Global Civil Society

An Answer to War

Mary Kaldor

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745627588, 9780745627571
• eBook ISBN: 9780745657172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The terms 'global' and 'civil society' have both become part of the contemporary political lexicon. In this important new book, Mary Kaldor argues that this is no coincidence and that the reinvention of civil society has to be understood in the context of globalization. The concept of civil society is no longer confined to the borders of the territorial state. Whether one considers dissidents in repressive regimes, landless labourers in Central America, campaigners against land mines or global debt, or even religious fundamentalists, it is now possible for them to link up with other like-minded groups in different parts of the world and to address demands not just to national governments but to global institutions as well. This has opened up new opportunities for human emancipation, and, in particular, for going beyond war as a way of managing global affairs. But it also entails new risks and insecurities.

This is a book about a political idea - an idea that came out of the 1989 revolutions. It is an idea that expresses a real phenomenon, even if the boundaries and shape of the phenomenon are contested and subject to constant redefinition. The study of past debates as well as the actions and arguments of the present is a way of directly influencing the phenomenon, and of contributing to a changing reality, if possible for the better. The task is all the more urgent in the aftermath of September 11.

Global Civil Society will be read by students of politics, international relations and sociology, as well as activists, policy-makers, journalists and all those engaged in global public debates.

1

Five Meanings of Global Civil Society

The terms ‘global’ and ‘civil society’ became the new buzzwords of the 1990s. In this book, I want to suggest that the two terms are interconnected and reflect a new reality, however imperfectly understood. The reinvention of ‘civil society’ in the 1970s and 1980s, simultaneously in Latin America and Eastern Europe, had something to do with the global context – the social, political and economic transformations that were taking place in different parts of the world and that came to the surface after 1989. Indeed, although the term ‘civil society’ has a long history and its contemporary meanings draw on that history, the various ways in which it is used, I shall argue, are quite different from in the past.

What is new about the concept of civil society since 1989 is globalization. Civil society is no longer confined to the borders of the territorial state. There was always a common core of meaning in the civil society literature, which still has relevance. Civil society was associated with a rule-governed society based largely on the consent of individual citizens rather than coercion. Different definitions of civil society have reflected the different ways in which consent was generated, manufactured, nurtured or purchased, the different rights and obligations that formed the basis of consent, and the different interpretations of this process. However, the fact that civil society was territorially bound meant that it was always contrasted with coercive rule-governed societies and with societies that lacked rules. In particular, as I shall argue, civil society within the territorial boundaries of the state was circumscribed by war.

This is what has changed. The end of the Cold War and growing global interconnectedness have undermined the territorial distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘uncivil’ societies, between the ‘democratic’ West and the ‘non-democratic’ East and South, and have called into question the traditional centralized war-making state. And these developments, in turn, have opened up new possibilities for political emancipation as well as new risks and greater insecurity. Whether we are talking about isolated dissidents in repressive regimes, landless labourers in Central America or Asia, global campaigns against land mines or third world debt, or even religious fundamentalists and fanatic nationalists, what has changed are the opportunities for linking up with other like-minded groups in different parts of the world, and for addressing demands not just to the state but to global institutions and other states. On the one hand, global civil society is in the process of helping to constitute and being constituted by a global system of rules, underpinned by over-lapping inter-governmental, governmental and global authorities. In other words, a new form of politics, which we call civil society, is both an outcome and an agent of global interconnectedness. And on the other hand, new forms of violence, which restrict, suppress and assault civil society, also spill over borders so that it is no longer possible to contain war or lawlessness territorially.

In the aftermath of the revolutions of 1989, the term ‘civil society’ was taken up in widely different circles and circumstances. Yet there is no agreed definition of the term. Indeed, its ambiguity is one of its attractions. The fact that neoliberals, Islamicists, or post-Marxists use the same language provides a common platform through which ideas, projects and policy proposals can be worked out. The debate about its meaning is part of what it is about. As John Keane suggests, the global spread of the term and the discussion about what it betokens is, in itself, a signal of an emerging global civil society.¹

This global discussion has involved the resurrection of a body of civil society literature. The search for classic texts has provided what might be called a legitimizing narrative, which has had the advantage of conferring respectability on the term but has also often weakened our understanding of the novel aspects of the rediscovery of the term. By clothing the concept in historical garb, it is possible that the past has imposed a kind of straitjacket which obscures or even confines the more radical contemporary implications. Comaroff and Comaroff talk about the ‘archaeology’ of civil society ‘usually told, layer upon layer, as a chronological epic of ideas and authors’ starting with an ‘origin story’ in the late 1700s. They argue that the term has become a ‘neo-modern myth: consider the extent to which a diverse body of works – some of them analytic, some pragmatic and prescriptive, some purely philosophical – have begun to tell about the genesis and genealogy of the concept, even as they argue over its interpretation, its telos, its theoretical and socio-moral virtues’.²

The ‘neo-modern myth’ does obscure the implications of the break with territorially bound civil society. On the other hand, agreement about the history of the concept is part of what provides a common basis for a global conversation. The civil society literature is so diverse that it allows for selectivity; the choice of texts to be studied can be used to justify one interpretation rather than another. While the debate about earlier literature can reify particular meanings that are no longer applicable, it can also serve as a way of investigating the idea, exploring the answers to questions which were faced in earlier periods as well as today, finding out what questions were different and how they were distinguished from the present situation.

This is a book then about a political idea. It is an idea that expresses a real phenomenon, even if the boundaries of the phenomenon vary according to different definitions, and even if the shape and direction of the phenomenon are constantly changing. The investigation of these different definitions, the study of past debates as well as the actions and arguments of the present, are a way of directly influencing the phenomenon, of contributing to a changing reality, if possible for the better.

This book is subtitled an ‘answer to war’. This is because the concept of civil society has always been linked to the notion of minimizing violence in social relations, to the public use of reason as a way of managing human affairs in place of submission based on fear and insecurity, or ideology and superstition. The word ‘answer’ does not imply that global civil society is some sort of magic formula – a solution or alternative to war. Rather it is a way of addressing the problem of war, of debating, arguing about, discussing and pressing for possible solutions or alternatives.

I will start by briefly recapitulating the context in which the term was ‘reinvented’. I will then set out five different meanings of global civil society, two historical and three contemporary. And in the last section, I will outline my plan for the book, how I will investigate these different meanings and their implications for our understanding of the changing political world.

Context

Developments variously known as globalization, post-industrialism and information society came to the surface in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. Two aspects of these developments are of particular significance in providing a context for the evolution of the concept of global civil society.

First of all, concern about personal autonomy, self-organization, private space became salient not only in Eastern Europe as a way of getting around the totalitarian militaristic state but also in other parts of the world where the paternalism and rigidity of the state in the post-war period was called into question. In the United States and Western Europe, these concerns had already surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s, with the emergence of movements concerned about civil rights, feminism or the environment. Giddens and Beck emphasize the growing importance of these concerns in societies which are increasingly complex, vulnerable to manufactured risk, and where expert systems no longer hold unquestioned sway.³ The rediscovery of the term ‘civil society’ in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, therefore, had a resonance in other parts of the world. The term ‘civil society’ and related terms such as ‘anti-politics’ or ‘power of the powerless’ seemed to offer a discourse within which to frame parallel concerns about the ability to control the circumstances in which individuals live, about substantive empowerment of citizens. Indeed, East European thinkers like Václav Havel believed their ideas were not only applicable to Eastern Europe; they were a response to what Havel called the ‘global technological civilization’.⁴ While Western elites seized upon the language as evidence for the victory of actually existing democracies, the inheritors of the so-called new social movements began to use the term to express a demand for a radical extension of democracy for political as well as economic emancipation.⁵

Even though these ideas had echoes of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with restraints on state power, it seems to me that they were responses to an entirely novel situation. It was a situation characterized by the actual experience of an overbearing state, which reached into everyday life far more widely than ever before. In the case of Eastern Europe, it was experience of arbitrary power and the extension of state activity into every sphere of social life, even, at least during the Stalinist period, private life. Elsewhere, it was both the extension of state power and the rigidity and lack of responsiveness to social, economic and cultural change. As I shall argue, the character of the state has to be understood in terms of the heritage of war and Cold War. It was also a time of social, economic, technological and cultural transformations in life styles, ranging from work (greater insecurity, greater flexibility and greater inequality) to gender and family relations, which called into question institutional loyalties and assumptions about collective or traditional behaviour.

Secondly, growing interconnectedness and the end of the last great global inter-state conflict have eroded the boundaries of civil society. It was growing interconnectedness that allowed the emergence of ‘islands of civic engagement’ in Eastern Europe and in those Latin American countries suffering from military dictatorships. The activists of that period were able to seek international allies both at governmental and non-governmental levels and pierce through the closed societies in which they lived, even before the great advances in information and communications technology. On the one hand, the extension of transnational legal arrangements from above, for example the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, provided an instrument for opening up autonomous spaces in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. On the other hand, the inheritors of the ‘new’ social movements, the European peace movements and the North American human rights movements were able to link up with groups and individuals in Eastern Europe and Latin America to provide some kind of support and protection. Keck and Sikkink use the term the ‘boomerang effect’ to describe the way civil society groups bypassed the state and appealed to transnational networks and institutions as well as foreign governments, so that their demands bounced back, as it were, on their own situation.⁶ In effect, these movements and their successors made use of and contributed to global political and legal arrangements; they were an essential part of the process of constructing a framework for global governance.

The end of the Cold War has contributed to the breakdown of the sharp distinction between internal and external, what is often called in the International Relations literature the Great Divide.⁷ Some argue that something like a global civil society (however this is defined) exists in the North Atlantic region but not elsewhere.⁸ Hence the boundaries of civil society have merely moved outwards. This could perhaps have been said to be true during the Cold War where the boundaries of the West were pushed outwards to protect a North Atlantic group of nations. But, in the aftermath of the Cold War, I would suggest that something different is happening. It is no longer possible to insulate territory from anarchy and disorder. In place of vertical territorial-based forms of civil society, we are witnessing the emergence of horizontal transnational global networks, both civil and uncivil. What one might call zones of civility and zones of incivility exist side by side in the same territorial space; North Atlantic space may have more extensive zones of civility than other parts of the world but such sharp geographic distinctions can no longer be drawn. The events of September 11 were a traumatic expression of the fact that territorial borders no longer define the zones of civility. In other words, the territorial restructuring of social, economic and political relations has profound implications for how we think about civil society.⁹

To sum up, I want to suggest that the discussion about global civil society has to be understood in terms of what one might call deepening and widening, a move away from state-centred approaches, combining more concern with individual empowerment and person autonomy, as well as a territorial restructuring of social and political relations in different realms.

Definitions of global civil society

I propose to set out five different versions of the concept of civil society in common usage and to say something about what they imply in a global context. This is a non-exhaustive and abbreviated (but not altogether arbitrary) list. As I try to show in chapter 2, the civil society literature is much richer and more complex than this summary would suggest; the aim is to set up some parameters for the rest of the book.

The first two versions are drawn from past versions of the concept; the last three are contemporary versions, with echoes of historical usage. It is not straightforward to transpose the concept of civil society into the concept of global civil society, since, as I have argued, the key to understanding what is new about contemporary meanings is precisely their global character. Yet the exercise may be illuminating since I do believe that there is a common core of meaning and we can investigate the nature of the contemporary phenomenon by trying to understand the relevance of past meanings.

Societas civilis

Here I am referring to what could be described as the original version of the term – civil society as a rule of law and a political community, a peaceful order based on implicit or explicit consent of individuals, a zone of ‘civility’. Civility is defined not just as ‘good manners’ or ‘polite society’ but as a state of affairs where violence has been minimized as a way of organizing social relations. It is public security that creates the basis for more ‘civil’ procedures for settling conflicts – legal arrangements, for example, or public deliberation. Most later definitions of civil society are predicated on the assumption of a rule of law and the relative absence of coercion in human affairs at least within the boundaries of the state. Thus, it is assumed that such a societas civilis requires a state, with a public monopoly of legitimate violence. According to this definition, the meaning of civil society cannot be separated from the existence of a state. Civil society is distinguished not from the state but from non-civil societies – the state of nature or absolutist empires – and from war.

One of the main objections to the notion of global civil society is the absence of a world state.¹⁰ However, it can be argued that the coming together of humanitarian and human rights law, the establishment of an international criminal court, the expansion of international peacekeeping, betoken an emerging framework of global governance, what Immanuel Kant described as a universal civil society, in the sense of a cosmopolitan rule of law, guaranteed by a combination of international treaties and institutions.

Bourgeois society (Bürgerliche Gesellschaft)

For Hegel and Marx, civil society was that arena of ethical life in between the state and the family. It was a historically produced phenomenon linked to the emergence of capitalism. They drew on the insights of the Scottish enlightenment, especially Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, who argued that the advent of commercial society created the individuals who were the necessary condition for civil society. Markets, social classes, civil law and welfare organizations were all part of civil society. Civil society was, for the first time, contrasted with the state. For H...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Five Meanings of Global Civil Society
• 2 The Discourse of Civil Society
• 3 The Ideas of 1989: The Origins of the Concept of Global Civil Society
• 4 Social Movements, NGOs and Networks
• 5 Globalization, the State and War
• 6 September 11: The Return of the Outside’?
• Notes
• Index