisingly for

students of mutual aid, centre on overcoming problems of

everyday life for the vulnerable under transition. A

major issue was lack of time given work commitments,

especially for those working long hours, perhaps with two

jobs, for low pay. Ferenc from Szolnok Kör found that

“people were working very, very hard for low salaries, so

they did not get too much income and they didn’t really

have the time and energy to meet and contribute given all

the other things in their life……newly-retired people have

to continue to find a job here, and those who are able to

work they can find one so they don’t have energy and

time”. Sándor from Tiszalúc found that people working

long hours did not have the energy for mutual aid: they

wanted light relief:

“In Hungary, people do not have as much time as

people in the West, we work much harder and don’t

have time to take care of each other, relatives and

the human side of things, …. or watch television,

52

try to escape from reality. They don’t see the hope,

don’t fill their life with real things.”

Putnam would approve of Ferenc’s identification of

television as a destructor of civic life. The other side

of lack of time, for those without work, was lack of

money and isolation. It takes a minimum amount of money

to participate in mutual aid as materials might need to

be bought, you might need tools or work clothes, fuel or

a bus fare to travel to trade, and for the very poorest

this might be beyond their means. This was a particular

issue in Szolnok for a scheme based on a relatively

isolated outer housing estate:

“those who are on low income can’t really afford the

ticket for the bus, they won’t go by bus to the

garden area and do work, they stay here. There are

people who don’t even go to the city for months, two

or three months.” Erika, organiser, Szolnok Kör.

53

Lack of money also led to estate residents who had bought

their home being evicted when they were unable to pay

their utility bills, leading to a disruption of the

network for all and exclusion from it for those directly

affected:

“On this estate, at least 50 per cent of these

families are lone parents and they are members of

the shop. They have a long relationship with

families, and if the couple get divorced … they can

come in, the lone parents, and this relationship

continues and they can have services from the shop,

or they can buy clothes here. The problem only comes

when they don’t even have enough money to pay their

bills, and after a while they have to move out from

the estate and then the relationship just stops.”

Erika, organiser, Szolnok Kör.

People then found green money unconvincing either as

they did not understand the power of networks or did not

have the skills to use them, and were wary of networks

54

beyond their kin. If they did understand networks, they

were often prevented from joining through a lack of

resource, primarily time and money. All these problems

prevent networks from developing into what could be

robust mutual aid institutions, so they tended to stay as

small, personalised, bonding networks that withered away,

unless an ecological consciousness meant that people

joined the networks to meet likeminded people. But then

Gábor from Gödöllõ’s objection comes in: without an

environmental consciousness, then network benefits could

have come from any institution provided it was large and

diffuse enough, and if the ecological consciousness was

enough, then why grow the group – Budapest Talentum’s

perspective?

This dilemma led to a final reason why green money

networks did not grow was a problem of commodification.

The two objectives of green money, setting up an

environmental form of money based on local networks, and

the mutual aid objective, cut against each other as the

environmentally minded often regarded green money as an

55

unwelcome commodification of mutual aid networks that

they felt worked better through reciprocity. Green money

seemed either superfluous or unwelcome. This could be

for moral, or instrumental reasons. Gábor, in Gödöllõ,

set up his scheme to help lubricate and regulate the

running of a Steiner school, which had previously been

undertaken by what he felt was a chaotic and inefficient

system of kaláka-like mutual aid. His proposals were

accepted by his friends at the school in principle as a

good idea, but in practice green money was seen as

commodification:

“(They) rejected this measurement of their effort

and their contribution because .. (they felt) ‘if I

work for money I don’t feel free’. They thought like

this, so a convenient house is better than a

rigorous contract system which, so people rejected,

the leaders felt that, ‘oh I don’t want to work for

money’….. They felt that somehow this was a

devaluation of their contribution ….. they insisted

on old reciprocity, this chaotic system where no one

56

knows who is responsible for doing this or that or

the other, and who made already enough and who is

overloaded or is disappointed.”

In Tiszalúc the members of this small group who joined

for community rather than economic reasons debated why

they needed a formal scheme, whether green money has got

in the way of friendship: “Really good friends help each

other anyway, so why charge? Why calculate? … People

start as traders, become friends and stop using points.”

(Sándor, Tiszalúc Kör). Members asked whether a formal

scheme was too bureaucratic, another state socialist hang

over? Can the old kaláka feeling be recreated without

the use of money by developing a stronger community

feeling in the village irrespective of the extent of

trading, measurable economic activity? In Szolnok, the

lone parents came to the shop to meet each other, and

then solved problems through mutual reciprocity: “those

young mothers who know each other from school, or from

other places, it works without the system because they

are just helping each other out without the system”.

57

(Erika, Szolnok Kör.). While in Tiszalúc the green money

network pulled together a group of incomers who did not

know each other before and created a mechanism for mutual

aid, for those who already had mutual aid networks it

could seem an alien imposition that at worst disrupted

traditional coping mechanisms, at best was superfluous.

IX Conclusion: Building mutual aid institutions in

transition economies.

While it is a commonly held understanding that the

transition to an idyllic western style de Tocquevilleian

democracy requires the creation of civil society

organisations to act as mediators between the state and

the citizen, less is written about the difficulty in

doing this in practice. Kör, then, took some time to

emerge. Was this due to particularly Hungarian

conditions arising from a popularly individualistic

society, or were problems applicable to transition

economies more widely?

58

Some of the problems were generic to green money and

were founded and replicated elsewhere in other countries.

These included the low level of trades, the lack of

resources accessible by already poor people, the

preponderance of members with a green ethos, the

difficulty in getting those outside green networks to

understand what can seem rather strange and esoteric.

Hungary is not alone here. Internationally, there is some

slippage between claims and the grounded effectiveness of

these programmes (Barnes, North et al. 1996; North 1996;

Stott and Hodges 1996; Williams, Aldridge et al. 2001;

Aldridge and Patterson 2002). If this study shows that

there are problems with green money in Hungary, it should

be remembered that these problems are not confined to

transition economies. Other problems were characteristic

of transition economies generally, such as the break up

of networks under a restructuring economy, insecurity, a

feeling of runaway change, great unmet need. A third

group of problems were specific to Hungary such as an

individualistic political culture, a fear of outsiders

and a trust in family-based solutions.

59

There was no real difference in performance and

sustainability between the networks which grew through

connections to transnational environmental networks

(Budapest, Gödöllõ) and those developed through east-west

development networks. It is early days: Budapest

talentum is only ten years old and the activists are

still enjoying their freedom to organise, connecting a

new group of post-materialist greens who have no wish to

return to communism, but neither do they buy into the new

market-orientated, westernised, consumerist Hungary.

However, the attempt at introducing support from the

west, through the British Council was limited in its

effectiveness. Staff appointed by the non-profit

services association also moved to new jobs, and there

was little follow up of the projects started. A national

network or organisation was not established, something

the Hungarian Green movement also resisted, feeling that

the country was small enough for this to be unnecessary,

but which meant that an institutional support structure

for green money was lacking. External support did not

60

make up for local deficiencies or a lack of experience in

running and developing sustainable civil society

organisations.

All the schemes suffered from a lack of key

activists continuing to act as ‘engines’ for the

networks, ensuring that members meet, producing a

directory, keeping accounts, dealing with problems,

promoting the idea. Activists got jobs, moved town, or

got burnt out, and their schemes did not so much fail as

fade away. The key activists did stop organising their

groups quite quickly. Civil society organisations do

take time to mature, and when quick success was not

achieved, activists did something else, perhaps wasting

the work that had been achieved to date. This may be due

to the ‘demobilisation thesis’ (Arato 1999), over-

optimistic aspirations fuelled by civil society boosters,

a lack of commitment to what was, for those associated

with ANHSH a job, not a political commitment; or just

inexperience. This is not been a problem limited to

Hungary – it is one for social movements everywhere – how

to win new resources to run their operations without

61

burning members out? Nevertheless, Budapest Talentum in

particular stands as a small, but tangible, reminder that

in 1989 another future for east/central world was

possible, and still is. The final word goes to Csilla

from Budapest, reminding us that the future is to be

constructed. It is not set:

“I think we are another generation. Not the one they

expected, but another one. We are trying to find our

way, OUR way. … we don’t want to be something that

we are expected to be. We want to be, we are trying

to get our way of expressing things, to be

ourselves, without the limitations put down by

others.”

Table One: the six Hungarian schemes studied.

Scheme Dateestablishe

d

Instigator Location Maximummembershi

p

Survived to2003?

Budapest 1994 Greens,transnational

Capitalcity

150 yes

62

networks,

Hilfe.Gödöllõ 1999 Greens,

SteinerSchool

Suburbantown

100+ no –leader

itcloseddown

Szolnok 1999 CivicRegionalAssociat

ion

Provincial town

300 yes, buttransformed intocharityshop

Miskolc 1999 Youthand

Community

Centre

Rustbelt

provincial town

indepressed east

40 no –activistleft

district.

Tiszalúc 1999 Association ofLarge

Families

Villagein

depressed east

17 no –membersfelt itwas

superfluous

Bordány 2001 Telecottage

Association,

Association forCultural

andLeisureServices

Villagein south

76 yes

63

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