Between Two Civil Societies

Imagine waking up one morning to the news that the government of the country in which you live has collapsed. I don’t mean a violent revolution, a coup, a total breakdown of the state, or a shutdown—but a collapse, where the governing administration and its sitting cabinet are forced out prematurely. Maybe they lost political support or failed a confidence vote from the national parliament, or perhaps they watched their coalition disintegrate in real time.

Whenever and however it happens, watching a government collapse means watching an executive branch lose its ability to govern. But something odd also happens: The underlying constitutional machinery continues to run, absorbing the shock, but doing so without violence. Events like that reveal a hard truth: No matter how established a system feels, its institutions are surprisingly fragile, and political progress is almost always met with a wave of backlash.

This has happened six times during my 10 years living and working in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). By comparison, in my lifetime, only once has the United States come anywhere near close to a formal collapse. Even then, the institutions of civil society stopped it from happening. If I could pinpoint the big difference between civil society in CEE versus the US, it isn’t how often governments fall; it’s that one sector was built assuming they would, and the other wasn’t.

In contrast to the CEE, much of the US nonprofit sector evolved within a historically stable legal, regulatory, and financial framework. This environment enables deep specialization, long-term program planning, and significant organizational overhead. But it often leaves institutions vulnerable when foundational assumptions—such as nonprofit tax exemptions, steady philanthropic flows, or predictable government partnerships—are disrupted.

In CEE, civil society organizations developed within an environment marked by rapid political shifts, backsliding, and fluctuating legal frameworks. As a result, adaptiveness became an operational default rather than an emergency measure.

The stakes are high and the consequences are real, but here people build for instability, treating it more like a feature than a bug; like a persistent nuisance more than a crisis. It’s the baseline from which non-governmental organizations build and plan. In the US, we still treat disruption like a surprise or emergency.

Nonprofits in the US are facing real-time funding cuts and political pressures that groups throughout CEE have already navigated. While the US continues to experience a crisis unfolding, groups in Central and Eastern Europe have built practical responses to keep operating. Learning and adapting some of those approaches is not about ceding ground or acquiescing principles. It’s about survival and endurance, so that something better emerges afterwards.

Telling the Difference Between Hostility and Collapse

In the Visegrad Four (V4) region, a government collapse carries a specific constitutional framing. A collapse occurs when a ruling cabinet loses confidence from the legislature or resigns during a political crisis. The broader state machinery continues operating while top executive authority vanishes overnight. Executive power transitions through established constitutional procedures rather than extrajudicial violence or military coup. This event differs fundamentally from a US government shutdown over budget appropriations.

Between 2016 and 2026, the four member states experienced varying degrees of executive cabinet instability. Slovakia recorded three cabinet collapses due to prime ministerial resignations in 2018 and 2021 alongside a successful no-confidence vote in 2022. Poland experienced two collapses when a sitting prime minister resigned in 2017 and a short-lived government failed a confidence vote in late 2023. Czechia recorded one collapse in early 2018 following a failed mandatory parliamentary confidence vote.

Meanwhile, Hungary recorded zero government collapses during this same period. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán maintained continuous autocratic executive control for 16 years until his ouster in April 2026 because the ruling party held stable legislative majorities through successive general elections.

Distinguishing between general political hostility and the operational fallout of a government collapse is essential for understanding civil society resilience.

Background political hostility involves long-term rhetorical attacks, targeted tax audits, and restrictive legislative proposals. These ongoing pressures create a hostile operating environment without necessarily halting state administrative machinery.

Conversely, a government collapse triggers an immediate and unpredicted structural rupture within state institutions. Executive turnovers freeze public grant disbursements regardless of whether the incoming administration is hostile or friendly. Nonprofit organizations face sudden contract delays because ministry leadership vanishes overnight.

General political crackdowns force organizations to expend resources on legal defense and compliance monitoring over extended periods. In contrast, the fallout of a government collapse presents an immediate liquidity and operational crisis. Bureaucratic decision-making grinds to a halt while civil servants await new political appointments.

Ongoing legislative initiatives and public policy dialogues stall indefinitely during the transition period. Even state-favored organizations experience financial paralysis when funding authorization mechanisms break down. Analyzing civil society survival requires separating chronic legislative pressure from the acute administrative paralysis caused by executive collapse.

Across Slovakia, Poland, and Czechia, executive cabinet collapses repeatedly triggered immediate administrative paralysis across the nonprofit sector. Whether caused by prime ministerial resignations or failed confidence votes, each turnover halted ministerial decision-making, froze annual grant disbursements, and placed multi-year contract renewals in bureaucratic limbo. Independent watchdogs and service organizations alike faced acute funding vacuums and policy stagnation while awaiting caretaker or incoming ministry staff. By contrast, Hungary experienced zero cabinet collapses; continuous legislative control allowed the state to subject independent groups to permanent regulatory pressure and targeted audits rather than abrupt administrative pauses.

Civil Society’s Fragile Existence

In the V4/CEE region, civil society is still fighting for basic legitimacy, struggling to be recognized as something more than “not government.”

When a populist cabinet wants to quiet watchdogs, that neutral label is instantly weaponized as “anti-government.” We see this across the entire region: In Hungary, the state built a formal “Sovereignty Protection Office” specifically to legally harass and target foreign-funded civil society organizations. In Slovakia, the executive branch smeared anticorruption and investigative groups as “Soros-backed subversives” attempting a coup.

In Poland, the ruling coalition weaponized state media to attack critics and redirect public funds toward state-aligned organizations. In Czechia, ruling politicians structurally marginalized watchdogs by splitting “good” service-delivery groups from “political” NGOs to strip them of state funding and advisory seats. When the state controls the dominant media or the dominant narrative, “nongovernmental” becomes a “national threat” overnight.

From policy fights to media attacks, I routinely see and navigate systemic clashes, institutional infighting, and uncertainty more in Europe than I did in the US. I can’t help but laugh to myself at the reminders that technically I’m older than each of the countries I work in. Yet I’m also younger than these societies by at least several millennia. And the fragility of these democracies and societies is on public display every day.

Defensive Infrastructures Designed to Survive Crisis

Unlike the massive US ecosystem of endowed foundations and tax-incentivized giving, private domestic foundations remain rare across the V4. Due to thin domestic philanthropy, CEE nonprofits rely on volatile percentage-tax designation systems (allowing citizens to direct 1 percent of income tax to NGOs) alongside domestic state and EU grants This creates a structural chokehold: State grants leave groups vulnerable to cabinet collapses, while EU funding exposes them to political smears as foreign-controlled entities.

It’s rare to find many people who could dare to dream of an NGO salary equivalent to their American counterparts, even when it’s the founder. This isn’t just a lack of philanthropy or wealth; it is a persistent bind. CEE groups survive on a grueling “project-reimbursement trap” in which they spend months writing paperwork for tiny, rigid grants that only pay after the work is completed and forbid spending a cent on organizational overhead.

Managing all of this means navigating a dizzying, multi-tiered bureaucracy. Instead of a single central regulator like the US IRS, CEE advocates must fight through a fragmented patchwork of regional courts, interior ministries, and judicial prosecutors—compounded by complex EU funding rules. This administrative maze forces independent advocates to fixate on compliance and reporting, often at the expense of their core mission.

To survive this continuous instability, Central European organizations developed a gritty “defensive infrastructure” organized around three core operational shifts. First, they diversified funding channels away from national ministries by turning to domestic crowdfunding, municipal-level partnerships, and nonaligned corporate allies. Second, groups across the region adopted leaner, asset-light operational models to protect their financial stability against frozen grants and targeted state audits. Third, independent watchdogs maintained proactive policy readiness. Some groups have even pre-drafted legislative roadmaps so incoming administrations had plug-and-play democratic reforms ready during transition periods.

By shifting from national lobbying to flexible, community-rooted networks, these organizations maintained continuity through chronic hostility and sudden administrative vacuums alike.

Learning to Expect Rupture as We Build for a Better World

For everything America’s civil society is facing right now, the CEE has experienced it much longer and harsher—and has built the defensive infrastructure to survive it with only a fraction of the resources we take for granted. After all, instability is the norm here, not the outlier.

Observing Central European civil society through a modern US organizational lens reveals striking structural parallels. Mainstream American nonprofit culture often assumes permanent institutional stability, benevolent courts, and reliable foundation wealth. However, civil rights history in the American South demonstrates that formal legal compliance offers no absolute shield against hostile state power.

State authorities can alter regulatory definitions, challenge organizational legitimacy, and weaponize tax audits overnight. Furthermore, the American South has historically operated as a philanthropic desert for grassroots community organizers. Grassroots Southern organizers survived resource scarcity through mutual aid and micro-donations, mirroring Central European survival strategies.

Coming of age during the political shifts of the late twentieth century highlights the dangers of sterile institutional neutrality. Under systemic political pressure, maintaining bloodless

nonpartisanship often functions as capitulation to dominant power structures. Organizations must define their core values long before a political crisis forces an immediate choice.

Additionally, Black Southern organizing tradition relies on decentralized community spaces capable of scaling operational capacity dynamically. These adaptable networks scale up during acute crises while shrinking during periods of intense state hostility. Central European civil society relies on these exact asset-light networks to maintain continuity through repeated government collapses.

None of this had to be a crisis. In the CEE, instability stopped being an emergency a long time ago; it became the terrain people learned to build on. America hasn’t made that shift yet. We still treat every rupture like the first one, which is exactly why each new one catches us flat-footed.

It’s a warning sign when public trust gives way to leadership that systematically weakens democratic safeguards; it’s an alarm when discontent spirals in the absence of responsive governance; and it’s a fire when power is wielded openly against democratic pillars.

It’s easy to overlook just how quickly and chaotically a regime can fall. It’s also easy to forget how regimes can return, even if in different forms, at any time. The hard work never actually ends—and neither does civil society, so long as it can continue to connect people, channel individual energy and community spirit, and truly communicate its value.

America could view this strange time of chaos and transition not with the aim of a return to normalcy, but as a time to shift to something better. That’s what I see happening in the CEE region every time there’s a transfer of power.

NGOs and civil society, even in times of some of the fiercest crackdowns I’ve ever known, are still present and persistent and persuading those who care to stay active, engaged, and connected. Even when the work is hard, and especially when the outcomes aren’t perfect.

When any part of civil society fails to provide hope as well as opportunities for people to truly engage and connect, everyone loses. And when support is limited or constrained to just a handful of sources without truly taking root widely, we guarantee civil society cannot survive.

The Bridge of Experience

Every morning, I walk through Wenceslas Square in Prague—a boulevard where independence was proclaimed, tanks crushed reforms, and thousands gathered during the Velvet Revolution. I walk through it as part of an ordinary present, feeling the extraordinary past beneath my feet.

Occasionally, before crossing past the statue of Saint Wenceslas, I think back to growing up in Richmond, VA. Standing on ground shaped by slavery, Civil War espionage, and historic Black leadership, I learned early what it means to walk through a place where history is not behind you, but always all around you.

It’s against this backdrop of living history that my American existence in the CEE region functions as its own small counterargument. At least once a week, I’m asked some variation of “Why are you here?”—a question usually masking the real one: Why did you leave the US nonprofit sector?

I think back to the persistent barriers I hit back home. The spaces focused on democracy and philanthropy rarely opened their doors to a Black practitioner from the South, and the racism and classism were real and relentless. You cannot fight for the public good when you resent the system that deeply. So, just before the 2016 elections, I made the choice to step away—an act more pragmatic than prescient. It cost me professional connections and stability, but I didn’t abandon the mission; I abandoned a broken vehicle to protect my ability to contribute on my own terms.

I didn’t need Europe to teach me that institutional systems can fail, or that civil society is often tasked with maintaining continuity across broken mechanisms. I had already learned that inside America’s nonprofit sector long before setting foot in Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, or Warsaw. What Europe gave me was confirmation—and an expanded vocabulary to name what I had already lived.