Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Uzbekistani Civil Society: A Gramscian Perspective

Introduction

The concept of civil society has enjoyed, in the last two

decades, an enormous relevance in discourses on

democratisation, particularly in regard to those countries

making the transition from socialism to capitalism. In the

late 1980s, in the wake of dissident movements throughout the

Warsaw Pact bloc, civil society started to be equated with

‘enclaves of independence’ (Babajanian, Freizer, & Stevens,

2005) against the tyranny of the totalitarian Communist

regimes; a ‘social space’ where groups of individuals could

clamour for the respect of the values of justice, freedom,

human rights and democracy. Since then, and increasingly after

1991, civil society has become the philosopher’s stone of

Western thought and practice in its effort to democratise the

Post-Soviet space. However, the authoritarian turn of the

post-communist regimes in Eurasia during the 1990s has given

little satisfaction to those hoping to compel the ex-Socialist

‘other’ to become like the out-dated image of us.

However, if ever valid, the liberal, Lockean definition of

civil society as the sphere of free association amongst

individuals in a State of Law, directly opposed to the

coercive sphere of the State, fails to grasp the dynamics of

state-society relations in Post-Soviet Eurasia in general, and

Central Asia in particular. As Chatterjee (1990: 120) has

pointed out: ‘the state-civil society opposition is too

simplistic an abstraction, for it ignores the profound ways in

which the state and civil society are implicated in and

supportive of each other’.

In fact, by means of its institutions and enclosures, civil

society rather constitutes the site for the disciplinary

deployments of power in modern society, producing normalised

subjects on which hegemony is exerted subtly through consent

(Foucault, 1977).

In addition, civil society is the locus where groups fight for

supremacy, or to say it in Gramscian terms, hegemony:

‘the leading group must generate interests and values

general and broad enough to attract the support of

other groups. Thus, the generation and manufacture of

consent, a hegemonic activity, presupposes a

congruence of economic interests and the formulation

and dissemination of a way of life (and a conception

of the world), throughout the people’ (Fontana, 2006:

55-56).

Starting from these premises, in this essay I will analyse

the dynamics of civil society development in Uzbekistan as a

struggle for ideological domination of society and thus, of

the state.

In modern society, power presents itself as ethico-political,

as the representative of universal values, independent of

narrow economic, social, or class interests (Gramsci, 1971:

257-263). The Uzbek government, as well as the International

(Western) community, embodied in the NGO sector, compete

against each other in a conflict which is identified by

Gramsci as a ‘war of position’: a protracted and long-term

struggle of opposing weltanschauung. Finally, such a conflict

(which occurs within civil society) over the formation and

direction of public opinion determines the content of the

state; thus, the conflict over civil society is simultaneously

the conflict to attain and maintain state power (Fontana,

2006: 74). Nevertheless, in some aspects and to a certain

extent, in Uzbekistan these two conceptions of the world,

which we will simply define as the ‘authoritarian’ and the

‘neo-liberal’, express in turn a tendency in legitimising each

other, as being part of an organic relation, rather than as

unambiguous opposing counterparts in the struggle for ethico-

political hegemony. For instance, the insistence on the mahalla

as local government fulfils both ideological positions, as it

can be considered either a tool for government control (in the

authoritarian paradigm) or, simultaneously, a tool for

government decentralisation (in the neo-liberal paradigm);

NGOs might help consolidate the authoritarian Karimov

government, even though their primary intention is that of

consolidating neo-liberal hegemony; moreover, the kolkhoz,

traditionally a tool of state power and control might fulfil

the role of agent of neo-liberal transformation, and so forth.

In conclusion, all these institutions - NGOs, mahallas, the

kolkhoz – might also help creating the conditions for a

genuine democratic change in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in

Central Asia. However, while recognising the democratic

functions that the concept and reality of civil society have

made possible, we also have to be aware of the functions of

discipline and exploitation that are inherent in and

inseparable from these same structures (Hardt, 1995: 27)

NGOs, the State and the Intellectuals in the Uzbekistani

context: Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony?

Nowadays NGOs have increasingly become to be equated with

(neo-liberal) civil society as a whole. They are believed to

have the potential to further encourage the rolling-back of

the state and make significant contributions to the

liberalisation of social service provision, as well as support

the establishment of a free market and the strengthening of

private property – all ideological dogmas of neo-liberalism.

After all, the downsizing of state power in Uzbekistan is an

aim very few people in the West would disagree with; however,

the process of ‘franchising the state’ (Kamat, 2004), instead

of empowering local communities before their rulers, ends up

in reinforcing the existing structure of social relations

within society and thus, purposely or not, within the state.

Therefore, it is not a mere coincidence that, as noted by

Stevens (2007: 56), today’s indigenous NGO leaders are in many

cases the same individuals that previously held privileged

positions within Soviet Uzbekistan up until independence.

Their post-soviet transformation could be seen as the desire,

common to many post-colonial contexts, of replicating in their

own societies the forms as well as the substance of Western

modernity (Chatterjee, 2004: 174). As such, civil society

becomes the domain of the elite, where a privileged minority

from the intelligentsia seeks to mediate state and individual;

and where the function of civil social institutions in

relation to the public at large will be one of pedagogy rather

than free association, a top-down exercise aimed at the

creation of a new hegemonic project.

Yet, is the neo-liberal project of NGOs authentically

‘counter-hegemonic’ vis-à-vis state power? Does it, in other

words, engage the state on the terrain of the ideological

domination of society?

Let’s take the example of USAID sponsored civic advocacy

programmes for NGOs. One could easily argue that, being USAID

a congressional appropriation, it is inherently hardly non-

governmental, giving to its projects the implicit smell of the

dominant neo-liberal ideology. However, national elites’

aspirations and NGO projects find a common terrain in their

non-confrontational, rather compliant, relation with the

state. For instance, as noted by Mandel (2002: 284), it has

recently emerged in Uzbek society a group of people who

maintain a foot in two camps: the aspiring elite of the

‘indigenous development professionals’ (Mandel, 2002: 280),

who, very pragmatically, while hanging on their poorly paid

yet prestigious government jobs, simultaneously work for new

independent NGOs; in this way state employees assume parallel

roles as directors of NGOs. By means of their positions within

the NGO sector, these ‘intellectuals’ could exercise a very

authoritative role in modifying state/society relations.

Here we have to make a digression by spending few words on

the role of intellectuals in modern societies. Gramsci refers

to intellectuals as performing the key function of supplying

legitimacy and creating consensus on behalf of the ruling

group (Kumar, 1993: 382); even though they continue to perform

the traditional task of mastering the cultural realm,

intellectuals increasingly take on the all-important functions

of the state in the form not of scholars and artists, but of

bureaucrats, technicians, moralists and local potentates

(Brennan, 2001: 173-174); it is in this latter sense that I

refer here to the category of the ‘intellectuals’.

Moreover, the category of the ‘indigenous development

professionals’ fits in what Gramsci identifies as the

‘Southern type’ of intellectual; with ‘Southernism’ Gramsci

refers to a general political quietism purveyed by those

intellectuals whose authority is enhanced by claims to

transnational credentials (Brennan, 2001: 146). Their role, in

the light of a declining power, is that of joining formerly

hostile constituencies into a political syncretism, that

Gramsci names 'transformism', in which the elites co-operate

in order to maintain the status quo. Applied to the Uzbek

case, we can see how these intellectuals work for the

convergence of two previously nominally opposed

constituencies: the Uzbek government and the international, or

better transnational, NGO sector.

As we have briefly discussed above, intellectual elites play

a somewhat contradictory role in mediating state-society

relations in Uzbekistan. On the one hand, they support state’s

goals by accepting and working within the parameters of

official ideology and use their institutional location within

the state as the resource base for their own goals, thus

legitimising and reproducing these same state institutions. On

the other hand, each of these activities has unforeseen

consequences that, to a certain extent, sabotage the nation-

building project of the state (Adams, 2003: 95-96). For

instance, the rewarding careers in the NGO sector clearly

depend on the continuation of an only partially reforming

authoritarian regime, for, as long as the state is perceived

as inefficient and unrepresentative of the interests of the

majority, donors would be more inclined to direct funds

towards the NGO sector and civil society, rather than the

state. On the other hand, they have interest in maintaining

good relations with the state, for if any NGO is seen as too

oppositional, it run the risk of losing funding from donors

whose remits steer them away from funding anything too

political (Stevens, 2007: 57). In this way they apparently

both challenge and legitimise the state. However, being

simultaneously part of both civil society - as the ‘private

apparatus of consensus’ (Morera, 1990: 28), and political

society – as the arena of coercion and domination, i.e. the

state (Gramsci, 1971: 267), intellectuals and NGOs alike

create and maintain the conditions for the hegemony of the

ruling class to persist, since hegemony itself ‘is expressed

through the organic relations between the two realms’ (Kumar,

1993: 382).

These ‘organic relations’ are perfectly expressed by the

creation, in recent years, of NANNOUz (National Association of

Non-Government and Non-Profit Organizations of Uzbekistan); an

entirely governmental creature, within the policy for a

‘strong civil society within a strong state’ (Buxton, 2011:

174). This body is seen by the government as ‘enabling a

coordinated approach in which non-state actors, including the

private sector and state bodies, could work together, and as a

way of channelling and controlling all resources from

government and foreign donors aimed at the sector. The

association was given a fund to work with and the power to

make grants and issue contracts to NGOs’ (Buxton, 2011: 174).

If then, following Gramsci, we accept the conception of civil

society as both shaper and shaped, an agent of stabilisation

and reproduction as well as a potential agent of

transformation (Cox, 2002: 263), we must conclude that, even

though ‘Western assistance projects that strengthen these

organizations [NGOs] […] contribute to a tradition of

independent civic initiative in Uzbekistan’ (Polat, 1999:

149), NGOs and intellectuals in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan act

predominantly as agents of stabilisation and reproduction of

the existing cultural, social, political and economic

hegemonic class, and are unlikely to be able, and most

importantly willing, to build progressive ‘blocks of

democracy’.

In the next section we will analyse the mahalla and the role

that this institution plays in regard to the production of

hegemony; in addition, we will question its potential for

being a resourceful locus for counter-hegemonic civil society.

The Mahalla: Centralising Efforts and Centrifugal Nature

Communal civil society has existed in Uzbekistan for centuries

as a system of ideas and practices through which cooperation

and trust are established in social life. In the pre-Soviet

period, mahallas, or neighbourhood committees, developed

throughout the oasis and urban areas of today Uzbekistan and

Tajikistan as relatively independent associations of citizens:

They brought people living on the same territory

together on a voluntary basis. They were self-

governing and members gathered regularly to exchange

information, decide community problems, provide

support for life-cycle rituals and define public

opinion in neighbourhood mosques and teahouses

(Freizer, 2005: 226-227).

However, this once self-governing and autonomous character of

the mahalla, and of its committee, based on traditions of

community voluntary action, trust, and solidarity network have

been institutionalised in what appears, once again, a

commonality of intents between the Uzbek state and the

international (neo-liberal) community.

Mahallas are fully recognised as governing bodies by the 1995

Constitution (art. 105). The committees’ official

responsibilities include, among others: ‘controlling a local

budget for development of territory and sanitation; assisting

in environmental matters; proposing changes to mahalla

borders, names, streets; distributing land plots; providing

aid to poor families; and appointing ‘prevention inspectors’,

who act as local police and health inspectors (Sievers, 2002:

121). This designation, turning a social formation into an

administrative unit, might be seen as an outcome of the

normalising and disciplining effects of power within civil

society (Foucault, 1977).

Nonetheless, empowering the mahallas’ committees has been

seen by the World Bank as a positive move towards devolution

of central authority to local government (Kamp, 2003: 31)

rather than as a push towards stronger governmental social

control over the lives of individuals.

However, communal traditions continue to exist in tension

with the bureaucratic responsibilities of the mahalla

committee – in some cases merging and in others co-existing in

parallel (Stevens, 2005). For instance, women’s activism to

pressure the government to change certain policies, takes

place mainly within government directed women’s committees

(Kamp, 2003). Nevertheless, all in all, devolution seems to

have supported and strengthened authoritarianism rather than

democratisation. In this case then, the long-serving World

Bank effort of creating a neo-liberal hegemony by supporting

the publishing of articles, reports, and policy advise papers

to directly or indirectly influence public opinion (Gramsci,

1996: 52-53) in favour of devolution and the shrinking of

central state power have produced, eventually, a paradoxical

outcome. The neo-liberal insistence on social spending cuts

have materialised in the mahalla as becoming practically part

of the state structure – carrying out functions of social

control, education and promoting economic development in the

neighbourhood, with little or no state funding; representing a

very successful attempt to exploit the voluntarism of the

community in support of state directed objectives (Stevens,

2005: 282).

This co-optation of communal civil society by the state, even

by instrumentally using the neo-liberal rhetoric, expresses

once more the hegemony of the ruling class in Uzbekistan; in

fact: ‘a group is hegemonic if and when it exercises […]

leadership over others in society, where the latter are

‘allies’ and ‘associates’ of the former’ (Fontana, 2006: 55).

Another important ally of the state in this process of co-

optation might be found in the figure of the oq soqol, the

‘white-beard’ authoritative leader so influential in communal

politics in Central Asia; in its figure the ruling class

hegemony and its attitude towards a revival of traditional

values and practices finds its natural embodiment. As

mentioned above, the supremacy of a social group is manifested

in two ways: as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral

leadership’ (Gramsci, 1971); the white-beards – a term very

obviously gendered – exercise both: the functions of moral and

intellectual leadership which derive from the respect that an

elder, wise man enjoys within the community; and domination by

also patrolling and compiling information about the members of

the community (Sievers, 2002), perfectly explicating the idea

of hegemony as ‘a combination of force and consent which are

balanced in varying propositions, without force prevailing too

greatly over consent’ (Gramsci, 1971: 267).

Abdullaev (2003) argues, in regard to Uzbekistan, that the

experience of 'traditional' Muslim societies shows that they

will never be allies in the task of developing civil society.

However, two observations can be made to confute this point.

Firstly, we can argue that, if civil society is defined as the

Western Lockean model, then it is a truism that that kind of

civil society will probably never appear in any non-Western

context, since a different, specific historical trajectory

will inevitably produce different kinds of institutions. The

judgement and analysis of a society starting from its capacity

to ‘create’, import and reproduce Western values, concepts and

institutions always produces a bitter tinge of colonial

flavour. As Chatterjee (1990: 130) explains, relating to a

post-colonial context: ‘the forms of the modern state are

imported into these countries through the agency of colonial

rule. The institutions of civil society, in the forms in which

they had arisen in Europe, also make their appearance in the

colonies precisely to create a public domain for the

legitimisation of colonial rule’. They might not open their

way through the oasis by means of artillery and cavalry,

though their aim is the same.

Secondly, to define Uzbekistan as a ‘traditional Muslim

society’ would be incorrect, negating the impact of its

centuries-long relationship with the Russian ‘other’, in its

imperial and then Bolshevik manifestations; and, furthermore,

it downplays the way through which the identities and values

of the people of today Uzbekistan have been modified by this

same, even conflictual, relation.

Lastly, in contrast to Abdullaev’s argument, we can identify

a rich tradition of ‘ways of life’ that support notions of

civil society: independent associations of artisans and guilds

that flourished everywhere until they were eventually

suppressed by Stalinist collectivisation; the traditional

mahallas, which provided a considerable sphere for the

development of neighbourhood-level initiative; independent

foundations (waqfs) that maintained shrines, schools, and

public welfare agencies; moreover, even the Muslim tradition

of ‘giving’ (zakat) does create the expectation that a pious

person must take responsibility of others at the local level

(Starr, 1999: 31).

In conclusion, if there is a space for the creation of a

counter-hegemonic civil society in Uzbekistan, this has

inevitably to pass through the reinforcement and expansion of

the scopes and power of certain segments of society, in order

to challenge the authoritarian, patriarchal, and exploitative

ruling class. The role of women is, in this regard, a decisive

one: in a highly patriarchal society, their slow though

constant increase of responsibilities within the mahalla

committee will create a shift in social relations which, being

authentically in contrast with the official state ideology of

male domination, constitutes a tool in the pursue of creating

an authentic counter-hegemonic bloc.

In the next and last section, we will briefly analyse the

relevance of another ‘traditional’ institution of post-Soviet

society, the kolkhoz; and how reforming it might be at the

core of an approach for developing a ‘counter-hegemonic’ civil

society.

Kolkhoz and Civil Society: A Prospect for a Counter-Hegemonic Bloc?

Nazpary argues that one of the most dramatic consequences of

the collapse of the Soviet Union has been the disintegration

of the notion of society at large, and its substitution with a

‘threatening wilderness of violence and crime from which the

individuals take refuge into networks’ (Nazpary, 2002: 89).

Although it has been portrayed as a still essentially stagnant

country in which, unlike most post-Socialist nations, rural

areas have been very minimally impacted by substantial reform,

Uzbekistan has experienced a certain degree of social changes

in the last decades.

The kolkhoz, as an institution of Soviet memory, has retained

in the post-Soviet present a paramount relevance in the lives

and relations of rural Uzbeks; and since Uzbekistan is still a

largely rural country, the kolkhoz assumes an importance as a

locus where social relations shape and are shaped by society.

Its relevance for our analysis here is based primarily on the

fact that as every institution and actor previously analysed,

the kolkhoz too retains the ambivalence of being an actor

which could either reinforce or overturn the current hegemony.

During the Soviet era, the kolkhoz functioned as part of a

‘state-led civil society’: as an economic and social unit

which was controlled by the state as part of the Soviet

political structure, and yet performed civil society

functions; and as a public organisation representing its

beneficiaries vis-à-vis the state (Babajanian, Freizer &

Stevens, 2005). However, rather surprisingly, the kolkhoz was

rather autonomous in its domestic management: generally no

security forces (militias or KGB) were based in its premises

and sometimes not even in the surrounding ‘Soviet of

villages’. The agent of the state was supposed to be the local

Communist Party apparatus, but all party members were by

definition kolkhoz members, born and brought up in the place,

with family links to all the would-be ‘enemies of the people’

(Roy, 1999), so that the collective farm protected its members

from outside state encroachments. This function of social

safeguards and ‘political protection’ is still very much

maintained in today Uzbekistan.

However, there are contradictions in its role. On the one

hand, representing collective identities, the kolkhoz could be

the basis for the creation of a civil society with ‘indigenous

characteristics’, allowing peasants to turn into farmers

whilst retaining social structures which protect them from

both state encroachments and wild privatisation. On the other

hand, it could simply be a tool in the hands of former

apparatchiks trying to retain a social basis for their

political power, with the consent and support of the state

(Roy, 1999: 109). Once again we face the ambivalence of civil

society institutions in their production of a progressive or

conservative hegemony. However, as we have seen above, the new

state bureaucracy, or ‘intellectuals’, are less and less based

on rural networks for its own legitimisation, since they are

becoming increasingly urbanised. During Soviet times the

Communist parties of the Muslim republics did not have access

to the ‘statist’ means of power (army, security forces, custom

duties, etc.); they were obliged to rely on rural networks of

support, from whence they originated. Now that their post-

Soviet inheritors have access to these traditional state

instruments, they need less support from the countryside (Roy,

1999: 117). Therefore, the radical social transformation that

Gramsci equates with ‘transforming the institutions of civil

society from within according to a socialist world-view’

(Morera, 1990: 32) could start with the kolkhoz trying to

modernise and diversify its structures, becoming some kind of

cooperative of autonomous farmers, with an elected leadership,

which join in several activities (Roy, 1999).

Conclusion

In this essay I have tried to identify and analyse some of the

components of civil society in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan,

starting from Antonio Gramsci concept of ‘hegemony’, thus

trying to explain the relations between these social

institutions and the state not merely as opposing each other,

as in a black and white battle between good and evil, but

rather as influencing and shaping one another dialectically.

Moreover, I have argued that the quest for the development of

a Western-type civil society in a non-Western context

resembles neo-colonial aspects of the imposition of ‘our way’

of engaging with social and political dynamics, irrespective

of local traditions, institutions and historical patterns

which are, explicitly or implicitly dismissed as backward and

bankrupt.

As an alternative, I consider institutions such as the

mahalla and the kolkhoz the terrain where the struggle for the

construction of a counter-hegemonic bloc have to be sustained.

This is not to say that these institutions are impenetrable to

the dynamics of power – since, in Foucauldian terms, power is

everywhere and there is no outside to it - or that the

hegemony of the ruling class is not exercised on their

premises. On the contrary, these same institutions are the

primary terrain for the production of consent by the state and

its ruling class; and it is precisely for this reason that

they have to be the locus where a counter-hegemonic bloc has

to emerge. The key ideological factors in creating this

movement are, in my opinion, two. Firstly, the gradual

modification of gender roles, of which women activism within

the mahalla committees is an example; and, secondly, the

revival of communal, cooperative forms of social behaviour by

means of, for instance, an autonomous system of reformed

collective farms.

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