The making of a European civil society: “Imagined”, “practised” and “staged”

The paper tries to go beyond normative debates on what should count as civil society and who is to be identified as being part of civil society by relating such normative claims to the social sites where they are produced and claimed. It starts with the idea of conceiving civil society as a script which is used by a series of collective actors. This performance is structured first by general background conceptions of what a civil society looks like and which are taken up by all those engaging in claiming to be a civil society actor, and secondly by the public to which such performances are addressed. This second dimension is further explored assuming that the public civilizes civil society in terms of accepting or rejecting the performance of particular actors. Thus civil society is reformulated as a process in which the question of who is a legitimate part of civil society is permanently contested by a public that is addressed by these collective actors.