**1. Introduction**

Civil society organizations typically are defined as not being identified with government or the for-profit business sector. This would include, unions, voluntary associations, churches, agricultural cooperatives, and a variety of other organizations that receive a special "exempt" status within the tax code of liberal democratic nations [1]. An important effect of strong civil society organizations is that they enhance a nation's ability to respond to exigencies, both internal and external.

The weakness of intermediary civil society organizations in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s facilitated the emergence of fascism. The evidence shows that individuals who were not attached to civil society organizations, like unions, were more vulnerable to appeals from authoritarian leaders like Hitler and Mussolini [2]. The absence of competing sources of information from civil society organizations was a major cause of the failure of the Soviet government to respond to technological change and the internationalization of supply chains in the 1980s and 1990s [3].

The decline in American membership in voluntary associations is linked with the appeal of "populist" authoritarian movements [4]. Research has found, for example, that individuals living in rural places have *highly dense and kin dominated social networks* that do not provide them with the kinds of support needed to adapt to social change. This contrasts with their counterparts in metropolitan areas who have more diverse social networks that gives them better access to resources to deal with life's changing exigencies [5].

The critical question, then, is what can increase the growth of civil society organizations? The focus of this chapter is on the role of national-level political institutions in achieving this objective. Theda Skocpol points out that federal policies in the United States were instrumental in the development of civil society organizations, such as the Grange and the American Farm Bureau ([6], p. 3). Federal legislation, the Wagner Act, led to the protection of the right of workers to vote for independent union representation ([7], pp. 66–97).

The creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the forerunner of the European Union (EU) included a de facto recognition of the pre-WWI situation in which each of the nations engaged in the conflict contained a mix of competing ethnic, religious and language groups without any mediating mechanisms to resolve conflicts between them ([8]: (1)). It focused on creating a supra-national governmental structure with material incentives for nations and sub-groups within them to participate. As the European Union has evolved considerable *attention has been given to ameliorating sub-national conflicts* by focusing on *regional development through its "cohesion policy"; a direct effort to build local-level civil society, which now accounts for one-third of the total EU budget* [9, 10]. (My Italics).
