Global Civil Society2

8/14/2019 Global Civil Society2

1/25

C H A P T E R 2

GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY?

John Keane

A New Cosmology

All human orders, hunting and gathering societies

included, 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 the

military 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 worlds peoples,their institutions and ecosystems, but each also failedto accomplish its mission. In our times, against the

backdrop 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 societyaneologism 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, andpoliticiansthe 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 descriptive

interpretation, 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 orcivil 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 many

hundreds of thousands of self-directing or non-governmental institutions and ways of life. It canbe likenedto draw for a moment upon ecologicalsimilesto 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

2

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 termscosmopolitan 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: 389420).

2 The importance of distinguishing among these different usages isanalysed in more detail in my introduction to Keane (1988[1998];1998).


2/25

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 biosphere

that 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 earths 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 virtually

uninhabited. 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 theearthparts of contemporary Afghanistan, Burma,Chechnya, and Sierra Leone, for instanceare 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 societycities,business corridors, and regions, for instanceareinterconnected. 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 terrestrial

biosphere, 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 sporting

organisations: 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,

throughcapacity-building

programmes that supply jobs, 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 theworlds 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 imagineGL

OBAL

CIVIL

SOCIETY

?

John

Keane

24

Global civil society is a vast,

interconnected, and multi-layered social

space that comprises many hundreds ofthousands of self-directing or non-

governmental institutions and ways of

life.


3/25

different futures.3 And it mostdefinitely obliges us to abandonsome old certainties and prejudicesgrounded in the past. The wordsglobal civil society may be said toresemble signs that fix our thoughtson winding pathways that stretch

not 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 ofworld

civil society.Consider the works of two influential authors of

the eighteenth century: Emmerich de Vattels Le droitdes gens(1758) and Immanuel Kants Idee zu einerallgemeinen Geschichte in weltbrgerlicher 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 perfect

according 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). Kant

joined 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 sociabilityof subjects could be cured by subordinating themwithin a cosmopolitan alliance of states that isoverridden and protected by its own legal codes. De

Vattel 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 verwaltenden

brgerlichen 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 ofinternational society, familiarin the work of scholars like Hedley Bull and MartinWight, tried both to register this historical changeand to preserve something of the old-fashioned

meaning ofsocietas 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 calledinternational society, a state-centred term thatHedley Bull considered to be a basic precondition ofcontemporary world order. International society, he

2

These networks

have the power to

shape new identities,

even to stimulate

awareness among the

worlds inhabitantsthat mutual

understanding of

different ways of

life 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]).


4/25

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 civilisnor thestate-centric concept ofinternationalsociety is capable of grasping the

latter-day emergence of a non-governmental sphere that is calledglobal 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 and

complexity, and its political potential.The principle is cleartheorieswithout observations are bland, observations withouttheories are blindbut 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 tectonictwohundred-foldincrease 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 Unions reliefaid is currently channelled through them.

The actual contours of global civil societynevertheless remain elusive, for understandablereasons. Histories of the globalisation of civil societystudies of the rise of cross-border business, religion,

and sport, for instanceare 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 criteriabook translations, diasporas, linksamong global cities, the spread of the Englishlanguage, telephone traffic, geographic locations of

Web-sites, the mobility patterns ofcorporate nomadsare the mostpertinent for picturing the networked

character 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 food

consumption and television news-watching, are virtually non-existent.These empirical and technical barriers to mapping

and 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:

GLOBAL

CIVIL

SOCIETY

?

John

Keane

26

The terms world civil

society and

international society

still have their

champions, but their

state-centredness is

today deeply

problematic . . .

5 Examples include Ralf Dahrendorfs 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 stronginternational society in Buzan (1991: 17481).

6 See the data covering the period 190997 presented in the Unionof International Associations (1997-98: Vol. 4, 559); compareRisse-Kappen (1995), Matthews (1997: 5066); 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).


5/25

not the dynamism of the restless seaa naturalisticsimile suggested by Victor Prez-Diaz (1993)8but 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 participantsathletes, campaigners,

musicians, religious believers, managers, aid-workers,medics, scientists, journalists, academicsto seethrough global civil society by calling it both ourworld and (more impersonally) thisworld. 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 nationalphenomena 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 thecontinents rise to world eminenceand its laying ofthe foundations of a global civil society.9 Althoughthe distribution of these European townsunusual

clumps of people engaged in many different tasks,living in houses close together, often joined wall towallwas 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, they

functioned 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 numeroustradesfloor polishers, pedlars, sawyers, chair-carriersadded to the sense of motion across

distance. 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 civilisationsthe other was Islamthat 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 thecuckoos egg laid in the little nests of the medieval

2

. . . 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?


6/25


7/25

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 worlds wrongs.

Although many things can be said for and against

these 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 ones own initiative to dothe right thing; the impulse toward altruistic givingand sharing; the refusal of inequality, violence, andoppression (de Oliveira and Tandon 1994: 23)12 are

undoubtedly 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 state

capitalism 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 search

of 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 armamentstheir combinedassets make up roughly a quarter of the worldsproductive assetsno 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 integrated

networks of staff , money, information, rawmaterials, components, and products.14

Admittedly, the degree to which turbo-capitalistfirms operate globally, like border-busting

juggernauts, 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 top

100 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

2

11 The temptation to see global civil society in this way is evident inthe introduction to Florini (2000: 115).

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: 1519).

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 worlds 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 worlds 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 (2000:201).


8/25

technologies, they can do business anywhere in theworld. The exceptionsNorth Korea, Afghanistan, SierraLeoneprove 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: 42739; Gereffi andKorzeniewicz 1994: Ch. 5).

When Adam Smithfamously analysed thedivision of labourwithin the emergingcivil societies of theAtlantic region, his

references 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)arms length trade in goods and services amongindependent firms and through international move-ments of capitalwas 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 aglobal 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 capitalistapartheida term used by the Peruvian economistHernando de Soto16suffer the consequences oforganised neglect by turbo-capitalist investors.

Elsewhere, further along the continuum, straight-forward exchange across vast distances betweenwealthy core and poorer peripheral areasforinstance, the exporting of granite mined in Zimbabweto the kitchens and bathrooms of western Europeis 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 number

of 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 placesChina,Singapore, Taiwan, South Koreawhere wages are

GLOBAL

CIVIL

SOCIETY

?

John

Keane

30

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 . . .


9/25

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 have

led some observersSakamoto Yoshikazu, forinstance (2000: 98116)to question whether marketforces with such destructive consequences properlybelong within the category of global civil society.

Yoshikazus 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 societythe realm of non-profit, non-governmental organisationsand themarket the sphere of profit-making and profit-taking

commodity production and exchange. Yoshikazu,treading Gramscis path, mistakenly conflates thedifferent possible usages empirical interpretation,strategic calculation, normative judgementof 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 order

to 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.

Yoshikazus normative reasoning is temptingwhobut 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 nineteenthcentury 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 marketmoney,

jobs, workers, trade unions cannot by definition beof much use in struggles to achieve that civilising

goal. Otherwise, the meansthe commodification ofsocial relationswould 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 technologies

supplied 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 by

Yoshikazu and othersis a phantom, a badabstraction, for inreality markets arealways a particularform of socially andpolitically mediatedinteraction structuredby money, production,exchange, and con-sumption. Global civil

society 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

3

. . . 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).


10/25

juggernaut ruthlessly breaking down political bordersand smashing through walls of social restraintembodied in local communities and other institutions.Cold-blooded, truly arms-length and thereforepurely contractual relations exemplify the entire spiritof turbo-capitalism, writes Luttwak (1999: 43). Suchdescriptions of the spread of global business correctly

capture 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 social

considerations . . . 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 go

where the returns are high. The commercial intro-duction of these technologies, as well as wide-bodied

jet aircraft, fibre optics, super-freighters, andcontainerisation, have several cumulativerevo-lutionaryeffects. 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 costs

and 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 include

Seoul-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,

GLOBAL

CIVIL

SOCIETY

?

John

Keane

32

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


11/25

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 society

acts as technopole (Castells and Hall 1994) ortechnology 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 opponentsas 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 of

armed 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 generatefor somepeopleincome, goods and services, and jobs (50 percent of the worlds manufacturing jobs are nowlocated outside the OECD region, a twelve-foldincrease in four decades). These firms produce somemeasure ofsocial 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 ofcivil 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-marketserviceshotels in Dubai boasting seven-star statusand featuring exotic menus of breaded Dover sole andchar-grilled bison filletsand the down-market

retailing of products like McDonalds, Pepsi, andAmerican television programmes to the villages of

south 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.

3

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 hasnt made us Chinese. On the contrary, we obliged theChinese to invent chop suey. What could be more American thanthat? French fries?


12/25

Market Failures

Caution should certainlybe exercised on this lastpoint, for the truth is

that global corporations todayenter our living rooms aglow

in public-image or pro-socialadvertising. Many firms,backed up by high-flying,well-paid ethics officers,present the world with theirwe 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 potential

menace 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 of

turbo-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 cancellationsee 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: 4250; 7175)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 endless

chatter about choice. Ifduring the eighteenth centurya cosmopolitan was typicallysomeone who thought lafranaise, 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 bourgeoiscosmocracycorporate executives, peripatetic lawyers,rock-stars, jet-age nomads living in penthouse

apartments in choice locations, like the Upper East Sideof Manhattanmonopolises more than its share ofwealth and income. The combined wealth of the worldsrichest 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 worlds 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 Qubec 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 surprisinglya final item on the balance sheetturbo-capitalism strengthens the hand of marketdomination over the non-profit institutions of civilGL

OBAL

CIVIL

SOCIETY

?

John

Keane

34

Many global

corporations today enter

our living rooms aglow in public

image or pro-social advertising to

distract potential critics from sayingthey employ eight-year-olds or

brazenly trample upon the

environment


13/25

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 great

inequalities 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 organisationsso-calledbusiness NGOs or BINGOseven explicitly modelthemselves on business enterprises by developingcommercial departments, head-hunters, media

sections, 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 asyndrome

(Mittelman 2000) of processes and activitieswhich have multiple origins and multiple dynamics,

some of themlike the recent collapse and discreditingof communismmore 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 scalelets say, a versionof Disneys 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 states

and 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 Geneva

Convention 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 womens andpopulation conferences in Beijing and Cairo (seePianta, Chapter 7).

3

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).


14/25

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 states

reaffirmed 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 openly

collaborative, 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, Mdecins sansFrontires, 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 meaninglessasif the term could only ever be the

Siamese 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 need

to 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 ber allesand partly because some of their opponents slamglobalisation 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 theGL

OBAL

CIVIL

SOCIETY

?

John

Keane

36

Although

turbo-capitalism is

arguably the force

that most strongly

energises the non-

governmental sector

from within, globalcivil society is not

simply its

child


15/25

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 be

fully 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 which

citizens 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 Althusiuss Politica (1614), a many-sided

world 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-medievalmlange 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 it

can be proved that the site wastargeted at their countries; the HagueConvention aims to enforce foreign

judgements in matters such ascontractual disputes, libel and intel-lectual property claims; and theCouncil of Europe has drafted theworlds 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 ofsafe harbourrules guaranteeing privacy and consumerprotection.22

This mlange of political and legal structures in thefield of the Internet is present in many other policyareas, so much so that the so-called system ofglobalgovernance hardly deserves the name system. Itcomprises a clutter of nation states and regional andlocal governments; intergovernmental agencies andprogrammes, like United Nations Childrens 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

3

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: 257.


16/25

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 the

effect 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 Hague

Tribunal; 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 produce

equalities; 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 worlds 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 sayare 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 worlds population(which now totals 6 billion) are too poor to buy a

book; 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- capitalismtalk of deregulation, structural

GLOBAL

CIVIL

SOCIETY

?

John

Keane

38

23 From theLos 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


17/25

adjustment, opportunity, risk-taking, consumerchoicehave 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 upon

others, 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 chronic

features 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 cosmopolitan

outlook, 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 not

just 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 an

unresolved 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 worldssingle 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 arrangement

clearly differs from the extended freeze imposed by thecold war, when, according to Raymond Arons 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 unpredictable

anarchy 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

3

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.


18/25

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 Wounded

Soldiers) after the 1859 Battle of Solferino; thefounding of The Save the Children Fund after WorldWar I; and Mdecins Sans Frontires 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 buildbridgeheads for expanding the

reach 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 otherssuffering 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 societyto 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 violenceagainst themselves(see Kaldor, Chapter 5).

This weakness of global civil society is partlytraceable to its own plural freedoms: to the extent

that 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 thebullet, 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

GLOBAL

CIVIL

SOCIETY

?

John

Keane

40

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).


19/25

emerging global civil society from violence, and underwhat circumstances. The answer provided by thepost-Shoah advocates ofjust or humanitarian warthat the violent enemies of global civil society shouldbe fought wherever they make a movearguablylegitimises 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 of

computerised, 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 sufficiently

strong 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 headwayRussia,China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Algeria, Saudi Arabiaare 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, multiplying

encounters 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 ofthe social

good 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. The

problem of hubris is internal toglobal civil society as well: just likethe 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

4

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.


20/25

supremely aggressive and oligopolisticsector oftodays 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, childrens 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-scne. 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. The

dictatorship 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 as

Date post:	30-May-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	northerndisclosure
View:	215 times
Download:	0 times

Global Civil Society2

Documents