Global Ethics and Civil Society

Darren O'Byrne, John Eade, John Eade

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351933490
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This detailed and timely volume examines the impact of global transformations on concepts of civil society. Divided into two sections, it evaluates changing notions of ethics and how these transformations are operationalized. The first part deals with the theoretical aspects while the second examines the practical impact of the evolution of global ethics and norms on society. Providing solid case studies, this accessible volume contributes to the theoretical literature in the field and will prove a useful library reference work or graduate reader in the areas of globalization, civil society, ethics, human rights, citizenship and cosmopolitanism.

Chapter 1
Globalization, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Civil Society: Some Introductory Remarks

Darren J. O'Byrne

The Global Civil Society Debate

At present, the concept of global civil society is very much in vogue. For many commentators – academics and activists alike – it provides a framework within which to locate a diverse range of contemporary public concerns, from the much publicized 'anti-globalization' (or more accurately, 'anti-capitalism') protests, through the worldwide expressions of concern over American and British involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, to on-going political and ideological struggles in the areas of human rights, the environment, development, labour standards, anti-racism and anti-sexism. The idea of global civil society is thus presented as an alternative to the three apparently unsatisfactory frameworks for understanding the global condition – namely, the global marketplace model which celebrates unregulated capitalist expansion in a borderless world; the nation-state model which accepts that it is the duty of the militarily and economically powerful states to oversee world affairs; and the world federal model which demands more centralized political administration at the supranational level.

In recent years, there has been no shortage of academic literature outlining the structures of this emerging global civil society. Possibly the leading theorist working within this tradition is Richard Falk. In a series of important publications, Falk and his colleagues have sketched out a defence of what they call 'globalization-from-below', which emerges from the struggles of grass roots movements and the concerns and actions of 'global citizens' (Falk, 1999, 2000a, 2000b, see also Brecher, Brown Childs and Cutler, 1993; Brecher, Costello and Smith, 2000). Falk's work belongs to a 'cosmopolitan' tradition which has its roots in Kant's famous essay on perpetual peace (for a slightly different version of cosmopolitanism, see Archibugi and Held, 1995).

The contributors to this volume are by no means unsympathetic to the writings or the intentions of Falk, or of the cosmopolitan tradition in general. The purpose of this volume is not to provide an ideologically cohesive critique of cosmopolitan thinking. Rather, it is to advance those debates from within, by drawing on ideas and literature outside the cosmopolitan tradition in order to highlight and overcome some of its weaknesses. Three general weaknesses can be summarized here:

1. The cosmopolitan tradition tends to rely on an overly simplistic, polarized view of the world, reducible to a few dichotomies ('cosmopolitanism versus the nation state' or 'global civil society versus global capitalism').
2. The cosmopolitan tradition accepts rather too quickly and uncritically the role of new social movements (and more recently, the global anti-capitalist movement) as the agents responsible for building the new civil society.
3. The cosmopolitan tradition reifies concepts such as capitalism, and thus fails to provide a critical analysis of the structures and dynamics of these concepts, and ignores the important distinction between institutions and logics.

Concerned that such weaknesses in cosmopolitan theory might also weaken the noble wider project undertaken by cosmopolitans in practice, we seek in this volume to extend the cosmopolitan perspective by introducing into it a range of diverse theoretical tools, which can provide a clearer understanding of global processes. To this end, we draw on such unlikely but useful concepts as sentiment, embodiment, consequentialism, friendship and many others.

In order to develop an academic understanding of global civil society as it is defined here, and thus to develop a sympathetic critique and expansion of the cosmopolitan tradition, we want to ask two distinct but inter-related questions:

1. How is such a society constituted? Clearly, the idea of global civil society evolves largely from the Kantian concern with 'cosmopolitanism'. However, located as it is within the ethical sphere, it cannot and should not refer solely to a global political community administered via a 'world-state' (by which one could mean either a futuristic 'world government' or, in a more moderate sense, a re-empowered United Nations). The separation of ethical and political dimensions remains at the heart of this project. It is important, then, to provide a clear theoretical framework within which to understand the emerging global civil society.
2. What are its dynamics? In particular, who are the agents operating within the global civil society, and what form does their agency take? Global civil society is a broader category than global citizenship, and while such citizens clearly do operate as agents within the civil society, so, surely, do corporations, networks and social movements.

Each of the contributors to this volume addresses one of these questions. The earlier chapters deal with the constitution of global civil society, the later ones with its dynamics. Before we turn to the various contributions in more detail, we need to explore two frequently used but by no means uncontested concepts, which are central to the themes in this book, namely, civil society and globalization.

The Problem of Civil Society

Jeffrey Alexander, the American sociologist, has defined 'civil society' as 'the realm of interaction, institutions, and solidarity that sustains the public life of societies outside the worlds of economy and state' (1993: 797; see also Alexander, 1998; Cohen, 1995). Note that, for Alexander, civil society exists outside both the market and the state. The complexities surrounding the definition of civil society are most evident in the contributions of its greatest theorist, Hegel, for whom civil society was alternately the realm of social and individual relations mediating between the private realm and the political society (the state), or a realm either synonymous or dialectically related to the state as the ultimate suppression of pre-state ('natural') society (Bobbio, 1979). In fact, Alexander is the latest in a line of social theorists, who have undertaken the task of providing a clear and distinct definition of civil society. In another recent publication, a field of distinguished scholars sought to grapple with this problem, and typically reached no consensus (Walzer, 1995a). As the editor bluntly states in his introduction to that volume, there is considerable disagreement over the meaning of civil society, and it sits in a peculiar position vis-à-vis the state, the market, and the nation (Walzer, 1995b: 1).

The common interpretation of Hegel's theory of civil society is that he saw it as containing not just economic relations but also legal and juridical ones: in other words, the public institutions through which the state manifests itself to private individuals. This tendency to equate civil society with the economy influenced the young Marx; needless to say. As Marx further refined his base-superstructure model, this became a source of tension in his writings, in so far as it became problematic to equate the entirety of civil society with the economic base. This tension reached its pinnacle in later Marxist thought in Gramsci's writings, where the celebrated Italian revolutionary clearly relocated the realm of civil society from the base to the superstructure (Bobbio, 1979). Civil society is, for Gramsci, 'the political and cultural hegemony of a social group on the whole of society, as ethical content of the State' (Gramsci, 1966: 164, cited in Bobbio, 1979: 31).

That civil society stands in opposition to the market is largely uncontested by most contemporary scholars (although see Kai Nielsen's contribution, which in orthodox Hegelian fashion posits civil society between the state and the private domain, thus incorporating the economy within its boundaries {Nielsen, 1995}). To separate civil society from the state is a more controversial proposition, at least in so far as the state is traditionally viewed as the site of all political action. Surely, if the concept of civil society is to have any currency at all, it must involve a politics of sorts (Cohen, 1995) – a politics which is both ethical and democratic, and which is grounded in identities and differences without being hampered by postmodern relativism. Thus, to best understand the concept of civil society, one should first seek to understand the complex and contested concept of ethics. In this volume, the chapters by Parekh, Esposito and Murphy, and Widdows, all contain useful summaries of the major historical contributors to the philosophy of ethics.

Of course, the assertion that political action is not confined to the realm of the state is hardly new, and has been made most forcefully by Foucault. The state is the institutionalization of political action, the agency responsible for administering the centralized means of violence. The relocation of political action away from the individual consciousness and into the hands of the state machinery exemplifies the increasing dominance of systemic forces which, according to Habermas, has been a core characteristic of modernity.

Civil society, then, can be understood as the space in which political action takes place outside the formal, institutionalized structures of the state; the residue of political action left within the consciousness, the lifeworld, untainted by the colonizing, systemic machinery of administration and governmentality. Furthermore, it is an inherently ethical space – a claim consistent with the classical formulations of civil society provided by Hegel and Gramsci. It serves to provide the necessary checks and balances on the powers of the state and its institutions. As an example of the relationship between civil society (in the sense advocated here) and the state, consider the idea of human rights. This idea was invented to serve as an ethical framework within which to condemn the atrocities committed against individuals and groups; that is, a legitimation of that condemnation. Thus, to reduce human rights to a purely legal positivist framework – rights are whatever the law says they are – is to deny their purpose (Freeman, 2002: 10). If the institutionalization of rights occurs when they are embedded in positive law, the law still remains a state institution, and it is the state which, more often than not, commits these atrocities, often utilizing its institutions, including the law, for this purpose. Where, then, is the condemnation of such atrocities legitimized? Not within the law, for sure, but within an ethics which exist outside of the formal institutional system, in the realm of the lifeworld, where the discourse on human rights still resides, regardless of its formalization within the legal framework. Civil society thus serves to connect the political sphere to the realm of public opinion and, in doing so, acts as an important check on government activity (Cohen, 1995; Nielsen, 1995).

If civil society represents the possibility for de-colonized, emancipatory political action, is it not reasonable to assume that it also represents the possibility for economic action free from the dictates of the capitalist market economy? After all, the concern for contemporary critical theorists is not that the political and economic realms are necessarily oppressive, but that the logic which drives them –an instrumental, purposive-rationality – is restrictive to human freedom. If a trace of civil society remains within the economic sphere, perhaps it can be found in economies held together not by the desire for profit for profit's sake, but by networks of friendship and trust, or in transnational corporations exhibiting corporate social responsibility, topics covered in this volume.

Civil society, then, reflects the politicized core of the lifeworld, sustained through social interaction and through a normative engagement with values, which generates the struggle within the personality for emancipation. It is related to, but broader than, the concept of citizenship. Indeed, as Walzer (1995b) points out, the concept of civil society, unlike that of citizenship, allows us to understand better the complex ways in which actors are involved in participatory decision-making through associational networks of interest groups, social movements, cultural allegiances, and so on. Citizens might ideally act out their political and ethical commitments within the realm of civil society, but so might (and do) social movements, networks, and even corporations. The contributors to this volume share many of the concerns of, and ask similar questions to, communitarians such as Walzer and neofunctionalists such as Alexander. However, they seek to answer them equipped with a commitment to a new democratic politics, which has, in social theory at least, manifested itself in two distinct but related forms: the 'radical democracy' of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), with its roots in Foucauldian discourse theory, and the Habermasian-inspired projects of 'discursive' or 'reasonable' democracy (Chambers, 1996; Dryzek, 1990).

The Challenge of Globalization

The classical positions on civil society – Hegel, Marx and Gramsci – were clearly formulated within the paradigm of the nation-state. The task of this volume is to explore the impact of processes, which have commonly come to be called 'globalization', upon this concept of an ethical civil society. Contributors discuss a variety of different actors in what we can loosely, but not without controversy, call the 'global civil society', and a diverse range of forms which participation in this sphere can take.

In fact, the possibility of global civil society is implicitly presupposed in the major work on globalization by Roland Robertson, possibly the foremost scholar in the field. In outlining four images of world order, Robertson presents us with at least two that correspond with some image of global civil society: a cultural-ethical image of world order which he calls global gemeinschaft 2, and an image of world order as a network of socio-cultural and economic exchange relations which he calls global gesellschaft 1 (Robertson, 1992: 78-79). Other writers are more explicit in their advocacy of global civil society based on human rights and a 'cosmopolitan' democracy (Archibugi and Held, 1995; Falk, 1999), or on the active realization of 'global citizenship' (O'Byrne, 2003). Falk – whose contributions to this debate have already been summarized and are subjected to more detailed critical examination in this volume by Kiely – makes his position clear when he defines global civil society as 'the field of action and thought occupied by individual and collective citizen initiatives of a voluntary, non-profit character both within states and transnationally' (Falk, 2000a: 163). Even contributors more sceptical towards the possibility of global restructuring on political and ethical grounds concede that the ideal of global civil society is important. As Sklair (2002: 45) points out, 'now that humankind is vulnerable to destruction through nuclear and toxic catastrophes, a democratic and just human society on the global level, however Utopian, seems to be the best long-term guarantee of the continued survival of humanity'.

The discourse on globalization is as complex and contested as that on civil society, particularly in those cases where it throws up peculiar intellectual alliances which transcend traditional ideological divides. For example, Robertson's historical and non-Marxist account of globalization, which suggests that, despite recent changes in form and intensity, the process is largely a continuation of a much more long-term transformation, shares a number of similarities with Hirst and Thompson's robust refusal to concede that globalization is anything other than the continuation of the long-term project of capitalist internationalism, which purports to be more sympathetic to traditional left-wing ideology (Robertson, 1992; Hirst and Thompson, 1996). Arguing from a neo-Marxist (indeed, Gramscian) perspective, Leslie Sklair maintains that globalization signals a new phase in capitalism (and at the same time for alternatives to capitalism), a position not overly dissimilar to that of neo-liberals such as Ohmae (1990).

It needs pointing out that the contributors to this volume are not seeking to engage directly with the theoretical literature on globalization, nor is this volume intended to serve as a contribution to globalization theory. At this theoretical level, where the meaning, nature and constitution of 'globalization' is discussed, three dominant approaches can be outlined. The first, which is associated primarily with Robertson (1992), sees globalization as a long-term historical process which runs concurrently with modernity and modernization. Opposing this is the belief that globalization signals less of a process than a disjuncture, which disrupts the flow of modernity, either signalling its demise or transforming it radically. An extreme version of this approach is Alb...