Giving and Refusing: The Contested Reception of Transnational Philanthropy in the Case of the Prague Central European University Foundation

Abstract

This article builds on the identification theory of philanthropy. It examines transnational philanthropy as a social phenomenon dependent on transnational “communities of participation” and their perceived needs. An empirical case study of the Prague Central European University (CEU) Foundation, founded in the Czech Republic by the American philanthropist George Soros, is used to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of the rejecting of a philanthropic project. Discourse analysis was conducted on a public media debate to uncover the key discursive categories that shaped the public controversy over the Prague CEU Foundation and made it possible to refuse the gift: philanthropic giving versus government control, gift versus calculation, cosmopolitism versus national interest, elitism versus egalitarianism. The article proposes that the acceptance or rejection of a charitable gift is a sensitive indicator of changing values, one that can be used in the study of social and political conflict and change.

Keywords

philanthropy university gift discourse analysis George Soros

In philanthropic studies, the focus is often on giving—for example, the motivations and determinants of giving, the way donors give, the amount given, the area supported (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2011). It is presumed that the gift is accepted and not much attention is paid to the situations where the gift is refused (cf. Morris, 2008). However, it is precisely such a rare occasion that allows us to learn more about the nature of a gift. The idea that philanthropy is a relationship between a donor and a recipient has been a key notion in fundraising. Consequently, questions regarding such issues as maximizing donations by establishing and sustaining a relationship with the donor have been well covered in literature on the nonprofit sector. Little attention has been paid, however, to gifts as a particular category of meaning that is constructed in the framework of the social relations in which it is embedded (Komter, 2005) and which has in turn specific consequences for these relations.

This article is based on an empirical case study of a private foundation, the Prague Central European University (CEU) Foundation, which was founded in the Czech Republic by Hungarian-born American philanthropist George Soros¹ in April 1991, shortly after the collapse of the communist regime, and which was then closed down by its benefactor in 1996 after the Czech government refused to participate in the philanthropic project (Pospíšilová, 2014, 2017). The establishment of the CEU was based on the offer of a large gift of US$25 million that was to be paid over a period of 5 years. The questions posed in this article are why such a large gift was refused and how this can be explained using identification theory of philanthropy. To gain a deeper understanding of the socially constructed meaning of a gift and its refusal, a discourse analysis was conducted on the public media controversy.

The article approaches the case from the perspective of philanthropic studies and explores it as a form of gift relationship. There are other potentially useful concepts that the article does not consider, such as organizational change and efficiency, the internationalization of higher education, and processes of globalization. Transnational private philanthropy at universities has been a subject of interest as a way of studying the internationalization of higher education institutions (Warren & Bell, 2014; Warren, Hoyler, & Bell, 2014). There is a long tradition of historical studies of philanthropy, but most have been either descriptive or laudatory (Ris, 2017; Walton, 2017). This article aims to tell a more complex story. It also offers a perspective from Central Europe, in contrast to the majority of writing on the history of university philanthropy, which tends to be concerned with American universities and philanthropies.

The article first outlines the conceptual framework of the study, then describes the context of the case and afterward it presents the findings about the communities that constituted the philanthropic project in question and the most important discursive categories that structured the public debate. Conclusions are drawn about the importance of particular local and transnational “communities of participation” and their values for the reception of transnational philanthropy.

Philanthropy as a Relationship: A Conceptual Framework

In the philanthropic studies literature, a theory of philanthropy as a relationship between donors and recipients was put forward by Ostrander and Schervish (1990). They defined philanthropy as a two-way, interactive relationship (Ostrander, 2007). In her subsequent work, Ostrander focused on new kinds of donor-controlled philanthropy and her main aim was to draw attention to the ways in which control in the donor–recipient relationship can be shifted toward the recipients (Ostrander, 2007). Schervish (2006) further developed the idea of philanthropy as a care-based social relationship typically observed among friends or in a community.

This article draws on the identification theory of philanthropy put forward by Schervish and Havens. Whereas the theory of altruism “explains prosocial commitment as a function of a biologically, psychologically or socially grounded impetus of selflessness—a more or less comprehensive disregard for one’s self-interest in taking up care for others” (Schervish & Havens, 1997, p. 237), Schervish and Havens, building on Becker (1976), explain giving as driven by the donor’s identification with the needs of a particular group or community: “It is engagement rather than absence of self that generates greater charitable giving” (Schervish & Havens, 2001, p. 91). Transnational philanthropy, which is the topic of this article, could thus be viewed as philanthropy that is grounded in transnational communities and in their identities, values, and perceived needs (Pospíšilová, 2017, p. 28).

The main objective of Schervish and Havens’s paper was to draw attention to the mutual self-interest that can form a legitimate part of philanthropy. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also argued that gift exchange is in principle a mechanism of self-interest that differs from market exchange only by “the way of giving.” Whereas a commercial purchase is based on narrow economic interests and calculations, gifts are based on moral obligations and emotional attachments that are not recognized as a form of self-interest and control. This “misrecognition” depends on the framing of the actions and institutions of the gift through specific symbolic categories, which enable participants to perceive it as a gift and not as self-interest or an attempt to exert control (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 217; Silber, 2009). This is why the shared understanding of action as philanthropy is crucial to the existence of philanthropy as a social phenomenon.

According to Komter (2005), there is nothing inherent to a thing that makes it a gift; its meaning is socially constructed. When a particular exchange is perceived as a gift, it signifies a specific type of relationship—a gift relationship (Komter, 2005). Gifts are the result but also the source and signifier of social ties (Adloff, 2010). The capacity of gifts to be inscribed with the identity of the giver and to impose the giver’s values on the recipient of the gift has long been discussed in the literature on gifts (Adloff, 2010; Mauss, 1990/1924). “High-engagement” or donor-controlled philanthropy has been on the rise in the United States since the 1990s. Such donors impress their identity upon the gift relationship much more than traditional donors do. To capture the increased agency and ambition of large donors to form institutions, Schervish (2006) introduced the notion of a wealthy donor as a hyper-agent and defined hyper-agency as “the institution-building capacity of wealth holders” (p. 488).

Although Komter’s focus is mostly on interpersonal interaction, we could extend this perspective to apply to relationships among larger and more institutionalized social units, such as foundations, governments, or universities. They, too, interact and have social identities (Jenkins, 2004); they, too, can be participants in the gift relationship. Through foundations gifts become institutionalized and they are thereby to some extent detached from the direct will of the donor (Adloff, 2015). However, foundations actually have the effect of strengthening the identity-forming capacity of gifts because their permanent endowment ties wealth to the established mission of the foundation and fixes its values in time and space. Foundations thus make visible and stable identities that would be otherwise inconspicuous or fluid (Silber, 1998).

The scenario in which a gift is refused has received little attention in recent scholarship on giving. Komter deals with the rejection of gifts only at the level of individual people and does not discuss it further than that. She describes the rejection of a gift as a “painful event” for the giver because the recipient is rejecting “our own personal identity and being” (Komter, 2005, p. 54). Ostrander, recognizing the power imbalance inherent in the gift relationship, notes that “this (refusal or acceptance) is the main way that recipient groups can set some limits on donor control” (Ostrander, 2007, p. 357). However, given the generally high cultural legitimacy of foundations (Strachwitz, 2010), the charismatic authority of gifts (Adloff, 2015), and the social pressure to accept gifts (Morris, 2008), it is not common for gifts to be refused.

Although the literature does not provide much guidance on how to approach the issue of the refusal, we can proceed by analogy and begin with a gift’s key characteristic as a relationship, as described above. First, while the giving of a gift is an expression of social ties, the refusal of a gift is an expression of social distance. Second, refusing a gift constitutes a rejection of the identity and values that are inscribed in it. Third, to refuse a gift means to refuse the implicit obligations of the gift relationship. Although a gift may be a subtle form of control, refusing a gift is a way of asserting the agency of the gift’s intended recipient. The rejection of a large gift is therefore anything but a neutral act. It is an act that indicates a social affinity with or distance from particular communities, that supports or subverts particular values or identities, and that—in the case of high-engagement philanthropy—touches on the legitimacy of actors to shape the public sphere.

Method

The article draws on in-depth case study of the Prague CEU Foundation (1991-1996) based on research of archival documents and on interviews (or written exchanges) conducted in 2011-2016 with 43 persons who had participated in the philanthropic project (Pospíšilová, 2017). The focus of this article is on the public discourse of the CEU’s champions and opponents during the key year 1993, when the Prague CEU philanthropic project faced a major crisis. A data corpus of 39 newspaper articles published in nine different daily newspapers across the political spectrum, together with the CEU’s (1991) Statement of Intent, was analyzed² with the aim of identifying the key symbolic categories that structured the public debate over the Prague CEU in Czech society in the early 1990s. These categories can help us understand the dynamics that ultimately resulted in the Prague foundation’s closure.

The two concepts that guided the discourse analysis were identities and values. Although this is not a study of identity, once we perceive a gift as a relationship, the identities and values of the donor and the recipient become of key importance. Identities are constructed through discourse (Fairclough, 2003), and they develop and can be challenged or reframed through discourse (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005). The analysis looked for both explicit and implicit categorizations and evaluations relating to the CEU in Prague and its founder, George Soros. An underlying assumption of the analysis was that different groups of actors in the Prague CEU case produced specific framings of the case and specific discourses (Focault, 1994). The data were consequently analyzed as a clash between the discourse of the CEU’s champions and that of its opponents. This approach made it possible to differentiate more clearly between the different symbolic representations of the philanthropic project.

The main categories and discursive strategies identified are presented and discussed in the article in the context of the extra-discursive events and processes that shaped the history of the Prague CEU Foundation.

Background of the case: Reestablishing private philanthropy in Central Europe

The collapse of communism in Central Europe involved the major and simultaneous transformation of political regimes and governments, and of property rights, economies, and culture(s) (Berend, 2009). Although foundations may have “an inherent cultural legitimacy” in countries like the United States (Strachwitz, 2010, p. 685), Central Europe had lost its tradition of private philanthropy during the 40 years of communist rule. By the early 1950s, private foundations had been abolished and their assets nationalized in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia and the whole idea of private philanthropy was delegitimized. As a result, the period after the fall of communism was also one in which private philanthropy had to be reestablished as a legitimate part of civil society.

A significant role in reestablishing philanthropy in the region was played by foreign foundations (Quigley & Popson, 1999). George Soros was an important actor in these developments. His foundations provided over a third of the total support donated to the Central and Eastern European region between 1989 and 1997 by international private foundations (Pinter, 2001). He had already established his first foundations prior to communism’s collapse in Hungary (1984), the Soviet Union (1987), and Poland (1988), and after 1989 he intensified his philanthropic activity so that by 1994 there were Open Society foundations in 22 countries across the region (Open Society Institute, 1995).

In the Czech Republic, there were hundreds of private foundations established from 1990 onward after a provisional amendment was made to the economic code, and most of them were set up without any endowment, which was not a requirement. Legislation governing foundations remained rudimentary until 1998, which led to the frequent misuse of the foundation as a form of legal entity (Ronovská, 2012). The Act on Foundations and Funds (No. 197/1997, Coll.) introduced strict regulation of foundations, and, as a consequence, their number fell from 5,238 in 1997 to 144 in 1999 (Lagerspetz & Skovajsa, 2006). However, the Prague CEU Foundation was no longer operative by that time. The case presented here falls within the period of the new and quickly changing environment of the early postcommunist transformation when private philanthropy could rely on neither traditional norms, values and practices, nor a well-developed legislative environment. This was a highly precarious time for private philanthropy, which means legitimacy and philanthropic identity were more visible and salient issues at that period.

The Prague CEU and Its “Community of Participation”

It was the specific approach of Soros as a philanthropist to base the philanthropic projects he introduced into a particular country on local board and staff (Lehn & Quigley, 2010). This style of philanthropy was different from that of most international donors at the time and was not replicated by other U.S. foundations, who either administered their programs from the United States or established their own offices in the region (Carothers, 1996; Pinter, 2001). Soros’s approach was possible because of the previous social ties he had established in the region as a philanthropist in the 1980s (Guilhot, 2007; Stone, 2010; Stubbs, 2013; Pospíšilová, 2014).

Soros’s philanthropy developed from the early 1980s within the transnational networks of dissidents and human rights activists inside the Soviet bloc and in the West. Soros supported organizations and activities in the sphere of so-called independent culture, as well as the international mobility of scholars and academic projects emphasizing East–West exchange, multinationalism, and cosmopolitism. The idea to found the CEU was born within this cultural milieu in the late 1980s. Building on established personal ties and a shared understanding of the future priorities of the region, the CEU became one of the major philanthropic projects funded by Soros after the collapse of communism (CEU, 1999; Guilhot, 2007).

The CEU was a macro-regional postgraduate university specialized in the humanities and social sciences and it operated as two independent foundations, one in Prague and one in Budapest (for more on the early history of the university, see CEU, 1999; Fleishman, 2007; Guilhot, 2007; Soros, 1991; Soros, Wien, & Koenen, 1995; Stepan, 2009). Identification theory sees philanthropy as the result of the donor’s identification with the needs of a particular community. In its early days, the CEU linked its mission directly to the 1989 revolution and to the circles of intellectuals and former dissidents and their supporters in the West:

The Central European University has come into existence in response to the revolutionary changes that have occurred in Central and Eastern Europe recently. The primary impetus comes from Central European intellectuals who seek to understand their past and prepare for the future. But it has also received enthusiastic support from Western intellectuals . . . (CEU, 1991, opening statement)

The transnational networks, which Soros had supported since the 1980s, gave the CEU its meaning as philanthropy and constituted what we could call, after Shervish, its “community of participation.” In this sense, the early CEU had close ties to academic and political circles, whose members were at the beginning of the 1990s regarded as the heroes of Central Europe’s revolutions and who sought to define the meaning of 1989 and set the priorities of the postcommunist transformation.

In the Czech Republic, the CEU project was closely tied to a specific and rather limited circle of political and academic elites. Unlike in Hungary or Poland, Soros did not establish a foundation in Czechoslovakia prior to 1989 and his charitable giving there was done anonymously until the change of regime. There were very few people who knew that Soros was the source of much of the financial assistance provided through the foreign-based Charter 77 Foundation and the Jan Hus Educational Foundation. However, gift relationships cannot be established when the donor is anonymous. When the identity of Soros as a donor was revealed after 1989, there was little room for a “retrospective” construction of gift relationships (Pospíšilová, 2017, p. 64). As a result, Soros as a philanthropist had limited social and symbolic capital on which to build his philanthropic project in Prague.

Prague CEU Foundation and the Czech Government: A Gift Accepted and a Gift Refused

The Prague CEU Foundation was based on the idea of a matching fund, where George Soros promised to invest US$25 million over a period of 5 years to build the CEU (in 1992 he extended this to a promise of a permanent endowment) and the Czech government pledged to provide a building and cover some costs. A declaratory agreement was concluded in April 1991 between Soros on one hand and the Czech minister of education on the other outlining the obligations of Soros and the Czech government toward the philanthropic project.³ The first Czech postcommunist government, led by Petr Pithart (June 1990-July 1992), subscribed to the ideals of the CEU and supported it both financially, by contributing to its operations approximately US$1 million a year in 1991 and 1992,⁴ and personally and officially—Pithart was the chair of the Prague CEU Foundation board and the country’s president, Václav Havel, was an honorary chair. This partnership between the national government and the philanthropist was made possible by the fact that at that time the top state representatives were former dissidents and in a way belonged to the “community of participation” described above.

The situation of the Prague CEU changed after the national elections in June 1992. The liberal political party of Petr Pithart suffered an electoral defeat and was replaced with a conservative party led by the economist Václav Klaus, who brought to power a different stratum of largely technocratic and managerial elites with different cultural backgrounds and career trajectories in the pre-1989 period (Hadjiisky, 2011). The Czech government as an organizational actor formally continued to be a party to the gift relationship represented by the Prague CEU Foundation, but it radically reduced the state subsidy to US$0.25 million in 1993 and in effect discontinued its support for the CEU.

The new government checked its legal obligations to the philanthropist and reached the conclusion that the Czech government was not bound by the agreement, which had only been signed by the minister of education (Pospíšilová, 2017, p. 69), and this opened up a space for the government to withdraw from the relationship. Soros considered legal action to protect his philanthropic investment but did not pursue it in the end, partly because the grounds for such action were probably weak but mainly because the evident lack of support for the project on the part of the gift’s recipients, that is, the Czech government and Czech academic circles, was more important to the project’s success and no legal measures could do anything to change this. Soros financed the CEU by himself in 1994-1995, when he finally closed the Prague CEU Foundation and transferred most of the study programs to the CEU in Budapest.

Symbolic Frames Defining the Prague CEU Foundation Controversy

Understanding an action or institution as a gift is made possible by the symbolic framing that leads participants and the general public to perceive it as a gift, not as self-interest or control (Bourdieu, 1997). An analysis of the public discourse surrounding the Prague CEU in the early 1990s produced four sets of key opposing discursive categories: philanthropic giving versus government control, gift versus calculation, cosmopolitism versus national interest, elitism versus egalitarianism. These categories, presented below, were mobilized during the Prague CEU controversy by the champions of the CEU and its opponents in an attempt to construct the CEU symbolically as a legitimate philanthropic project or, conversely, to challenge and subvert such a framing.

Philanthropic Giving Versus Government Control

In the public debate in 1993, George Soros’s activity was interpreted by the CEU’s champions in a philanthropic frame, that is, as a “generous offer,” “help,” and “giving.” Soros himself was defined as a “donator and benefactor.” This was in line with the original framing of the CEU as a philanthropic project. Although the words “gift,” “help,” “donor,” or “benefactor” were absent from the text of the Statement of Intent and the only philanthropic vocabulary in the text was the word “foundations,” this way of articulating Soros’s activity was consistent with a particular type of “project” or “entrepreneurial” philanthropy that is characterized by a high degree of donor control (Leat, 1999). The key philanthropic relationship discursively constituted in the text was between Soros and the governments and presidents of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. It was the Czech government, which had already “pledged” to invest, that was taking on specific obligations.

The discourse of the CEU’s opponents, however, lacked any such “giving” element. They did not see George Soros as a benefactor or the Czech government as the recipient of his gift. They skipped over the fact of Soros’s financial contribution and focused instead on the fact that the CEU was asking the Czech government for cofinancing. This allowed them to redefine Soros’s activity as “demanding a state subsidy.” This was a key shift in the nature of the relationship, whereby it went from being a gift to become a government subsidy. This allowed the new Czech government to assert control over the situation and to reinforce its identity as an active agent that was making decisions and not just sticking to past obligations.

This reframing was supported by a closely related discursive construction of Soros as a “private” person and his project as a “private school.” This was presented in contrast with the public authority of the Czech government and ministers. It was assumed that a “private” person can pursue only private interests and Soros’s motivations were therefore seen as suspicious. From the perspective of philanthropy studies, private foundations naturally reside on the sometimes uneasy border between public and private—as private funds are used for a public purpose (Anheier & Toepler, 1999). However, the CEU’s opponents successfully delegitimized such claims.

Counting as the Dominant Logic

The Klaus government was portrayed during the 1993 public debate as “realistic” compared with the previous Pithart government, which was presented as “hasty” and “unreasonable,” or to Soros, who was depicted as “ignoring the law,” “unaccountable,” and “nontransparent.” The Klaus government’s “realism” was premised above all on its ability and readiness to “count,” “average,” and “compare” in assessing the value of the Prague CEU. This approach was described as “logical” and gradually came to form one of the main perspectives used to assess the Prague CEU Foundation in the 1993 public debate.

To counter this dominant framing, the CEU’s champions emphasized that the value of the Prague CEU was more “complex,” “nonfinancial,” and “hard to quantify.” Also, to perceive the value of the CEU, one would need to go beyond the “present” and “consider both past and future.” They criticized the Klaus government’s approach as too “narrow,” reducing all considerations to economic value. Instead, they stressed the “cultural value” of the CEU. However, they were unable to put forward a persuasive alternative to a logic based on economic calculation. Even they finally resorted to calculating the benefits of the Prague CEU in financial terms, thus abandoning to some extent themselves the framing of the CEU as a gift.

This is because, in theory, a gift precludes any explicit calculation of its value. As Bourdieu argued, a gift is an individual and collective self-deception that “refuses to attend to egoistic and interested calculations of exchange” (Schrift, 1997, p. 14). Its social value is recognized only because its material value is misrecognized (Schrift, 1997). A gift is not free from personal interests; indeed, most big donors do not see themselves as altruists, but rather as engaged individuals who want to help solve problems (Fleishman, 2007). However, disinterested giving is the assumption that allows a gift to exist as a social phenomenon.

A gift often has an exact financial value, but its meaning cannot be reduced to that value. The CEU’s opponents successfully asserted economic rationality as the norm for interpreting and evaluating the benefits and costs of the Prague CEU, which helped to make the government’s decision to withdraw from this philanthropic project look rational and logical.

Elitism Versus Egalitarianism

The CEU was defined in its Statement of Intent as an institution offering an exclusive type of education, oriented toward “high-quality Western-style education” and aiming to “attract students of the highest caliber.” The CEU’s principal objectives were “to develop a new curriculum which can be taught both at the CEU and in other universities of the region” and “to raise the standards and methods of teaching and research throughout the region.” The implication of this was that the quality of local education was not good. The relationship between local academia and the CEU was defined as equal only where cooperation between “scholars” was concerned, that is, on a personal, not an institutional level.

This definition of the CEU was challenged during the public controversy surrounding the university in 1993. The value of excellent education and research was not challenged as such, but the version put forward by the CEU was seen as exclusionary. The CEU’s approach was defined as “elitist,” as a “luxury” for the few, and was contrasted with the basic needs of the educational system as a whole and of elementary and secondary education especially. Based on the above mentioned calculative logic, the cost of the CEU to the public budget was presented as excessive compared with the average level of financial support the government gave to Czech public universities. Government financial support for public universities was constructed as the standard for such support and the cost of the CEU as a deviation from this. It was assumed that everyone should be treated equally and too much public support for the CEU would violate the implicitly invoked norm of equality. By portraying the CEU as an “elitist” institution, the CEU’s opponents tapped into the tension between elitism and privilege on one hand and egalitarianism and democracy on the other that is inherently present in private foundations (Anheier & Daly, 2007, p. 4).

Cosmopolitism Versus National Interest

Perhaps the most important discursive distinction that structured the controversy surrounding the Prague CEU was that between national interests and an orientation toward the world. The mission of the early CEU was based on the idea that the “West” was the source of quality education and research. Furthermore, its identity was built around Central Europe as a meaningful concept and a positive value in itself. A major value of the early CEU was to be “truly international”: It was important that the CEU would exist in several places (“sites,” “locations”) at the same time. However, the international cooperation concerned individuals (“students,” “scholars”), networks of universities, and major Central European cities, historically multinational sites, not states. The significant absence of states from the Statement of Intent together with an emphasis on academic excellence and education as universal factors with the capacity to connect different places and people, and an emphasis on fostering “cooperation and understanding,” combined to create a form of internationalism that can be defined as cultural cosmopolitism (Held, 2002, pp. 57-58). Cosmopolitism was a key part of the CEU’s identity and was what connected it with its original “community of participation.”

Indeed, the Prague CEU was highly international. In 1992/1993 there were only 15 students from Czechoslovakia studying at the Prague CEU, that is, 13% of the total number of students. Although student numbers continued to rise, the percentage of local students did not.⁵ The Prague CEU also had a majority of foreign academic staff. Local academics were the minority among the lecturers in most of the Prague CEU’s programs and more than 60% of the top academic positions at the Prague CEU were held by foreign academics (Pospíšilová, 2017, p. 105). The internationalism of the Prague CEU was a fact, yet it was interpreted and evaluated in the public debate differently by the CEU’s opponents and champions.

The CEU’s champions emphasized the importance of the CEU for strengthening European and Western values and highlighted its multinationalism and openness to the world as positive attributes. The CEU’s opponents did not challenge the value of these attributes explicitly—that is, they did not criticize international or regional cooperation. They proceeded by significantly omitting the international and regional dimension of the CEU and instead emphasized national (Czech) interests as the more important category of meaning. As the minister of education put it in an information memorandum to the Czech government, “Before any further action, it is necessary to answer the essential question: Is the CEU a contribution to the Czech Republic, or not?” (Ministry, 1993).

This was what the calculative logic described above was necessary for. The CEU’s contribution to “Czech” students was measured against the contribution from the public budget to the CEU, and the average cost per “Czech” student at the CEU and at public universities was compared. The CEU was no longer presented as an institution of international or regional importance, it became an issue for consideration in relation to Czech government policy and, more narrowly, Czech higher education policy. The CEU’s champions reacted by critically conceptualizing the “nationalism,” “provincialism,” “pettiness,” and “narrow-mindedness” of the Klaus government, or of Czech society as such. However, this did not alter the fact that the transnational values and cross-border belongings that usually define transnational philanthropy were rendered meaningless by the adoption of a strictly national perspective.

Interpretation and Discussion

Discourse analysis of a public media debate was used to uncover key discursive categories which shaped the public controversy over the Prague CEU Foundation. The shifts in the symbolic framing of the Prague CEU and its founder undermined the understanding of his actions and his institution as philanthropy. Instead, they made it possible to focus attention on its nonphilanthropic aspects: self-interest and control. In this way, they made it possible to refuse the gift.

Philanthropic gifts to institutions of higher education often come with strings attached. Boyce (2013) cites several recent examples of universities and colleges in the United States that were presented with offers of large charitable investments, but conditional upon interventions into the curricula and/or personal politics of the university. What makes us interpret such cases as threats to academic freedom is the perception of the donor as an outside actor who seeks to “influence the work we do by inserting their agendas into our colleges and universities” (Boyce, 2013, p. 264, emphasis added). The rejection and open criticism of gifts enacts the border between “us” (the recipients) and “them” (the donors). It always highlights the issue of belonging and social or explicitly political identities.

Although the concept of hyper-agency of large donors, as developed by Schervish, emphasized the agency of key individuals, it would be wrong to focus too much on personalities. To understand why philanthropy, even in fields so seemingly apolitical as higher education, becomes politicized, we have to explore the link between the philanthropist’s actions and the communities of participation that give the gift its meaning. This may in some cases concern “politics” within the university or the higher education field, and in other cases—such as the case explored in this article or the highly politicized case of present-day CEU in Budapest—even outside it.

In the case of the Prague CEU, there was much more at stake than higher education. This was because of the ambitions of the donor (and the communities of participation linked with his philanthropy) who saw postcommunist societies in the early 1990s as in need of social change toward the ideal of liberal, pluralist democracy, and an interconnected world. Although these ideals at that time seemed to be taken for granted in both the United States and Central Europe, the rejection of the gift served as one the early indicators of disagreement over these ideals. It was also a visible enactment of borders between different groups of Czech elites, which showed that cosmopolitan elites were already on the political defensive in the early 1990s. Therefore, the refusal of the Prague CEU by the Klaus government was anything but a neutral act. It was embedded in the local political conflict and served as one way of distancing the political elites, who had come to power at the end of 1992, from the first postcommunist elites, who were connected to dissident circles and cosmopolitan values.

The contested reception of the Prague CEU Foundation was indirectly part of a domestic struggle for political power and reflected the ideological differences among Czech political elites in several ways, especially with respect to international policy and economic privatization. The Central and East European regionalism the CEU embodied was in line with the ideas of the Pithart government and the Czechoslovak president Václav Havel. Havel supported cooperation between Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland and initiated the Visegrád framework in April 1991. However, the ensuing Klaus era (1992-1997) ushered in a new focus on national interests in foreign policy, unilateralism, and opposition to Visegrád cooperation (Baun & Marek, 2010). In a similar vein, while the strategy of economic privatization under the Pithart government was open to foreign direct investment, the subsequent Klaus government redirected its focus toward “Czech capitalism,” an internally oriented strategy prioritizing domestic capital (Drahokoupil, 2008). In both cases, the internationalism and Central and East European regionalism embodied by the Prague CEU clashed with the emphasis on national interests and economic nationalism backed by the majority of Czech political elites at that time.

From a different perspective, we can see the fate of the Prague CEU Foundation as an early indicator of ideological disagreement over the legitimate role of civil society organizations, including private foundations, in the public sphere. Efforts to discredit civil society were consistent through both Klaus governments (1992-1997) and his two presidencies (2003-2013). In this sense, we must agree with Anheier and Daly (2007) that “foundations indicate long-term directions and shifts in the relationship between public and private,” between the state and civil society (p. 4).

Conclusion

The article explored the case of a private foundation, the Prague CEU Foundation, founded in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s by Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros. The case was approached from the perspective of philanthropic studies and explored as an instance of a large transnational gift, which was first accepted but then in effect refused by the government of the host country. The aim was to learn more about the nature of high-engagement transnational philanthropy. Consistent with the identification theory of philanthropy, the case suggests that both the acceptance and the refusal of a gift depend on communities of participation and their presuppositions and prior understanding of the values that motivate charitable giving and support the identity of the giver as a philanthropist.

According to Schervish and Havens (1997), being connected to particular communities “is the basis of people becoming aware of needs and choosing to respond.” Also, it is especially within such communities that direct requests can be made to individuals for support (p. 241). Soros’s philanthropy developed from the early 1980s within the transnational communities of dissidents and human rights activists inside the Soviet bloc and in the West. George Soros was to some extent “created” as a philanthropist by the transnational communities that existed before he joined them in the early 1980s. Those communities were shaped by his charitable giving, but at the same time they gave meaning to the causes that Soros supported, they involved Soros in continued and stable gift relationships, and they thereby enabled his philanthropy. One of the reasons it was easy to challenge the identity of Soros as a philanthropist and make him abandon the Prague CEU Foundation in the Czech Republic so soon was the fact that his gift community was small and little established there.

The case study of the Prague CEU sought a deeper understanding of high-engagement transnational philanthropy by investigating the link between philanthropy, communities, and their values. The findings support the thesis that existing communities of participation play a key role not only in motivating charitable giving but also in generating an understanding of the donor’s action as constituting a gift and of the donor’s identity as a public benefactor, and not a self-interested private person. For this reason, we could call communities of participation “gift communities.”

The results reported in the article may also be of interest to students of transnational actors and “soft power” in international politics. Historical cases of U.S. university soft power in China or the Middle East suggest host states attacked these universities “during times of conflict with the USA” (Bertelsen, 2014, p. 117). The case of the Prague CEU was different because the conflict took place shortly after the 1989 change of régime when the nation’s “road back to Europe” and alignment with the foreign policy goals of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were unquestioned. In this sense, and in the light of rising nationalism and the questioning of liberal Western values in Central Europe since 2000, it can be seen as an early indicator of later developments in the region. The case seems to confirm that the acceptance or rejection of a charitable gift is a sensitive signal of changing values, one that can be used in studies of social and political conflict and change.

Footnotes

Author’s Note

The article benefited greatly from the suggestions of the anonymous reviewers and the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ) editor.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Work on this article was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GA CR) grant 13-15802S.

Notes

Author Biography

Tereza Pospíšilová is an assistant professor at the Department of Civil Society Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on philanthropy and volunteering. Her most recent research concerns individual and public narratives of the postcommunist re/construction of civil society.

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