Global Civil Society E-Book

Mary Kaldor

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 360

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The terms 'global' and 'civil society' have both become part of the contemporary political lexicon. In this important new book, Mary Kaldor argues that this is no coincidence and that the reinvention of civil society has to be understood in the context of globalization. The concept of civil society is no longer confined to the borders of the territorial state. Whether one considers dissidents in repressive regimes, landless labourers in Central America, campaigners against land mines or global debt, or even religious fundamentalists, it is now possible for them to link up with other like-minded groups in different parts of the world and to address demands not just to national governments but to global institutions as well. This has opened up new opportunities for human emancipation, and, in particular, for going beyond war as a way of managing global affairs. But it also entails new risks and insecurities.

This is a book about a political idea - an idea that came out of the 1989 revolutions. It is an idea that expresses a real phenomenon, even if the boundaries and shape of the phenomenon are contested and subject to constant redefinition. The study of past debates as well as the actions and arguments of the present is a way of directly influencing the phenomenon, and of contributing to a changing reality, if possible for the better. The task is all the more urgent in the aftermath of September 11.

Global Civil Society will be read by students of politics, international relations and sociology, as well as activists, policy-makers, journalists and all those engaged in global public debates.

Leseprobe

Global Civil Society

An Answer to War

MARY KALDOR

polity

Copyright © Mary Kaldor 2003

The right of Mary Kaldor to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2003 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Reprinted 2003, 2004 (twice)

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kaldor, Mary. Global civil society : an answer to war / Mary Kaldor.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7456-2757-9 – ISBN 0-7456-2758-7 (pbk.) – ISBN 978-0-7456-5717-2 (eBook)

1. Civil society. 2. Globalization. I. Title.

JC337 .K35 2003

300-dc21

2002014306

Typeset 11 on 13 pt Berling

by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ldt. Pondicherry, India. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

For further information on Polity, visit our website:

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

1Five Meanings of Global Civil Society

2The Discourse of Civil Society

3The Ideas of 1989: The Origins of the Concept of Global Civil Society

4Social Movements, NGOs and Networks

5Globalization, the State and War

6September 11: The Return of the ‘Outside’?

Notes

Index

Preface

In a lecture at the London School of Economics in October 1999; Adam Michnik pointed out that everyone claims responsibility for the end of the Cold War:

Whenever I happen to consider that topic – why Communism failed – I know that in Washington, everybody is sure that Communism failed as a result of the American policy – how else?. . . Whenever I am in the Vatican, it seems perfectly clear that Communism fell as a result of the activities of the Apostolic See and John Paul II, our pope…. Whenever I am in Asia, I have no doubts that Communism was lost in Afghanistan. That it was just there where the Soviet Union broke its teeth. And whenever I am in Moscow, it is absolutely obvious to me that Communism was toppled by Russians, the only thing that remains unclear being whether it was by Gorbachev or Yeltsin. And finally, we Poles know and are convinced that it was we who toppled Communism and that the world received freedom from Communism from us, as a gift.

This book has its starting point in the debates and dialogue between the West European peace movement and the East European opposition in the 1980s, in which I was deeply engaged and which has left a lasting imprint on my political understanding. While we in the peace movement did not think that we were responsible for the fall of communism we did feel that we had played a part and that, in the subsequent triumph of neoliberalism, our part was written out of history. The ideas that we developed at that time and the efforts we made to influence the behaviour of governments and international institutions were both about democratization and human rights and about peace and international security. Indeed, we believed that these issues were deeply interconnected since the organization of states for war constituted a profound limitation on democracy. The idea of a ‘transcontinental movement of citizens’, in the words of E. P. Thompson, was the genesis of the notion of global civil society.

Subsequently, I and others tried to put these ideas into practice in the Helsinki Citizens Assembly – a network of groups and individuals, whose aim was to create a pan-European civil society. We found ourselves confronting a very different world. If the Cold War of 1945–89 was actually experienced as a kind of peace, albeit an oppressive peace, then the Orwellian post-Cold War peace is actually experienced as war, not only in the Balkans or Africa but in the urban ghettos of the new global cities. We found that global civil society did not only include human rights and peace groups like us but also new nationalist and fundamentalist groups and, as the 1990s drew to a close, a new radical anti-capitalist movement as well.

Since 1999, I have been able to spend time reading and thinking about these issues and discussing ideas with my colleagues in the Global Civil Society programme. Thus this book is the product both of activism and analysis and I should like to thank all those, who are too numerous to mention, who were involved in the dialogue of the 1980s, the Helsinki Citizens Assembly in the 1990s as well as my colleagues both at Sussex and LSE, from whom I have learned such a lot.

I am especially grateful to David Held, who proposed and promoted the project, to Meghnad Desai, who read the manuscript twice and was always ready to stop everything to help think an argument through, and to Jo Hay for moral and administrative support. I am also grateful to all those who read and commented on all or parts of the manuscript and who discussed the ideas with me, including Nancy Cartwright, Mient Jan Faber, Marlies Glasius, Julian Robinson and Yahia Said. Finally, I want to thank everyone at Polity, including the anonymous readers, who were all unfailingly helpful.

Chapter 3 is based on a lecture I gave at the London School of Economics in October 1999 in a series called ‘The Ideas of 1989’. Earlier versions have been published in Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 9, no. 2 (Fall 1999); and in R. Falk, L. E. J. Ruiz and R. B. J. Walker (eds), Reframing the International: Law, Culture, Politics (Routledge, 2002).

Abbreviations

ATTACAction pour une Taxe Tobin d’Aide aux CitoyensBJPBharatiya Janata PartyCARECooperative for American Relief EverywhereCBOcommunity building organizationCSCEConference on Security and Cooperation in EuropeDRCDemocratic Republic of CongoENDEuropean Nuclear DisarmamentFIDESZYoung Democrats, now Hungarian Civic PartyGROgrass roots organizationICCInternational Criminal CourtICRCInternational Committee of the Red CrossICTinformation and communications technologyIMFInternational Monetary FundINFintermediate nuclear weaponsINGOinternational non-governmental organizationKLAKosovo Liberation ArmyMSFMédecins sans FrontièresNatoNorth Atlantic Treaty OrganizationNGOnon-governmental organizationNMDnational missile defenseOECDOrganization for Economic Cooperation and DevelopmentUNICEFUnited Nations Children’s Fund

1

Five Meanings of Global Civil Society

The terms ‘global’ and ‘civil society’ became the new buzzwords of the 1990s. In this book, I want to suggest that the two terms are interconnected and reflect a new reality, however imperfectly understood. The reinvention of ‘civil society’ in the 1970s and 1980s, simultaneously in Latin America and Eastern Europe, had something to do with the global context – the social, political and economic transformations that were taking place in different parts of the world and that came to the surface after 1989. Indeed, although the term ‘civil society’ has a long history and its contemporary meanings draw on that history, the various ways in which it is used, I shall argue, are quite different from in the past.

What is new about the concept of civil society since 1989 is globalization. Civil society is no longer confined to the borders of the territorial state. There was always a common core of meaning in the civil society literature, which still has relevance. Civil society was associated with a rule-governed society based largely on the consent of individual citizens rather than coercion. Different definitions of civil society have reflected the different ways in which consent was generated, manufactured, nurtured or purchased, the different rights and obligations that formed the basis of consent, and the different interpretations of this process. However, the fact that civil society was territorially bound meant that it was always contrasted with coercive rule-governed societies and with societies that lacked rules. In particular, as I shall argue, civil society within the territorial boundaries of the state was circumscribed by war.

This is what has changed. The end of the Cold War and growing global interconnectedness have undermined the territorial distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘uncivil’ societies, between the ‘democratic’ West and the ‘non-democratic’ East and South, and have called into question the traditional centralized war-making state. And these developments, in turn, have opened up new possibilities for political emancipation as well as new risks and greater insecurity. Whether we are talking about isolated dissidents in repressive regimes, landless labourers in Central America or Asia, global campaigns against land mines or third world debt, or even religious fundamentalists and fanatic nationalists, what has changed are the opportunities for linking up with other like-minded groups in different parts of the world, and for addressing demands not just to the state but to global institutions and other states. On the one hand, global civil society is in the process of helping to constitute and being constituted by a global system of rules, underpinned by over-lapping inter-governmental, governmental and global authorities. In other words, a new form of politics, which we call civil society, is both an outcome and an agent of global interconnectedness. And on the other hand, new forms of violence, which restrict, suppress and assault civil society, also spill over borders so that it is no longer possible to contain war or lawlessness territorially.