Global civil society - More or less democracy
No 49 -nov 2007  development dialogue
Dag Hammarskjöldstiftelsens medverkan vid  WSF 2007 i Nairobi.


Mikael Löfgren and Håkan Thörn
As part and parcel of the modern discourse of democracy, ‘civil society’
is one of the essentially contested concepts of political modernity
as well as in academic  discourse.
The 18th century liberals made a fundamental distinction between
state and (civil) society.
In the 20th  century it was Marxists, under the influence of Antonio Gramsci,
who made a distinction between the three spheres of
the (capitalist) economy, the state and society.
When the concept of ‘civil society’ was revived during the 1980s,  in order to
conceptualise  developments in Eastern Europe and Latin America, the various
definitions of civil society have been associated with the modern nation  state.

The recent discourse on a ‘global’, ‘international’ or ‘transnational’
civil society implies the emergence of a new global political space,
distinguished from the world of inter-state ‘international politics’.

Various and conflicting definitions of ‘global civil society’ are
around – reflecting different interests, political identities and strategies.
Institutions such as the World Bank, aid agencies, private foundations
and non-governmental development organisations (NGOs)  use
‘civil society’ as part of a reformulation of North/South relations in
the context of ‘development aid’.
In a different context, at the meeting 1999 of the World Trade Organization (WTO)
in Seattle  1,600  NGOs signed an appeal in the name of ‘international civil society’.
‘Civil society’ is also used by the World Social Forum (WSF) in the defining
document called  Charter of Principles.

According to some scholars and activists, the emerging global civil
society represents a forceful and promising response to the ‘democratic  deficit’
that has been one of the most problematic aspects of the globalisation process.

However, criticism  against the concept of civil society as such and the various
developments it represents is also frequently expressed.
To put it simply, two contradictory views have been put forward.

One is that the increasing importance of NGOs globally, and
the policy/governance networks they are part of, represent a project
through which political and economic elites, hungry for democratic
legitimacy, compete in their attempts to colonise actual and potential
spaces of popular participation.
The most striking examples given are  related to the aid industry, where NGOs
channel private or government funding, which arrives with particular conditions
that impose certain (Western) values on the receiving context.

This is in contradistinction to the second view, which sees global civil society as
representing  grassroot self-organisation of social spaces which have been
colonised by the practices either of technocratic administrations or of private
corporations (or an alliance of the two, promoted under  ‘good governance’).
Civic actors are here seen as potential carriers of democratic learning processes
(widening the meaning and practice of democracy), initiators of public debates
– through which  marginalised issues and social groups are made visible globally –
and guardians of human rights in relation to states and other powerful organisations,
such as transnational corporations.

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