Search Results

Civil society plays a central role in democratic regimes. Repressive governments may try to suppress or limit civil society, but so may relatively democratic societies. Historically, this suppression has taken two principal forms: limits on individuals’ rights to assemble or associate and limits on organizations’ or associations’ rights. We provide a simple framework for thinking about the right to associate and the rights of associations, illustrated with examples from US history. We then turn to our principal historical example, tracing the history of limitations on association and civil-society organizations in Prussia from the late eighteenth century until World War I. Prussian governments restricted the right to associate, but they also denied to most civil-society organizations corporative legal rights such as the ability to contract in their own right. We argue that the latter rights are crucial to effective civil-society organizations, and trace the process by which Prussia liberalized its treatment of such groups. We show that similar limitations operated in France in the nineteenth century, even though France after the Revolution had a very different constitutional order. Restrictions on association can be found in quite diverse political environments, even those based self-consciously on the idea of liberty.

Taunts from the Senate, damaging to President Harry S. Truman's claim that he would not tolerate religious persecution in Spain, led him to call for a study of the problem. The ensuing report estimated that there were around 25,000 Protestants in Spain. An estimation following World War I had put the numbers of Christians in Hungary, where persecution had met little response from the American government, at approximately eight million Roman Catholics, four million Greek Orthodox and Uniates, and four million Protestants. Truman's genuine anguish over the plight of the Spanish Protestants was compounded by the fact that persecution of Protestants in Spain was closely connected with the persecution of Freemasons. Truman's freemasonry, in which he followed the pattern of many previous presidents, could be proudly flaunted, but not in relation to Catholicism, from which the Democratic party drew an essential proportion of its vote. This chapter discusses the right of association versus trade and commerce in Spain, Britain, the United States, and other countries in Europe, as well as the status of trade unions and international labour.

Chapter 2 sets out the cornerstone of Confident Pluralism's constitutional commitments: the protections for individuals to form and gather in groups of their choosing. These protections are under pressure from modern changes to the right of association that focus on intimacy and expressiveness. Intimate association protects very few actual groups. Expressive association, which emerges most clearly from Roberts v. United States Jaycees and Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, lacks a coherent framework and leaves certain groups deemed “non-expressive” particularly vulnerable. Chapter 2 explores these ideas through the Top Hatters Motorcycle Club and Muslim Student Associations. It emphasizes the importance of strengthening protections for the voluntary groups of civil society. Let's call this the Voluntary Groups Requirement.