2. CONCEPTUALIZING OPEN SOCIETY
This captive situation in which people had found themselves under totalitarian system of governance, generated a strong opposition named “Solidarność”. This movement played the main role in the 80’s. It was a turning-point, and many dissidents were deeply engaged in it. People believed in their program and their aim, which was to lead up to collapse of a communist regime. However they had not clearly specified details for the further future, they didn’t know what to do next, after the transformation. They hoped that the society can be transformed in a natural way without any specified agenda. But it wasn’t so. The idea of open society required some background, some foundations on which it would be possible to build a healthy democratic, liberal, tolerant and totally independent society.
According to the definition, the “open society” in contrary to the “closed society” is a kind of society with liberty of thoughts, liberty of confessions, and where wide variety of behaviours can coexist. The governance is under public control, it is not banned to go abroad or to keep in touch with the people from different countries. Education is to provide knowledge, not to indoctrinate etc.
Great philosopher and sociologist, Henri Bergson, originally used this concept to describe a social behaviour. Later it was evaluated by Karl Popper. Henri Bergson said that governance, which should be tolerant and responsive, and political mechanisms, should be transparent and flexible. The state doesn’t hide anything, keeps no secrets to public. Introducing such kind of society is impossible in an authoritarian or totalitarian regime. Human rights and political freedoms are crucial in developing of open society.
Karl Popper pointed out that a state should be minimized in what it does. Individual citizen cares about his own interest; however governance should “shelter” these citizens by “piecemeal social engineering”. It means: “Rather than engage in grand schemes, government should deal with problems as they emerge, and respond to social or economic deficiencies in an ad hoc manner.”
 The other main assumption that Karl Popper made was pluralism – cultural and political. Open society should not concentrate only on their native citizens. And what is more important is tradition and a moral sense of community.
Before 1989 in Poland there was no statistic about the legal ethnic minorities (one of the founds of the open society). But than, a after transformation the number of association representing ethnic minorities increased rapidly. In 1993, there were 54 minority organizations with at least 50 members each. The majority of these organizations (33) represented Poland’s German minority and had a combined total of 361,000 members. All other minority organizations had some 30,000 members combined. German minority organizations effectively established their own political presence: they run their own representation in the parliament. As in Poland did not have any significant ethnic problems, these organizations focused primarily on cultural issues.

The concept of open society is correlated with a civil society. The civil society is a important condition of open society. The society can not be “open” in that sense, without civic, public behaviour and organization from the bottom. With long and complex history civil society has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance during the 1990s. The existing definition of this term fall into three basis types. First, civil society can be constructed as a specific social space or sphere. It is a space between family (household, domestic society) and the state. Second, it can be defined as a set or system of a specific social and self-organized groups:

• That are relatively independent of both public authorities and private units of production and reproduction, i.e., of firms and families;
• That are capable of deliberating about and taking collective actions in defence/promotion of their interests/passions;
• But do not seek to replace either state agents or private (re)producers or to accept responsibility for governing the polity as a whole;
• But do agree to act within pre-established rules of “civil” or legal nature

Finally, civil society can be defined as a “normative project”, a discourse, a collective dream, that mobilize people to action against the oppressive state. Thinking about civil society as a space and as a set of specific groups. The space must be institutionally established, and guaranteed usually through not necessarily, by legal, particularly, regulations.

There is no rule of law in authoritarian and post-totalitarian system, open society develops only within the confines of the arbitrary autonomy allowed either deliberately or inadvertently by the rules. Totalitarian systems accept only little space of autonomy; authoritarian system are a bit more often tolerate to free, independent associations. They are unprotected by the law  and are subject to arbitrary interference by the authorities. As a set of groups, open society does not exist in a institutionally sheltered area. Furthermore, some of organization may be protected by the authorities, while others are ruthlessy persecuted.
Under state socialism, the principle of uninstitutionalized autonomy allowed the existence of three types of organization:  

• Pseudo-autonomous (for example, official trade unions),
• Semiautonomous (for example, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland),
• “Illegally” autonomous (for example, dissident groups, black-market networks)

In authoritarian systems, where the elite political actors reserve for themselves an almost complete monopoly over political activities, any independent action of society, particularly its third sector, becomes inadvertently political. On the other hand, mobilization for action within dissident groups is unthinkable without the support of familial, kinship, and friendship networks .

Each particular societies in a fully democratic state is different form the others in a organizational way, it’s destiny, which varies significantly across regions and local communities. What is more, these different ways of organization are related to each other in a various ways. They even compete with each other as well (for political access, members, resources). These behaviour can be called as a cooperative forms of public participation. When the actors of  these society interact with the state, their actions become competitive and contentious (like resistance or protest). What is interesting, in open political system, protest becomes a primary form of civil society’s contentious politics. In the late 80s, during the final years of communism, some of organization achieved an autonomy, since than the process of liberalization and internal pluralization was initiated. The end of totalitarian period, many organization were left free and responsible to fend for themselves. Old organizations changed their leaders, save their assets and smoothly adapted to a new democratic environment

During rapid democratization in former nondemocratic regimes, the locus of political power shifts among the three realms. The first phase of democratization, that is, the deconstruction of the old regime, entails the weakening of the state’s coercive capacity and infrastructural power and the political mobilization of organizations and movements within civil society. When such a situation continues during the transfer of power and the establishment of incipient democracy, an anarchic transitory polity may result.

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