Voluntas (2006) 17:303–324DOI 10.1007/s11266-006-9025-1

ORIGINAL PAPER

Global Civil Society and Its Discontents

T. Olaf Corry

Published online: 23 November 2006C© International Society for Third-Sector Research and The Johns Hopkins University 2006

Abstract According to enthusiasts the concept of global civil society is spreading rapidlyand becoming pivotal to the reconfiguring of the statist paradigm. However, critics haverecently grown more numerous and outspoken in opposition to the term claiming thatit is actually perpetuating statism by grafting the idea of civil society onto the globalby way of an unhelpful domestic analogy. This paper examines the role the concept isplaying in perpetuating/reconfiguring statism. First it summarizes current criticism byidentifying three basic accusations: the ambiguity of the term, the “domestic fallacy,” andthe undemocratic effects of using it. Second, these criticisms are considered in turn and it isconcluded that all three points relate, ultimately, back to the failure of the critics themselvesand some global civil society theorists to move beyond a state-centered framework ofinterpretation. In the final section it is shown how global civil society discourse is beginningto move not only the concept of “civil society” away from its state-centred historicalmeanings, but also how it is contributing to changing the content of the concept of“the global.”

Keywords Global civil society . Civil society . Globalization . Globality .

State sovereignty

Introduction

Probably the first time the term global civil society was printed in a major world newspaperwas in 1991,1 when Eduard Shevardnadze, the then former Soviet foreign minister, saw

T. O. CorryDepartment of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Ostre Farimagsgade 5, DK-1014Copenhagen K, Denmark

T. O. Corry (�)Denmarke-mail: olaf@arbat.com1 According to the media database Lexis Nexis, which has the search category “major world newspapers.”

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before him the possibility of a new world order based on the rule of law at the globallevel:

It seems to me that from an historical perspective we are moving towards the formationof a global civil society based on the precepts of law. If this is the case, then itwould be worth seeing whether we couldn’t approach international problems andchallenges more or less in the way that democratic systems resolve domestic issues.(Shevardnadze, 1991)

In doing so Shevardnadze makes what would be called the “domestic analogy:” the global,Shevardnadze hoped, would simply become an enlarged version of the domestic. Sincethen, globalization scholarship has in various guises shown that this analogy does not hold:that “the global” is a new category that demands fresh thinking across the board; that themodel of the nation state, despite its hold on our collective political imagination, is not theonly feasible way of organizing power legitimately; and that state sovereignty, while stillimportant, has lost its paradigmatic status. International relations are increasingly spoken ofin terms of world politics or global governance, and while nobody imagines that the state hasalready withered away, the question for some commentators is now not whether it is beingtransformed but how. Grasping such questions is an important precondition for working outnew ways of organizing legitimate and/or democratic governance in areas where the nationstate lacks formal jurisdiction, influence, or legitimacy.

Yet answering such questions has proved to be an uphill struggle due to widely held anddeeply ingrained statist predispositions. These predispositions, derived from the historicalpredominance of the state as the undisputed carrier of the collective interest (Pierre, 2000,p. 242) make it in Jens Bartelson’s words “difficult to envisage let alone justify new formsof authority and community beyond the state” (Bartelson, 2003, p. 111). These assumptionsare most clearly seen in “realist” theories and accounts, but variants of liberalism and somethird sector studies dealing with non-state actors also still proceed from the assumption thatthe authority of states is such that inquiry must begin and end with analysis of nationalgovernments (Rosenau, 1999, p. 168). More subtly, the idea of the state as the archetypalbounded community saturates many of the shared concepts of politics, even including, asargued below, some conceptions of globalization.

For some analysts, the concept of global civil society is a key to overcoming these statistassumptions in global politics and the endeavour to reconfigure academic and politicaldiscourse anew. Ronnie Lipschutz saw “the growth of global civil society” as a challengeto the nation-state system because it “represents an ongoing project of civil society toreconstruct, re-imagine, or re-map world politics” (Lipschutz, 1992, p. 391). Scott Turnerasserted that “the emergence of global civil society demands not only the re-evaluationand possible revision of realism’s empirical claims; more fundamentally it challenges theparadigm’s ideological underpinnings that often masquerade as objective truth” (Turner,1998, p. 29). Some speak in tentative terms of a “nascent” global civil society (Warkentin &Mingst, 2000), while others are less coy announcing that “we now live in a tri-polar world oflarge businesses, powerful governments, and global civil society” (Perlas, 2000). Since 2001the term has had its own yearbook and is now becoming the object of systematic scholarlycriticism, a sure sign that it has made at least an impact of some kind.

Its critics, however, are also gathering momentum. Some find it wholly unsuitable tothe task of re-imagining world politics because of its historical proximity to the concept ofstatehood (Walker 1994, p. 679) and ask why we should “recycle a concept which is logicallyintertwined with that of the state in order to make sense of a transformation which allegedlytakes us beyond the state and the state system” (Bartelson, 2003). Others object to it on

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democratic grounds and hope very much that it will wither away because “the global civilsociety movement” cannot claim to be representative of a constituency (Andersen & Rieff,2004; Chandler, 2005).

So can it become a central concept for a post-statist era as its supporters claim or isit hopelessly fuzzy, irredeemably statist, or thoroughly undemocratic and about to die outas its critics hope? Those questions are approached in three basic steps in this paper. Inthe first section the paper summarizes the growing body of criticism by dividing it intothree accusations: the ambiguity of the term, the statism supposedly inherent in it, and theundemocratic effects of thinking in terms of a global civil society. Second, these criticismsare considered in turn and it is concluded that all three points relate, ultimately, back to thefailure of critics and some supporters to move decisively beyond a state-centered frameworkof interpretation. Finally, the paper suggests how the concept, though ambiguous, retainsits coherence through a widely agreed upon discursive myth concerning its origins andbasic values. It concludes that the discourse of global civil society is contributing morefundamentally to the reconfiguration of the language of world politics than its critics andeven some of its supporters think.

Before proceeding, it should be noted that it is specifically the contribution of the conceptof global civil society to ways of thinking about global politics that is under investigation.The prevalence of the term global civil society has been interpreted by one commentator as a“sign” that an emerging global civil society actually exists (Kaldor, 2003, p. 2). However, justas discourses about witch-hood in the Middle Ages were not just a “sign” of the proliferationof witches but rather part of a system of knowledge and power that constructed certainwomen as witches, so the concept of global civil society plays a role in ordering globalsocial relations in certain terms. It is therefore precisely the different ways this term has beeninvested with meaning that is under investigation.

The critics of “global civil society”

Criticism has taken roughly three forms. First, some reject the term as wishful thinking, notleast because it is hopelessly vague. Second, others express much more fundamental doubtsabout the ability of the term to effectively challenge the stranglehold that statism (the beliefin the state as the primary or only way of organizing effective legitimate power) is alleged tohold on the collective political imagination. This is blamed mainly on conceptual baggageimported via the concept of civil society, which has historically been defined precisely inrelation to the state. Third, critical voices are now beginning to be heard questioning thedesirability of constructing global civil society as an actor on the world stage because ofthe perceived anti-democratic nature of global civil society. These three sets of criticism arediscussed in turn.

The ambiguity of global civil society

The first criticism of the concept of global civil society considered here is the one claimingit is unworkable due to its ambiguity. Rupert Taylor concludes that “current research intoglobal civil society suffers from weak description and inadequate theorization” (Taylor, 2002,p. 339) agreeing with Waterman, that “global civil society” has not yet passed “through theforge of theoretical clarification or the sieve of public debate” (Waterman, 1996). For otherssuch a forge and sieve will not be enough because ambiguity stems from the long history

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of the concepts involved rather than by the youth of the new concept on offer. The mainproblem is what civil society actually means in its contemporary guise.

Several histories of the concept have been written since the term re-emerged from relativeobscurity at the end of the 1980s.2 Whereas civil society once referred to society governed byrule of law as opposed to anarchical or hierarchical society (Cicero) in Eighteenth CenturyEuropean Enlightenment literature it became a term for a sphere distinct from the state, inpractice the realm of the bourgeoisie, including the market and private associations (Hegel,Marx, Adam Smith). With the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci it later became rephrasedas a zone of contestation where hegemonic forces (classes) fought out struggles for societaldomination including party politics. A neo-Gramscian position popular today sees it as thatwhich is neither state nor market, nor party political, but remnants of past meanings are stillreferred to and in play.

This historical variation need not be problematic, but according to Dale G. Thomas “alarge part of this confusion [over the meaning of global civil society] comes from present dayscholars invoking arguments of ‘great’ political theorists” (Thomas, 1998, p. 49). While in-tended to close the argument, references to past masters only serves to illustrate the disputedand ambiguous content of the term. Additionally, the concept of civil society has in its revivalin Eastern Europe taken on a logistical and tactical role that is bound to multiply its meanings:“A banner for the opposition between 1987 and 1989, the term became, with the fall ofthe communist regime, a legitimizing device for the new government” (Seligman, 1992,pp. 7–8). The richness of the concept of civil society and the fact that it now has, yet again,acquired new content will thus pose a constant challenge to any attempt to define it neatly.

This difficulty is compounded by the contemporary resurgence of “civil society” beinglinked to the globalization debate. As the globalization debate and the debate about civilsociety have grown closer and more intertwined, particularly around the turn of the millen-nium, they have become ever more dependent upon each other. As Mary Kaldor puts it: “anew form of politics, which we call civil society, is both an outcome and an agent of globalinterconnectedness” (Kaldor, 2003a, p. 2). This has tended to multiply definitional difficul-ties because “global” itself is also a notoriously disputed term that has proved extremelyflexible and multifaceted.

For some, the epithet global is simply inaccurate or premature in relation to civil society.Christopher Rootes finds “global civil society” ineffectual in terms of influencing policyeven in a case where he expected it to be at its strongest, namely in European Union (EU)environmental politics (Rootes, 2004). Keck and Sikkink explicitly reject the idea of aglobal civil society because norms and rules in their view are not yet diffused on a scalethat can be considered “global.” They declare themselves much more comfortable with “aconception of transnational civil society as an arena of struggle, a fragmented and contestedarea” rather than “strong claims about an emerging global civil society” (Keck & Sikkink,1998). Others such as Jan Aart Scholte understand global less as “world-wide” and more as“non-territorial,” which sets up other standards for globality all together.

Still, it is the concept of civil society, which has been objected to most strongly and whichis deemed to be the biggest source of ambiguity. The most obvious problem related to allthis is the question of which actors and organizations are considered to be a part of globalcivil society. Taylor finds that “when employed, the term has generally served as a kind ofcatchall term for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or social movements, of all shapes

2 Several scholars have given accounts of the development of the concept; see e.g., Ehrenberg (1999), Kaldor(2003b), and Keane (1999).

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and sizes, operating in the international realm” (2002, p. 339). The main problem seems tobe agreeing on what nongovernmental (or even worse: “non-state”) actually entails. Someformal definitions explicitly rule out only actual states and their bureaucracies, but most alsoexclude organizations built by states such as the EU, the World Trade Organization (WTO)or the United Nations (UN). State-building movements (such as separatist nationalists) andthose non-state organizations that are oriented only towards state policies are also excludedfrom global civil society from time to time (Turner, 1998, p. 29). As far as market actorsgo, most analysts are currently hostile to the idea of them being included, although there areexceptions (Keane, 2003).

The problem of statist bias

A second and potentially more serious kind of objection to the concept is that “global civilsociety,” rather than just creating confusion by being vague, may systematically be leadingresearch in an undesirable direction. The accusation is that “global civil society” posits animplicit analogy between global and domestic spheres, importing into globalization studiesprecisely the statist assumptions that global civil society is supposed to be reconfiguring ortranscending. Because the domestic and global contexts are not comparable, the critics say,the domestic analogy, or domestic fallacy, is misleading—some commentators concludingthat global civil society is simply a contradiction in terms.

The argument runs something like the following: There is broad agreement that historicaluses of civil society have always had one thing in common which has maintained the identityof the term, despite its changing connotations. Language is relational, so concepts gain theirmeanings from their relations to other concepts and civil society has always been closelyrelated to ‘the state’. Civil society is thus always in some way a product of the rule of lawbacked by the threat of force, or as a check on state institutions prone to abuses of powerand corruption (Bartelson, 2003; Kaldor, 2003a; Walker, 1994). Outside a domestic statesetting, and in the absence of a global state, the idea of “global civil society” becomeseither meaningless (because a civil society cannot possibly be “beyond the state”) or atleast problematic, because it assumes that the problems and solutions to domestic politicalproblems can be readily transferred to non-state settings like the arena of global governance.

For more radical globalists, the whole idea of discrete and territorially based “domestic”political communities is no longer tenable in the way that it used to be. “The global” renders“civil society” “redundant” (Bartelson, 2003). Global civil society is therefore an awkwardconstruct, Bartelson concluding that given globalization, the concept of civil society oughtto be ditched, perhaps in favour of the concept of world society, that does not imply a statein the same way that “civil society” historically has (ibid.).

Apart from being self-contradictory, it has also been argued that the framing of globalcivil society in statist terms has blunted it as a tool in the critique of state power. GideonBaker thus sees the continued focus on human rights within global civil society discourse asan expression of the closet statism of the concept, which inhibits a more radical critique ofstate power: “By reducing political action to interest that can find expression in statist forms,namely through rights, these [cosmopolitan democracy] theorists are affirming a discourseof state sovereignty” (Baker, 2002; also see Hopgood, 2000).

The undemocratic features of global civil society

Another variant of the domestic analogy argument makes up the third category of criticism.This concerns the broad issue of the legitimacy and democratic credentials of global civil

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society, rather than its existence or the coherence of global civil society. Kenneth Andersonand David Rieff identify what they see as a “a widely received, standard account of whatit means for international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international socialmovements to be described as constituting ‘global civil society’” (Anderson & Rieff, 2005,p. 26). Understanding it as a movement or discourse, global civil society is accused ofundermining democracy either by sapping further the authority of the only really democraticinstitution, the nation-state, or of harbouring undemocratic practices within itself.

John Fonte argues that “an entire industry of transnational agencies and nongovernmentalorganizations is pushing forward changes designed either to deny or override the nationalsovereignty of democratic states against surprisingly muted or inchoate opposition. Takentogether, these changes amount to a serious political and intellectual challenge to democraticsovereignty vested in the liberal democratic nation-state” (Fonte, 2004). Fonte’s argumentseems to be an argument against globalizaiton in general, since global civil society is hardlyas effectual in overriding national sovereignty as the global economy, for instance. Suchcriticisms ignore the question of how to democratize those areas of sovereignty that havealready escaped the boundaries of the liberal democratic nation-state (other than by somehowrestoring national sovereignty). In this criticism the question of global governance is thereforenot addressed, and the nation-state is assumed to be the de facto relevant level of analysisfor considerations concerning democracy.

However, a related criticism picks up where this argument leaves off, namely at the level ofthe global. Anderson and Rieff suggest that global civil society, as it is commonly understoodas a transborder version of a domestic civil society, exerts an anti-democratic influence onglobal politics, rather than just on national ones. Rather than lamenting the existence ofINGOs in themselves, which Fonte’s argument seems to imply, the very act of framingNGOs as “global civil society,” they argue, creates an expectation that NGOs operatinginternationally will fulfil the same function as the one civil society performs in settleddemocracies (read: domestic nation-state democracies). In domestic democratic settings,“civil society organizations . . . do not claim either to represent or to intermediate; they donot stand between the people and their elected representatives, because the ballot box does”(Anderson & Rieff, 2005, p. 30). According to Anderson and Rieff the “domestic analogy”between democracy and global governance fails because INGOs are not able to perform thesame function when operating outside the auspices of a democratic state where no partiesand ballot boxes are present to perform a representative function: “International civil society,when it sees itself as global civil society, aspires to a quite different, and much more inflated,set of roles: first, to ‘representativeness’ and second, to ‘intermediation’—to stand betweenthe people of the world and various transnational institutions” (ibid). Anderson and Rieffseem to suggest that civil society only makes sense within a democratic context, which allows“domestic civil society organizations to be what we understand as ‘civil society’ by relievingthem of the possibility, the obligation, and indeed the temptation to regard themselves asrepresentatives or intermediaries” (ibid).

Answering the critics

Vagueness and confusion?

The first criticism concerning vagueness is easy to assert. A short history of the term since1991 shows how it has changed content several times already. After it emerged in 1991 in themanner that Shevardnadze and others used it as a post-Cold War “New World Order” termfor a global state in terms of a global rule of law (Moisie & Mertes, 1993), it disappeared

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for a while only to reappear three years later as a synonym for a global free trade regime.Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, saw US strategy as building “a globalcivil society through enlargement of the core of major market democracies” (Walker, TheGuardian, February 22, 1995). In 1995 the term was used by the UN Commission on GlobalGovernance in the report Our Global Neighbourhood (1995) as a term for a global ethos ofgood neighbourliness based on common values of respect for life and freedom of information.By 1998 the term was beginning to gain real momentum within academia and academicsbegan to use the term in the media too, first as a synonym for global public opinion. UlrichBeck used the term in this sense arguing that global civil society is a vital precondition if acosmopolitan democracy is to become more than a necessary utopia (Beck, 1998). Later thatyear Benjamin Barber refers to global civil society as a culture carried by civic associations:“a genuinely global democratic culture . . . hooped together by bands of civic associationsrepresented by non-government organizations, churches, foundations, citizen organizations,and other civic groups” (Barber, The Independent August 29, 1998). By December 1999,after the debacle in Seattle, the term had become almost the opposite of a global free traderegime, in the words of one commentator: “an increasingly powerful worldwide response tothe human costs of an unworkable global regime . . . a ragged coalition of NGOs” targetingtransnational governmental bodies and companies (The Guardian, 1999).

However, all this kind of criticism is of limited consequence. After all, practically allkey concepts in the social sciences today are somehow vague or disputed—and all have ahistory. Moreover, if the problem is defined as conceptual immaturity or as a lack of rigour,the solution is obvious: more work needs to be done to sort out the confusion.

We also might agree with Anderson and Rieff that such a thing as “a standard account” ofglobal civil society actually has emerged although there are still variations of course. It canbe argued that the existence of two things—a standard account and a standard definition—can be found in the databases to have established themselves roughly around 1999. Suchdefinitions have generally taken current conceptions of what civil society is and added aglobal dimension to them (e.g., Waltzer, 1995). Globality is conceptualized in terms of being“beyond the state” whereas civil society is treated roughly as “the third sector” betweenstate and market. Since 1999 this kind of definition of global civil society as a non-state andnon-market sphere (or set of actors) situated beyond the level of the nation state has been,if not unchallenged, then at least dominant. The LSE’s Global Civil Society Yearbook for2001 for example, defines global civil society for pragmatic purposes as “the sphere of ideas,values, institutions, organizations, networks and individuals located between the family, thestate, and the market and operating beyond the confines of the national societies, polities,and economies” (Anheier et al., 2001, p. 21).

However, this definitional convergence is not borne out in the way the term actuallyfunctions, and this is a major source of ambiguity. The basic problem is defining somethingas non-state given the fraught status of the state in the era of globalization. NGOs, theseemingly paradigmatic civil society actors, are (despite the label) being included and tiedmore and more closely to structures of states and to state-centred global governance, manytimes through inter-state institutions but also via conventional (nation) states, many of them inreality Quasi Nongovernmental Organizations (Quangos). Despite this, NGOs and INGOs areonly very seldom deemed to be outside of global civil society, and this seemingly only whenthey have other qualities of a more normative character that disqualify them. Indeed there aresigns that NGO-status, which the UN confers upon successful applicants, is more dependenton the political ideals that run through much global civil society literature than the non-stateprinciple. In an area like the promotion of democracy, for instance, the leading NGOs arein reality extensions of leading democratic states. The World Movement for Democracy

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calls itself an NGO but grew out of the National Endowment for Democracy, which isfunded by the United States government. The Westminster Foundation for Democracy, anNGO promoting democracy globally is mentioned in the Global Civil Society Yearbookfor 2004/5 as a part of global civil society despite being funded almost exclusively by theUnited Kingdom (UK) Ministry of Overseas Development, the board of directors containingrepresentatives of the three main UK political parties and the director being appointed bythe government. Even the World Social Forum, supposedly the most impressive coordinatedmanifestation of global civil society, is part funded and organized by a Brazilian regionalstate government. This does not seem to lead to anyone questioning the status of the WorldSocial Forum as being a part of global civil society. When NGOs and INGOs are deemed tobe outside of global civil society, this seemingly only happens when they have other qualitiesthat disqualify them. The non-state definition is, perhaps more than anything else, the causeof ambiguity and confusion surrounding the term, because it is not adhered to in the way theterm functions.

This problem is reproduced when global civil society is defined as civil society “beyondthe state.” Again, if the borders of the state are fuzzy, many bodies and organizations beingneither pure state nor pure non-state, then the borders of global civil society will not be ableto be set by reference to “non-state” or “beyond the state.” How many transnational ties mustan NGO have to be “global”? Is it perhaps a question of members, funding, operations, orthe outlook of an NGO being from various national contexts? This definition is difficult tooperate from at the global level in particular, since the question of what is state and non-stateis even more open to question, most dismissing the idea of “a global state.”3 To what degreeorganizations like the UN and WTO are autonomous of states or merely the sum of theirconstituent states is of course debateable. The growing interest in the distinction betweengovernment and governance reflects recognition that the exercise of state power is by nomeans self-evidently statist, not even in “domestic” situations and definitely not in “globalgovernance.”

There is thus a disjunction between how the term is defined and how it functions. Ifglobal civil society cannot be defined satisfactorily in terms of non-state actors acting inter-nationally, we have look to how it manages to function. It would seem that the concept ofglobal civil society has gained ground much less by way of stringent definition and clarity,and more through the emergence of a common discourse surrounding the term, bindingtogether a sometimes contradictory yet connected whole. Finding this unifying discoursecan be described in terms of locating a “myth” that serves to bind actors—academic andnon-academic—together: “a coherent story, fashioned—by making imaginative connectionsbetween an originary past and the present—in such a way as to address preoccupations,conundrums, and contradictions in the contemporary world” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1999,p. 4). Uncovering this myth is not to search for a historically accurate account of how “globalcivil society” arose, but to uncover how representations of the origins of “global civil society”construct a standard history that functions to create a unity of discourse.

Rather than trying to fix the boundaries analytically and then proceeding to investigate anoperationalized version of it, the final part of this paper therefore explores how the boundariesand contents of the concept of global civil society are being set through the emergence ofa coherent story that constructs a past, for purposes of the present. While the full story andthe total range of implications of this story for concerns of the present is outside the scope

3 Even for Martin Shaw (2000), perhaps the most confident theorist of the global state, the “global westernstate” is a state in a very different way to the nation-state.

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of this paper, a sketch of this global civil society discourse is offered with the specific aimof identifying how the usage of global civil society has transformed current meanings of theadjacent concepts of “civil society” and “the global.”4

The upshot of the first point of criticism is that “global civil society” must reduce theconfusion caused particularly by the “non-state” criterion, but not in the way probablyimagined by most of the critics: by dropping the non-state definition. However, beforeattempting this, we must consider the second type of criticism, which posits that “globalcivil society” is irreparably statist and should therefore be abandoned completely.

Statist bias?

The argument that civil society is too laden with statist baggage to be of value in thereconfiguration of statist assumptions dismisses the idea of global civil society as ultimatelycontradictory. This concern is relevant for anybody who wishes to be alerted to the discursivegrip of statism on political analysis, but the proposed strategy of hoping the term will dieout again or suggesting alternatives like “world society” ignores the way the term has spreadalready and fails to ask why, if it is a contradiction in terms, it has such appeal to those whouse it. The statism argument may also be self-defeating from the point of view of challengingstatism because this strategy freezes the idea of civil society precisely within a statist way ofthinking, perpetuating the very problems the same critics bemoan.

Whether the concept does in fact import statist assumptions, or can be freed of theseassumptions is ultimately an empirical question. Bartelson suspects that civil society cannotplausibly be combined meaningfully with the concept of globalization due to its lengthy andintimate historical and rhetorical relation to the concept of statehood, while others disagree.Kaldor, for example, makes the exact opposite proposition, that: “the reinvention of ‘civilsociety’ can only be understood in the context of the global, in contrast to earlier centurieswhen civil society only had meanings in relation to a territorial state” (Kaldor, 2003a, p.142).

This line of argument would suggest that civil society is no longer juxtaposed the state,and poses the question of how the concept, so long entangled in the idea of statehood,achieves stability without this prop. For some global civil society is best thought of as “themedium through which a social contract is negotiated and renegotiated between individualcitizens and the centres of power and authority,” the latter nowadays being “dispersed amongdifferent layer of governance” (Kaldor et al., 2005, p. 2) rather than collected in a sovereignterritorial state construction. This suggests that civil society now functions as the alter ego,not of the state alone, but of centres of power and authority in general. If this is the case, theconcept of civil society has reacted adeptly to the diffusion of state power, diffusing its focusaccordingly. While definitions are lagging behind, it is shown below that this is indeed thecase whilst also suggesting some of the places where “civil society” locates these centres ofpower and authority, apart from in states.

Whether we are willing to follow the concept of civil society in such a “global turn,”depends in part on how it performs—whether it creates a conceptual muddle only or alsosome original or novel conceptual constructs that are useful for understanding global politics.

4 Ronaldo Munck (2002) suggests a similar approach to global civil society regarding it as a “Sorelianmyth” similar in function to the myth of the general strike for syndicalism. Munck sees global civil society asfunctioning as an “empty signifier currently hegemonized by western liberal notions of civility and citizenship”(Munck, 2002, p. 358). According to this approach, what it means to speak of a global civil society dependsupon which political forces have successfully hegemonized the term.

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But it also raises a more general question of whether and how far concepts can travel fromtheir “original” meanings, while retaining their identity as a concept. Here, it can be arguedthat “global civil society” does not stretch “civil society” unreasonably or beyond its limits.Even if it may have strong historical roots in the state, civil society has undergone manychanges before and the idea that it may just have taken another turn is at least worthpursuing. J. G. A. Pocock expounded a “wait and see” stance when he argued that “onlyan overly rigorous historicist would presuppose that the application of a political languageto circumstances other than those which it conventionally presupposes leads necessarily tofailure or ‘false consciousness’” (Pocock, 1987, pp. 31–32).

Similarly Keane attacks “the reductionist view that civil society is a merely ‘bourgeois’ or‘liberal’ phenomenon” pointing out that “the language of civil society has become ‘unhinged’from its middle-class and professional and aristocratic origins [and thereby from the itsorigins in the bourgeois state]; like the veritable genie that escaped its bottle, it has wanderedoff, in several directions” (2003, p. 57).

The new will always to some degree be conceived of in terms of the old. The challengeis not to avoid this tout court but to strive to be as aware of how the new reveals olderassumptions and how it may change the terms involved, following the genie out of the bottle,so to speak, tracing its most recent meandering. Terms change meanings and “civil society”has already gone though some astonishing changes, as has the concept of global civil society,as already shown.

Furthermore, it has become increasingly clear that civil society is by no means the onlyconcept to have become “unhinged” from its former meanings. Much indicates that followingthe concept of civil society in its globalization turn will lead us to the “unhinging” of othercentral concepts, which is what the likes of Ronnie Lipschutz hoped it would (Lipschutz,1992).5 How this may be happening will be elaborated upon later.

Is global civil society undemocratic?

The third category of criticism of the concept is one that harbours arguments claiming that“global civil society” is problematic because it is undemocratic. This, in effect, is a variantof the statism argument only more specific. Because these critics conceive of democracyin terms of a liberal democratic state, and civil society as something fostered within suchinstitutions, exporting this to another alien context, a non-democratic domestic or global ordercreates problems, primarily of legitimacy: “what drives the severe inflation of ideologicalrhetoric surrounding claims about ‘global civil society’” is the desire for legitimacy of bothNGOs and the public international organizations such as the UN, argue Anderson and Rieff(2005, p. 26). Without representative democracy, we are told, this legitimacy will not beforthcoming.

There is obvious purchase to the idea that problems of legitimacy and accountabilityare rife in an age when power is diffusing but democratic institutions remain centred. Theidea that the concept of global civil society compounds these problems, however, rests ona restricted notion of legitimacy derived from a certain conception of democracy, which inturn is fashioned with a certain type of statehood in mind. If a legitimate role for civil society

5 Bartelson (2000) in fact pointed to the likelihood of this happening, pointing to the revolutionary effectsupon political discourse of the concept of globalization. Rather than merely denoting an intensification oftransference between units (nation states) or a transformation of the international system, globalization isconceived by Bartelson (and Shaw and others) as a process that transcends known categories and redefinesany basic constructs in political science and international relations (including those two categories themselves).

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is dependent on the existence of a representative party system at state level, which absolvescivil society from the responsibility of representation, then we can conclude that civil societynever ought to aspire to playing a representative role, irrespective of the form of governmentor governance it found itself under. Under the right circumstances it can legitimately performa non-representative function, existing “to convince people of the rightness of their idealsand invite people to become constituents of the those ideals, not to advocate for whateverideals people already happen to have” (Anderson & Rieff, 2005, p. 29).

This idealizes the role of civil society within a democracy while vilifying it “outside”democracy. Both are problematic because civil society can be a force for or against democ-racy in either context. First, the idea that civil society within a nation-state never functions asrepresentative is strange, as if civil society observes an invisible line, respecting the sanctityof the representative party system. Anderson and Rieff would be hard put to find a domesticcivil society actor who does not in some way play “the representation card,” many of themhaving extensive membership organizations to represent, many of them claiming to representanimals and inanimate objects or future generations who have no representative system gov-erning them. Conversely, the idea that political parties do not also advocate and invite peopleto become their constituents, restricting themselves strictly to fulfilling manifesto promiseswhich they were elected upon, is of course simplistic. Although parties in democracies havean exceptional mandate to claim legitimacy through representation, advocacy and represen-tation occur intertwined in the real world where claims and counter-claims to legitimacy arepart of the political game rather than decided procedurally beforehand.

Second, the idea that civil society cannot exist legitimately outside a domestic democraticsetting is reductionist in its understanding of legitimacy. If democracy is considered in moregeneric terms as governance based on the consent of those governed, this opens up a fieldcontaining multiple ways of gaining consent and democratic legitimacy which needs to betaken into consideration when considering the legitimacy of actors identified as global civilsociety. Democratic legitimacy (unless we are to freeze our conceptions of democracy atthe sovereign liberal democratic state stage in its long development) has been derived frommultiple sources, even for political parties, and some parties even lack legitimacy becausethey break other kinds of rules than electoral ones. Other sources include the internal qualitiesof an organization, rights-based claims, moral authority, independence and integrity, andtransparency in operations (Van Rooy, 2004). As Scholte puts it: “In one way or another,democratic governance is participatory, consultative, transparent and publicly accountable”(Scholte, 2001, p. 6).

The whole idea that the concept of civil society has purchase only for democracies as weknow them from “settled domestic settings” must be a clear cut case of what Walker calls “thereproductive powers of statist discourse” (Walker, 1994, p. 674). Admittedly civil societytakes on a unique form in the context of a liberal democracy. The role of civil society changesas a state makes a transition from autocratic rule to liberal democracy, parties taking oversome of its functions as and when they are formed. But to limit its meaning and legitimacysolely to the context of the democratic nation state obstructs a deeper understanding of howsocieties create and maintain democratic institutions. Anderson and Rieff would presumablyhave to dispute the idea that “civil society” played a role in bringing about democratic rulein Eastern Europe and South America in the late 1980s appearing only as a “civil society” atthe inception of democratic institutions. This neglects other forms of democratic legitimacythat civil society may have as an independent social force that limits and checks the powersof rulers, irrespective of whether these rulers are elected party representatives or depots inan autocratic regime.

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Enthusiasts, however, can go overboard in the opposite direction. For Hillary Wainwrightcivil society is relevant both within the state as a check on state power (even if this is deemedto be a democratic state), but also outside it “as a means of building democratic counter-powerto the anti-democratic sources of power outside the state which have long been eroding thepower of the franchise” (Wainwright, 2005, p. 96). The argument that global civil society isa major factor pressing for the democratization of global governance, trying to reclaim someof democracy’s lost territory within the state and establish it beyond the state is appealing butperhaps a little presumptuous. Global civil society may harbour undemocratic just as wellas democratic aims after all, and within a Gramscian perspective of hegemony, democracydoes not necessarily even come into the equation. Civil society represents simply the sphereof contestation where various hegemonic forces struggle for dominance within a politicalsystem. Seen through this lens, the context of liberal democratic institutions is less importantfor the function that civil society performs and the goal of democracy cannot be assumed tobe the guiding principle of civil society. But neither can it be assumed to be undemocratic bydefinition unless, as Anderson and Rieff have it, democracy is equated with the national ballotbox and civil society to non-party actors operating within such domestic settled contexts.

Critics in the grip of statism?

A major source of ambiguity in the term is definitions specifying “non-state” and “beyondthe state” while the fuzziness of the state increases. Yet the irony is that those attacking theconcept for being statist seem to be the ones most intent on making the state the pivotalpoint for the concept of global civil society. Bartelson prefers to reserve the term for nationalcontexts (although even there it may be considered “redundant”) because of its stronghistorical and rhetorical relation to the idea of the state. Anderson and Rieff lay down eventighter constrictions on the term, finding it applicable only to a certain historical class ofstates, namely representative liberal democratic ones. It must be acknowledged that questionsof legitimacy and the role and nature of civil society in a globalizing context involve a rethinkof the idea of legitimacy, democracy, civil society, and the state, but it is a mistake to give upon “global civil society” as irreparably statist or inherently undemocratic. While this in itsentirety is a task beyond the scope of this paper, the following offers an account of how theconcept is contributing to bringing us beyond statist ways of thinking—the ways of thinkingthat critics of “global civil society,” paradoxically, seem intent on maintaining.

Towards a non-statist understanding of global civil society

The interesting thing about “global civil society” is not so much what it “is” as what itis “becoming.” Rather than defining it to begin with and then evaluating it, the interestingquestion is how actors themselves fashion it and how it functions—in this case how it might bereconfiguring the idea of global politics. Rather than being “non-state” and “beyond the state,”it can be argued that “global civil society” is involved in the process of a reconfiguration ofthe concept of statehood by re-fashioning the adjacent concepts of civil society and globality.

The myth of the formation of “global civil society”

The rise of “global civil society” has been based less on theoretical and definitional pre-cision than on widely accepted storylines about its emergence. A brief account of thesestorylines can be organized in terms of three key dates: 1989, 1994, and 1999. These dates

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make the revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, and the anti-capitalist demonstrations from 1999 key events in “global civil society” discourse. They areall commonly referred to in contemporary global civil society literature, irrespective of whatdefinitions authors prefer.

First, the events of 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe are a key part of this discoursewhich sees global civil society as the rebirth of the concept of civil society in a globalform. According to Kaldor global civil society has its most recent historical roots in therevolutionary events in Eastern Europe, the ending of the Cold War, and the growth oftransnational ties. A growing body of work traces the origins of the theme back to the yearsof opposition leading to the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe. Keane cites “the revivalof the old language of civil society, especially in central-eastern Europe, after the militarycrushing of the Prague Spring in 1968” as one of three main antecedents of the emergenceof “global civil society” (Keane, 2001, p. 23). This case for drawing a connection betweenthe 1989 revolutions and the idea of global civil society has recently been argued explicitlyby Kaldor (2003a).

However, the linking of global civil society to 1989 is a surprisingly new phenomenon.Around the time of the revolutions in Eastern Europe, the significance of the term global civilsociety had a different meaning, as we saw, and the significance of 1989 for the relaunch ofthe idea of civil society was not yet widely accepted. Lipschutz’s seminal article on globalcivil society from 1992 does mention the events of 1989 and the idea of using civil societyas a term for “those aspects of social and cultural life that had not been captured or colo-nized by the totalitarian state” but notes also that “the idea that one might even think aboutcivil society in similar terms [in the West] has always been a non-starter” (Lipschutz, 1992,pp. 391–392). For Jurgen Habermas one of the peculiar characteristics of the Eastern Eu-ropean upheaval of 1989 was “its total lack of ideas that are either innovative or orientedtowards the future” (Habermas, 1990, p. 5). Only later during the 1990s did the narrative of1989 and global civil society emerge clearly.

Thus, by 1996 scholars began to warn against initial interpretation of the revolutions of1989 that “marginalizes and/or ignores important forms of politics that were practiced by theCentral European democratic oppositions” (Isaac, 1996, p. 293). Jeffery Isaac agreed that theopposition movements or so-called civic initiatives saw liberal democratic institutions as nec-essary, but questioned whether these were seen as sufficient conditions for political freedom:“While the ‘high politics’ of normal liberal democratic institutions are important, these needto be supplemented by—and sometimes challenged by—more vigorous, grass-roots forms ofcitizenship” (Isaac, 1996, p. 318). In their article on “The Emergence of Global Civil Society”Oliveira and Tandon claim that “the breath taking peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, thedemocratic transitions in so many countries of the South, and the dramatic changes in SouthAfrica all bear witness to the strength of civil action” (Oliveira & Tandon, 1996). The EasternEuropean revolutionaries began to be seen to have launched a critique of monist liberalismby reintroducing the idea of civil society as a kind of support system of democracy. Theanti-political politics of the 1989 revolutionaries, such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakiaand Janos Kis in Hungary, subscribed eagerly to the liberal critique of the state, but alsoadvocated a more Arendtian view of individuals charged with ethical responsibilities.

Like the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Mexican Zapatista uprising is likewise alynchpin of the global civil society storyline, despite it being initially an armed insurrection bya separatist or localist movement that began in 1994 in San Sebastian, Chiapas, Mexico. TheGlobal Civil Society Yearbook for 2001 describes the story of the Zapatistas as “a textbookexample of the relation between the local and the global in civil society today” (Said & Desai,2001, p. 70) and in Clifford Bob’s appraisal of global civil society, the Zapatista rebellion

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Fig. 1 Number of articles using the term “global civil society” per year in major world newspapers accordingto the media database Nexis Lexis

in Chipas is chosen as “representative of a large universe of social movements frustrated athome, seeking NGO support abroad” (Bob, 2001, p. 315).

Third, the events of 1999, the demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle in November—which were carried on a wave of activist optimism after NGOs saw themselves as havingblocked the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investments in 1998—have perhaps donemore to promote the term of “global civil society” than anything else. After these events, useof the term increased dramatically, especially in the media (see Fig. 1). This was also the firsttime events were immediately interpreted as “global civil society” rather than retrospectivelylabelled as such (e.g., Bernard, 1999) and similar events have been framed as global civilsociety (Said & Desai, 2001). According to a key NGO discussion paper from 2002, inthe “late 1990s global civil society gained public visibility primarily as a popular resistancemovement challenging the institutions and policies of corporate globalization” (Korten et al.,2002).

This is by no means the whole story, and it continues to develop and be rewritten. Inbetween these, the UN conferences in Rio in 1992, Beijing in 1994, Copenhagen in 1995,and Johannesburg in 2002 also often cited in global civil society discourse, as is the first WorldSocial Forum held annually since 2001. This has brought NGOs to be a very dominant themefor global civil society discourse, as the UN “decade of conferences” brought NGOs furtherinto the processes of global governance. This construct tends to emphasize consultationrather then confrontation and is the preferred version in the institutions of global governanceand some mainstream NGOs.

However, all these themes sit, sometimes uncomfortably, along side each other in globalcivil society discourse: the more radical social movement version of extra-institutional ac-tivism, the anarchist idea of non-coercive social organization, the republican ethos of politicsas self-realization, the liberal construction of civil society as a buffer against the state, and thedissident anti-political politics. Together they make up current global civil society discourse,the unity of which can be found in the formative myths and storyline, some of which havebeen summarized briefly here.

The changing meaning of “civil society”

All this has suggested a reconfiguration of the concept of civil society, although some themesare old and perhaps only modified by global civil society discourse. As noted, followingKaldor (2003b), the indications are that civil society has adopted a more generic meaning asthe medium through which citizens negotiate a social contract with overlapping and multiplecenters of power rather than being simply juxtaposed the state. Global civil society discourse

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is, however, not agnostic about where power is now centred. The concept of civil society isbeing recast.

Since global civil society tends to see itself in terms of being in opposition to powerin many forms—rather than just state power—diversity is a concomitant feature of theterm. Emphasis on diversity and even the celebration of diversity can be found in virtually allnotions of civil society within global civil society discourse. This underlines how historicallycontingent the statist idea of civil society is, the supposed monolithic power structure of thesovereign state imagined by many as the sole focus of civil society resistance. Apart fromthis basic feature, the turn away from statism has given rise to new themes in civil societydiscourse as well as modified some older ones.

First, “civil society” has taken on a significant non-market theme, which in some in-stances overshadows the non-state theme. Corporate power is articulated in some globalcivil society discourse as insidious by definition, and by more “moderate” voices as dan-gerous if unchecked or monopolistic. The idea that civil society can be non-market, or evenanti-market in the form of anti-neoliberalism owes a great deal to the Zapatista movement,although the idea of civil society to come out of 1989 already began to place civil societyin opposition to liberal economics as well as state planning. It is arguably not inconceivablethat a former World Bank economist like Joseph Stiglitz or a relatively market-critical stateleader like President Lula of Brazil can be included within global civil society, especially ifthe non-state criteria are relaxed. Much global civil society discourse has already embracedthem already, Lula having spoken at the WSF in Mumbai in 2004 and Stiglitz himself usesthe term.

Perhaps the best example of this anti-market turn, however, is the way the World Eco-nomic Forum (WEF)—which meets annually in Davos each year—has been consideredpositively antithetical to global civil society in some quarters. The World Social Forum, of-ten considered centrepiece of global civil society life, started life as an “alternative summit”to counterpoise the WEF. Yet the WEF has official NGO status and exists in its own words as“an independent organization committed to improving the state of the world [which worksto] embrace new challenges by developing initiatives which support our core principles andvalues, which are to provide a collaborative framework for world leaders to address globalissues; promote entrepreneurship in the global public interest; maintain a non-partisan andindependent position” (WEF website). The WEF has no direct market aims and is officiallyunaffiliated with states, although market and state leaders are routinely invited to seminarsand conferences there. But if contact with state and corporate leaders were a criterion fordisqualification from the status of NGO, then hardly any NGOs would be in existence. Itis perhaps not surprising that the non-market meaning of civil society is becoming moreimportant since civil society has been “rediscovered” in conjunction with the rise of “glob-alization,” a term originally laden with economistic baggage.

Second, revolutionary discourse has become a strong undercurrent in global civil societyliterature. The events of 1989 secured this theme and focus on Zapatismo has served tostrengthen the revolutionary streak in global civil society discourse, something of a noveltyfor the concept of civil society which for centuries had been thought of as a product oflaw, or as a safeguard of it, at most correcting tendencies towards oligarchy in a politicalsystem. By around 1999 the Arendtian vision of civil society secured its space in global civilsociety literature, bringing with it a belief in the necessity of extra-parliamentary activismor activism directed towards institutions of global governance. Global civil society came tobe seen both as safeguards against what is seen as the inherent tendency towards corruptionand the abuse of power in political structures—also as a kind of republican project, whichhad as a separate goal the self-realization and moral education of an active citizenry, a key

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understanding of the dissidents of 1989. Where the formal political institutions conformed toconstitutional liberal democracy, the “anti-political politics” of the dissidents went beyondthis by developing and practicing a more radically democratic kind of political praxis basedon civic initiatives, activism, and non-instrumental political activities that often had no directpolicy focus. The World Social Forum is perhaps one of the best expressions of this, wherethe idea is to create a space for deliberation rather than direct lobbying activity.

Third, another strong construct in “global civil society” discourse is that of non-coercion.In a critical essay the Hungarian dissident-turned-politician G. M. Tamas equates the dissidentconception of civil society with the reinvention of utopian communism writing that “the mythof civil society is a tale of a non-coercive political order” based on the illusion of voluntary,mutual, and symmetrical human relationships: “The absence of coercion means that everyact in pursuance of a contractual obligation in civil society is a new affirmation of individualwill, a new commitment and a new beginning” (Tamas, 1994, p. 213). Illusionary or not,this notion of non-coercion is important to the now dominant conception of global civilsociety especially within its anarchist support, but also in the neo-Tocquevillian idea thatparticipation in voluntary associations is now creating social capital at a global level.

So the term civil society has been articulated anew in global civil society, moving awayfrom a sole reliance on the notion of the state. Has it lost its identity in the process? Or is itsurreptitiously upholding a notion of the state? It would seem that it retains its identity, butthat it is not contributing to statist assumptions. On the contrary it has served to pluralize thegeneral perception of where power lies by pointing to the need to check corporate power,for instance. It also retains many of the older characteristics of civil society, continuing todelimit itself by distancing itself decisively from the most naked expression of power, namelyviolence. According to Kaldor “the concept of civil society has always been linked to thenotion of minimizing violence in social relations” (Kaldor, 2003, p. 3). This explains whyIslamic terrorism is generally not accepted as being part of global civil society and is anotherreason why the Zapatistas of Mexico are given such a central place in the narrative of globalcivil society, having given up the gun in favour of the pen in the early 1990s. Also the VelvetRevolutions of 1989 have iconic status partly for this reason. Global civil society is delimitedfrom mafia and terrorist movements because it is imagined to be “marked by a strong andoverriding tendency to both marginalize or avoid the use of violence and to take pleasurein violence. Its actors do not especially like mortars or tanks or nuclear weapons” (Keane,2003, p. 13). When the US National Rifle Association (NRA) applied for recognition as anNGO, the UN resisted, despite the NRAs obvious non-governmental status (Rieff, 1999).

The overlooked statism in “the global”

A more overlooked discursive effect of the rise of global civil society is the one it is havingon the concept of the global, which is a more subtle potential source of statism in global civilsociety discourse. Critics concerned about the reproduction of statist assumptions appear tohave overlooked this, concentrating their fire on the concept of civil society. On the faceof it, the idea of the global is precisely what is challenging the state, about redefining therole of the state after a diffusion of sovereignty. Yet the great globalization debate may beunderstood as a gigantic conversation with the state, which in many ways has kept the statecenter-stage. According to some analysts, globalization discourse exaggerates the degree towhich the state at one time commanded sovereign powers (Lacher, 2003). The concept ofthe global may in this way be regarded as a post-statist rather than a non-statist term becauseit still has the state as the structure to compare with in the same way that “post-modern” is acontinuation rather than a radical break with modernity.

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Global civil society may be beginning to change this by facilitating the articulation of adifferent conception of “global” that does not concern physical notions of movement overborders. This is not so much in the formal definitions of global civil society, but in the moreinadvertent ways that “global” is used in global civil society discourse. In one prominentdefinition of global civil society, “global” is posited as a distinct level over and above theinternational but still tied to the idea of borders, albeit negatively as that which is trans-border or transnational. According to Keane, “to speak of global civil society is to refer topolitically framed and circumscribed social relations that stretch across and underneath stateboundaries and other governmental forms” (2003, p. 17). It is when civil society crosses stateboundaries that it becomes “global” for Keane. Similarly, for Scholte, in the global, socialconnections are not determined by territorial location, distance or borders: “‘global’ relationsare social connections in which territorial location, territorial distance, and territorial bordersdo not have a determining influence” (Scholte, 1999, p. 9). Global civil society thereby againtranslates roughly as civil society where borders are crossed.

There is a curious paradox in this understanding of the global, because it remains aquestion of borders and territory, albeit in a negative sense (trans-border, de-territoriality).State boundaries are the delimiting factor and paradoxically, global civil society is therebysafely within the vocabulary of the (inter-) national through the concept of globality. Thecentrality of boundedness is inverted but not avoided. However, the concept of global civilsociety in the way it functions in the discourse sketched out earlier, suggests a differentconception of globality that does not rely on the idea of transborder or world-wide in thesense of “planetary.” Particularly, it has highlighted the social rather than the physical andterritorial aspects of globalization.

One of the great problems for globalization theorists has been how the concept of global-ization can be distinguished from other more familiar concepts such as internationalization,and therefore whether and how it was a worthwhile concept at all. The concept of “theglobal” is rejected for being “old hat” by those who understand it in terms of internation-alization (Holm & Sørensen, 1995, p. 40). For those who understand it as universalizationin the sense of “all over the globe,” it remains an unrealized or unrealistic proposition “inthat most globalization is not really global in scope” (Scholte, 1999, p. 19). Consequently,globalization theorists have been preoccupied with the task of differentiating the term fromthese other terms. Scholte has the intention of transcending the statist paradigm writingthat “intenationalization,” “universalization,” “westernisation,” and “liberalization” hardlyrepresent qualitatively new phenomena, which could legitimize the use of the novel term“globalization.” For Scholte, globalization is about de-territoriality understood as the ability(or potential ability) for something to move “across any distance on the planet” (ibid). Hecites examples such as faxes, ozone depletion, and CNN broadcasts to illustrate this point.

This reproduces the same emphasis on physical transgression of borders. But arguably,Scholte is more interesting when he writes on global civil society. Here he includes bothphysical and social understandings of globality, defining global civil society as civic activitythat amongst other things “works on a premise of supraterritorial solidarity” (Scholte, 1999,p. 13). The idea of supraterritorial solidarity suggests that a civil society organization maybe “global” simply by the way that it conceives of its constituency, the interests it choosesto advance. In a similar vein Martin Shaw advises that “the global” can be understood asincluding “the development of a common consciousness of human society on a world scale”that dominates more particularistic forms of consciousness such as the clan, the nation, etc.(Shaw, 2000, p. 19).

Shaw views the global partly in terms of de-territorialization: “a transformation of thespatial content of social relations,” but adds “that the emergent meaning of the global

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goes beyond this, to concern the social meaning of these spatially-transformed relations”(Shaw 1999, p. 160). The environmental issue is singled out as the quintessential globalcause that paved the way for a global consciousness. But more fundamental processes areseen as underlying this. Thus, “to be Global now refers, maximally, to the self-consciouslycommon framework of human society worldwide. In this sense, global has a fully social aswell as spatial and environmental meaning” (Shaw, 1999, p. 160). For globalization to bea meaningful reality beyond accelerated interaction, the totality of human social relationsmust become the dominant constitutive framework: “The distinction between global andpre-global is therefore that, with the development of global relations, the understanding ofhuman relations in a common worldwide frame comes to predominate over other, morepartial understandings” (Shaw, 2000, p. 12).

Global civil society discourse is placing emphasis more on this social or psychologi-cal sense of globality, essentially referring to a non-particularlistic discourse rather than ageographical conception concerning movement across the planet or a geo-political one oftrans-border movement. This can be seen when (despite the formal definitions of globalcivil society referring to issues of transborder movement), civil society organizations areconsidered “global” if and when their constitutive framework poses as non-particularistic,taking the whole of humanity (or creation more broadly) as the ultimately most legitimateconstituency. A localized group such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas may not venture outsidetheir home state and may not be able to move freely around the globe, and may be aboutan indigenous people fighting a state. But they are still seen as the textbook example ofglobal civil society, in part because their discourse is globalist: their aims are conceived ofin universalistic claims, “human society” against “neoliberalism,” for example. Oliveira andTandon write that although global civil society is immensely diverse:

the common thread in this ever-changing quilt is to be found in the realm of values:solidarity and compassion for the fate and well-being of others, including unknown,distant others; a sense of personal responsibility and reliance on one’s own initiativeto do the right thing; the impulse toward altruistic giving and sharing; the refusalof inequality, violence, and oppression . . . a renewal of the sense of concern andsolidary among citizens could be a powerful alternative to social fragmentation and theaggressive affirmation of ethnic and religious identities. (Oliveira & Tandon, 1996)

The cosmopolitan impulse is strong in global civil society discourse indeed and it is beginningto twist the concept of globalization toward social and psychological rather than economicor physical issues.

Of course, this issue is not clear-cut. There is a strong sense of dependence upon the statewithin global civil society discourse, as well as disappointment with and hostility toward thestate—which sits along side the idea of being “beyond” the state. The Zapatistas are again agood illustration of these contradictions. Their emblematic status within global civil societydiscourse may be largely due to their reluctance to attempt to conquer a state themselves,but may also be put down to their hostility to the state and the state system. In the words ofZapatista spokesman Subcommandante Marcos: “We are saying, Let’s destroy this State, thisState system. Let’s open up this space and confront the people with ideas, not with weapons”(Marcos, 1994). In other words, they tone down the importance of the state by eschewingthe goal of capturing the state explicitly, but also articulate a strong hostility towards it. Thistension has been built into the concept of civil society whenever it has conceived of itself assimultaneously dependent upon, yet threatened by the state.

This is not to say that global civil society has a unique position as harbinger of a trulyuniversal project, but that changing political projects can inhabit this space, so long as they

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are framed in non-particularistic terms. The universality or commonality that global civilsociety lays claim to, surprisingly often seems to be taken at face value by its supporters—its inclusivity and anti-particularism regarded as a straightforward defining feature. Keaneassures us that his “claims made in support of a global civil society try hard to be hard-nosed”(2003, p. xii), but in the same breath global civil society is presented as a “pluralist ideal“that “openly challenges previous big ideas, all of which were held together by monisticpresumptions of one sort or another. . . . To speak of a global civil society in normative termsis to dismiss the big ideas of the past as wooden horses used by certain power groups to buildunaccountable institutions wrapped in ideological deception” (ibid, p. xii). We are in otherwords asked to accept that global civil society is not a big idea used by certain power groupsto build unaccountable institutions wrapped in ideological deception.

In this way, although they mistakenly reduce legitimacy to national democratic repre-sentation, Anderson and Rieff’s (2005) criticism is a useful reminder to global civil societydiscourse users to take the issue of legitimation seriously and not simply assume the le-gitimacy of global civil society as the representatives of a global constituency of “we thepeople.” So far global civil society literature has lacked a discussion of this idea of non-particularity. This may be because global civil society has hovered between being a positivistterm for a certain kind of actor on the one hand, and a normative project or “movement”on the other. This assumption of legitimacy may also be a trace of the anti-political politicsof the Eastern European dissidents that revived the term civil society as an unmediatedexpression of the will of “the people.” If the normative features of global civil society arebrought more to the fore by redefining it as a discourse or even “movement,” hiding thevalues and presuppositions behind global civil society discourse will become less and lesstenable.

Conclusion

The concept of global civil society has obvious potential due to its roots in more thancontemporary “great debates” of governance, globalization, and democracy. The furtherspread and impact of the term, however, depends largely on whether it shows itself capableof aiding the reconfiguration of the language of world politics, loosening the grip of thestatist paradigm on the collective political imagination. The critics have a point when theysay the term, as it is most commonly defined to denote non-state actors beyond the state, isunclear and cannot logically be defined in relation to an unreconstructed notion of the statewhile simultaneously employing the conceptual machinery of globalization. We are unlikelyto find one clear and consistent meaning of the term running along the lines of state/non-stateor within/beyond national borders.

But to write it off as a contradiction in terms is reductionist, locking the term civil societywithin the conceptual universe of the nation-state. Similarly, use of the term does raise seriousquestions concerning legitimacy and democracy as other critics point out, and they are rightto cry foul of any inflated ambitions to represent a global “the people.” The solution is notto stay voluntarily within the confines of statist conceptions of legitimacy and democracy.Ironically it is the critics who appear most statist although some theorists of global civilsociety have also been perhaps too slow in abandoning simplistic definitions along the linesof “non-state” and “transborder,” creating a disjunction between definitions and dominantways of using the term.

Instead, this paper has argued in favour of “following the genie out of the bottle” andidentifying how both “civil society” and “global” have taken on new meanings within the

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currently dominant discourse of global civil society. This discourse finds unity in beingin opposition to multiple centers of power and in some cases to power in general, ratherthan being specifically oriented towards state power. It suggests a notion of civil society thatcontinues older themes of diversity and non-violence but rearticulates civil society in relationparticularly to corporate power, the non-market theme arguably becoming just as or moreimportant than the non-state one. This market-critical aspect is part of what distinguishescurrent constructions of civil society from historical meanings of civil society, which criticsare correct to point out defined it almost exclusively in relation to statehood. Instead of civilsociety being post-statist, it is becoming a non-statist term.

Another way this can be seen is how global civil society discourse allows us to understandthe concept of “the global.” Although often defined in terms of trans-border civil society, itfunctions differently in global civil society discourse, in practice not distinguishing betweenintra-border and trans-border actors, but instead referring to the nature of the constituencywhich these actors claim to speak on behalf of. “Global” in global civil society relates to theemergence of a discourse of global consciousness, espousing non-particularity or worldwideinterests as not the only but the prime legitimate constituency for political interests.

There is no suggestion that unanimity exists within global civil society literature con-cerning these themes, only the relative dominance of certain rules of discourse. Neither isthe claim that we in general already are living in post-statist times. According to Shaw, forglobalization to take on a meaning that reaches beyond accelerated international trade andinteraction, the totality of human social relations must become the dominant constitutiveframework and even that must be a far way off. According to Shaw, “the distinction betweenglobal and pre-global is . . . that, with the development of global relations, the understandingof human relations in a common worldwide frame comes to predominate over other, morepartial understandings” (Shaw, 2000, p. 12). Perhaps this kind of globalist frame does noteven predominate within globalization literature. But this is the direction global civil societydiscourse, on balance, is pushing us. Global civil society discourse is undermining statistassumptions derived from the historical predominance of the state as the undisputed carrierof the collective interest by advancing a framework of interpretation which neither has thestate as its pivotal point, nor as its defining Other.

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