CONCEPTS OFGLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY

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practice, might be seen by future historians as essentiallya 1990s discourse, which reached its apogee with the1999 Seattle protests and the 2000 Millennium Summit,but which is frankly much less important in 2004 thanit was in 2000.

The standard account of globalcivil societyThe standard account of the meaning of ‘global civilsociety’ (and this is deliberately the simple, unsophisti-cated analysis written for broad consumption which,while running the risk of caricature, nonethelesshighlights some salient features) runs as follows.

Globalisation, it is said, is gradually eroding theauthority of sovereign states, which traditionally haveexercised control over actions, events, and personswithin their borders and, in the case of powerful states,touching their vital interests abroad (Waters, 1995). Theprocesses of economic globalisation are instead trans-ferring unprecedented power to a variety of trans-national actors, including transnational business andfinancial interests. Many of these transnational businessactors are familiar Western transnational corporations,such as Shell Oil or Proctor & Gamble; others, however,are much less ‘brand-visible’ to Western consumers andinclude the movement of ethnically based diasporacapital across borders, such as the circulation of ethnicChinese capital around the markets of the Pacific Rim(Chua, 2003). These actors are able to take advantageof the increasingly global nature of economic and manyother activities, whereas economic regulation remainsfundamentally national because the principle ofnational sovereignty remains, well, sovereign.

In addition to transnational economic actors, a widevariety of other actors also flourish in an environmentin which economic transactions, transportation and,above all, communications are both transnational andinexpensive (Rugman, 2001). These other actors includeNGOs of every variety and purpose, leveraging theirinfluence globally through global media and newtechnologies such as the Internet (Gamble, King and Ku,2000). The falling cost of worldwide communications,however, has especially favoured the development oftransnational social movements. These include not justinternational NGOs but transnational social movementsat a mass and not simply an organisational orinstitutional level, including the growth of transnationalreligious movements such as Islam, new socialmovements such as Falun Gong, as well as a globalised

popular culture. Unsurprisingly, too, these actors alsoinclude transnational organised crime, which takesadvantage of gaps between state jurisdictions to set uptransnational operations in drug trafficking, weaponssmuggling, illegal immigration, trafficking in persons,prostitution and the exploitation of child sex workers,and other illegal activities. Finally, of course, there aretransnational terrorist organisations, such as al-Qaeda,that rely on a web of globalised economic transactionsto finance themselves (including cross-border crime suchas drug trafficking), international social movements thatprovide a base of social support that transcends borders,and cross-border acts of terrorism; transnationalterrorism acts, in effect, as a kind of perverse NGO.

One important source of the presumed erosion ofsovereignty is the loss of regulatory control over cross-border actions, which produces situations for whichregulation is urgently needed, such as cross-borderprotection of the natural environment (pollution knowsno borders). Still, the erosion of sovereignty generally isunderstood, on the standard account, to be a good andworthy thing (Held et al, 1999). Sovereignty is at bestan impediment to the universal good governance ofhuman beings, whose fundamental rights and needsknow no borders, and to the ideal of political progresswhich, in a long intellectual tradition, has beenunderstood to lead to universal political governance forthe protection of universal human rights and theprovision for universal human needs. At worst,sovereignty has served, on the standard account, toprotect regimes that oppress their own people and,perhaps worst of all, that wage war (the right to wagewar, after all, was long seen as the defining attribute ofsovereignty). A globalising world stands in need of aglobalising political authority to regulate it, accordingto the standard account, less because of the failures ofsovereign states to regulate adequately the transactionsof the global world than because of the moraldeficiencies of the very idea of sovereignty (Beck, 2003).

What is needed instead, therefore, is globalgovernance, ideally exercised by a reformed andtransformed United Nations, in order to protect the poorand global labour, promote the global distribution ofwealth and the equity of trade, and safeguard theenvironment, health, human rights, gender equity andmany other things. The just claims of global governanceare impeded, however, by the residue of sovereignty, andabove all by the sovereignty of the world’s superpower,the United States, which sees much to lose and little togain from global governance because of the authorityit would have to yield to others over how it uses its

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CHAPTER 1

‘GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY’: A SCEPTICAL VIEW

CHAPTER 1

Kenneth Anderson and David Rieff

IntroductionThis chapter aims to raise scepticism about both theconceptual and the practical foundations of ‘global civilsociety’. We describe, and then challenge, a widelyreceived, standard account of what it means forinternational non-governmental organisations (NGOs)and international social movements to be described asconstituting ‘global civil society’. In particular, we aredubious about the very application of the term ‘globalcivil society’ to the international NGOs and new socialmovements said to comprise it.

We are sceptical, first, of the claim that transnationalor international NGOs constitute ‘global civil society’,at least if this term is intended to draw upon on theconceptual machinery of ‘civil society’ as understood toapply in a settled domestic democratic society. Thisclaim, in our view, is misplaced; indeed, we find the term‘global civil society’ conceptually incoherent. Ourargument goes on to consider why, however, if ourscepticism is indeed justified, such inflated ideologicalclaims are made so as to convert international NGOsconceptually into ‘global civil society’. We also considerother, better, ways of viewing the rise of transnationaland international NGOs, including as a quasi-religiousmovement and as a revival of the post-religious of theearlier European and American missionary movements.Alternatively, we suggest, the global civil societymovement might better be understood as imaginingitself as the bearer of universal values, both operatingin the teeth of globalisation and yet simultaneouslyusing globalisation as its vehicle for disseminatinguniversal values. It may be even better understood as amovement seeking to universalise the ultimatelyparochial model of European Union integration.

We are sceptical, second, about whether the valuesthat the global civil society movement embodies are,indeed, as desirable as the movement’s supporters wouldclaim. Specifically, the fundamental moral values of theglobal civil society movement appear to be about human

rights rather than democracy. Despite valiant theoreticalattempts by global civil society theorists to find waysto satisfy the requirements of democracy whilerecognising the limits of electoral participation insomething intended to encompass the whole world, weargue that the ‘democracy deficit’ of the internationalsystem is buttressed rather than challenged by theglobal civil society movement, despite its commitmentto human rights. Indeed, we argue, the global civilsociety movement seems to present human rights as aset of transcendental values and as a substitute fordemocracy, whereas, we would have thought, eachought to be considered indispensable. But, if this is thecase, why is it so? We argue that it is best understoodas intertwined quests for legitimacy both by the NGOssaid to make up global civil society and by publicinternational organisations such as the UN. We suggestthat each legitimises the other in a system that is notonly undemocratic but also ultimately incapable ofbecoming democratic. This, we argue, is what drives thesevere inflation of ideological rhetoric surroundingclaims about ‘global civil society’.

The final question addressed in this discussion isdeliberately speculative, and we do not pretend tofinality in our responses. Nonetheless, we pose thequestion: what does the discourse of ‘global civil society’mean post-September 11 and in the midst of conflictsin Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror? Wetentatively suggest that, following September 11,sovereignty and democratic sovereignty are back at thecentre stage of political discourse. This, we suggest, isas true for states as it is for international organisationssuch as the UN. One consequence is, perhaps, that sinceSeptember 11 attention has shifted away from ‘globalcivil society’, considered as a marker of internationallegitimacy, and back towards relations betweenpowerful states, the superpower, and the UN SecurityCouncil. Global civil society, both as a concept and as a ‘G

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economic actors and the world’s superpower, areglobally unregulated.

It is conceptually appropriate, on the standardaccount, to describe this conglomeration of trans-national NGOs and associated social movements as‘global civil society’ (or ‘international civil society’ or‘transnational civil society’) because they are civil societyorganisations that operate on a transnational orinternational rather than a domestic scale (Keane, 2003).Yet their advocacy function is really analogous, ona global scale, to that of their domestic society homo-logues. And given that the international arena is farfrom democratic, their advocacy is all the morenecessary because international civil society providesthe only voice the ‘peoples’ of the world have tointermediate on their behalf with transnational actorsor international institutions (The Economist, 1999).

Nonetheless, it is essential to be clear, even in themidst of delivering this standard account, that thosewho speak with enthusiasm about global civil society infact have a specifically value-laden view of it. It is, ineffect, institutionalised ‘new social movements’ –promoting environmentalism, feminism, human rights,economic regulation, sustainable development, and soon – that count (Carothers, 1999a). Yet the RomanCatholic Church and many far more politically con-servative Christian denominations, for example, are infact transnational NGOs of great size, resources,members and energy. But for their politics, they surelywould be included as part of ‘global civil society’ on anypolitically neutral interpretation of that term. But ‘globalcivil society’ is understood by its advocates to be a‘progressive’ movement, and thus it contains only certainpolitically progressive NGOs and social movements(Rieff, 1998).

With that caveat to the standard account, therefore,global civil society is thus perceived as the logicalcontinuation of the growth of civil society (or at leastof ‘progressive’ civil society), elevated from the levelof merely domestic democratic society. Global civilsociety is the advocate and intermediary for the peopleof the world both in the nascent institutions of globalgovernance as well as against those transnationalactors – transnational economic actors and the US,principally – that impede the emergence of globalgovernance that reflects ‘progressive’ values. Withoutglobal civil society, the people of the world have novoice and no representation to advocate for ‘correct’values before the world’s transnational institutions.These transnational NGOs are properly called ‘globalcivil society’ and not merely ‘advocacy NGOs’ for the

fundamental reason that they are perceived, on thestandard account, to speak for the people of the world(Williams, 1997).

Why ‘global civil society’ is amisnomerThe claim to be ‘global civil society’ is at its heart a claimto be something more than merely a collection ofadvocacy NGOs and social movements with visions andaxes to grind on any number of particular topics. Globalcivil society is claimed to be the international,transnational analogue of that which is called ‘civilsociety’ in a settled domestic democratic society. Thisclaim rests, however, on two alleged analogies: between‘civil society’ and ‘global civil society’ and between asettled domestic democratic society (in which civilsociety is a part of the fabric of domestic society) andan ‘international society’ or, if one likes, ‘internationalcommunity’. These analogies seem to us flawed, inclosely related ways.

The analogy between civil society and global civilsociety rests on the assumption that the NGOs bearingthese conceptual labels can and do play similar roles invery different settings. Civil society institutions that arepart of the social fabric of a settled domestic democraticsociety are able to play the role of single-mindedadvocates – organisations with an axe to grind and asocial mission to accomplish – precisely because theyare not, and are not seen as being, ‘representative’ inthe sense of democratic representation (Anderson,2000). They do not stand for office. Citizens do not votefor this or that civil society organisation as theirrepresentatives because, in the end, NGOs exist to reflecttheir own principles, not to represent a constituency towhose interests and desires they must respond. NGOs,in their most exalted form, (and there are many hybridexceptions) exist to convince people of the rightness oftheir ideals and invite people to become constituents ofthose ideals, not to advocate for whatever ideals peoplealready happen to have. Thus, voters may listen to whatNGOs tell them as lobbyists and advocates but, in theend, NGOs are separate from the ballot box.

True, voters do vote for political parties, which are,in some sense, civil society organisations. Yet politicalparties, like labour unions, while non-governmental incertain ways, are historically separate from the NGOsthat serve as the touchstones of the global civil societyanalogy – the crusading or do-gooding organisationsthat see themselves as bearers of values far more

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power. (Although all states would have to cedeauthority, the more powerful the state, the more poweris ceded; and the US, the most powerful state of all,would have to cede the most power.) This is indeedvexing, on the standard account. And yet the growth oftransnational global governance is understood ashistorically inevitable. It is as natural a process as theconsolidation that the US experienced in the nineteenthcentury, or the consolidation that the EU is heroicallyundergoing today (Giddens, 2000). It cannot help butoccur, eventually, for it is not merely a matter ofideology but is materially driven by essentially the sameforces that today benefit from an economy that isglobal in effect but nationally controlled – technology,communications, and transportation especially – andthat tomorrow will benefit from markets that are bothglobally open and globally regulated rather thanregulated piecemeal by conflicting and counter-efficientnational regulators. Be of good cheer, for, on thestandard account, the material conditions of historydrive forward both the erosion of sovereignty and thefinal triumph of global governance.

We are, however, at a dangerous historical moment:transnational economic forces are taking advantage ofthe current vacuum in which national sovereignty isbeing eroded but is not definitively being replaced byglobal governance. Much of the burden of sustainingthe dream has fallen, ideologically at least, not just uponthe existing organs of international governance such asthe UN (which is understood even by its friends to be,however noble in original intent, inefficient and weakat best, and venal and lacking in legitimacy at worst),but also upon transnational NGOs (Kaldor, Anheier andGlasius, 2003). This may appear, on the standardaccount, initially somewhat surprising; who are theseself-appointed NGOs to be the bearers of anythingbesides their own interests and values? Yet internationalNGOs have gradually taken a leading role in providingwhat is declared to be the legitimate, and politicallylegitimising, input of the world’s peoples across a myriadof issues and causes (Tyler, 2003). International NGOscome together to advocate for the peoples of the world,those who would otherwise have no voice, given thatthe actors they seek to influence, which include both

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environment. But the key in these ironies is always thedemocratic deficit of the international system, and thequestion whether it can be made up.

Before turning to those issues, however, we shouldacknowledge the two principal objections to thisscepticism about the claims of global civil society. Thefirst objection (which will be taken up later as one ofthe normative concerns about democracy) is that thisaccount makes too much of democracy and electoraldemocracy in particular (Held et al, 1999). Domesticdemocratic systems, it might be said, are not sodemocratic as all that, and the ballot box is overratedand fetishised in what is really better understood as anagglomeration of interest groups in which NGOs indeedserve as representatives and intermediaries. Democracyis not all that it is made out to be, and our scepticismsets too high a bar by invoking it.

The second objection is a practical one. Even if thisscepticism, this lack of anology, should be acknowledgedin some way as true, then is that really a reason forNGOs to pack up their tents, so to speak, and go home?Isn’t the proper response to press on for the sake of boththeir causes and the democratisation of the inter-national system, so that the scepticism is defanged bymaking the system democratic and the NGOs genuinelya global civil society? The short answer is that ourscepticism is a basis for giving up the ideological

pretensions of global civil society in order to focus onaccomplishing specific social missions, but this objectionwill likewise be taken up at greater length below, underthe normative discussion of democracy.

Other ways of understandinginternational NGOsIt is worth noting that international NGOs can beunderstood as a social movement on very differentmodels from that of global civil society. One or anotherof these might be thought frankly more powerful inexplaining the international NGO movement. One modelis simply that of a contemporary secular, post-religiousmissionary movement (Anderson, 1998).

On this view, the NGO movement, rather than beingglobal civil society in the contradictory sense discussedearlier, is simply the analogue of the Western missionarymovements of the past, which carried the gospel to therest of the world and sought in this way to promotetruth, salvation, and goodness. It is a weak sense ofreligious movement because it claims a connection toearlier religious missionary movements only by analogy,rather than through a genuinely historical inheritance.Yet even by analogy alone it remains a powerful way ofexplaining the international NGO movement. It is a

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universal than the agglomerated interest groups thatare political parties. Certainly, those who draw ananalogy between global civil society and domestic civilsociety are thinking not of political parties but ratherof such examples as the American Civil Liberties Unionin the US or the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo of Guatemala(supporting families of the disappeared), or theGrameen Bank in Bangladesh (providing micro-creditand organising development projects among the poor)(Otto, 1996). This partly reflects the view, oftenjustified, among civil society advocates that politicalparties, when not merely venal and despite theirrhetoric to the contrary at party congresses andconventions, are bearers of interests, not of theuniversal values disinterestedly held on which civilsociety organisations pride themselves: global civilsociety advocates would not necessarily want toassimilate themselves by analogy to political parties.

At the same time, it has also been observed that indemocratic transitions there is an indispensable pointwhen talented and virtuous people, committed to thedemocratic process, must invigorate the political partyprocess precisely because, responding to multipleinterests of multiple groups, it serves a vital social andpolitical integrating function in a way that civil societyorganisations, remaining isolated in their purity ofprinciple, cannot do (Carothers, 1999a). Civil societyorganisations are therefore the glory of democraticsocieties, but they are not the electoral institutions ofdemocracy. And because they are not electoralinstitutions, (not representative in the electoral sense)they are free to be pure, unabashed advocates of apoint of view; free to ignore all the contradictoryimpulses that democratic politics requires and thecompromises and adjustments and departures fromprincipled purity that democratic politicians mustmake; and free to ignore entirely what everyone else,the great democratic masses and their leaders, mightthink in favour of what they themselves believe is theright, the true, and the good (Anderson, 2001).

International NGOs may believe that they play thissame role in the international realm but, in so far as theyaspire to the legitimacy of ‘global civil society’, theycannot and do not. The reason is beyond their control:the system in which they purport to advocate is notdemocratic. And because it is not, their advocacy rolecannot be and is not the same; the analogy fails. Thedifference lies in the claim of ‘representativeness’(Annan, 1999a). In a settled domestic democratic society,civil society advocacy claims to represent no one otherthan itself, and stakes its legitimacy, first, on the right

and value of free expression and, second, on the abilityto persuade others to adopt its views. In some cases, itmight organise itself as a voting bloc, an electoralinterest group, but it is striking that within democraticsocieties the most effective civil society advocacyorganisations have no electoral constituencies of theirown, but rely on their rational persuasiveness; if theyhave a constituency, it is the media. International civilsociety, when it sees itself as global civil society, aspiresto a quite different, and much more inflated, set of roles:first, to ‘representativeness’, and second, to ‘inter-mediation’ – to stand between the people of the worldand various transnational institutions (Annan, 2000).Civil society organisations in domestic democraticsocieties do not claim either to represent or tointermediate; they do not stand between the peopleand their elected representatives, because the ballotbox does.

Obviously, this scepticism about the analogy betweencivil society in a domestic democratic society and globalcivil society in an undemocratic global system is closelyrelated to the second grounds for scepticism, about theanalogy between a settled domestic democratic societyand what is inappositely (begging the question, as itwere) called ‘international society’ or the ‘internationalcommunity’ (Rieff, 1999). Because, plainly, internationalsociety is not democratic, international NGOs aredeprived of the democratic context in which their(disanalogous) domestic counterparts act. Thatdemocratic context, peculiarly, allows domestic civilsociety organisations to be what we understand as ‘civilsociety’ by relieving them of the possibility, theobligation, and indeed the temptation to regardthemselves as representatives or intermediaries.

Scepticism about the claims of ‘global civil society’,therefore, rests on scepticism about its analogy withdomestic civil society and about the analogy betweendomestic democratic society and international society.In each case, the touchstone is the problem ofdemocracy. The claim of global civil society is that itplays the same role as domestic civil society but, becausethe environment in which it acts is not democratic, itaspires, perversely, to roles that domestic civil societydoes not claim, namely, representation and inter-mediation. The claim of global civil society elevates thestatus and reach and importance of what are otherwisemerely international NGOs advocating and acting forwhat they see as the right and the good. It elevatesthem, however, supposedly to the equivalent levelof civil society but by claiming precisely what civilsociety eschews, because it operates in a democratic

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The value of democracy

A further ground for scepticism about global civilsociety is that the universalist values that it espousesmay not be so good, or at least so complete, as itimplies. The key issue, once again, is the question ofdemocracy or, more precisely, democratic legitimacyand the lack thereof – the much discussed ‘democraticdeficit’ (Diamond, 2003). Against our moral complaintthat the international system lacks democraticlegitimacy, and that this is a major problem foradvocates of global civil society who are inclined tosubstitute human rights for democracy, there areperhaps five principal responses. We will set them outand offer a reply to each of them.

First, it can simply be said that global democraticlegitimacy is not as necessary, or at least not as important,as our moral claim makes it out to be. It can be said, forexample, that the claim that the international systemlacks democratic legitimacy ignores the fact that mostso-called national democracies are not really democratic,but are really just collections of colliding interest groups,in which the ballot box plays a relatively small role in howpolitical decisions are reached. Our account fetishises theballot over actual political relations in democratic states.We have, it can be said, raised the bar for the democraticlegitimacy of the international system far higher than itis in so-called democracies. Democratic legitimacy ismostly an illusion in democratic states, not the fact ofthe matter; what matters is instead the perception of theirlegitimacy. And that perception is less a function ofactual, successful democratic process than the fulfillment– through the performance of efficient government,bureaucracies, and economies – of the material expecta-tions of the citizenry. The citizenry’s material expectationstrump its expectations of democratic perfectionism(Alvarez, 2000).

The difficulty with this response is that, despite themany failings of democratic sovereign states, andhowever imperfect their democratic systems, the factremains that democratic legitimacy – of the kind obtainedonly at the ballot box – does matter. It is simply a fact ofcontemporary life. Modern nation-state constitutionalismis right about that – a legitimate state is one that isdemocratic, respects basic human rights and the rule oflaw, and looks after the common good. In that, the ballotbox is indispensable. This is true both in fact and as amatter of perception; in the contemporary world, statesthat seek legitimacy without elections have seriousdifficulties in reality as well as perception (Annan, 1999b).

This reply, that the ballot box is indispensable,anticipates the second response. Even granted thatdemocratic legitimacy is a requirement of legitimacy inthe world today, for nation states as well as for aninternational system, it is not the case that democraticlegitimacy requires the actual ballot box (Held, 1991).There are methods of participation other than electionsthat can supply democratic legitimacy – after all,representative democracy is itself a modification of the‘purest’ form of democracy, so why not others? Theseothers include participation through intermediaries,such as NGOs and other ‘organic’ sites of people’s actuallives, rather than through the formality of universalsuffrage. And so, for example, we have suggestions fora new upper chamber of the UN General Assembly, tobe filled by representatives of NGOs, and many otherproposals that would deal with the fact that evenrepresentative, quasi-parliamentary democracy at thelevel of the whole planet is not realistic (Held et al,1999).

The effect of these other mechanisms for achievingdemocratic legitimacy is, notably, to restore inter-national NGOs to precisely the position of inter-mediation and representation that we earlier deniedthem on the grounds that they are not a replacementfor the ballot box. And we remain as unenthusiastic asbefore. This form of global civil society, and this ballot-free representation and intermediation, is not civilsociety as we have so far understood it. It is notdemocracy as we have understood it because, howeverimperfect its implementation, it does include themystery of the ballot box. And it is, moreover, morallywrong to the extent that it indulges in a sleight of handover what the world generally understands democracyto mean, which does include the ballot box.

The third response acknowledges the force of thisreply, and accepts that democracy means ballot boxes,parliamentary elections, and the associated apparatus.These are necessities that cannot be wished away bymeans of new social movements, intermediationthrough NGOs or labour unions or peasant assembliesor UN conferences or anything else. Therefore, let usstraightforwardly create a world parliamentary system;the role of international NGOs is merely to advocate forthat system, and it is mistaken to accuse NGOs of havinga role other than temporary midwife to a democraticsystem. Let us have elections and make planetarydemocracy a reality (Commission on Global Governance,1995).

This response is admirable in confronting the issuedirectly, without any sleight of hand whatsoever.

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movement with transcendental goals and beliefs. It isself-sacrificing and altruistic. It asserts a form ofuniversalism and builds it into its transcendentalism. Itappeals to universal, transcendental, but ultimatelymystical values – the values of the human rightsmovement and the ‘innate’ dignity of the person –rather than to the values of democracy and the multipleconceptions of the good that, as a value, it spawns. Mostnotably, its personnel do indeed resemble missionaryorders – the human rights organisations, for example,might be thought of as the Jesuits of the movement, orperhaps Opus Dei, keepers of the true doctrines, the trueuniversals, while the development organisations mightbe thought of as the equivalent of the Maryknoll Order,one of the Catholic missionary orders devoted to humandevelopment among the world’s poor. (If this be thoughtoffensive as a caricature, no offence is intended, as it isproposed as an aid to thinking beyond the categories ofliberalism writ into liberal internationalism; if, on theother hand, this characterisation is thought offensivebecause sacrilegious to the NGO movement – what,nineteenth-century foreign missionaries in moderndress? – well, that is just the point.)

Why does this matter? Because, in so far as the NGOmovement, especially in aspiring to the status of globalcivil society, actually elevates itself into a religiousmovement, it underscores that the universal claims itmakes are so only in the sense that each religion makesits own universal claims. That is, each religion makes aclaim of universality, but – seen severally from theoutside – each is just one among many such religions.Seen as a religion, seen as missionary work, global civilsociety’s (fundamentally human rights) claims are justone set of universal claims amid all the others thatreligions and transcendental philosophies make. Thereis no obvious sense in which any one of them has specialauthority. This, obviously, threatens the moral hegemonythat the NGO movement claims through its morality ofhuman rights, and so has been a reason for resisting theanalogy to religious missionary movements and forpreferring the much more accommodating ideology ofglobal civil society.

A second way of seeing the international NGOmovement and its claims about the need for globalgovernance – the presumed obviousness of the good ofovercoming sovereignty – is that it universalises andclaims as the path of history the ideal of creating largerand larger political entities. The narrow motivation fordoing so is perfecting the regulation of transnationalactors. The broad motivation is that it is thought to bethe historically progressive thing to do. But it might be

thought that this universalising of size and number infact represents the fetishising of a parochial model – thatof the EU (Giddens, 2000). One may admire the accom-plishments of the EU without believing that it representsa universal model for humankind at the planetary level.One may understand European grandees whose experi-ence has taught them that integration works – works inEurope and can create peace, prosperity, and respect forhuman rights – without actually believing the corollary,not just that it can work elsewhere, but that it can workon a planetary level (Carothers, 1999b). Why does thismatter? Because it raises the possibility that what hasbeen urged with such grandiosity as the universalcondition of liberal internationalism is, instead, simplythe unjustified universalising of a particular historical andcultural experience, EU integration – a project, moreover,whose ultimate outcome is far from clear.

What is common among these alternative views isthat they challenge a key moral assumption built intothe ideology of global civil society: the universality andtranscendence and completeness of its moral system,which is that of universal human rights. They questionwhether leaving democracy out of account can give acomplete moral system in the way that the ideology ofhuman rights claims to – while not coincidentallyleaving the interpretation and authority of that ideologyin the hands of global civil society itself. In invokingeither religious models or EU parochialism, alternativeexplanations of the international NGO movementchallenge the movement’s universal claims. Thus, byextension, they challenge a key reason for which theclaim to be ‘global civil society’ was invoked in the firstplace namely, its claim to be universal, representative,and an intermediary for the peoples of the world. Eachalternative explanation in its own way threatens theauthority that the international NGO movement claimedfor itself when it appropriated the elevated, ideologicallyextravagant language of global civil society.

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one. Is not the effect of this corrosive scepticism merelya call for the NGOs to pack up their tents and go home?Of what possible value could that be? If thefundamental complaint is that the international systemis undemocratic, how would it help if the NGOs were toleave the scene, especially since our claim is that theinternational system not merely is undemocratic but cannever become democratic? The question is an importantone because it highlights what we do not ask inter-national NGOs to do, that is, to pack up and go home –far from it. The original claim of international NGOs wasthat they merited being respectfully heard by thoseengaged in international planning and execution ofpolicy, as well as receiving a share of the budget becauseof their expertise and their competence. That is whatshould indeed command respect.

But the claim to constitute ‘global civil society’asserts a sharply different claim and role – that ofintermediary and representative of the world’s peoples.This is a claim for a legitimate place that at once elevatesthe role of NGOs and, significantly, dispenses with theneed for NGOs to prove their expertise and competence,whether in development, humanitarian relief, health, orwhatever. After all, if they represent someone, especiallya ‘someone’ who is so vague as to be entirely malleable,then what matters is their representation, not their

competence at any actual skill. This is a seductiveposition for any NGO because it places it permanentlybeyond the bounds of serious accountability. But it isalso a recipe for failing to serve those who most needthe help of international NGOs. Our call, therefore, isnot for international NGOs to retire from the field, butinstead to assert themselves on the basis of theirexpertise and competence and, concomitantly, to giveup their claims to intermediation and representation –that is, to give up the claim to constitute global civilsociety.

A 1990s discourse in a post-9/11world?And yet there is a whiff of tiredness about this wholediscussion – both the claims and our responses. It allfeels very much like a discussion from the late 1990srather than 2004, a discussion from pre-September 11.The question is, what remains of this kind of discoursein a world in which security is back on the table, andwith it the value of sovereignty. The love affair betweenglobal civil society and international organisations, eachlegitimising the other, during the 1990s, has given wayto an international system under a specific challenge

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Unfortunately, it confronts a profoundly practicalproblem, which is that it is unlikely that planetaryparliamentary democracy is possible. Democracy is asystem of government that rapidly bumps up againsthuman problems of space and numbers. It is not, in ourunderstanding, infinitely upwardly scalable, andcertainly not scalable up to the level of the whole planet(Diamond, 1999).

On the contrary, what we refer to as the world’s largedemocracies, with their tens of millions or hundreds ofmillions of people, are really compromises between therequirements of democracy, which tends towards thesmaller, and the wealth of the common market, which,being a network, does benefit from growing larger andlarger. Democracy and the common market arefrequently confused, particularly by economists of aconservative persuasion, but it is important to under-stand that, although the large, wealthy democracieshave compromised their democracies significantly in ashifting trade-off between democracy and wealth, sizeand numbers take a severe toll upon the purity ofdemocracy. The large democratic states are helped invarious instances by common languages, commoncultures, common ethnicities and common religions,none of which are present at the level of the wholeplanet (Harrison, 2000). It is simply not the case thatparliamentary democracy can be projected and scaledupwards from the nation state to the whole planet.

The same problem afflicts the closely related claimthat the international system already has democraticlegitimacy, through the legitimacy of the nation statesthat make it up (which ignores the question of howmany of those states are democratic); nation states passtheir legitimacy upwards to endow the internationalsystem with legitimacy. No doubt for many purposes –the setting of international postal rates, for example –such legitimacy is sufficient (Slaughter, 2004). But, asthe international system both tasks itself with more andmore intrusive tasks and, it must be said, is assignedmore and more intrusive tasks by leading states,including the US, the ever more diluted legitimacy thatpasses upwards from nation state to internationalsystem is inevitably far too attenuated to satisfy therequirements of those new tasks.

The fourth response likewise confronts the issuehead-on. It says that democratic legitimacy is not reallythe issue; the international system, through the tutelageof global civil society, has another, different, moral basisand legitimacy. It is the moral foundation of humanrights. Democracy is a lovely thing, if you can have it,but although it is sometimes thought of as the moral

exercise of ordered liberty, really it is just a way, in thelanguage of economics, of sorting mass preferences, asort of market in politics, nothing more. It is not afundamental moral principle. Human rights, on theother hand, is about fundamental moral principle. Andwhat global civil society brings to the internationalsystem, infuses it with and advocates for, is humanrights. It, rather than democracy, is what gives moraland political legitimacy.

This response puts squarely on the table what is oftenan occult move by human rights advocates. Notingcorrectly that somewhere, higher or lower, in the canonof human rights one can find many references to thevalue of democracy, they claim that they, too, favourdemocracy. Yet, in fact, it would be more accurate tosay that, seeing the insuperable difficulties in creatinga genuinely democratic international system, they optfor substituting the ideology of human rights for theideology of democracy (Casey and Rivkin, 2001). But thissubstitution likewise fails the test of civil society in aliberal, democratic, constitutional order, consisting ofdemocracy, human rights and individual guarantees, therule of law, and the common good. It dispenses with onebut says that it does not ultimately matter so long asthe other is available. But it does matter.

Moreover, the top-down nature of human rightsnorms, and the fact that they are held, formed,fomented and determined by what might appear, forexample, in a UN conference on women or theenvironment or race to be a vast agglomeration ofgroups and people, is in fact a tiny collection oftransnational activists responding to the sometimesdownright peculiar cultural characteristics of thesegroups. Like other religionists, they imagine that theycarry forth moral universals that they have somehowdiscerned. As they fly effortlessly from place to place,continent to continent, capital to capital, they cannotimagine that they are less than a universal class, pureand disinterested, beyond geography and theparochialism of place. They cannot grasp that ‘inter-national’ is not the same as ‘universal’, and that eventhose who have apparently abandoned fidelity tolocation might still have interests, class interests todefend, the interests of, well, the interests of those wholive in the jet stream. Nor can they grasp that there arethose at the bottom who, without being moralrelativists, nonetheless believe that they are just ascapable of discerning the true universals, just as capableof identifying universal values, as those who take theovernight flight business class from New York to Geneva.

The fifth and final response is an intensely practical

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discovered in Western aid workers an easy meansof leverage, another form of asymmetric warfare(Anderson, 2003). But it is also in crisis because the aidagencies themselves have sought to extend the conceptof humanitarian inviolability to cover a series of NGOand international agency activities that cannot properlybe regarded as neutral.

Nation building is not a politically neutral activity.On the contrary, it is an activity that requires theassistance of many outside agencies, whether govern-mental or non-governmental, if it is to work at all (itselfan open question), whose interventions, however tactful,cannot be considered neutral (Rieff, 2002). Thecommitment to democracy is not neutral; there aremany in the world who are opposed to it. The com-mitment to basic human rights, including the rights ofwomen, is not neutral; it is the object of intenseopposition, and not merely from the Taliban and SaudiArabia. The list of matters that are essential to remakinga political society and yet on which outside aid agencies,including NGOs, cannot remain purely neutral (in thesense of viewing any outcome as morally and politicallyacceptable) is very long. It follows that the claim ofhumanitarian inviolability for the activities of agenciesinvolved in nation building is unsound. Such agencieshave a claim to inviolability; however, it is not based onthe humanitarian nature of their work but rather on thedemocratic rule of law. The confusion of these two kindsof activity, and the respective bases on which theyoperate, is potentially a fertile source of tragedy in manysites of nation building today – not just in Iraq orAfghanistan, but also in Kosovo, East Timor, and otherplaces. The confusion places genuinely neutralhumanitarian relief in a situation of dire risk, andsuggests, incorrectly, that nation building is a value-neutral enterprise.

The circumstances of the post-September 11 worldhave altered the relationship between global civil societyand public international organisations such as the UN.They have altered the relationship of mutual legitimisa-tion in which global civil society organisations providedlegitimacy to public international organisations thatsubstituted for the democratic legitimacy that onemight otherwise have thought was required. For theirpart, public international organisations gave to inter-national NGOs an unprecedented legitimacy based noton competence or expertise but on the presumption ofrepresentativeness. That cosy embrace of mutuallegitimisation is no longer at the heart of internationalorganisations, which today look directly to the mostpowerful nation states.

This means, however, that international NGOs mustalso redefine their relationships and their conception oftheir legitimacy. For many, it means, too, defining therelationship between them and the superpower, the US.Global civil society (in the progressive, left-wing,normative sense that advocates of the conceptordinarily mean) faces something of an identity crisisnot only with respect to the US but necessarily as wellwith respect to its self-conception. Actions of the US,whether one agrees with them or not, have taken centrestage in the world in a way not true for a long time;and, particularly, at a moment in which internationalNGOs cannot simply seek their identity in an idealisedrelationship with international global governance, theymust determine where they stand in relation to the US.Belief in a strong form of liberal internationalism as theonly acceptable basis of global governance leads, at thepresent moment, to principled opposition to the Bushadministration, which is committed to a strong form ofdemocratic sovereignty as the foundation of (limited)global governance. Equally plainly, much of the globalcivil society movement has simply defined global civilsociety to be anti-Americanism, a sort of counter-cultural ideology based on mere opposition, intel-lectually sterile where not outright self-contradictory,and morally uninteresting. If the intellectuals of the

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from the world’s superpower: make yourself relevant orsee yourself disappear. Time was when the UN SecretaryGeneral could go and address the Millennium Forum ofNGOs in 2000 and describe in ecstatic terms how theyrepresented the world’s peoples (Annan, 2000). Today,Annan has, and must have, his eye on the White Houseand a handful of other capitals; and NGOs, whetherstyling themselves as global civil society or anythingelse, appear frankly irrelevant as the grown-ups, nationstates, confer among themselves, sometimes withinternational organisations and sometimes not.

In some respects, therefore, the ideal of a love affair,the mutual legitimisation, between the nascent organsof global governance and their loyal, if sometimescritical, constituency, global civil society, appears to haveled the NGOs astray. There is a marriage, loveless andprobably childless, to be sure, and, moreover, one thatis in serious danger of ending in divorce. But it is notbetween international institutions and the NGOs: it isbetween the leading nation states, particularly thesuperpower, and the UN. The love affair betweeninternational organisations and global civil society wasnever more than a minor affair with a minor mistress;when push came to shove, as it did on September 11and again in the war in Iraq, what mattered was themarriage (including the potential divorce), not the affair.The NGOs promised that they would, on behalf of thepeople of the world, confer legitimacy on the nascentorganisations of global governance. It has turned outthat what matters to the Secretary General, when thestakes are genuinely high, is the legitimacy that comesfrom the capitals of important nation states. Thelegitimacy of the ‘world’s peoples’, at least as conveyed

by global civil society, is merely icing on that cake,dispensable as and when necessary. If that is the case,then perhaps it is the strongest, least theoretical reasonof all why the international NGOs should give up theirclaims to constitute global civil society, give up theirdreams of representing the people of the world – indeed,devote fewer of their resources to advocacy and tocreating a system of global governance and more timeand care to the actual needs of their actual con-stituencies, and re-establish their claims of expertise andcompetence.

That is our advice. Nevertheless, the complicationsand convulsions of the world in circumstances of terror,the war on terror, September 11 and March 11, and thewars in Iraq and Afghanistan all raise questions aboutthe proper roles of international NGOs, even if they giveup the pretence of representativeness and inter-mediation. For example, the bombings of the UN andthe international Red Cross headquarters in Iraq, andthe kidnap and murder of NGO representatives as astrategy of asymmetric fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,raise questions about the role international NGOs canhope to play in the world’s most difficult circumstances(Anderson, 2004). Of course, at one level, this is thewrong question; the whole world is not at war, and whileinternational NGOs that operate in dangerous zones arethe most visible in the media, the overwhelmingmajority of international NGOs work in quite differentcircumstances; their personnel are not being kidnappednor are their headquarters being blown up. It would bea mistake to generalise on the basis of the visibleminority of NGOs that work in conflict situations.

Nevertheless, even with that caveat, it is also truethat, even where conflicts are not occurring, inter-national NGO work has become much more difficult andsignificantly more dangerous. The problem is com-pounded by a confusion indulged in by both the UN andits agencies on the one hand and by many internationalNGOs on the other. This is the fiction of neutrality in thework of international NGOs. There are moments of crisisand disaster in which basic human needs take pre-cedence over other considerations, moments of humani-tarian emergency in which, arguably, humanitarian aidcan be thought to be genuinely neutral, in the sensethat it responds only to need. The organisations, includ-ing NGOs, that work in such circumstances have trad-itionally benefited from a doctrine of humanitarianinviolability based on the belief that no one couldoppose activities aimed at relieving dire humansuffering. That doctrine of humanitarian inviolability isin crisis and under attack today from fighters who have

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global civil society movement wish to guarantee itsirrelevance to future political debates, this is surely theway to do it, but the loss to the discourse of the moralityof globalisation and its future directions would beimmense.

This is partly what the debate over the reconstructionin Iraq is about for international NGOs. The USgovernment has had mixed views – on this as on manythings – about the role of NGOs in occupied Iraq.Drawing on a sort of ‘compassionate conservativism’rhetoric grounded in certain self-help and limitedgovernment ideologies within the US and its unques-tionably robust civil society, the Bush administrationbelieved that international NGOs could take a lead inreconstruction. But such a lead was in fact far beyondthe capacities of the NGOs. Irrespective of what onethinks of Halliburton or Bechtel, it was always someinternational corporation that would have to rebuildthe oil facilities, for example, obviously not an NGO; andthe question was simply, would it be American, BritishRussian or French? In part, of course, underestimatingwhat kind of rebuilding would be required and whatkind of opposition would be faced, but also under-estimating the visceral hatred of many of theinternational NGOs for the US, the Bush administrationassumed that international NGOs would be – well, what?partners? grantees? contractors? – present, at least, inoccupied Iraq. Global civil society, with its set ofideological blinkers, has never really understood that,for reasons grounded in a very American ideology,a sizeable part of the Bush administration has alwaysbeen receptive and, indeed, overly receptive, to the workof NGOs.

The reasons for the non-presence of the internationalNGOs in Iraq are overdetermined. On the one hand, thelevels of violence and risk certainly deterred manyorganisations. But on the other hand, attitudes rangingfrom the refusal to be ‘tainted’, as it were, by theoccupation to a straightforward desire that the occupa-tion would break down altogether, despite the obviousdisaster that would mean for the Iraqis, have also beena decisive reason for the absence of the usual collectionof international NGOs from Iraq (Anderson, 2004). Atthe same time, another part of the Bush administration,taking careful note of the aftermath of the bombingsof the UN and Red Cross headquarters in 2003, and the

subsequent mass exodus of organisations, hasquestioned whether the NGOs and UN agencies reallymattered very much in the actual reconstruction efforts,as opposed to providing icing on the cake of a legitimacythat mattered more to outsiders than to ordinary Iraqis.It was not so clear that the exit of the aid agenciesmattered very much to concrete material facts ofreconstruction – electricity, security, and so on. Theconvulsions at the time of writing (May 2004), withsharply increased levels of fighting in Iraq, hostagetaking and executions of Western NGO workers, and thescandals of the prison abuses, leave it unclear whetherit is true that international legitimacy of the kindoffered by UN and NGO agencies, even if it did notcontribute directly to material conditions such aselectricity and potable water, would have contained thepresent violence. It is not possible to know how thingswill turn out as of this moment, and we will notspeculate further about current events.

What is clear, however, is that the coin that manyNGOs, like the UN agencies, offer is now not necessarilytheir competence or expertise. What they offer islegitimacy and cover – a sort of branding processwhereby money from various national sources,particularly from the US, is ‘re-branded’ with the logosof some NGO, or UN agency, or both. Legitimacy is notto be sneered at, to be sure; it is an invaluable, ifintangible, element of political stability, in Iraq aselsewhere. But the entitlement of international NGOsto offer legitimacy, and to receive legitimacy, which isamong the ideologically extravagant claims of globalcivil society, is suspect. Nor is it merely an academicquestion, a question of the success or failure of this orthat intellectual analogy. The stakes are much, muchhigher. Organisations that have legitimacy based onrepresentativeness have less necessity, frankly, to beeither expert or competent. It is a recipe for rot andutter lack of accountability.

Unmoved by the claims of representativeness, anddisbelieving that the assent of NGOs to this or that is asubstitute for ballot-box democracy, we believe that thevalue and the salvation of the international NGOmovement lie in giving up the pretensions, howeverseductive, of the ideology of global civil society andmaking its case to be heard on the basis of undeniableexpertise and competence.

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