John Keane | John Keane - G IVIL...
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CHAPTER 2 G LOBAL C IVIL S OCIETY ? John Keane A New Cosmology A ll human orders, hunting and gathering societies included, have lived off shared images of the cosmos, world-views that served to plant the feet of their members firmly in space and time. Yet very few have fantasised the linking of the five oceans, six continents, and peoples of our little blue planet wrapped in white vapour. Each of these world- views in the strict sense emerged only after the military defeats suffered by Islam, in modern Europe. They included the forceful global acquisition of territory, resources, and subjects in the name of empire; the efforts of Christendom to piggyback on imperial ventures for the purpose of bringing spiritual salvation to the whole world; and the will to unify the world through the totalitarian violence of fascism and Marxism-Leninism. Each of these globalising projects left indelible marks on the lives of the world’s peoples, their institutions and ecosystems, but each also failed to accomplish its mission. In our times, against the backdrop of those failures, the image of ourselves as involved in another great human adventure, one carried out on a global scale, is again on the rise. A new world-view, radically different from any that has existed before, has been born and is currently enjoying a growth spurt: it is called ‘global civil society’. These unfamiliar words ‘global civil society’—a neologism of the last decade— are fast becoming fashionable. They were born at the confluence of three overlapping streams of concern among publicly minded intellectuals at the end of the 1980s: the revival of the old language of civil society, especially in central-eastern Europe, after the military crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968; the new awareness, stimulated by the peace and ecological movements, of ourselves as members of a fragile and potentially self-destructive world system; and the widespread perception that the implosion of Soviet-type communist systems implied a new global order. 1 Since that time, talk of global civil society has become popular among citizens’ campaigners, bankers, diplomats, non-governmental organisations, and politicians—the term even peppered the speeches of former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright (2000)—to the point where the words themselves are as fickle as they are fashionable. The phrase ‘global civil society’ must certainly be used with caution. Like all other vocabularies with a political edge, its meaning is neither self-evident nor unprejudiced. When used carefully as an ideal type, which can in turn be wielded for purposes of descriptive interpretation, or political calculation, or normative judgement, 2 global civil society refers to the contemporary thickening and stretching of networks of socio-economic institutions across borders to all four corners of the earth, such that the peaceful or ‘civil’ effects of these non- governmental networks are felt everywhere, here and there, far and wide, to and from local areas, through wider regions to the planetary level itself. Global civil society is a vast, interconnected, and multi-layered social space that comprises many hundreds of thousands of self-directing or non- governmental institutions and ways of life. It can be likened—to draw for a moment upon ecological similes—to a dynamic biosphere. This complex biosphere looks and feels expansive and polyarchic, full of horizontal push and pull, vertical conflict, and compromise, precisely because it comprises a bewildering variety of interacting habitats and species: organisations, civic and business initiatives, coalitions, social movements, linguistic communities, and cultural identities. All of them have at least one thing in common: across vast geographic distances and despite barriers of time, they deliberately 23 1 Among the earliest expressions of these concerns is the theory of a ‘world civic culture’ in Boulding (1988); the idea of ‘global civilization’ in the working paper by Richard Falk (1990); the theory of the ‘internationalisation’ of civil society and the terms ‘cosmopolitan civil society’ and ‘global’ or ‘transnational’ civil society in Keane (1989; 1991: 135) and Ougaard (1990). Among the first efforts to draw together this early work is Lipschutz (1992: 389–420). 2 The importance of distinguishing among these different usages is analysed in more detail in my introduction to Keane (1988[1998]; 1998).
Transcript of John Keane | John Keane - G IVIL...
C H A P T E R 2
GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY?
John Keane
A New Cosmology
All human orders, hunting and gathering societiesincluded, have lived off shared images of thecosmos, world-views that served to plant the
feet of their members firmly in space and time. Yetvery few have fantasised the linking of the fiveoceans, six continents, and peoples of our little blueplanet wrapped in white vapour. Each of these world-views in the strict sense emerged only after themilitary defeats suffered by Islam, in modern Europe.They included the forceful global acquisition ofterritory, resources, and subjects in the name ofempire; the efforts of Christendom to piggyback onimperial ventures for the purpose of bringing spiritualsalvation to the whole world; and the will to unify theworld through the totalitarian violence of fascism andMarxism-Leninism. Each of these globalising projectsleft indelible marks on the lives of the world’s peoples,their institutions and ecosystems, but each also failedto accomplish its mission. In our times, against thebackdrop of those failures, the image of ourselves asinvolved in another great human adventure, onecarried out on a global scale, is again on the rise. Anew world-view, radically different from any thathas existed before, has been born and is currentlyenjoying a growth spurt: it is called ‘global civilsociety’.
These unfamiliar words ‘global civil society’—aneologism of the last decade— are fast becomingfashionable. They were born at the confluence ofthree overlapping streams of concern among publiclyminded intellectuals at the end of the 1980s: therevival of the old language of civil society, especiallyin central-eastern Europe, after the military crushingof the Prague Spring in 1968; the new awareness,stimulated by the peace and ecological movements,of ourselves as members of a fragile and potentiallyself-destructive world system; and the widespreadperception that the implosion of Soviet-typecommunist systems implied a new global order.1
Since that time, talk of global civil society has becomepopular among citizens’ campaigners, bankers,
diplomats, non-governmental organisations, andpoliticians—the term even peppered the speeches offormer US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright(2000)—to the point where the words themselves areas fickle as they are fashionable. The phrase ‘globalcivil society’ must certainly be used with caution.Like all other vocabularies with a political edge, itsmeaning is neither self-evident nor unprejudiced.When used carefully as an ideal type, which can inturn be wielded for purposes of descriptiveinterpretation, or political calculation, or normativejudgement,2 global civil society refers to thecontemporary thickening and stretching of networksof socio-economic institutions across borders to allfour corners of the earth, such that the peaceful or‘civil’ effects of these non- governmental networksare felt everywhere, here and there, far and wide, toand from local areas, through wider regions to theplanetary level itself.
Global civil society is a vast, interconnected, andmulti-layered social space that comprises manyhundreds of thousands of self-directing or non-governmental institutions and ways of life. It canbe likened—to draw for a moment upon ecologicalsimiles—to a dynamic biosphere. This complexbiosphere looks and feels expansive and polyarchic,full of horizontal push and pull, vertical conflict,and compromise, precisely because it comprises abewildering variety of interacting habitats andspecies: organisations, civic and business initiatives,coalitions, social movements, linguistic communities,and cultural identities. All of them have at least onething in common: across vast geographic distancesand despite barriers of time, they deliberately
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1 Among the earliest expressions of these concerns is the theory ofa ‘world civic culture’ in Boulding (1988); the idea of ‘globalcivilization’ in the working paper by Richard Falk (1990); thetheory of the ‘internationalisation’ of civil society and the terms‘cosmopolitan civil society’ and ‘global’ or ‘transnational’ civilsociety in Keane (1989; 1991: 135) and Ougaard (1990). Amongthe first efforts to draw together this early work is Lipschutz(1992: 389–420).
2 The importance of distinguishing among these different usages isanalysed in more detail in my introduction to Keane (1988[1998];1998).
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organise themselves and conduct their cross-bordersocial activities, business, and politics outside theboundaries of governmental structures, with aminimum of violence and a maximum of respect forthe principle of civilised power-sharing amongdifferent ways of life.
To liken global civil society to a vast biospherethat stretches to every corner of the earth is tounderscore both its great complexity and, as we shallsee, its vulnerability to internal and externalinterference. Just as nearly every part of the earth,from the highest mountains to the deepest seas,supports life, so too global civil society is now foundon virtually every part of the earth’s surface. To besure, everywhere it is tissue-thin, just like the naturalbiosphere, which resembles a paper wrapping thatcovers a sphere the size of a football; and its fringes,where ice and permafrost predominate, are virtuallyuninhabited. In the interior of the Antarctic, onlyrestricted populations of bacteria and insects are tobe found; and even on its coasts there are very fewliving inhabitants. Global civil society is similarlysubject to geographic limits: whole zones of theearth—parts of contemporary Afghanistan, Burma,Chechnya, and Sierra Leone, for instance—are no-go
areas for civil society, which can survive only bygoing underground. But in those areas of the earthwhere it does exist, global civil society comprisesmany biomes: whole areas, like North America andthe European Union, characterised by specific animalsand plants and climatic conditions. Each biome inturn comprises large numbers of living ecosystemsmade up of clusters of organisms living within a non-living physical environment of rocks, soil, and climate.These ecosystems of global civil society—cities,business corridors, and regions, for instance—areinterconnected. And they are more or less intricatelybalanced through continuous flows and recycling ofefforts among, as it were, populations of individualsof the same species, which thrive within communities,
such as smaller cities, that are themselves embeddedwithin non-living geographic contexts.
Biospheric similes are helpful in picturing thecontours of global civil society, but they should notbe overextended, if only because global civil societyis not simply a naturally occurring phenomenon.Although it is naturally embedded within a terrestrialbiosphere, global civil society is an ensemble of moreor less tightly interlinked biomes that are in factsocial processes. The populations, communities,and ecosystems of global civil society compriseflesh and blood, symbol-using individuals, house-holds, profit-seeking businesses, not-for-profit non-governmental organisations, coalitions, socialmovements, and cultural-religious groups. Its biomesfeed upon the work of charities, lobby groups,citizens’ protests, small and large corporate firms,independent media, trade unions, and sportingorganisations: bodies like Amnesty International,Sony, the Catholic Relief Services, the Federation ofInternational Football Associations, TransparencyInternational, the International Red Cross, the FordFoundation, News Corporation International, andthe Indigenous Peoples Bio-Diversity Network. Suchbodies lobby states, bargain with internationalorganisations, pressure and bounce off other non-state bodies, invest in new forms of production,champion different ways of life, and engage in directaction in distant local communities: for instance,through ‘capacity-building’ programmes that supplyjobs, clean running water, sporting facilities,hospitals, and schools. In these various ways, themembers of global civil society help to conserve orto alter the power relations embedded in the chainsof interaction linking the local, regional, andplanetary orders. Their cross-border networks help todefine and redefine who gets what, when, and howin the world. Of great importance is the fact thatthese networks have the power to shape newidentities, even to stimulate awareness among theworld’s inhabitants that mutual understanding ofdifferent ways of life is a practical necessity, that weare being drawn into the first genuinely transnationalorder, a global civil society.
Defined in this way, the ideal-type concept ofglobal civil society invites us to improve ourunderstanding of the emerging planetary order, tothink more deeply about it, in the hope that we canstrengthen our collective powers of guiding andtransforming it. This clearly requires sharpening upour courage to confront the unknown and to imagineG
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Global civil society is a vast,interconnected, and multi-layered socialspace that comprises many hundreds of
thousands of self-directing or non-governmental institutions and ways of
life.
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different futures.3 And it mostdefinitely obliges us to abandonsome old certainties and prejudicesgrounded in the past. The words‘global civil society’ may be said toresemble signs that fix our thoughtson winding pathways that stretchnot only in front of us but alsobehind us. To utter the words ‘globalcivil society’, for instance, is to supwith the dead, with an earlymodern world in which, among theeducated classes of Europe, ‘worldcivil society’ meant something quitedifferent than what it means, orought to mean, today. Just howdifferent our times are can be seen by dwelling fora moment on this older, exhausted meaning of ‘worldcivil society’.
Consider the works of two influential authors ofthe eighteenth century: Emmerich de Vattel’s Le droitdes gens (1758) and Immanuel Kant’s Idee zu einerallgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht(1784) and Zum ewigen Frieden (1795).4 These booksstand at the end phase of a long cycle of Europeanthinking which understands civil society (societascivilis) as the condition of living within an armedlegal order that guarantees its subjects stable peaceand good government. ‘A State is more or less perfectaccording as it is more or less adapted to attain theend of civil society’, wrote de Vattel, for whom thedistinction between state and civil society was literallyunthinkable. A civil society is a special form ofgovernment. It ‘consists in procuring for its citizensthe necessities, the comforts, and the pleasures of life,and in general their happiness; and in securing toeach the peaceful enjoyment of his property and asure means of obtaining justice, and finally indefending the whole body against all externalviolence’ (de Vattel 1758: Ch. 1, section 6). Kantjoined him in making it clear that civil society in thisnormative sense was not necessarily synonymouswith the modern territorial state and its legal codes(ius civile). Their classically-minded theory of civilsociety emphasised that war- mongering amongstates and what Kant called the ‘unsocial sociability’of subjects could be cured by subordinating themwithin a cosmopolitan alliance of states that isoverridden and protected by its own legal codes. DeVattel insisted that states are obliged to respect andto protect what he called the universal society of
the human race. ‘When . . . men unitein civil society and form a separateState or Nation . . . their dutiestowards the rest of the human raceremain unchanged’ (1758: Ch. 1,section 11). Kant went further. Heenvisaged a ‘law of world citizenship’(ius cosmopoliticum) which bindscitizens and states into a higherrepublican commonwealth of states.This commonwealth, which resemblesnot a peace treaty (pactum pacis)but a league of peace (foedus pacifi-cum), would put an end to violencefor ever by treating its subjects ascitizens of a new law-governed
political union. This union he called ‘universal civilsociety’ (einer allgemein das Recht verwaltendenbürgerlichen Gesellschaft) (1784: fifth thesis).
The subsequent birth of modern colonial empires,the rise of nationalism from the time of the FrenchRevolution, and the near-triumph of a globalsystem of sovereign territorial states arguablyconfounded this eighteenth-century vision of globalgovernment or a world civil society. Two centurieslater, the concept of ‘international society’, familiarin the work of scholars like Hedley Bull and MartinWight, tried both to register this historical changeand to preserve something of the old-fashionedmeaning of societas civilis. The global system ofinterlocking territorial states was said not to resembleHobbes’ classic description of a lawless state of natureracked by deathly strivings after power over others.Territorial states were rather seen by Bull and othersas socialised by the behaviour of other states. Theywere linked into ‘the most comprehensive form ofsociety on earth’, an increasingly global frameworkof mutually recognised, informal customs, and formalrules: diplomatic protocol, embassy functions,multilateral treaties, and laws governing matters asdiverse as trade and commerce, war crimes, and theright of non-interference (Bull and Holbraad 1978:106). These state-enforced customs and rules thatlimit sovereignty by respecting it came to be called‘international society’, a state-centred term thatHedley Bull considered to be a basic precondition ofcontemporary world order. International society, he
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These networkshave the power to
shape new identities,even to stimulate
awareness among theworld’s inhabitants
that mutualunderstanding ofdifferent ways oflife is a practical
necessity
3 A stimulating example of such rethinking that is guided by theidea of a global civil society is Edwards (2000).
4 The emergence of the distinction between civil society andgovernmental/state institutions is examined in Keane (1988[1999]).
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wrote, ‘exists when a group of states, conscious ofcertain common interests and common values, forma society in the sense that they conceive themselvesto be bound by a common set of rules in theirrelations with one another, and share in the workingof common institutions’ (Bull 1995: 13; see also Bull1990).
Contours
The terms ‘world civil society’ and ‘internationalsociety’ still have their champions,5 but fromthe standpoint of the new concept of global
civil society their ‘governmentality’ or state-centred-ness are today deeply problematic. Neither theclassical term societas civilis nor thestate-centric concept of ‘internationalsociety’ is capable of grasping thelatter-day emergence of a non-governmental sphere that is called‘global civil society’. These words,‘global civil society’, may well soundold-fashioned, but today they have anentirely new meaning and politicalsignificance. This is why the quest tomap and measure the contours ofglobal civil society is essential forclarifying both its possible conceptualmeanings, its empirical scope andcomplexity, and its political potential.
The principle is clear—theorieswithout observations are bland, observations withouttheories are blind—but the task is difficult. Somesketchy data are available thanks to the path-breaking contributions of bodies like the Union ofInternational Associations, the Index on Civil Societyproject supported by CIVICUS (World Alliance forCitizen Participation), the Ford Foundation-fundedcomparative study of civil society in 22 countries,and this Global Civil Society Yearbook. These effortsconfirm the widespread impression that, during thepast century, the world has witnessed a tectonic—twohundred-fold—increase in the number and varietyof civil society organisations operating at theplanetary level.6 Today, in addition to many hundredsof thousands of small, medium, and large firms doingbusiness across borders, there are some 40,000 non-governmental, not-for-profit organisations operatingat the global level; these international non-govern-mental organisations (INGOs) currently disburse moremoney than the United Nations (excluding the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund); whilemore than two-thirds of the European Union’s reliefaid is currently channelled through them.
The actual contours of global civil societynevertheless remain elusive, for understandablereasons. Histories of the globalisation of civil society—studies of the rise of cross-border business, religion,and sport, for instance—are in short supply.7 Mostdata are nation-based and systems of nationalaccounting provide few detailed statistics on theeconomic contribution of corporations with a globalreach (see Chapter 1). Researchers also disagree aboutwhich criteria—book translations, diasporas, linksamong global cities, the spread of the Englishlanguage, telephone traffic, geographic locations of
Web-sites, the mobility patterns ofcorporate nomads—are the mostpertinent for picturing the networkedcharacter of the emerging globalsociety. In-depth, qualitative accountsof global summits, forums, and othereye-catching events like the globalcampaign against landmines andpublic protests against the G7 powersare also rare. And studies of theintimate details of everyday life,especially research that concentrateson the civilising and socialising effectsat the global level of matters like foodconsumption and television news-watching, are virtually non-existent.
These empirical and technical barriers to mappingand measuring global civil society are compoundedby a basic epistemological difficulty. Simply put, itsactors are not mute, empirical bits and bytes of data.Linked to territories but not restricted to territory,caught up in a vast variety of overlapping andinterlocking institutions, these actors talk, think,interpret, question, negotiate, comply, innovate, resist.Dynamism is a chronic feature of global civil society:
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The terms ‘world civilsociety’ and
‘international society’still have their
champions, but theirstate-centredness is
today deeplyproblematic . . .
5 Examples include Ralf Dahrendorf’s stimulating neo-Kantiandefence of a universal civil society in Dahrendorf (1988: 189):‘The next step towards a World Civil Society is the recognition ofuniversal rights of all men and women by the creation of a bodyof international law.’ Compare the argument that a ‘matureanarchy’ among states is a precondition of a strong‘international society’ in Buzan (1991: 174–81).
6 See the data covering the period 1909–97 presented in the Unionof International Associations (1997-98: Vol. 4, 559); compareRisse-Kappen (1995), Matthews (1997: 50–66); and themisleadingly titled, country-by-country study by Lester M.Salamon et al. (1999).
7 But on these topics see Hobsbawm (1989), Beeching (1979), andMaguire (1999).
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not the dynamism of the restless sea—a naturalisticsimile suggested by Victor Pérez-Diaz (1993)8—but aform of self-reflexive dynamism marked byinnovation, conflict, compromise, consensus, as wellas rising awareness of the contingencies anddilemmas of global civil society itself. This civil societyenables its participants—athletes, campaigners,musicians, religious believers, managers, aid-workers,medics, scientists, journalists, academics—to seethrough global civil society by calling it both ourworld and (more impersonally) this world. For thisreason alone, those who speak of global civil societyshould not lose sight of its elusive, idealtypischquality. The concept of global civil society has whatWittgenstein called ‘blurred edges’. It is an ill-fittingterm clumsily in search of an intelligent object thatis always a subject on the run, striding unevenly inmany different directions.
Sustained and deeper reflection on the subject,and a willingness to puncture old thinking habits,are definitely warranted. An example is theneed to question the current tendency tospeak of civil societies as ‘national’phenomena and, thus, to suppose that globalcivil society and domestic civil societies arebinary opposites. In fact, so-called domesticcivil societies and the emerging global civilsociety are normally linked together incomplex, cross-border patterns of looped and re-looped circuitry; or, to switch to similes drawn fromthe field of physics, the domestic and the global aremarked by strong interactions of the kind that holdtogether the protons and neutrons inside an atomicnucleus. The use of ecological similes earlier in thisessay may be questionable, but it serves the basicpurpose of identifying the urgent need to developtheoretical imagery for better imagining global civilsociety, as it is and as it might become.
The rule of thumb, both in the past and in thepresent, is that the liveliest local civil societies arethose enjoying the strongest links with the globalcivil society. So, in practice, the development ofmodern civil societies within the framework ofEuropean states and empires contained from theoutset the seeds of their own transnationalisation. Theroots of local civil societies are partly traceable to therevival of towns in Europe during the eleventhcentury, a revival that marked the beginning of thecontinent’s rise to world eminence—and its laying ofthe foundations of a global civil society.9 Althoughthe distribution of these European towns—unusual
clumps of people engaged in many different tasks,living in houses close together, often joined wall towall—was highly uneven, with the weakest patternsof urbanisation in Russia and the strongest in Holland,they were typically linked to each other in networksor archipelagos stretching across vast distances.Wherever these urban archipelagos thrived, theyfunctioned like magnets that attracted strangersfascinated by their well-lit complexity, their real orimagined freedom, or their higher wages. Towns likeBruges, Genoa, Nuremberg, and London resembledelectric transformers. They constantly recharged lifeby adding not only motion but also tension to itselements. Town-dwellers seemed to be perpetually onthe move. The constant rumble of wheeled carriages,the weekly or daily markets, and the numeroustrades—floor polishers, pedlars, sawyers, chair-carriers—added to the sense of motion acrossdistance. All these occupations rubbed shoulders withmembers of the better sort: merchants, some of them
very rich, masters, mercenaries, engineers, ships’captains, doctors, professors, painters, architects, allof whom knew what it meant to travel through timeand space.
The winding, twisting layout of towns added totheir appearance of geographic and social dynamism.Medieval Europe was one of only two civilisations—the other was Islam—that fashioned large towns withan irregular maze of streets. What was differentabout the medieval and early modern Europeantowns was their unparalleled freedom from thepolitical authorities of the emerging territorial states.Local merchants, traders, craft guilds, manufacturers,and bankers formed the backbone of a long-distancemoney economy endowed with the power to dictatethe terms and conditions on which governmentsruled. Seen in this way, urban markets were thecuckoo’s egg laid in the little nests of the medieval
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. . . Neither is capable of grasping the latter-day emergence of a non-governmental
sphere that is called global civil society.
8 Compare my remarks on the self-reflexivity of actually existingcivil societies in Keane (1998: 49ff.).
9 The section that follows draws upon Braudel (1981: Ch. 8). Theurban origins of civil society are explored more fully in my work inpreparation, Global Civil Society?
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towns. These nests were woven from various non-governmental institutions, which together with themarkets helped to nurture something brand new:unbounded social space within which theabsolutist state could be checked, criticised, andgenerally held at arm’s length from citizens.
The birth of civil societies in this sense heralded thedawn of universal history marked by the constantreciprocal interaction between local and far-distantevents (Aron 1978: 212–23). So it can be said that theeighteenth-century vision of cosmopolitanismdefended by Vattel, Kant, and others was a child oflocal civil societies; and that cosmopolitanism was theprivilege of those whose lives were already anchoredin local civil societies. The other-regarding, outward-looking openness of these societies—their glimpseof themselves as part of a wider, complex world—constantly tempted them to engage that enlargedworld. True, this worldliness, helped along by thesuperior naval power, deep-rooted pugnacity, andcomparative immunity to disease that had earlierfacilitated the rise of the West from around 1500onwards often triumphed in violent, uncivilised form.Among its landmarks, which now appear barbaric bytoday’s standards of civility, are the ruthlessaggression of Almeida and Albuquerque in the IndianOcean, the destruction of the Amerindian civilisationsof Peru and Mexico, and the generalised hostilitytowards peoples as diverse as Muslim traders in theMediterranean basin and aboriginal hunters andgatherers in such countries as Australia and Canada(McNeill 1963: Ch. 11). And yet—the birth andmaturation of global civil society has been riddledwith ironies—the worldliness of early modern civilsocieties undoubtedly laid the foundations for theirlater globalisation. An example is the colonisingprocess triggered by the British Empire, which at itsheight governed nearly one-third of the world’spopulation. Unlike the Spanish colonies, which werethe product of absolute monarchy, the British Empirewas driven not only by maritime-backed colonialpower but also non-state initiatives, either for profit(as in the Virginia Company and the East IndiaCompany) or for religious ends, evident in extensiveChristian missionary activity and the emigration of
dissenters: Puritans to New England, Quakers toPennsylvania, Methodists to Australia, and Presby-terians to Canada.
Overdeterminations
The neologism ‘global civil society’ belatedlynames this old tendency of local and regionalcivil societies to link up and to penetrate regions
of the earth that had previously not known the ethicsand structures of civil society in the modern Europeansense. But the neologism points as well to currentdevelopments that speed up the growth, and greatly‘thicken’, the networks of transnational, non-governmental activities. What drives this globalisationof civil society? Its activist champions and theirintellectual supporters sometimes pinpoint the powerof autonomous moral choice. Treading in Gramsci’sfootsteps, usually without knowing it, they defineglobal civil society as the space of social interaction‘located between the family, the state and the mar-ket and operating beyond the confines of nationalsocieties, polities, and economies’ (Chapter 1, p.17).That leads them to speak, rather romantically, ofglobal civil society as a realm of actual or potentialfreedom, as a ‘third sector’ opposed to the impersonalpower of government and the greedy profiteering ofthe market (households typically disappear from theanalysis at this point). ‘Civil society participatesalongside—not replaces—state and market insti-tutions’, write Naidoo and Tandon. Global civil society‘is the network of autonomous associations thatrights-bearing and responsibility-laden citizensvoluntarily create to address common problems,advance shared interests and promote collectiveaspirations’ (1999: 6–7).10 Such purist images reduceactually existing global civil society to campaignstrategies harnessed to the normative ideal ofcitizens’ autonomy at the global level. That in turncreates the unfortunate impression that global civil
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The other-regarding, outward-looking openness of these societies—their
glimpse of themselves as part of a wider, complex world —constantly tempted them to engage
that enlarged world
10 The more recent campaign writings of Kumi Naidoo develop lessromantic and more sophisticated images of global civil society,which, however, continues to be understood as the spacewedged between global market forces and various forms ofgovernment (see for example Naidoo 2000: 34–6).
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society is a (potentially) unified subject, a ‘thirdforce’,11 something like a world proletariat in civvies,the universal object-subject that can snap its chainsand translate the idea of a ‘World Alliance for CitizenParticipation’ (Tandon 1999: 5) into reality, therewithrighting the world’s wrongs.
Although many things can be said for and againstthese conceptions, it is worth noting here that theirGramscian bias, which draws a thick line between (bad)business backed by government and (good) voluntaryassociations, leads them to understate the over-determined character of global civil society. ‘Solidarityand compassion for the fate and well-being of others,including unknown, distant others, a sense of personalresponsibility and reliance on one’s own initiative to dothe right thing; the impulse toward altruistic givingand sharing; the refusal of inequality, violence, andoppression’ (de Oliveira and Tandon 1994: 2–3)12 areundoubtedly significant, even indispensable motives inthe globalisation of civil society. But one-sided emphasison the free civic choices of men and women has theeffect of obscuring other planetary forces that currentlyconstrain and enable their actions.
Turbo-capitalism
Turbo-capitalism is undoubtedly among theprincipal energisers of global civil society.13 Tounderstand why this is so, and what the term
‘turbo-capitalism’ means, a brief comparison needs tobe made with the system of Keynesian welfare statecapitalism that predominated in the West after WorldWar II. For some three decades, market capitalisteconomies like the United States, Sweden, Japan, theFederal Republic of Germany, and Britain moved in thedirection of government-controlled capitalism. In termsof the production of goods and services, firms, plants,and whole industries were very much nationalphenomena; facilitated by international trade of rawmaterials and foodstuffs, production was primarilyorganised within territorially-bound national economiesor parts of them. Markets were embedded in webs of
government (Hobsbawm 1979: 313). In the era of turbo-capitalism, by contrast, markets tend to becomedisembedded. Turbo-capitalism is a species of privateenterprise driven by the desire for emancipation fromtaxation restrictions, trade union intransigence,government interference, and all other externalrestrictions upon the free movement of capital in searchof profit. Turbo-capitalism has strongly deregulatoryeffects, and on a global scale. The transnationaloperations of some 300 pace-setting firms in industriessuch as banking, accountancy, automobiles, airlines,communications, and armaments—their combinedassets make up roughly a quarter of the world’sproductive assets—no longer function as productionand delivery operations for national headquarters(Barnet and Cavanagh 1995: 15). Bursting the boundsof time and space, language and custom, they insteadfunction as complex global flows or integratednetworks of staff , money, information, rawmater ia l s , components, and products.14
Admittedly, the degree to which turbo-capitalistfirms operate globally, like border-bustingjuggernauts, should not be exaggerated. Turbo-capitalism has a marked geographic bias. Its home basefrequently lies within the OECD countries, and thecapital, technology, and trade flows that it effectstend to be concentrated, for the time being, withinrather than among the European, Asian-Pacific, andNAFTA/Latin American regions.15 Only one of the top100 transnational corporations has its headquartersoutside the OECD, and nearly 60 per cent of worldtrade is between high income countries (see Tables R3and R2 in part IV of this Yearbook) Yet, wherever theturbo-capitalist economy gains the upper hand, it hasdefinite globalising effects. It leads to sharp increasesin profit-driven joint ventures and co-production,licensing and sub-contracting agreements among local,regional, and global firms. For the first time ever, moderncapitalist firms have unlimited grazing rights. Helpedalong by trade and investment liberalisation and radicalimprovements in transportation and communication
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11 The temptation to see global civil society in this way is evident inthe introduction to Florini (2000: 1–15).
12 Similar views are defended in Korten (1990) and in Habermas(1996: Ch. 8). The chief theoretical limitations of the (neo-)Gramscian approach are analysed in my forthcoming Global CivilSociety? and in Keane (1998: 15–19).
13 The term ‘turbo-capitalism’ is drawn from Luttwak (1999). It willbe seen that my substantive account of the impact of theprocess differs considerably from that of Luttwak.
14 By 1997 there were some 53,000 transnational corporationswith 450,000 foreign subsidiaries operating worldwide. Theyspanned the world’s principal economic regions in virtuallyevery sector, from finance, raw materials, and agriculture tomanufacturing and services. Selling goods and services to thevalue of some US$9.5 trillion in 1997, these transnationalenterprises accounted for 70 per cent of world trade and around20 per cent of the world’s overall production. Some relevantdata are usefully summarised in Held and McGrew (2000: 25).(See Table R3 in part IV of this Yearbook)
15 Compare Hirst and Thompson (1999) and Mittelman (2000:20–1).
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technologies, they can do business anywhere in theworld. The exceptions—North Korea, Afghanistan, SierraLeone—prove the rule, especially since the collapse ofthe Soviet Empire and the beginning of the Chineseexperiment with state-engineered market reforms.Some economists describe this trend in terms of thehistoric development of global commodity chains:geographically dispersed yet transactionally linkedsequences of functions in which each phase adds marketvalue to the overall worldwide process of production ofgoods or services (Gereffi 1996: 427–39; Gereffi andKorzeniewicz 1994: Ch. 5).
When Adam Smithfamously analysed the‘division of labour’within the emergingcivil societies of theAtlantic region, hisreferences to the spe-cialisation of workerswithin different partsof the production pro-cess had no specificgeographic connota-tions. He could sup-pose that industriesand services of all kindsenjoyed a ‘natural pro-tection’ from foreign
competition thanks to the vagaries of geographicaldistance. That supposition continued to be plausibleeven during the vigorous growth spurt of internationaleconomic integration before World War I and until twodecades ago, when shallow integration (Dicken 2000:5)—arm’s length trade in goods and services amongindependent firms and through international move-ments of capital—was the norm. The system of turbo-capitalism, by contrast, draws everybody and everythingwithin its wake into processes of deep integration,which extend from visible and invisible trading to theproduction of goods and services by means of globallyconnected commodity chains organised by transnationalcorporations.
These processes of deep integration are highlycomplex and uneven. Turbo-capitalism has unleashedglobalising forces but this has not yet resulted in afully globalised world economy. Turbo-capitalismdoes not lead to a ‘global marketplace’, let alone a‘global village’. Its effects are variable, ranging fromvery weak or non- existent forms of integration tovery strong or full integration. At one end of the
continuum stand whole peoples and regions who areroutinely ignored by the dynamics of turbo-capitalism. Some parts of sub-Saharan Africa fallinto this category; such areas, victims of ‘capitalistapartheid’—a term used by the Peruvian economistHernando de Soto16—suffer the consequences oforganised neglect by turbo-capitalist investors.Elsewhere, further along the continuum, straight-forward exchange across vast distances betweenwealthy core and poorer peripheral areas—forinstance, the exporting of granite mined in Zimbabweto the kitchens and bathrooms of western Europe—is the norm. Then, at the opposite end of thecontinuum, there are sectors of economic life, like thehighly unstable, twenty-four-hour financial specu-lation conducted in cities like New York, London, andTokyo, in which the whole earth is a playground forturbo-capital.
Within the industrial and service sectors of globalcivil society, turbo-capitalism also slices throughterritorial and time barriers by bringing about highlycomplex forms of market integration involving thefragmentation of production processes and theirgeographical relocation and functional reintegrationon a global scale. In accordance with what can becalled the Low Cost and Safety Principle, turbo-capitalist firms globalise production by transferringsophisticated state-of-the-art production methods tocountries where wages are extremely low. A numberof poorer countries, Mexico and China among them,are consequently now equipped with the infra-structural means of housing any service or industrialoperation, whether airline ticket and holidaytelephone sales or capital-intensive, high-techproduction of commodities like computers andautomobiles. Such trade and investment within firmsalso leads to the formation of a global labour pool.17
When businesses develop globally interconnectedchains of investment, resources and finished productsand services workers based in richer countries likeGermany and France are effectively forced tocompete with workers living in places—China,Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea—where wages are
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16 De Soto (2000) argues that some five-sixths of humanity hasbeen denied the economic fruits of globalisation.
17 Estimates are that about a third of world trade is now taken upby trade between one part of a global firm and its otheraffiliates, and the proportion is growing. Such ‘self-trading’,oiled by so-called transfer pricing, is strongly evident in theoperations of firms like General Electric, which like many otherfirms operating across the Mexican-US border ships machinerycomponents to its own subsidiary in Nuevo Laredo.
The Gramscian bias of
the activists and their
intellectual supporters
draws a thick line
between (bad) business
backed by government
and (good) voluntary
associations . . .
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low and social entitlements of workers are eitherpoorly protected or non-existent.18
Market Contradictions
The striking social discrepancies produced bymarket processes within global civil society haveled some observers—Sakamoto Yoshikazu, for
instance (2000: 98–116)—to question whether marketforces with such destructive consequences properlybelong within the category of global civil society.Yoshikazu’s query is important, if only because itexemplifies the strong tendency within the existingacademic literature on global civil society to drawupon the deeply problematic, originally Gramsciandistinction between civil society—the realm of non-profit, non-governmental organisations—and themarket— the sphere of profit-making and profit-takingcommodity production and exchange. Yoshikazu,treading Gramsci’s path, mistakenly conflates thedifferent possible usages— empirical interpretation,strategic calculation, normative judgement—of theconcept of global civil society. On that basis, his under-standably strong dislike of the socially negative(disruptive or outright destructive) effects of marketforces within actually existing civil societies moveshim to banish the market altogether from the conceptof global civil society. The reasoning secretly drawsupon the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ in orderto defend the latter against the former. The termglobal civil society is thereby turned into a normativeutopia. Ethically speaking, it becomes a ‘pure’ concept:an unadulterated ‘good’, like a sparkling coveteddiamond that all would want to prize, especially ifoffered it on a soft velvet cushion of fine words. Yoshikazu’s normative reasoning is tempting—whobut curmudgeons, ideologists, and crooks could beethically opposed to civil society in his sense?—but itshould be rejected, for three reasons. Normativelyspeaking, it implies that global civil society could infuture survive without money or monetary exchanges,rather as nineteenth- century and early-twentieth-century communists disastrously imagined that futurecommunist society would be bound together by suchattributes as love, hard work, and mutuality. In mattersof strategy, the purist concept of global civil societyfares no better. If the aim is to create and/or tostrengthen global civil society by displacing marketforces, then anything related to the market—money,jobs, workers, trade unions— cannot by definition beof much use in struggles to achieve that civilising
goal. Otherwise, the means—the commodification ofsocial relations—would corrupt and potentiallyoverpower the envisaged end: the humanisation ofsocial relations. It seems, unrealistically, that globalcivil society will be possible only if people behave asgood people. Work, trade unions, corporate philan-thropy, small businesses, advanced technologiessupplied by transnational firms: none of this (it issupposed) could or should play a part in the struggleto expand and thicken the cross-border social networksthat comprise global civil society.
Finally, there is a strong empirical objectionto the attempt toseparate markets fromglobal civil society.The dualism betweenmarket and global civilsociety wielded byYoshikazu and othersis a phantom, a badabstraction, for inreality markets arealways a particularform of socially andpolitically mediatedinteraction structuredby money, production,exchange, and con-sumption. Global civilsociety as we know and experience it today could notsurvive for a day without the market forces unleashedby turbo-capitalism. The converse rule also applies:the market forces of turbo-capitalism could not lasta day without other global civil society institutions,like households, community associations, regions,and linguistically shared social norms like friendship,trust, and non-violent cooperation.
To emphasise that market activity is always sociallyembedded runs counter to the view of those whowarn that ‘global capital’ is a profits-hungry
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. . . this one-sided
emphasis on the free
civic choices of men
and women has the
effect of obscuring
other planetary forces
that currently constrain
and enable their
actions.
18 The figures are telling of this new development: in 1975, the topdozen exporters of goods were almost all rich capitalist countrieswith relatively small wage differentials. The highest averagehourly wage was in Sweden (US$7.18); the lowest was in Japan(US$3), a differential of just under two-and-a-half times. By1996, driven by the forces of Turbo-capitalism, a global labourpool had developed, with a corresponding dramatic widening ofwage differences. The highest average hourly wages were foundin Germany (US$31.87) and the lowest in China (US$0.31): a paydifferential of more than a hundred times. The striking differencesare of course compounded by much longer hours of work(sometimes up to 80 hours a week) and poorly protected workingconditions in the low-wage sectors of the global economy. SeeAnderson and Cavanagh (2000: 30).
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juggernaut ruthlessly breaking down political bordersand smashing through walls of social restraintembodied in local communities and other institutions.‘Cold-blooded, truly arm’s-length and thereforepurely contractual relations exemplify the entire spiritof turbo-capitalism’, writes Luttwak (1999: 43). Suchdescriptions of the spread of global business correctlycapture something of its swashbuckling, buccaneer,time-and-distance-conquering tendencies. They alsopoint to its amoral profiteering as a consequence ofcompanies’ geographic separation of investmentdecisions and their social consequences. Thesedescriptions pose a normative problem: the need todeal politically with the chronic tendency of
commodity production and exchange to pick thelocks of global civil society and to roam freelythrough its rooms, like a thief in the night. ‘As longas capitalism remains triumphant’, comments Soros,‘the pursuit of money overrides all other socialconsiderations . . . The development of a globaleconomy has not been matched by the developmentof a global society’ (1999: 102).
While these claims are sobering, they arguablyexaggerate the degree to which turbo-capitalism hasbecome unhinged or disembedded from the emergingglobal civil society. No business, global businessincluded, can properly function as business unless itdraws upon and nurtures the non-market environ-ment of civil society in which it is more or lessembedded. The artificial distinction between ‘themarket’ and ‘global civil society’ obscures this funda-mental point and in so doing obscures a basicdynamic of our times: the tendency of turbo-capitalism to nurture and simultaneously disorderthe structures of global civil society within which itoperates.
It is important to grasp these positive and negativedynamics. On the positive, society-enhancing side,some sectors of global business greatly ‘thicken’ thecommunications networks that enable allorganisations and networks to operate at the global
level. Under modern conditions, states rather thanglobal businesses have often been the inventors ofnew technologies of transport and communication.While this rule holds true, say, for the World WideWeb and geostationary satellites, subsequent newinvestments in these and other communicationstechnologies are typically market-driven: they gowhere the returns are high. The commercial intro-duction of these technologies, as well as wide-bodiedjet aircraft, fibre optics, super-freighters, andcontainerisation, have several cumulative—revo-lutionary—effects. Through leased networks, organ-isations large and small can now operate over vastgeographical distances, thanks to the growth of
country-to-country links, regional hub-and-spoke networks, and global telecommuni-cations services (Langdale 1989). There is asharp reduction of both the operating costsand the time it takes both information andthings and people to move from one part ofthe world to another. The friction of distanceis greatly reduced.19
Business firms also have socialisingeffects by virtue of their tendency to cluster
geographically in the ecosystems of global civilsociety, in towns and cities that form part of a widerregion. They create regionally-based ‘untraded inter-dependencies’ (see Storper 1997; also Amin and Thrift1994). Examples of such thriving regions includeSeoul-Inchon, southern California, the M4 corridor,and the conurbations of Stuttgart, Tokyo, Paris-Sud,and Milan. The recently created Special EconomicZones, open coastal cities, and priority developmentareas in China also count as striking examples. Likebees to a hive, firms swarm to such places not simplybecause it is profitable (thanks to reduced transactioncosts) but because their own profitability requiresthe cultivation of densely textured socio-culturalties (‘untraded interdependencies’) that come withagglomeration. The regional civil society becomesthe hive and propolis of business activity. Firms findthat face-to-face interaction with clients, customers,
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19 The growth of market-driven communications within global civilsociety ‘shrinks’ the world, even though this time-spacecontraction is extremely uneven. Shaped like a slim octopus withthe globe half in its clutches, influential cities, together withpowerful national economies and globe-straddling firms, aredrawn together as if they are part of the same body; but whilecertain places and people become the head and eyes andtentacles of global civil society, whole geographic areas andwhole peoples, many millions of them, are left out and leftbehind in the spaces between the slim tentacles ofcommunication.
Global civil society as we know and experience it
could not survive for a day without the market
forces unleashed by turbo-capitalism
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and competitors is easier. They find as well that theirchosen patch contains social spaces for gatheringbusiness information, monitoring and maintainingpatterns of trust, establishing common rules ofbusiness behaviour, and socialising with others: inplaces like clubs, bars, cinemas, theatres, sportsvenues, and restaurants. And the regional civil societyacts as ‘technopole’ (Castells and Hall 1994) or‘technology district’ (Storper 1992). It enables firmsto enhance their capacity for technical innovation:they can better develop, test, mimic, and trackinnovations, find new gaps in the market, and reactmore quickly to changing patterns of demand.
Turbo-capitalist firms, aided by the local andregional networks of smaller firms withwhich they do business, also have definitecivilising effects on the global civil societyin which they are embedded. For a start,the hundreds of thousands of firms thatinhabit the markets of global civil society aregenerally antipathetic to violence. Some ofthem, in certain contexts, have shamefulrecords of colluding with the violence ofpolitical authorities hell-bent on destroyingtheir opponents—as happened in South Africa beforethe revolution against apartheid, or as now happensin the global small arms industry. There are evenglobal businesses, like the diamond and cocainetrades, that operate through murderous networks ofarmed guerillas. Yet—the qualification is important—most global businesses share a commonly perceived,long-term interest in the eradication of violence.Their chief executive officers, for instance, do notlike working within the deathly shadows of knee-capping, abduction, or murder. In general, theconduct of business, which requires the freedom tocalculate risk over time, prudently and withoutinterruption, is made difficult or impossible whenviolence threatens, which is why investment ischronically low, or non-existent, in zones of uncivilwar, like Sierra Leone, southern Sudan, Chechnya,and parts of the former Yugoslavia.
Turbo-capitalist firms also generate—for somepeople—income, goods and services, and jobs (50 percent of the world’s manufacturing jobs are nowlocated outside the OECD region, a twelve-foldincrease in four decades). These firms produce somemeasure of ‘social capital’ by training local employeesin such skills as self-organisation, punctuality, andforward-looking initiative. Particularly in the fieldof consumer retailing, through commercial radio and
television, firms also engage local cultures for thepurpose of constructing convincing worlds of moreor less shared symbols, ideas, and values. Consumerretailing by transnational conglomerates demon-strates the obsolescence of the neo-Gramsciandistinction between struggles for meaningfulauthenticity (for instance, in the idioms of food,dress, language, music, and dance) in the realm of‘civil society’ as narrowly conceived by Yoshikazu andothers, and money-centred conflicts over wealth andincome in ‘the economy’. To the extent that globalcivil society becomes media-saturated, with intensepressure to consume, conflicts about the generationof wealth and income within ‘the economy’ are
simultaneously disputes about symbolic meanings(see Ong 1999). The development of up-marketservices—hotels in Dubai boasting seven-star statusand featuring exotic menus of breaded Dover sole andchar-grilled bison fillets—and the down-marketretailing of products like McDonald’s, Pepsi, andAmerican television programmes to the villages ofsouth Asia and central America and to cities likeShanghai, Sydney, Johannesburg, and Cairo, ifanything, have the effect of accentuating localcultural diversity within global civil society. This ispartly because profit-seeking, turbo- capitalistretailers themselves see the need to tailor theirproducts to local conditions and tastes; and alsobecause (as Marshall Sahlins has wittily pointed out20)local consumers display vigorous powers ofreinterpreting and ‘overstanding’ these commodities,thus giving them new and different meanings.
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Most global businesses share a commonly
perceived, long-term interest in the eradication
of violence. Investment is chronically low, or non-
existent in zones of uncivil war.
20 Sahlins (1999: 34): ‘Why are well-meaning Westerners soconcerned that the opening of a Colonel Sanders in Beijingmeans the end of Chinese culture? A fatal Americanization. Butwe have had Chinese restaurants in America for over a century,and it hasn’t made us Chinese. On the contrary, we obliged theChinese to invent chop suey. What could be more American thanthat? French fries?’
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Market Failures
Caution should certainlybe exercised on this lastpoint, for the truth is
that global corporations todayenter our living rooms aglowin public-image or ‘pro-social’advertising. Many firms,backed up by high-flying,well-paid ‘ethics officers’,present the world with their‘we too are citizens of theworld’ corporate credo anddo their best to distract their (potential) criticsfrom saying that these firms employ eight-year-oldsin sweatshops or brazenly trample upon theenvironment. Corporate advertising is a potentialmenace when it comes to understanding clearly thedynamics of global civil society. Although turbo-capitalism feeds and fuels the delicate socialecosystems of the emerging global civil society, sadlythis is only half the story, essentially because turbo-capitalism also operates as a contradictory force withinglobal civil society. Like a predator, it misuses and de-pletes its resources, endangers some of its species,even ruining whole habitats, the effects of whichricochet throughout the ecosystems of global civilsociety. Not surprisingly, the predatory effects ofturbo-capitalism meet resistance: global resistancethat ranges from micro-experiments with creditunions, maximum wages, and time banks, throughpetitions (like the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which hascollected 25 million signatures worldwide in favour ofdebt cancellation—see Chapter 3) to militant streetprotests by individuals and groups, gas masks andmegaphones in hand, who are convinced that thecutting edge of anti-capitalist politics is extra-parliamentary.
The sources of this protest against turbo-capitalism are not hard to find. To begin with, thebusiness units of turbo-capitalism chronicallyexercise what C. B. Macpherson (1973: 42–50; 71–75)once called ‘extractive power’ over their workersand other dependents, for instance through day-by-day hiring and firing practices and their abilityto pay ruinously low, take-it-or-leave-it wages. Thesebusinesses also have at their disposal the power toruin others’ lives by deciding to invest here and notthere, or instead by moving their investments fromhere to there. Global civil society is also under great
pressure to adopt more or lessunaffordable turbo-capitalistliving standards, many ofthem originally American, likeautomobility, Windows 2000,microscooters, Mastercards,shopping malls, and endlesschatter about ‘choice’. Ifduring the eighteenth centurya cosmopolitan was typicallysomeone who thought à lafrançaise, who in other wordsidentified Paris with cosmo-polis, then three centuries
later, thanks to turbo-capitalism, a cosmopolitanmight turn out to be someone whose tastes arefixated on New York and Washington, Los Angeles,and Seattle.
Pressured by turbo-capitalism, global civil society,which otherwise displays a strong tendency towardspolyarchy, naturally cradles new property relations, withstaggering discrepancies in wealth and income distri-bution. The economies of giant firms like Ford andPhilip Morris exceed the gross domestic products ofcountries like Norway and New Zealand. Meanwhile, asmall elite of winners, the ‘transnational managerialclass’ (Cox 1986), less politely the bourgeoiscosmocracy—corporate executives, peripatetic lawyers,rock-stars, jet-age nomads living in penthouseapartments in choice locations, like the Upper East Sideof Manhattan—monopolises more than its share ofwealth and income. The combined wealth of the world’srichest 200 billionaires reached an astonishing US$1.1trillion in 1999, the year in which the combined incomesof 582 million people living in the least developedcountries was US$146 billion, or less than a dollar a day.The three richest people in the world own assets thatexceed the combined GDP of the world’s 48 poorestcountries (Hirsh 2000: 79; Mittelman 2000: 246). For thetime being, this bourgeois cosmocracy exercises powerglobally over a mass of survivors or losers of varyingaffluence or poverty. They do so despite the oppositionof market-shy governments and the growth of newforms of transnational protest, like the recent battles forthe streets of Seattle, Prague, and Québec City led bygroups like Earth First! and the Ruckus Society, andbacked up by contingents of farmers, environmentalists,students, aboriginal rights activists, and trade unionists.
Not surprisingly—a final item on the balance sheet—turbo-capitalism strengthens the hand of marketdomination over the non-profit institutions of civilG
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Many global
corporations today enter
our living rooms aglow in public
image or ‘pro-social’ advertising to
distract potential critics from saying
they employ eight-year-olds or
brazenly trample upon the
environment
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society, which are twisted and torn into bodies thatobey the rules of accumulation and profit-maximisation. Some non-governmental organisationsformerly dependent on government funding, like theSeattle-based service agency Pioneer Human Services,opt for self-financing through their own for-profitbusiness enterprises. Market forces produce greatinequalities among INGOs: Greenpeace, with a $100million annual budget, and the World Wildlife Fund,with $170 million, are wealthier than the UNEnvironment Programme and most other state-levelgovernments they deal with (Shaw 2000: 14). In somesectors, it is as if the emerging global civil society ismerely the appendage of the turbo-capitalist economy.Some non-governmental organisations—so-calledbusiness NGOs or BINGOs—even explicitly modelthemselves on business enterprises by developingcommercial departments, head-hunters, mediasections, and private fund-raising and investmentstrategies. The neat division between the corporateand NGO worlds consequently becomes blurred.
The New Medievalism
Although turbo-capitalism is arguably the forcethat most strongly energises the non-governmental sector from within, global civil
society is not simply its child. To repeat: global civilsociety is overdetermined by various forces. It is a‘syndrome’ (Mittelman 2000) of processes and activitieswhich have multiple origins and multiple dynamics,some of them—like the recent collapse and discreditingof communism—more conjunctural than deep-seated.Together, these forces ensure that global civil societyis not a single, unified domain and that it is not turnedinto something that is coming to resemble a combinedfactory, warehouse, and shopping mall retailingconsumer products on a global scale—let’s say, a versionof Disney’s ‘Its a Small World After All’. Global civilsociety is not simply reducible to the logic of com-modity production and exchange, which helps toexplain why the ideal of a global civil society currentlyappeals to an astonishing variety of conflicting socialinterests, ranging from groups clustered around theWorld Bank to broad-minded Muslims defending theirfaith and radical ecological groups pressing forsustainable development.
If the institutions of global civil society are notmerely the products of civic initiative and marketforces, then is there a third force at work in nurturingand shaping it? It can be argued that global civil
society is also the by-product of state or inter-stateaction, or inaction. Examples are easy to find. Mostobvious is the set of political institutions andagreements that play a vital role in fostering thegrowth of turbo-capitalism, for instance the ‘FinalAct’ of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, a1994 agreement that had the backing of 145 statesand that led to the establishment of the World TradeOrganisation and to the extension of the principle offreer trade into such areas as copyrights, patents,and services. Meanwhile, in fields like telecom-munications and air, land and sea traffic, politicalbodies such as the International Postal Union, mostof them resting formally on agreements to whichstates are signatories, exercise formidable regulatorypowers that enable many parts of global civil societyto keep moving at a quickening pace (see Tables R6and R10 in part IV of this Yearbook).
Government agencies, much more than corporatephilanthropy, also currently play a major, positive-sumrole in protecting, funding, and nurturing non-profitorganisations in every part of the earth where thereis a lively civil society (Salamon 1999, see also Pinter,Chapter 8).21 Included in this category are civilorganisations that operate on the margins of thegovernmental institutions that license them in thefirst place. Examples include the InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross which, although non-governmental, is mandated under the GenevaConvention and is linked to states through theorganisation of the International Federation of RedCross and Red Crescent Societies; similarly, theInternational Association of Religious Freedom, aforum for inter-religious dialogue, has accreditedNGO status at the UN and UNESCO levels. State-funded systems of mass higher education linkedtogether by shared languages, common teaching andresearch methods, staff and student exchanges, andcompatible hardware also fall into this category ofstate-enabled civil organisations. Governmentalinstitutions also sometimes operate as importantcatalysts of activity within global society, for instanceby hosting global conferences like the much-publicised 1992 Global Forum and Earth Summit heldin Rio de Janeiro, and the follow-up women’s andpopulation conferences in Beijing and Cairo (seePianta, Chapter 7).
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21 The comparative findings are cited in Evans (1997); and on thefunding of Japanese INGOs by the Ministry of Foreign Affairsand Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, see Menju andAoki (1995).
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This logic of catalysis is also evident in theproliferation of human rights groups like Charter 77after the 1975 signing of the Helsinki Accords, oneof whose ‘baskets’ required signatories to guaranteethe civil and political rights of their citizens; similarcatalytic effects have resulted from the 1993 ViennaConference on Human Rights, where 171 statesreaffirmed their commitment to theprinciple of the ‘universal nature ofthe rights and freedoms’ specified inthe International Bill of HumanRights.
These well-known examplesillustrate the less familiar rule thatglobal civil society should not bethought of as the natural enemy ofpolitical institutions. The vastmosaic of groups, organisations,and initiatives that comprise globalcivil society are variously related togovernmental structures at the local,national, regional, and supranationallevels. Some sectors of social activity,the so-called anti-governmentorganisations (AGOs), are openlyhostile to the funding and regulatorypowers of state institutions. Other sectors, forinstance those in which the acronym NGO rathermeans ‘next government official’, are openlycollaborative, either serving as willing contractorsfor governments or aiming at dissolving themselvesinto governmental structures (Tendler 1982). Stillothers (GONGOs or GRINGOs, like the InternationalAir Transport Association and the WorldConservation Union) are the dependent creations ofstate authorities. In between these two extremesstand those social actors (for example, Médecins sansFrontières, Oxfam, Greenpeace) who slalom betweenself-reliance and legal and political dependency. Theyform ad hoc partnerships with governments; lobbydonor intergovernmental bodies like the World Bankto change their policies; and work with other non-governmental organisations in rich and poorcountries, zones of peace and war alike.
More reflection is definitely needed on thecomplex, unstable relationship between global civilsociety and the hotchpotch of political-legalinstitutions in which it is embedded (see Young 1994;Rosenau and Czempiel 1992). One importantgeneralisation can safely be made, which is thatunlike the early modern civil societies, which typically
hatched within the well-established containers ofempires and territorial states, global civil society hasemerged and today flourishes in the absence of aglobal state or world empire. Practising the art ofdivide et impera from below, well-organised actorswithin global civil society, turbo-capitalist firms forinstance, often manage to transform territorial
governments into their submissivecourtesans or to evade the regulatoryhand of such governments, whoseown attempts to guard jealously theirown remaining sovereign powers tiesthe hands of transnational governingbodies like the United Nations.
Those who conclude from thesetrends that the term ‘global civilsociety’ is therefore meaningless—asif the term could only ever be theSiamese twin of the term ‘globalstate’ (Brown, 1999)—overlook thenovelty of our situation. It is true thatthere is currently no global state andthat it is most improbable that infuture one could be developed,assuming that it would be desirable todo so. The current growth spurt of
global civil society under ‘lawless’ conditions outpacesgovernments of all descriptions, and it containswithin it a pressing constitutional agenda: the needto find the appropriate form of global governance sothat something like publicly accountable, multi-levelgovernment can develop on a global scale.
There is currently no consensus about what formthis agenda might take, partly because of theinordinate strength of those forces that championunregulated, free market turbo-capitalism über allesand partly because some of their opponents slam‘globalisation’ in the name of stronger and morenationalist territorial states or through vague notionsof ‘deglobalisation’ and the ‘deconcentration anddecentralisation of institutional power’ through ‘there-empowerment of the local and the national’ (Bello2000). It should be obvious that global civil societyrequires political and legal protection throughlegal and political bodies that guarantee basicfreedoms of association, protect those whose voicesare ignored, enforce contracts, preserve property, andrule against violent crimes (Christenson 1997; Falk1992). Less obvious is which courts, governments, orgoverning regimes are reliably capable of grantingsuch protection. Some political theorists defend theG
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Although
turbo-capitalism is
arguably the force
that most strongly
energises the non-
governmental sector
from within, global
civil society is not
simply its
child…
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neo-Kantian principle of a transnational democraticlegal order, a community of all democratic commu-nities, something resembling a global Rechtsstaatof the kind implied in Art. 28 of the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights: ‘Everyone is entitled toa social and international order in which the rightsand freedoms set forth in the Declaration can befully realised.’ Others anticipate asecond-best scenario that oweseverything to Emmerich de Vattel: acomplex international system ofnominally sovereign, democraticstates that are the voting members ina variety of international forums.Still others foresee a newcompromise between these twooptions: a cosmopolitan process ofdemocratisation through whichcitizens gain a voice within their ownstates and in sites of power amongtheir states (Archibugi and Held1994).
There are evidently no guaranteesthat any of these competing viewscan or will prevail, not least becausethe form of political-legal institu-tions that currently frames global civil societyhas much more in common with the world addressedin Johannes Althusius’s Politica (1614), a many-sidedworld of overlapping and potentially conflictingpolitical structures, primordial groups, and differentlysized political associations, and federalist strivingsfor both particularism and universalism, community,and ecumene (see Althusius 1614; von Gierke 1966[1880]). From a normative point of view, it may bethat this Althusian world of political structures willfacilitate a new, multi-layered global politicalsettlement defined by a core of institutions designedto rein in the most destructive behaviours and aperiphery of governing institutions based on morevoluntary and non-coercive regulations (Edwards2000). This is the undecided future. For now, it isclear that global civil society is today flourishingwithin a thoroughly modern, strangely ‘neo-medieval’mélange of overlapping legal structures and politicalbodies that come in all shapes and sizes. The emergingpatterns of regulation of the Internet are a pertinentexample. The healthy mix of self-regulation and noregulation that once characterised the medium isnow withering away. So too is the presumption thatthe Internet abolishes both geographical boundaries
and territorially based laws. In fact, a regulatory netis being cast over the Internet by three intersectingtypes of political institutions. Territorial states likeSouth Korea have outlawed gambling Websites; inBritain, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Acthas granted the police broad powers of access to e-mail and other online communications; and a French
court has banned the Internet portalfirm Yahoo! from providing Frenchusers with images of Nazi memorabiliaotherwise posted on its Americansites. Meanwhile, supranationalinstitutions are also experimentingwith their regulatory powers. A newEuropean Union law drawn from theBrussels Convention entitles con-sumers to sue EU-based Internet sitesin their own countries so long as itcan be proved that the site wastargeted at their countries; the HagueConvention aims to enforce foreignjudgements in matters such ascontractual disputes, libel and intel-lectual property claims; and theCouncil of Europe has drafted theworld’s first global treaty on cyber-
crime, which aims to harmonise laws against hacking,child pornography, and Internet fraud (seeNaughton,Chapter 6). Finally, the ‘neo-medieval’pattern of multiple jurisdictions is reinforced bymoves by e-commerce firms to claw back regulatorypowers through so-called mechanisms of alternativedispute resolution: in effect, they are pushing for anew market-based system of private laws whichwould enable companies to operate outside of thecourts within a minimum framework of ‘safe harbour’rules guaranteeing privacy and consumerprotection.22
This mélange of political and legal structures in thefield of the Internet is present in many other policyareas, so much so that the so-called system of ‘globalgovernance’ hardly deserves the name ‘system’. Itcomprises a clutter of nation states and regional andlocal governments; intergovernmental agencies andprogrammes, like United Nations Children’s Fund(UNICEF) as well as intergovernmental structureswith sectoral responsibilities like the World TradeOrganisation and the OECD; and the InternationalCourt of Justice and other global institutions seeking
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…it can
be argued that
global civil society is
also the by-product
of state or inter-
state action, or
inaction.
22 Economist, 13 January 2001: 25–7.
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to enforce the rule of law. The hotchpotch system ofglobal governance also includes global accords,treaties, and conventions such as the MontrealProtocol covering ozone levels; policy summits andmeetings like the Davos World Economic Forum; andnew forms of public deliberation and conflictresolution like truth commissions that have a globalimpact. Summarising the dynamics of theseinteracting and overlapping neo-medieval structuresis not easy, but they are undoubtedly having theeffect of slowly eroding both the immunity ofsovereign states from suit and the presumption thatstatutes do not extend to the territory of other states.There are many tendencies in this direction. INGOs arelicensed by bodies like the Council of Europe andthe United Nations. Non-governmental groupsparticipate in election monitoring and as amici curiaein the proceedings of such bodies as the EuropeanCourt of Justice and the Inter-American Court ofHuman Rights. War crimes cases are given globalpublicity thanks to new bodies like the HagueTribunal; the project of establishing an internationalcriminal court is nearly completed; and local courtsshow ever greater willingness to prosecutesymbolically ‘foreign’ acts of wrongdoing.23
An Earthly Paradise?
Such ‘legalisation’ of global civil society, theeffort to remedy its permanent crisis ofrepresentation by giving it legal and political
voices and injecting the principle of publicaccountability into governing institutions, has deeperroots in the post-eighteenth-century opening ofstate constitutions to international law (Stein 1994).It arguably helps stabilise and perhaps strengthenthis society, even though it does not turn it instantlyinto paradise on earth. Global civil society is certainlyrich in freedoms beyond borders, for example, toinvest and to accumulate money and wealth; to traveland to reunite with others; to build infrastructures byrecovering memories, protecting the vulnerable,and generating new wealth and income; to denounce
and to reduce violence and uncivil war; and, generally,to press the principle that social and political powerbeyond borders should be subject to greater publicaccountability. Such freedoms are currently unfoldingin a hell-for-leather, Wild West fashion, and are alsovery unevenly distributed. The freedoms of globalcivil society are exclusionary and fail to produceequalities; in other words, global civil society is notreally global. It is not a universal society.
Vast areas of the world, and certainly the largemajority of the world’s population who live there, areexcluded. They are made to feel like victims of apredatory mode of foreign intervention: they areshut out from global civil society, or uprooted by itsdynamism, imprisoned within its discriminatorystructures and policies, like unpayable debt-servicepayments, or victimised by scores of uncivil wars(Dallmayr 1999; Falk 1999: Chs 3, 5, 8). Still others—many Muslims say—are made to feel that theenormous potential of global civil society to expanddialogue among civilisations, to ‘affirm differencesthrough communication’, is being choked to death bythe combined forces of global markets and militarymight, manifested for instance in the violentrepression of the Palestinians by the dangerousalliance between the United States and Israel.24
Then there are the cruel facts of communicationpoverty. Three-quarters of the world’s population(which now totals 6 billion) are too poor to buy abook; a majority has never made a phone call; andonly 1 per cent currently have access to the Internet(Keane 1999). All these points serve to fuel theconclusion that global civil society is currently astring of oases of freedom in a vast desert of localisedinjustice. Not only that, but the privileges within thisoasis cannot be taken for granted, for the pluralfreedoms of global civil society are threatenedconstantly by the fact that it is a breeding ground formanipulators who take advantage of its availablefreedoms. The growth of borderless exchangesencourages winners, global corporations for instance,to cultivate ideologies that slake their thirst for powerover others. Free market, IMF ideologies linked withturbo- capitalism—talk of deregulation, structural
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23 From the Los Angeles Times (11 August 2000: A11) comes arandom example: the order, applied during early August 2000 bya US District Court in Manhattan, requiring Radovan Karadzic topay $745 million to a group of twelve women who filed a civilsuit, accusing him of responsibility for killings, rapes,kidnappings, torture, and other atrocities.
24 Interview with Professor Abou Yaareb al-Marzouki, Hammamet,Tunisia, 18 April 2001.
Global civil society has emerged
and today flourishes in the absence of a
global state or world empire
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adjustment, opportunity, risk-taking, consumerchoice—have a strong affinity with these corporatewinners.
Borderless exchanges also produce strong politicalreactions in favour of the local and national, forinstance among losers who react to their dis-empowerment resentfully by taking revenge uponothers, sometimes cruelly, guided by ideological,uncivil presumptions like xenophobic nationalism. Inother words, global civil society is constantlythreatened with takeovers in the name of some orother organised ideology. Ideologies like the freemarket and nationalism take advantage of the growthof global civil society by roaming hungrily throughits free social spaces, treating others as competitorsor as enemies to be defeated or injured or left tostarve to death. Inequalities of power, bullying, andfanatical, violent attempts to de-globalise are chronicfeatures of global civil society. Understoodnormatively as a transnational system of socialnetworks of non-violent polyarchy, global civil societyis a wish that has not yet been granted to the world.
On Violence
Violence is undoubtedly among the greatestenemies of global civil society, whose tendencyto non-violence stems partly from the fact
that its participants more or less share a cosmopolitanoutlook, for instance by displaying a strong dislike ofwar, a facility for languages, or a commitment toordinary courtesy and respect for others. Given thistendency towards non-violence, it should come as nosurprise that the contemporary revival of interest incivil society and the corresponding invention of thenew term ‘global civil society’ have much to do withsuch twentieth-century experiences as total war,aerial bombardment, concentration camps, and thethreat of nuclear annihilation. World War II wasundoubtedly a turning point in the contemporaryhistory of global civil society. That global war certainlyencouraged post-colonial and ‘liberation’ strugglesand hence the spread of the modern territorial statesystem throughout the rest of the world (Badie 1992).But it also triggered exactly the opposite trend: thelong-term delegitimisation of state sovereigntybecause of the total mobilisation and sacrifice ofuntold millions by both victorious and vanquishedstates, who stood accused for the first time (in theNuremberg and Tokyo tribunals) of committing notjust war crimes but the ‘crime of war’ (Habermas
1997: 126; see also the important study by Bass2000). There followed a nuclear age, in which thechilling fact of nuclear-tipped sovereignty hasbrought the world together by subjecting it to thepermanent threat of mutually assured destructionmany times over.
Today, global civil society lives in the shadow of anunresolved problem: the role to be played by nuclear-tipped states in the post-cold war world system. Thissystem is dominated by the United States, the world’ssingle superpower, which can and does act as a ‘swingpower’ backed by nuclear force. As such, it is engagedin several regions without being tied permanently toany of them, but its manoeuvres are complicated bythe fact that it is presently forced to coexist andinteract peacefully with four great powers, three ofwhom are nuclear powers: Europe, China, Russia, andJapan (Buzan 2000). The geometry of this arrangementclearly differs from the extended freeze imposed by thecold war, when, according to Raymond Aron’s famousformula, most parts of the world lived in accordancewith the rule, ‘peace impossible, war unlikely’. With thecollapse of bipolar confrontation, this rule haschanged. There is no evidence of the dawn of a post-nuclear age and the freedom from the fear of nuclearaccident or attack that that would bring. Nowadays,as Pierre Hassner (1995) has put it so well, peace hasbecome a little less impossible and war is a little lessunlikely, principally because a form of unpredictableanarchy has settled on the whole world.25 Theprobability of a nuclear apocalypse, in which the earthand its peoples are blown sky-high, may have beenreduced, but major wars remain a possibility, includingeven the use of nuclear-tipped weapons in conflictsthat originate in local wars.
Future historians may well look back on the pasthalf-century and see it as the prelude to a barbarousform of Hobbesian ‘mediaevalism’ (first envisagedby Guglielmo Ferrero), a global order riddled withviolence, suspicion of enemies, and restless strugglesthat produced universal fear. Perhaps indeed our fatehas been so decided. And yet, among the mostpromising signs within global civil society is therenewal of a civilising politics, that is, networkedpublic campaigns against the archipelagos of incivility
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25 See the concluding interview in Hassner (1995), especially p. 332:‘In the past, the doctrine of deterrence matched the civilcharacter of our societies: an invisible hand, or abstractmechanism, took charge of our security, and we did not have tobother our heads with it. But today the nuclear issue can nolonger be considered in isolation; it is inextricably mixed up witheverything else.’
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existing within and beyond its frontiers. Thesecampaigns have a long history (see White 1968; Pei-heng 1981: Ch. 2; Seary 1996). They extend back intime, for instance to movements against slavery andtrafficking in women and children; the birth of theInternational Committee of the Red Cross (first namedthe International Committee for Relief of WoundedSoldiers) after the 1859 Battle of Solferino; thefounding of The Save the Children Fund after WorldWar I; and Médecins Sans Frontières after the BiafranWar. Oxfam, established to provide civilian relief toGreece when it was still under Nazioccupation, against the wishes ofthe British government, counts asanother example.
Such civil initiatives againstincivility, the attempts to build‘bridgeheads’ for expanding thereach of global civil society, are todaya feature of all zones of violence.Some efforts, like that of Saferworld,are aimed at publicising andrestricting global arms flows. Otherorganisations like Human RightsWatch actively ‘witness’ others’suffering in violent areas like Burma,Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and southernSudan. Or they push for theelimination of landmines or bio-logical weapons, or (like AmnestyInternational, which has more thanone million members in 162 countries) campaignagainst political repression, especially maltreatmentof the body and unfair imprisonment. Still othersattempt to negotiate ceasefires or to provide comfortfor lives ruined when civilians are turned intorefugees. And some groups find themselves targets ofglobal criticism for prolonging or complicating uncivilwars, for instance by sheltering hostages, feedingaggressors, or serving as cover for warring armies.
Social campaigns to civilise global civil society—to democratise or publicly control the means ofviolence (see Keane 1995a)—are among its vitalpreconditions. Yet they are hampered bycountervailing trends, which are perhaps betterdescribed as a single dilemma that the defenders ofglobal civil society need to recognise, to worry about,and practically to address. Put simply, the dilemmaconfronting global civil society is that while it isvulnerable to violence, whether from within orwithout, and needs armed protection, its members (by
definition) do not have the available means ofviolence (police and standing armies) to eradicatethat violence unless of course they resort to pickingup the gun to wield violence—against themselves(see Kaldor, Chapter 5).
This weakness of global civil society is partlytraceable to its own plural freedoms: to the extentthat global civil society enjoys such freedoms it caneasily be taken for a ride by mercenaries, gangs,wired-up hooligans, mafia, arms traffickers, terrorists,private security agents, and psycho-killers, all of
whom cavort with the devil ofviolence by using, misusing, andabusing the peaceful freedoms ofthat society (see Findlay 1999).Global civil society is furtherthreatened by the fact that theorganised violence (potentially)needed to protect its citizens has anasty habit of getting out of hand:arms breed arrogance, therebythreatening everything that globalcivil society stands for. As themerchants of the early civil societiesof the Italian city-states firstrecognised,26 standing armies are asdangerous as they are necessary. Thecitizens of global civil society thusrequire limited armed protection.
If that is so, then defenders ofglobal civil society must bite the
bullet, quite literally. For among the most difficultpolitical problems yet to be solved is if, how, andwhen armed intervention can legitimately be used tokeep alive, even to extend, the project of global civilsociety. Many activist supporters of global civil societyunderstandably shy away from talk of violence: likethe International Network of Engaged Buddhists,they have a principled commitment to active non-violence or they have simply seen enough of violenceand therefore pragmatically prefer pacific means ofprotecting and nurturing the lives of defencelesscitizens. Conventional ‘realists’, by contrast, doubtthat civil society can become the good-naturedcavalry of freedom. They point out that might oftentriumphs over right. They defend the formula thatsovereigns are those who actually decide to use forceto protect citizens, which begs hard normativequestions about who can and who should shield our
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The freedoms of
global civil society are
exclusionary and fail
to produce equalities;
in other words, global
civil society is not
really global. It is not
a universal society.
26 See the remarks on the relationship between markets andorganised violence by Lasswell (1935: 23).
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emerging global civil society from violence, and underwhat circumstances. The answer provided by thepost-Shoah advocates of ‘just’ or humanitarian war—that the violent enemies of global civil society shouldbe fought wherever they make a move—arguablylegitimises eternal war, particularly in a world bristlingwith incivility.
Or does it? The geo-military scope of non-nuclearhumanitarian intervention is arguably constrainedby the fact that the United States, despite its abilityto act as a ‘swing power’, is presently forced to coexistand interact peacefully with the fourgreat powers of Europe, Japan,China, and Russia. Not only that, butespecially under ‘post-Vietnam’,conditions, when log-rollingpoliticians’ fear of casualties leadsthem to rely on the use ofcomputerised, ‘risk-free’, aerialbombardment as their preferredmeans of ‘humanitarian inter-vention’, war can be waged only bythe superpower, it seems, in a verylimited number of uncivil contexts:like those of Kosovo, where themarauding forces to be bombed aregeographically strategic but withoutpowerful friends, and weak enoughto be defeated easily but sufficientlystrong to make the sensiblecalculation to refrain from usingfurther violence (see Luttwak 2000; other limitationsof ‘post-heroic’ aerial bombardment are examinedin Ignatieff 2000a, b). These preconditions ofsuccessful military intervention are exacting. Theyimply that most patches of the earth where globalcivil society has made little or no headway—Russia,China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia—are for the moment safe in their outright oppositionto its principles and practice.
Hubris
Hubris is also an enemy of global civil society.Its critics, including those who question thevery concept because there is ‘no common
global pool of memories; no common global way ofthinking; and no “universal history”, in and throughwhich people can unite’ (Held 1995: 125; the samepoint is made in Bozeman 1984), overlook orunderstate the advantages of the heterogeneity of
global civil society. It resembles a bazaar, a coveredkaleidoscope of differently sized rooms, twistingalleys, steps leading to obscure places, people andgoods in motion. It is marked by increasingdifferentiation, thickening networks of ever morestructures and organisations with different butinterdependent modi operandi, multiplyingencounters among languages and cultures, expandingmobility, growing unpredictability, even (despitegrowing numbers of full-time moderators andmediators) a certain depersonalisation and
abstractness of its social relations.Such complexity is sometimes saidto be a threat to democracy(Matthews 1997: 64). That is false,as John Dewey (1978) long agoemphasised, for the struggle againstsimplified definitions of ‘the socialgood’ is a hallmark of a mature civilsociety. It is nevertheless true thatcomplexity alone does not releaseglobal civil society from the lawsof hubris. It is not only that theplural freedoms of global civilsociety are severely threatened by apolitical underworld of secretive,unelected, publicly unaccountableinstitutions, symbolised by bodieslike the IMF and the WTO. Theproblem of hubris is internal toglobal civil society as well: just like
the domestic civil societies that form its habitats,global civil society produces concentrations ofarrogant power that threaten its own openness andpluralism.
Stronger legal sanctions and armed protectioncan ameliorate these inequalities, but are thereadditional ways of ensuring that its social freedomscan be nurtured and redistributed more equally at theworld level? The growth since the mid- nineteenthcentury of a globe-girdling, time-space conqueringsystem of communications, beginning with inventionslike overland and underwater telegraphy and theearly development of international news agencieslike Reuters and culminating in the more recentdevelopment of geo-stationary satellites, digitalisedmedia, and the growth of giant media firms likeThorn-EMI, News Corporation International, Sony,and Bertelsmann is arguably of basic importance inthis respect (Hugill 1999). It goes without saying thatthis global communications system is an integral— G
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The contemporary
revival of interest in
civil society has much
to do with such
twentieth-century
experiences
as total war, aerial
bombardment,
concentration camps,
and the threat of
nuclear annihilation.
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supremely aggressive and oligopolistic—sector oftoday’s turbo-capitalism. Ten or so verticallyintegrated media conglomerates, most of them basedin the United States, dominate the world market(Herman and McChesney 1997). They prioritiseadvertising-driven commercial ventures: music,videos, sports, news, shopping, children’s and adults’filmed entertainment. Programme-making codes, inthe field of satellite television news for instance, areconsequently biased in various ways. They are subjectto specific rules of mise-en-scène. And material fedto editors by journalists reporting from or aroundtrouble spots (called ‘clusterfucks’ in the vernacular)is selected, shortened, simplified, repackaged, andthen transmitted in commercial form.
Yet for all these turbo-capitalist biases, globalcommunications media do not simply produce turbo-capitalist audiences who are politically inactive. ‘Thedictatorship of the single word and the single image,much more devastating than that of the single party’,laments Eduardo Galeano, ‘imposes alife whose exemplary citizen is a docileconsumer and passive spectator builton the assembly line following theNorth American model of commercialtelevision’.27 Such laments areoverdrawn, partly for reasons (citedabove) to do with the marketingprocess itself: the retailing of productslike American movies has had theeffect of enhancing local culturaldiversity within global civil society,partly because profit-seeking, turbo-capitalist retailers themselves see theneed to tailor their products to localconditions and tastes. Local consumersof commercial television reciprocate:they display vigorous powers ofinvesting these commodities with newand different meanings.
The globalisation of media has also had a rich, ifwholly ironic, political effect, especially from thetime of the protest of youth against the VietnamWar: it has contributed to the growth of a pluralityof differently sized public spheres, some of themglobal, in which many millions of people witnessmediated controversies about who gets what, when,and how (see Keane 1995b).28 Not all global mediaevents—sporting fixtures, blockbuster movies, mediaawards, for instance—sustain global public spheres.But within the besuited world of diplomacy, global
business, inter-governmental meetings, and NGOs,thanks to wide-bodied jet aircraft, computerisedcommunications, and satellite broadcasting withlarge footprints, the public practice of non-violentlymonitoring the exercise of power across borders hastaken root. These global public spheres—the term isused here as an ideal type—are sites within global civilsociety where power struggles are visibly waged andwitnessed by means other than violence and war:they are the narrated, imagined non-violent spaceswithin globa1 civil society in which millions of peoplewitness the powers of governmental and non-governmental organisations being publicly named,monitored, praised, and condemned, despite barriersof time and space.
Although still rather issue-specific and not yetstrongly institutionalised, global public spheres,helped along by initiatives like TransparencyInternational and nurtured by channels like CNN andthe BBC World Service (which attracts 150 million
viewers and listeners each week),have several interesting effects,some of which are ‘pre-political’.Global public spheres, for instance,interpolate citizens of the newglobal order, in effect telling themthat, unless they find some meansof showing that global civil societyis not theirs, then it is. In this way,global public spheres function astemporary resting places beyondfamiliar horizons; they give anentirely new meaning to the oldwatchword of Greek colonisation,‘Wherever you go, you will be apolis’. Within global public spheres,people rooted in local physicalsettings increasingly travel todistant places, without ever leavinghome, to ‘second homes’ within
which their senses are stretched. Hailed by media narratives that probe the wider
world in tones of (ironic) intimacy, the members ofglobal civil society become a bit less parochial, a bit
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27 Eduardo Galeano, cited in the epigraph in Herman andMcChesney (1997: vi). More prudent assessments are presentedin Ong (1999); Packer (1995); and Schudson (1997).
28 Adam Michnik has suggested that the recent growth of globalpublic opinion can be seen as the rebirth in different form of anearlier parallel trend, evident within nineteenth-century socialistinternationalism, that came to an end with World War I(interview, Washington DC, 21 April 2001).
The dilemma
confronting global
civil society is that
while it is vulnerable
to violence, its
members do not have
the available means of
violence to eradicate
that violence
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more cosmopolitan. Global publics are taught lessonsin the art of flexible citizenship: they learn that theboundaries between native and foreigner are blurredand that they have become a touch more footloose.They learn to distance themselves from themselves;they discover that there are different temporalrhythms, other places, other problems, other ways tolive. They are invited to question their own dogmas,even to extend ordinary standards of civility—courtesy,politeness, respect—to others whom they will nevermeet (Toulmin 2000). Global public spheres centred onground-breaking media events like Live-Aid can evenbe spaces of fun in which millions taste something ofthe joy of acting publicly with and against others forsome defined common purpose. Global publics, like therecent UN-sponsored multimedia event ‘A World Freedof Violence Against Women’, can also highlight cruelty;and global publics can also be sites of disaster, spacesin which millions taste unjust outcomes, bitter defeat,and the tragedy of ruined lives.
The public spheres housed within global civilsociety also have more directly political effects.Especially during dramatic media events—like thenuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, the Tiananmenmassacre, the 1989 revolutions in central-easternEurope, the overthrow and arrest of SlobodanMilosevic—public spheres intensify audiences’ sharedsense of living their lives contingently, on a knifeedge, in the subjunctive tense. The witnesses of suchevents are encouraged to feel that the power relationsof global civil society, far from being given, are betterunderstood as ‘an arena of struggle, a fragmented andcontested area’ (Keck and Sikkink 1998), the result ofmoves and counter-moves, controversy and consent,compromise and resistance, peace and war. Publicspheres not only tend to denaturalise the powerrelations of global civil society. They most definitelyincrease its self-refIexivity, for instance by publicisingconflicting images of civility, civilisation, and civilsociety. Publicity is given as well to the biased codesof global media coverage and to hostile coverage ofglobal civil society itself, for instance by airing claimsthat it is a soft term without specific gravity, aWestern dogma, a mere smokescreen for turbo-capitalism, that is, a mere vehicle for ‘the usefulidiots of globalization’ (Rieff 1999).
In these various ways, global public spheresheighten the topsy-turvy feel of global civil society.Doubt is heaped upon loose talk that anthropo-morphises global civil society as if it were a universalobject/subject, the latest and most promising
substitute for the proletariat or for the wretched ofthe earth. Global public spheres make it clearer that‘global civil society’, like its more local counterparts,has no ‘collective voice’, that it alone does nothing,that only its constituent individuals, group initiatives,organisations, and networks act and interact. Globalpublics consequently heighten the sense that globalcivil society is an unfinished, permanently threatenedproject. They shake up its dogmas and inject it withenergy. They enable citizens of the world to shake offbad habits of parochialism, to see that talk of globalcivil society is not simply Western bourgeois ideology,even to appreciate that the task of painting a muchclearer picture of the rules of conduct and dowriesof global civil society, a picture that is absent frommost of the current literature on globalisation, istoday an urgent ethical imperative.
Democracy
The contemporary growth of global publics certainlypoints to the need to bring greater democracy toglobal civil society.29 By throwing light on power
exercised by moonlight or in the dark of night, globalpublics keep alive words like ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ bypublicising manipulation, skulduggery, and brutalityon or beyond the margins of global civil society. Globalpublics, of the kind that in recent years have monitoredthe fate of Aung San Suu Kyi, muck with the messybusiness of exclusion, racketeering, ostentation, cruelty,and war. They chart cases of intrigue and double-crossing. They help audiences to spot the various figuresof top-down power on the world scene: slick and suavemanagers and professionals who are well-practised atthe art of deceiving others through images; kingfisherswho first dazzle others then stumble when more isrequired of them; quislings who willingly change sides
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The problem of hubris is also
internal to global civil society:
it produces concentrations of
arrogant power that threaten its
own openness and pluralism
29 The exclusion of the theme of public spheres from virtually all ofthe current literature on globalisation is criticised by Slaatta(1998). A similar point is made implicitly by Appadurai (2000).
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under pressure; thugs who love violence; and vulgarrulers, with their taste for usurping crowns, assemblingand flattering crowds, or beating and tear-gassing theminto submission.
Global public spheres can also probe the powers ofkey organisations of global civil society itself. Remindersare served to those who read, listen, and watch that itsempty spaces have been filled by powerful butunaccountable organisations (like the WTO and theInternational Olympic Committee) or by profit-seekingcorporate bodies that permanently aggravate globalcivil society by causing environmental damage orswallowing up others by producing just for profit ratherthan for sustainable social use. Global public spheres canas well help question some of the more dubiouspractices of some non-profit INGOs: for instance, theirbureaucratic inflexibility and context- blindness, theirspreading attachment to market values or to clichés ofproject-speak, or their mistaken belief in the supply-side,trickle-down model of social development. Publicspheres can point to the post-colonial presumptuous-ness of some INGOs, their bad habit of acting as theirbrothers’ keepers, like missionaries, in so-called‘partnerships’ that are publicly unaccountable. Andpublic spheres can criticise their smartly-dressed, self-circulating, middle-class elites, sometimes dubbed the‘Five Star Brigade’, whose privileges and privilegedbehaviour contradict the principles for which globalcivil society should otherwise be rightly cherished itsdiversity of equal organisations, its open toleration ofdifferences, the speed and flexibility with which it formscomplex, shifting alliances around a plurality of sharedvalues and interests.30
Exactly because of their propensity to monitorthe exercise of power from a variety of sites withinand outside civil society, global public spheres—whenthey function properly—can help to ensure thatnobody monopolises power at the local and worldlevels. By exposing corrupt or risky dealings andnaming them as such; by wrong- footing decision-makers and forcing their hands; by requiring them torethink or reverse their decisions, global public sphereshelp remedy the problem—strongly evident in thevolatile field of global financial markets, which turnover US$1.3 trillion a day, 100 times the volume ofworld trade—that nobody seems to be in charge. Andin uneven contests between decision-makers and
decision-takers—as the developing controversieswithin bodies like the International OlympicCommittee show—global public spheres can helpprevent the powerful from ‘owning’ power privately.Global publics imply greater parity. They suggest thatthere are alternatives. They inch our little blue andwhite planet towards greater openness and humility,potentially to the point where power, whenever andwherever it is exercised across borders, is made to feelmore ‘biodegradable’, a bit more responsive to thosewhose lives it shapes and reshapes, secures or wrecks.
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