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CHAPTER 2

THE LIMITS OF GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY

Neera Chandhoke

The Three Sector Fallacy

There is something about modern modes of analysis—a propensity to analyse phenomena

in terms of discrete categories perhaps—which attracts theorists to additive modes of
social science. Thus, they first subdivide areas of collective life into separate spheres;
endow these domains with their distinct logics, distinguish them from each other, and
then add them together to form a whole. Witness how modern social theory first separates
the public and the private, views each of these spheres as possessing a different logic of
thought and action, and then adds them together to form an entity called ‘society’. The
point is that whereas in the process the public becomes the field of the rational, the
private is conceptualised as the site of unreflective emotions and affections.
Now on the face of it there is nothing wrong with employing this strategy as a
heuristic device. There is absolutely nothing wrong in conceptualising the different ways
in which people make their own histories even if they may not make those histories very
well. The idea that whereas the state is stamped mainly by the logic of coercion, the logic
of the market is that of competition, is perfectly acceptable. We can also agree that there
is a difference between the community and civil society. Community as social
anthropologists tell us, represents personalised and face-to-face interactions.
Relationships in civil society on the other hand are contractual.
What is problematic is the assumption that appears to underlie theorising in this
mode, namely, that these domains of collective existence do not influence each other, or
that they do not affect each other, or indeed that they do not constitute in the sense of
shaping each other (Chandhoke 2001). This is something that additive social theorists
tend to ignore. They should read Copernicus, who was to write about the astronomers of
his day thus: ‘With [I had put w in brackets since in the original quote it is a capital letter]
them it is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head, and other members for
his images from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single
body, and since they in no way match each other, the result would be a monster rather
than man’ (Kuhn 1962: 83). The same problem seems to bedevil additive social science,
for in this genre no one category influences let alone constitutes others, no category is
central to human life, and no category determines how we approach other categories of
activity. The questions that immediately confront us in this connection are the following:
do categories of collective existence not constitute each other? Equally, does not a single
logic, that of power, underpin these categories and bind them together?
To put it plainly, the separation of collective human existence into mutually
exclusive spheres of thought and action elides the way in which each of these domains is
constructed by power, which spilling over arbitrary boundaries underpins the whole.
Consider the feminist critique of the public-private dichotomy: if we conceptualise the
household as the site of affection and emotions as different from the power-driven state
or from the competition-ridden economy, we end up actually legitimising patriarchal
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power. For, as a microcosm of society, the household cannot but condense the tensions of
the social formation, it cannot but be permeated by power.
Of course, power manifests itself in and through different avatars that apparently
have nothing to do with each other. For instance, globalisation, which is legitimised by its
defenders as the rationalisation of economic life, may seem diametrically opposed to, say,
fundamentalist movements. On the face of it fundamentalist movements look as if they
are a knee-jerk reaction to the globalising project and thus possessed of a different logic.
But note that both of these projects manifest different forms of power, simply because
both limit the endeavours of human beings to make their own lives with some degree of
autonomy. This admittedly is difficult to fathom, simply because various forms of power
not only appear as contradictory, oppositional, and diffused, but also happen to operate in
invisible and intangible ways that escape the human gaze. Today theorists tell us and
practitioners claim that it is difficult to decipher power since it does not originate from a
single point. We have learnt that we can locate no meta-discourse but only the micro-
politics of a power that is heterogeneous, dispersed, and even unpredictable.
Nevertheless, power binds ostensibly autonomous institutions and practices in a myriad
of ways, all of which constrain human autonomy and creativity and limit political
initiatives. Power, in other words, produces identifiable effects even though its various
manifestations do not always act in concert.
It is, however, precisely these insights that are at a discount when theorists
suggest that civil society possesses a discrete and distinct raison d’être which marks it
out as different as well as autonomous both from the state and from the market. Thus,
civil society in contemporary political theory is often posed as an alternative to both the
state and to the market. It simply emerges as the third sphere of collective life. Gordon
White, for instance, conceptualises civil society as ‘an intermediate associational realm
between the family and the state populated by organisations which are separate from the
state, enjoy autonomy in relation to the state and are formed voluntarily by members of
society to protect or extend their interests or values’ (White 1994: 379). Charles Taylor
suggests that civil society is ‘those dimensions of social life which cannot be confounded
with, or swallowed up in, the state’ (Taylor 1991:171). If Axel Honneth (1993: 19)
thinks of civil society as ‘all civil institutions and organisations which are prior to the
state’, Jeffrey Isaac (1993: 356) speaks of the sphere as ‘those human networks that exist
independently of, if not anterior to, the political state’. Above all, Jean Cohen and
Andrew Arato in a rather well known definition, refer to a ‘third realm’ differentiated
from the economy and the state as civil society (Cohen and Arato 1992: 18). In the hands
of these two authors, civil society as a normative moral order is diametrically opposed to
both the state and the economy.
The same kind of thinking is more than visible when it comes to global civil
society. Many theorists seem to be of the view that global civil society represents a ‘third
sector’, which can not only be distinguished from but which is an alternative to both the
state-centric international order and the networks of global markets. Lipschutz, for
instance, employs the concept of ‘global civil society’ to indicate a plurality of agencies
such as social movements, interest groups, and global citizens. If the distinguishing
feature of these organisations is that they defy national boundaries, the cornerstone of
global civil society is constituted by the ‘self-conscious construction of networks of
knowledge and action, [and] by de-centred local actors, that cross the reified boundaries
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of space as though they were not there’. Global civil society actors, in other words,
engage in practices that can possibly reshape the ‘architecture’ of international politics by
denying the primacy of states or of their sovereign rights (Lipschutz 1992: 390). Other
scholars are of the opinion that the anti-state character of global civil society is revealed
through its projects, for example, through the promotion of values from below, which
exist in tension with dominant statist conceptions of the state system (Falk, Johansen,
and Kim 1993: 13–14). Or that global civil society moving beyond ‘thin anarchical
society’ is in the business of inaugurating a post-foreign policy world (Booth 1991: 540).
In other words, contemporary thinking gives us a picture of a global civil society
that seems to be supremely uncontaminated by either the power of states or that of
markets. Moreover, many theorists believe that global civil society, consisting of
transnational non-governmental organisations, political activists, social movements,
religious denominations, and associations of all stripe and hue, from trade unions to
business and financial groupings, can neutralise existing networks of power by putting
forth a different set of values. Global civil society (GCS), it is said, represents ‘a post
realist constellation, where transnational associational life (TAL) challenges the conceit
of the state system . . . GCS is touted as the antidote for the anarchical structure,
inequality, and exclusions of the state system’ (Pasha and Blaney 1998: 418).
Now, it is true that global civil society organisations have managed to
dramatically expand the agenda of world politics by insistently casting and focusing
widespread attention on issues such as human rights, the environment, development, and
banning of land mines. And all these issues, remember, have traditionally fallen within
the province of state sovereignty. Global civil society actors have simultaneously
challenged the new contours of the world economic order as mandated by the World
Trade Organisation, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund: think of the
protests against the global economic dispensation at Seattle in November 1999, at Prague
in September 2000, and in Genoa 2001. But to conclude from this that these actors have
drawn up a blueprint for a new or an alternative global order, or indeed to assume that
they are autonomous of both states and markets, may prove too hasty a judgement.
This is not to say that global civil society can be reduced to the logic of the state-
centric world order or to the workings of the global economy. All I wish to suggest is that
we should treat with a fair amount of caution the assumptions that (a) global civil society
is autonomous of other institutions of international politics, that (b) it can provide us with
an alternative to these institutions, or (c) that it can even give us a deep-rooted and
structural critique of the world order. Global civil society may well reflect the power
constellations of existing institutions. To put it bluntly, should our normative
expectations of civil society blind us to the nature of real civil societies whether national
or global?
In this chapter I address the concept of global civil society by asking two
questions. The first question has to do with the perennial preoccupations of political
theorists, i.e., what are the implications of the development of global civil society for
issues of representation and political agency? After all, civil society in classical political
theory is conceptualised as the space where ordinary men and women through the
practices of their daily life acquire political agency and selfhood. Do the organisations of
global civil society enhance this empowering process or constrain it? The second
question that I wish to explore is the following: to what extent can global civil society be
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autonomous of the state-centric world system and of the system of markets? In other
terms, can global civil society provide us with a third and presumably an alternative way
of organising international relations? Or is it bound by the same logic that characterises
the other two systems? Just one point here: I take it as given that both the international
political as well as the international economic order is dominated by the countries of
Western Europe and by the United States. Is it possible that actors from the same parts of
the world dominate global civil society? In sum, rather than begin with the presupposition
that global civil society constitutes a third, alternative sphere, we should perhaps explore
the context of the emergence of the sphere itself in order to understand what precisely it
is about. We may well find that it has thrown up genuine alternatives, or we may find that
global civil society actors work within a particular historical conjunction: that of the post-
cold war consensus among the powerful countries in the world. Let us see.

The Making of Global Civil Society.

The idea of internationalism has, of course, been central to working-class politics since
the end of the nineteenth century. In a parallel development Henri La Fontaine, who was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, created the Central Office of International
Associations in 1907 to link up non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in different
countries. The United Nations institutionalised procedures for consulting with these
organisations in 1945. It is estimated that whereas in 1948 41 NGOs enjoyed consultative
status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN, by 1968 the number had risen to
500. By 1992 we were to see the Economic and Social Council consulting 1,000 or more
NGOs. If we add to this number NGOs that interact with other bodies of the United
Nations, and which often participate directly in the proceedings, the number rises to tens
of thousands (Korey 1998: 2). It is perhaps not surprising that global civil society has
come to be dominated by NGOs, even though other actors, such as political activists
networking across borders and anti-globalisation movements, were playing an important
role in this sphere. It is indicative of the power of the non-governmental sector that civil
society has come to be identified with NGO activism both in influential tomes on civil
society and in policy prescriptions of international institutions today. The discussion that
follows therefore shifts between NGOs and other civil society actors, even as it
recognises that NGOs play a larger than- life role in global civil society.
It was, however, at the turn of the 1990s that we were to witness a veritable
explosion of NGOs, which, networking across national borders, propelled critical issues
onto international platforms. The power of global NGOs was first visible at the Earth
Summit in Rio in 1992, when about 2,400 representatives of NGOs came to play a central
role in the deliberations (Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor 2001: 326). By putting forth
radically different alternatives, by highlighting issues of global concern, and by stirring
up proceedings in general, these organisations practically hijacked the summit.
Subsequently, they were given a central role in the Committee on Sustainable
Development created by the Rio Summit. At the 1994 Cairo World Population
Conference, increasing numbers of international NGOs took on the responsibility of
setting the agenda for discussions. And by 1995 this sector almost overwhelmed the
Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Almost 2,100 national and international
NGOs, consisting largely of advocacy groups and social activists, completely dominated
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the conference (Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor 2001: 328). Since then we have seen that
international NGOs either participate directly in international conferences or hold parallel
conferences, which incidentally attract more media attention than official conferences.
And in the process they have won some major victories.
One of these major victories occurred when global NGOs launched a campaign to
pressurise governments to draft a treaty to ban the production, the stockpiling, and the
export of landmines. Almost 1,000 transnational NGOs coordinated the campaign
through the Internet. The pooling and the coordination of energies proved so effective
that not only was the treaty to ban landmines signed in 1997 but the International
Campaign to Ban Landmines and its representative Jody Williams were awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize. The citation at the award-giving ceremony spoke of their unique
effort that made it ‘possible to express and mediate a broad wave of popular commitment
in an unprecedented way’. A similar pooling of energies can be seen in the crusade that
led to the 1998 Rome Statute on an International Criminal Court (see Chapter).
Other triumphs followed in the field of human rights: in the battle that led to the
ousting of Soeharto in Indonesia in 1998, for instance. After the Indonesian military had
massacred more than 150 participants in a funeral procession in Dili, East Timor, in
1991, transnational human rights organisations mobilised massively against the political
abuses of the Suharto regime. Under pressure from these organisations, Canada,
Denmark, and the Netherlands froze economic aid to Indonesia, and the US, Japan, and
the World Bank threatened similar measures. Suharto appointed a National Investigation
Commission, which issued a mildly critical report of the incident; and aid was resumed
(Glasius 1999: 252–64). But Soeharto lost control of events as human rights groups in
Indonesia and East Timor mobilised under global human rights organisations to criticise
and publicise the violation of human rights. Opposition mounted even as Suharto
designated a national human rights commission, whose reports added to the general
discontent. In 1996, even as the leaders of civil society in East Timor—Jose Ramos Horta
and Bishop Ximenes Belo—were given the Nobel Peace Prize, the Blitzkrieg launched by
global human rights organisations strengthened the general atmosphere of dissatisfaction,
despite the intensified repression launched by the regime. In late 1997 the country was
buffeted by an economic crisis and mass protests led to the resignation of Suharto.
Transnational human rights organisations had managed to spectacularly overthrow a
regime on the grounds that it was not respecting the basic rights of its people.
In India the power of global civil society organisations was revealed in a different
way. Soon after independence, a massive project was inaugurated to dam the gigantic
Narmada River, which runs through the three States of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and
Maharashtra in western India. The Narmada Valley Development Project consists of 30
major dams, 135 minor dams, and 3,000 small dams. The largest dam is the Sardar
Sarovar Project, which ultimately will submerge 92,000 acres of land, displacing and
affecting more than 300,000 people, a majority of whom are tribals or forest dwellers. In
the mid-1980s a number of voluntary organisations began to mobilise the tribals for
better resettlement and rehabilitation policies, as the existing ones had been found sadly
wanting. Even as these organisations linked up with international NGOs to pressure the
government of India into granting better resettlement and rehabilitation for the displaced,
in 1988 about 20 groups formed the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) or the Save
Narmada Movement. The NBA launched a massive struggle against big development
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projects and for the right of the people not to be displaced. At the same time, international
NGOs such as the Environment Defense Fund and Oxfam began to lobby the World
Bank, and the Japanese government to withdraw from their commitments to fund the
project. The World Bank, now under public scrutiny, laid down conditions for better
resettlement policies, conditions that the Indian government refused to fulfil. In 1993 the
government decided to ask the World Bank to withdraw from the project rather than face
the embarrassment of having the Bank draw back on its own. Soon afterwards the
Japanese government also retracted its funding commitments. Whereas most of the
pressure against the dam was generated by the NBA, the matter would not have come to
international attention in quite the same manner without the support of international
NGOs, which publicised the issue and pressurised centres of power in the West,
(Chandhoke 1997). That the Indian government has now decided to build the dam on its
own, after the Supreme Court authorised it to do so in a judgement delivered on 18
October 2000, may point to the limits of political mobilisation in civil society.
However, the most dramatic manifestation of global civil society so far was to
appear in what came to be known as the ‘battle for Seattle’. At the end of November
1999, massive protests involving some 700 organisations and about 40,000 students,
workers, NGOs, religious groups, and representatives of business and finance who were
there for their own reasons brought the third ministerial meeting of the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) at Seattle to a halt. The WTO was to set in motion a new
multilateral round of trade negotiations. Collective anger at the relocation of industries to
the Third World, at the unsafe and abusive work conditions in the factories and
sweatshops found there, at environmental degradation, and at the wide spread
exploitation of working people, exploded in a series of angry demonstrations. Though
large-scale protests against the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the
World Bank were not new, what was new was both the scale of mobilisation and the
intensity of protest. Angry demonstrations by student unions, environmentalists or ‘tree
huggers’, economic and xenophobic nationalists, church groups, anarchists,
protectionists, consumer groups, NGOs, and even business and financial groups, were
hailed by some scholars as ‘globalisation from below’ (Kaldor 2000) or as heralding a
new internationalism.
There were two aspects of the ‘battle for Seattle’ that proved significant for the
consolidation of global civil society. First, for the first time hitherto single-issue groups
coalesced into a broad-based movement to challenge the way the world trade and
financial system was being ordered by international institutions. Second, whereas in the
late 1960s protest groups in the US and in Western Europe had targeted the state, at
Seattle they targeted global corporations and international economic institutions. The
protests themselves bore the mark of collective ire and resentment at the way in which
globalisation that had been set in motion two decades earlier had exacerbated inequality
and injustice. And matters did not stop here. Mass protests have become a regular feature
of annual meetings of the World Economic Forum, the IMF and the World Bank, and the
WTO. At the same time we have seen students across university campuses in the US
demonstrate against the unethical practices of large corporations such as Nike, Reebok,
the Gap, and Disney, which use cheap labour in the Third World. Novel methods and
vocabularies of protests captured the attention of the international media and generated
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considerable excitement at the idea of renewed political activism. And the phrase ‘global
civil society’ became an integral part of political, corporate, and technical vocabularies.
In sum, global civil society organisations have emerged as a powerful and
influential force on the world stage, affecting as they do both domestic and international
policies, deciding as they do the fate of some authoritarian governments at least, and
laying down agendas as they do. They not only have the power of influencing
international public opinion and mobilising it against policies that they consider
undesirable, they do so in ways that are sensationally visible and therefore effective.
Arguably two factors have strengthened the mandate of these organisations. One,
the informational revolution, has increased their capacity to collect, collate, select, and
publicise information on a variety of specialised issues ranging from development
disasters, to the environment, to the effect of WTO policies such a patenting, to human
rights violations. In fact, governments often just do not possess the capacity to gather and
assemble specialised information or mobilise public opinion in quite the same way as
NGOs organised on a global scale can do.
Moreover, the unprecedented and phenomenal revolution in information and
communications often described as the ‘third industrial revolution’ has allowed
organisations to network across the world through the fax, the e-mail, the Internet, and
teleconferencing. Loosely structured movements have used the Internet to set up web
sites that inform prospective participants about the timing of the meetings of international
institutions, on the organisation of protests, and about transportation and accommodation.
In fact we have witnessed a new phenomenon bursting onto the political scene: cyber-
space activism. Via this form of activism, members of a group who may never see each
other come together, through cyberspace, around issues that they consider important.
Informational networks have allowed concerned organisations to gather and put together
data on, for example, violations of human rights, muster opinion and activism around the
issue, publicise information through the international media, and pressurise both national
and international organisations to change both their mind as well as their manners.
The revolution in communications and information has allowed NGOs to form
coalitions, as for instance the Conference of Peoples Global Action Against Free Trade,
that held its first meeting in Geneva in May 1998, the Third World Network, which as a
union of Third World NGOs is based in Malaysia, and the formation of the International
Federation of Human Rights, a Paris-based transnational NGO, which consists of 89
human rights groups in 70 countries. In fact, the revolution has also facilitated a new
phenomenon: the development of intermediary NGOs, which act as ‘facilitators’ to help
voluntary organisations to find funds from donor agencies such as Action Aid (India) or
Charity Aid Foundation (UK). Intermediate organisations are, in other words, involved in
the channelling of money and information from one NGO to another or from donor
agencies to NGOs.
Second, global NGOs have become influential, simply because they possess a
property that happens to be the peculiar hallmark of ethical political intervention: moral
authority and legitimacy. And they possess moral authority because they claim to
represent the public or the general interest against official- or power-driven interests of
the state or of the economy. Though the idea that they are truly representative can be
challenged as I suggest below, this is not to deny that they have raised normative
concerns in the domain of global civil society. As the upholders of an ethical canon that
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applies across nations and cultures, international actors in civil society now define as well
as set the moral norms, which should at least in principle govern national and
international orders. To put it differently, global civil society actors legislate and mandate
a normative and thus a morally authoritative structure for the national and the
international community. Because they lend moral depth to the agenda of global concerns
and because they articulate a global and ethically informed vision on how states should
treat their citizens, global civil society actors command the kind of attention that
normally does not accrue to political activism within states. And they command this kind
of attention because they have access to the international media, they possess high
profiles, and they put forth their ideas in dramatic ways.
This as a matter of course has significant implications for our traditional concepts
of state sovereignty. Traditionally states, pleading sovereignty and state security, have
resisted any intervention by outside agencies,. Today global civil society actors act as the
guardians of a morally informed consensus on the minimum that is due to human beings.
As the keepers of a moral conscience that applies across borders, global civil society
organisations question the monopoly of the nation state over the lives of its people. But
they also challenge the workings of international institutions such as the World Bank, the
IMF, and the WTO, as well as opposing the working of giant economic corporations. If
the demonstrations at Seattle questioned the viability of economic arrangements set by
international institutions, the charting of norms for, say, the banning of child labour, or
exploitation of resources, or environmental protection, has mediated the operations of
powerful economic corporations.

The Historical Context for the Emergence of Global Civil Society

The two factors set out above have certainly facilitated as well as legitimised the advent
of global civil society actors as influential players on the world stage. However, the
causes of this phenomenon have to be sought elsewhere, in the deeper structural changes
that have occurred in the international political and economic order in the last two
decades. And the major change that has taken place in the world system since the 1980s,
is of course globalisation. Now globalisation is difficult to [ By essentialise I mean
reduce to a single essence but we can change the word to characterise if you think it is
necessary]characterise as it consists of a number of overlapping and even conflicting
projects. However, though it is increasingly difficult to define globalisation, the
implications of this process—or, rather, of this series of processes—are increasingly clear.
Globalisation has, for one, enabled the transmission of capital across the world as if national
boundaries were non-existent. Correspondingly, through the processes of globalisation
natural and national resources have been appropriated in the cause of capital. Local
knowledge systems have been harnessed and patented for the same purpose. And flows of
information and messages that tell people how they should think and what they should think
have legitimised the process itself.
Therefore, despite the difficulty in capturing the essence of globalisation, we can
accept that its core is constituted by a distinct phenomenon: capital’s restless and relentless
pursuit of profit across the world and across national borders. Today we see capital flitting
across national borders as if they were just not there. But note that there is nothing natural or
given in the processes of capital flows that ensure this much-needed erosion of state
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boundaries. In other words, globalisation demanded and demands sustained political

intervention for one main reason. Recollect that the post-Second World War period was to
widely disseminate and institutionalise the idea that the state should intervene in matters
relating to the production and to the reproduction of the economy and of society. The
interventionist state was to take many forms: the Soviet model of the state that commands
the heights of the economy, the welfare state that looks after the basic needs of its people,
the Keynesian state that regulates the market, or the developmentalist state in the post-
colonial world that commandeers both material and human resources to offset the legacies
of colonial underdevelopment.
Therefore, if capital more often than not originating in the West had to cross
boundaries in order to pursue accumulation on the world scale, the state had to be rolled
back from its hitherto legitimate tasks of regulating the market as well as providing social
services to the people. In other words, the legitimisation of the ability to the market to
regulate itself, as well as to provide for both growth and well-being, demanded the
delegitimisation and the consequent withdrawal of the state from the market. The state had
to be rolled back both to encourage the unhindered flow of capital and to enable the market
to display its dynamics.
It was precisely this understanding that underpinned what came to be known as the
neo-liberal agenda, or what John Williams termed the ‘Washington consensus’, which
reigned in the centres of power in the Western world in the late 1980s. The consensus
manifested itself in the form of ten policy recommendations, imposed on particularly
debt-ridden Third World countries by international financial and lending institutions.
Among these recommendations were the following: trade liberalisation, clearing all
hurdles to foreign direct investment, privatisation, deregulation, strengthening property
rights, and tax reforms. If we translate these economic imperatives into political terms,
we find that the consensus dictated the following: (a) the state, particularly in Third
World countries, should withdraw from the social sector; (b) the market should be freed
from all constraints; and (c) people in civil society should organise their own social and
economic reproduction instead of depending on the state.
Ironically, the idea that people in civil society should organise their own
reproduction has emerged at exactly the same moment as globalisation has drastically
eroded the capacity of the same people to order their own affairs. And reliance on the
market for this purpose is inadequate, since the market, remember, has room for only those
people who have something to sell and those who have something to buy. In other words,
the market does not provide for those people who cannot participate in its transactions
because they have nothing with which they can buy, or because they cannot not find buyers
for what they sell:- labour, for instance. The unleashing of the market simply meant that
massive sections of the people had to now fend for themselves in the sense of providing the
conditions for their social reproduction.
It was in this particular historical conjunction that NGOs emerged on the horizon to
take over functions hitherto reserved for the state, such as providing health and education,
instituting income-generating schemes, creating safety nets, and encouraging people to be
self-reliant. The space cleared by the rolling back of the state came to be known as ‘civil
society’, and NGOs were transformed into the guardians of civil society even as they sub-
contracted [ not really I mean function under contract by the state, we can put contract if
that is preferable] for the state. To put it in stark terms, the emergence and the growing
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power of NGOs whether national or global has been actively facilitated by the Washington
consensus.
The role of the non-governmental sector has been further strengthened by what came
subsequently to be known as the post-Washington consensus.

What John Williams termed the ‘Washington consensus’, which reigned in the
centres of power in the Western world in the late 1980s. The consensus manifested itself
in the form of ten policy recommendations, imposed on particularly debt-ridden Third
World countries by international financial and lending institutions. Among these
recommendations were the following: trade liberalisation, clearing all hurdles to foreign
direct investment, privatisation, deregulation, strengthening property rights, and tax
reforms. If we translate these economic imperatives into political terms, we find that the
consensus dictated the following: (a) the state, particularly in Third World countries,
should withdraw from the social sector; (b) the market should be freed from all
constraints; and (c) people in civil society should organise their own social and economic
reproduction instead of depending on the state.
The mid 1990s were to witness a sharp swing in the mood of international trade
and financial institutions. For the rhetoric of these institutions was to move away from an
emphasis on a free and untrammelled market to the idea that both the market and the
generic processes of globalisation had to be governed. The shift had largely to do with
one main factor. Doctrines of free trade and unregulated markets had run into trouble
ever since 1994, when Mexico was hit by financial devastation. The second financial
crisis, which began when the government of Thailand devalued the bhat, and which then
spread to the rest of East Asia, Japan, Brazil, and Russia in 1997 and 1998, impoverished
millions, and generated rage and discontent. We saw an inkling of this dissatisfaction
when Korean workers rose to defy the IMF. Many scholars saw these economic and
financial crises as a consequence of unfettered globalisation, as a result of the working of
the free and unregulated market (Rhodes and Higgot 2000). The neo-liberal agenda had
after all failed to deliver the much-promised benefits of greater growth, stabilisation of
financial markets, and political order. Income disparities had increased, the number of the
poor had grown drastically, and people had been deprived of their livelihoods and
security of life. A global economic order had been forged through globalisation without
any prospect of justice, or democracy, or re-distribution. And this posed problems for the
defenders of globalisation. For if a system is widely perceived as unjust, it will
necessarily engender resistance.
Therefore, whereas in the 1980s and the early 1990s free market liberalism had
been left to private corporations, this strategy had to be rethought since it had proved
counter-productive. In fact, as early as in 1995 the economist Paul Krugman had
suggested that the Mexican crisis marked the beginning of the deflation of the
Washington consensus (1995: 31-35). The very idea that globalisation had rationalised
capitalism came to be questioned because what we witnessed was the globalisation of a
crisis. Consequently, the managers of international financial and economic institutions
were to realise, somewhat late, what Marx had argued in the late nineteenth century: that
 11

there is nothing natural or self-regulating about markets and that they unleash their own
oppressions. If markets were to endure they had to be controlled or, in the new parlance
of international financial institutions, ‘governed’. Alternatively, the dominant approach to
development needed to be rethought, since neo-liberal policy prescriptions had not only
failed, they had intensified dissatisfaction and hostility particularly in the countries of the
Third World.
This realisation led to a radical shift in the rhetoric of globalisation: the
replacement of the language of the market by that of governance, accountability,
transparency, and democracy. And the World Bank, under the influence of the economist
Joseph Stiglitz, known for his critique of the unfettered market, moved from a narrow
economistic focus on development to what came to be known as the Comprehensive
Development Framework. Even as policies of structural adjustment were replaced by
notions of partnership between the Bank and borrowing governments, the language of the
Bank shifted from macroeconomic theory that focused on economic growth to the
recognition of the centrality of governance, albeit a notion of governance that was
stripped of politics (Jayal: 1997). The shift was not radical inasmuch as the dominant
themes of neo-liberalism continued to dominate the political imagination of most, if not
all, of the international financial institutions. But now international financial institutions
were to cushion neo-liberalism in a vocabulary that spoke of the regulation and the
moderation of the processes of globalisation. In effect, these institutions opted for
strategies of conflict management.
Perhaps the Bank had no choice. For global civil society actors in various
demonstrations insisted that ‘Fifty Years is Enough’, a slogan that overshadowed the
golden jubilee of the Bank. Even as James Wolfensohn was appointed President in June
1995, he was faced with the need to restructure the policy of the World Bank in the face
of sustained criticism by global civil society. In an attempt to legitimise the Bank, the
President engaged global NGOs in dialogue and entered into collaborative ventures to
reshape the policy prescriptions of the world body. The result was the adoption of a new
language of sustainable development, preservation of natural resources, equitable
development, and democratic development.
It is of some significance that some global civil society actors, who had earlier
emerged on the political scene in and through the politics of protest, now became partners
in decision-making activities. NGOs now attend the annual meetings of the World Bank
and the IMF as special guests. In 1982 the World Bank had created a discussion forum in
the shape of an NGO-World Bank Committee, which ensured the active involvement of
the non-governmental sector in implementing projects. Now NGOs came to be involved
in policy formulation. In 1996 the WTO General Council adopted guidelines that
provided for increased contacts between the Secretariat and the NGOs. This of course
raises an important methodological question: can we continue to call agencies that
become a part of global decision-making structures 'civil society organisations' that
supposedly challenge the workings of the global order? But more of that later.
In sum, in marked contrast to the earlier two decades that focused on the opening
up of national borders to the free flow of global capital and the doctrines of free trade, the
post-Washington Consensus concentrates on the governance of these activities. For
decision-makers recognised that the deep tensions that had been engendered by the
processes of globalisation had to be managed if they were not to spiral out of control. To
 12

put it bluntly, international trade and financial institutions realised that the processes of
globalisation could not be legitimised if they were left to private agencies such as
corporate houses or to some ‘invisible hand’ of the market.
The post-Washington Consensus was therefore to focus on three issues. First,
globalisation was too important to be left to the unrestricted corporate world and should
be mediated through ‘governance’ that ensured transparency, accountability, capacity
building, and safety networks. Second, the state needed to be replaced not so much by the
market as by civil society organisations that represented the aspirations of the people and
that strengthened democracy. This of course meant that the fields of the market and of
non-market transactions were, in policy prescriptions, separated. Third, the new
consensus opined that only a strong civil society under the guidance of NGOs can further
democracy. Note, however, that this avatar of civil society is not marked by democratic
contestation but by the building of ‘social capital’ and ‘trust’ among the inhabitants
(Harriss: 2001). In effect, the earlier move away from the state to the market has now
been replaced by a move away from the state to civil society based on networks of trust.
However, despite some changes in rhetoric, the post-Washington Consensus
continues to retain significant elements of the earlier neo-liberal consensus. For neither
was the idea that a free market encourages democracy put aside, nor was the role of the
state in institutionalising and realising democracy reconsidered. In the current
dispensation, both a minimal state and a free market continue to provide the conditions of
a strong and democratic civil society. More importantly, the international policy
community now concentrates on the management of discontent, which has erupted in
reaction to the liberalisation and the deregulation process that lies at the heart of
globalisation (Higgot 2000: 138)
The post-Washington Consensus, in other words, views protest and struggle,
which happen to be an integral part of civil society, as problems that have to be resolved
through managerial techniques. It still does not recognise that a democratic civil society
is about struggling for a better world, that it is about politics and not only governance,
that it is about visions and aspirations and not only about neutralisation of tensions. Nor
does the present consensus address issues such as unequal power relations either in the
world or within states. And civil society continues to be identified as in the earlier version
with NGOs. To put it differently, if earlier versions of neo-liberalism cleared the space
for global civil society actors, the present consensus legitimises their activities.
Conversely, the activities of most if not all NGOs legitimise the post-Washington
Consensus, for instance by linking civil society to an apolitical notion of governance. All
this, as argued below, has depoliticised the very concept of civil society. This of course
requires some elaboration of what civil society is about.
What Does Civil Society Mean?

Now civil society has been subjected to considerable over-theorisation in the post-1989
era. The concept, never too clear at the best of times, has turned into the proverbial will-
o’-the-wisp that eludes understanding. It has come to mean many things to many people:
as the space of solidarity, as a project of projects, as the area of associational life, as a site
of contestation, and as a third sector. This may not necessarily be a problem. For, as the
editors of Global Civil Society 2001 in the opening chapter argue, multiple meanings of
civil society can provide a space for dialogue (Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor 2001: 12).
 13

On the other hand, when people come to this overlapping space armed with their own
meanings of what civil society is about, we may find that such a dialogue becomes
impossible. For any dialogue needs at the least a common referral as a starting point for
an exchange of ideas. And such a referral can best be provided by classical political
theory.
If we were to reach back into the annals of political theory to investigate the idea
of civil society, it would look something like this. The concept of civil society signifies
both a space and a set of values. As a space it is metaphorically located somewhere
between the state, the market, and the family. Here people come together in projects of all
kinds to make their collective histories. Histories are in turn made through the politics of
affirmation as well as conflict-ridden encounters, the politics of solidarity as well as that
of struggle. Civil society possesses no one characteristic, no one core, no one essential
nature. Civil society is what its inhabitants make of it. It is a site where projects overlap,
where they reinforce each other, and where they challenge each other. This is possible,
for civil society, unlike pre-modern communities, allows its inhabitants to make their
own lives and their own destinies perhaps independently, perhaps in concert with others,
in some degree of freedom. For the values of civil society are those of freedom,
accessibility, and publicness. On this ground alone no one is in theory barred from civil
society, everyone is allowed entry into the sphere, and everyone—again in theory—is
free to link with others to make their own histories even though these histories are not
made, as Marx told us long ago, in conditions of their own choice. Thus is associational
life born and thus is an activity called politics born.
For arguably, it is only when people in and through social associations translate
their everyday experiences into expressed vocabularies, and it is only when people
interpret the experiential through the prism provided by the expressive, that we see the
birth of politics. Politics in the first sense is about translating the experiential into the
expressive. As individuals bring their own world-views into social associations, they
transcend individual beliefs into socially responsive and responsible political projects
through dialogue as well as through contention. Conversely, politics is about interpreting
the experiential in terms provided by the expressive. Consider, for instance, the women’s
movement. The movement was to gain shape and clarity only when some women—and
some men—were to express their discontent with patriarchal structures of oppression in
terms of feminism. In turn, feminist insights gave other women the tools with which they
could interpret the injustice that was inflicted on them by patriarchy.
Politics is, in short, a two-way activity. It moves from what is experienced to the
interpretation of these experiences in terms of specifically political categories such as
feminism. In turn political formulations allow other people to make sense of their
experiences. What is important is that the activity is empowering inasmuch as, when
ordinary men and women engage in political activity, they acquire agency, they recover
selfhood, and they earn self-confidence. This is politics in the best Aristotelian tradition:
politics as self-realisation.
Therefore, for most theorists of civil society, social associations are vital to
collective life simply because they allow people to realise their selfhood through
collective action. But note that social associations are significant only because
membership in these groupings is voluntary as well as revocable. It is the individual who
is the primary actor in civil society; social associations merely enable him or her to
 14

realise their own potential and their own projects. Social associations, in other words, are
nothing but aggregates of individuals, which in turn reflect the wishes and the desires of
their members.
It is this interpretation of civil society that finds it difficult to accommodate
NGOs, for two reasons. First, though it is possible that individuals who come together in
associations transform their association into an NGO, a number of important and
influential NGOs are not created through this process. Global NGOs come in from the
outside armed very often with their own ideas of what is wrong and what should be done
to remedy the situation. At precisely this point the issue of representativeness arises to
bedevil thinking on civil society. Second, the arrival of global NGOs onto the scene may
carry important and not so positive implications for notions of political agency. For if
they have their own ideas of what should be done and how should it be done, ordinary
human beings who have experienced, say, injustice in their daily lives are denied the
opportunity to frame their responses in their own terms. NGOs more often than not have
their own programmes, they more often than not speak a highly specialised language that
may well be incomprehensible for the inhabitants of the regions in which they operate,
and they may well have their own ideas of what is politically permissible and what is not.
Ordinary individuals, it is evident, possess little opportunity to influence agendas
that are formulated in far-off places. Associational activity at the global level tends
therefore to acquire a life of its own, a life that is quite distinct from the everyday lives of
the people who do not speak but who are spoken for. Bluntly put, people are
disempowered rather than empowered when highly specialised, professional, and more
often than not bureaucratised civil society actors tell them what is wrong with their daily
existence and how they should go about resolving the problems of their collective lives.
In the process civil society may undergo both depoliticisation and disempowerment.
Admittedly, some global civil society actors have initiated novel ways of bringing
the problems of everyday existence of poor and impoverished people of the Third World
to international platforms and propelling them into the glare of the media spotlight. But
can all this substitute for the activity we call politics? Let me put this differently: when
individuals who are otherwise far too preoccupied in eking out a bare and minimum
subsistence in adverse conditions come together and think through how to resolve their
situation, they are empowered because they are politicised. And to be politicised is to
acquire consciousness that collective endeavours offer possibilities of self-realisation. To
be politicised is to be made aware that certain rights accrue to every human being by
virtue of being human. It means that people who have been constituted as subjects and
not as citizens by the policies of the state can rise to demand justice, equality, and
freedom; to demand that the state delivers what it has promised in theory. Political
activity simply makes for aware and self-confident human beings because these human
beings acquire agency in and through politics. And thereby ordinary men and women
make the transition from subject to citizen.
It is precisely this notion of politics that is devalued when global civil actors
commandeer political initiatives and once again constitute human beings as subjects of
political ideas arrived at elsewhere, or, worse, when they constitute individuals as
consumers of agendas finalised elsewhere. For we must ask this uncomfortable question
of even the most well-meaning of NGOs: who was consulted in the forging of agendas?
When? And how where the local people consulted: through what procedures and through
 15

what modalities? Were they consulted at all? Do, in short, global civil society actors
actually represent people, particularly of the Third World? Or are they self-styled
spokespersons of people who do not have even a remote chance of influencing these
agendas? Do these more often than not well-funded and often well-organised civil society
actors actually speak from below? Or do they claim to do so in order to gain legitimacy?
Certainly cyber-savvy global activists are influential because they know the
language that will win attention and perhaps applause. But it is precisely this that causes
unease, for whatever happens to people who do not know any language that may have
resonance in the world of international politics? What happens when ordinary human
beings do not have access to computers through which civil society actors wage their
battles? What happens when activists who feel passionately about certain crucial issues
are not in a position to participate in acts of resistance at the annual meetings of the
international financial institutions? And now consider the somewhat formidable range of
issues that have been taken up by global NGOs. Today they dictate what kind of
development should be given to Third World people, what kind of education they should
receive, what kind of democracy should be institutionalised, what rights they should
demand and possess, and what they should do to be empowered.
We have cause to worry. For what we see is the collapse of the idea that ordinary
men and women are capable of appropriating the political initiative. What we see is the
appropriation of political programmes in favour of the agenda of the global civil society
actor. Frankly, it is unclear whether international NGOs strengthen or weaken the role of
the community. First, NGO activism, which straddles national boundaries to create global
coalitions, is no substitute for self-determining and empowering political action born out
of specific experiences. Second, whereas the Third World State has proved notoriously
non-responsive to the demands of civil society, it is also a fact that, at moments of crisis,
this very civil society has mobilised to hold the state accountable. In December 2001, for
instance, the streets of Buenos Aires were filled with agitating and agitated Argentinians
who demanded the resignation of President Fernando de la Rua. Even as the country
descended into financial chaos and anarchy, even as people banged pots and pans on their
balconies, even as the streets of the city overflowed with crowds, and even as deadly riots
took the lives of 30 people, the President had to resign. At some point he was held
accountable.
To whom, we may ask, are the international NGOs accountable? Witness, for
instance, the response of Lori Wallach, whose organisation Public Citizen orchestrated
the battle for Seattle. In an interview published in Foreign Policy, she was asked the
following question: ‘You’re referring to the idea of democratic deficits in multilateral
organizations . . . Some people argue that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like
yours also have a democratic deficit—that you also lack democracy, transparency, and
accountability. Who elected you to represent the people at Seattle, and why are you more
influential than the elected officials . . .?’ The answer Ms Wallach gave was the
following: ‘Who elected Mr Moore? Who elected Charles Barshefsky? Who elected any
of them?’ (Foreign Policy 2000: 36). This, to put it mildly, is no answer simply because
it evades the issue. In another question she was asked who Public Citizen is responsible
to. ‘Our members’, she replied. ‘How do they express their oversight?’ ‘Through their
chequebooks’, she replied, ‘they just stop paying their membership dues’ (2000: 39).
Note that no longer are people expected to realise their selfhood in and through
 16

associational life, their participation is confined to the payment or withdrawal of

membership dues.
We have cause for unease. For much of the leadership of global civil society
organisations appears to be self-appointed and non-accountable to their members, many
of whom are passive and confine their activism to signatures to petitions circulated via e-
mail. Also note that, whereas we see huge crowds during demonstrations against the
WTO or in alternative forums such as the World Social Forum, between such episodes
activity is carried on by a core group of NGOs. It is possible that participants in
demonstrations are handed a political platform and an agenda that has been finalised
elsewhere. This is hardly either democratic or even political, it may even reek of
bureaucratic management of participatory events. It may even render people, as
suggested above, consumers of choices made elsewhere.
Moreover, as has been widely observed, international NGOs resist attempts to
make their own functioning transparent even as they demand transparency and
accountability from international financial organisations. Observers have commented
that, since most global NGOs do not issue financial or activity reports or any declaration
of objectives, it is difficult to gauge their nature (Scholte 2000: 119). Even if they do
issue such statements, does this make their activities more transparent? And remember
that it is precisely these organisations, whose own processes of decision-making are
closed to public scrutiny, who happen to be in control of people’s lives and destinies.
We also need to wonder how democratic the organisations of global civil society
are given the great inequalities of resources between the North and the South. It is more
than possible that Third World organisations get sidelined when it comes to the making
of global agendas. For instance, Hart-Landsberg reports that influential groups such as
Public Citizen and leaders of labour organisations in the US focused on keeping China
out of the WTO at Seattle, citing exploitative working conditions and the unfair trade
practices of the Chinese government. However, no independent movement of Chinese
workers has called for international support for a campaign to keep China out of the
world body. ‘In fact, even organizations operating in Hong Kong that seek to promote
independent labour organizing in China have refrained from supporting such a campaign’
(Hart-Landsberg 2000:106).
To cite another example, environmental NGOs have persistently campaigned for
lower emission levels in the atmosphere through control of polluting industries and
vehicular traffic. In Delhi, at the beginning of the new millennium, ‘polluting industries’
were closed down and vehicles that did not meet the standard laid down were abandoned
by a decision of the Supreme Court, which was under pressure from the environmental
lobby. However, in the process people were condemned to homelessness, massive
hardship, and unemployment [unpublished report 2001]. The gap between the demands
of environment-conscious NGOs and the need of the poorer sections of society was just
too starkly visible. We discover dissonance in the way Third World activists envisage
crucial matters and the way in which global civil society actors largely based in the West
view them.
Certainly we need to acknowledge the outstanding services rendered by some
global civil society organisations. We should be grateful that some of these groups have
brought issues of crucial importance to the top of political agendas. Nevertheless, the
domination of global civil society by organised and well-funded NGOs hailing from the
 17

West poses some very vexing questions for issues of political representation, political
agency, and politics in general. They may even be a part of the project that seeks to
disable activism in civil society and depoliticise it. Is it possible that NGOs perhaps
unwittingly form an integral part of the same plan that characterises the state and the
market? Is it possible that the same logic of power underpins the activities of
international civil society actors?

Global Civil Society Actors and International Politics and Economics

My second set of questions has to do with whether global civil society actors can
counteract deep-rooted structures of global capitalism and the state-centric global order,
or provide an alternative to the system. There is a much wider methodological issue that
confronts us here: what is the relationship between civil society, whether national or
global, and the other two domains of collective existence, namely, the state and the
market. For, as suggested above, contemporary political theory tends to assume that
different sectors of collective life can counter each other and perhaps even provide an
alternative to each other because each of them has a specific raison d’être.
Let me begin this part of the argument by suggesting that civil society is not only
constituted by the state and the market but also permeated by the same logic that
underpins these two spheres. Recall, for a start, that civil society as a peculiarly modern
phenomenon emerges through the same historical processes that generate both the
modern impersonal state and the modern market system. These processes have to do with
the separation of the economic and the political, the appropriation of the economy by a
private class of proprietors, and the concomitant rise of the institution of private property.
They have to do with the emergence of the notion of the autonomous individual and self-
directed individualism. They have, further, to do with the dissolution of community as
‘face to face’ interaction and with the carving out of a space where individuals meet, in
the words of Marx, as ‘bearers of commodities’. Classical theory called this space ‘civil
society’ which, peopled by legally autonomous individuals who may well be strangers to
each other, was marked by impersonal and contractual relations. And all this carried its
own problems, as the theorists of early modernity were to tell us in some detail.
For instance, Hegel, arguably the most distinguished proponent of civil society,
was to hail the propensity of modern civil society to enhance freedom in contrast to the
‘unfreedom’ of pre-modern societies (Hegel 1942 ) [the original work was published in
1821, but Knox's translation was published by OUP in 1942 ). But at the same time he
was profoundly ambivalent about the democratic potential of the sphere or of its capacity
to institute ethicality in the Greek sense, or what he called Sittlichkeit. For if the material
context for the realisation of the self and for the recognition of rights is bourgeois or
burgerliche society, this, as he was quick to realise, carried its own momentum. Because
even as modern life witnesses a dramatic expansion of the sphere of social interaction in
civil society, this interaction is permeated deeply by the ethos of the capitalist market,
that of self-serving and instrumental action. And this can pose a problem for the very
reproduction of the sphere; it may well disintegrate under the influence of self-centred
reasoning, which is the hallmark of the capitalist market system. In sum, Hegel was to
teach us an important lesson: that civil society is shot through with the same power
equations as the market, for it is constituted by the market system.
 18

More significantly, there is another problem that confronts classical political

theory: even as the market constitutes transactions in civil society, the market order
presupposes a stable and sturdy civil society in order to function efficiently. Market
relations simply need to be embedded in non-market relations in order to function with
some measure of success. But not any kind of non-market relations, let me hasten to add,
will do. Market transactions need disciplined, predictable, and socialised behaviour as a
prerequisite for their successful operations. If Adam Smith put forth his theory of ‘moral
sentiments’ in 1759 (Smith 1976) to accomplish this, a contemporary theorist such as
Francis Fukuyama argues that capitalist accumulation needs the presence of trust
(Fukuyama 1995). And James Coleman and Robert Putnam suggest that ‘softer’ social
norms that guarantee expectation, such as social capital, should buttress economic
transactions, if we want the domain of these transactions to expand (Coleman 1988: S95-
S120; Putnam 1993; 1995). Civil society and the market, we realise, are dependent on
each other; they need not provide an alternative to each other at all.
Therefore, whereas it is perfectly true that global civil society has critiqued the
workings of the international economic order, is a critique of corporate managed
globalisation, we are compelled to ask, the same as a critique of capital in search of
global markets? The problem is that global civil society tends to be broad-based,
comprising as it does [of?] many groups with divergent purposes and aims. Kaldor, for
instance, accepts that only a few of the protestors at Seattle were actually against
globalisation; the others wanted to reform international trade and financial institutions as
well as make them accountable (2000: 112). And the same theme was echoed at the
World Social Forum that met in Porto Alegre in Brazil in February 2002. The meeting,
which was attended by 10,000 delegates and which was meant to be a parallel to the
meeting of the World Economic Forum in New York, put forth the idea of an alternative
world: ‘Another world is possible’, went the slogan. However, according to a newspaper
report, ‘delegates bristle at the WSF being called the “anti-globalisation” meet. They
argue that they are not meeting here to register protests but to work out concrete
proposals that will be superior to what will be floated at the New York meeting of the
WEF’ (The Hindu, 3 February 2002: 10).
Actually, the movement against globalisation can be split into (a) radical
individuals and groups who oppose capitalism but are rather clueless as well as powerless
when it comes to alternatives and (b) established NGOs that work at the margins to
‘reform’ the system. The latter would rather that the present system is reformed and made
more accountable and humane. They consequently focus on institutional reform rather
than on an alternative to the system. And the ones that are anti-capitalist globalisation and
who dream of a better international order are relegated to the fringes of global civil
society, dominated as it is by professional bodies who now are partners in world
decision-making forums.
Global civil society, it is evident, by and large prefers to work within the
parameters of a system that has been found wanting by many critics both from the Third
World and from the advanced capitalist world. Given the plural and somewhat
contradictory nature of the protest movements, they can hardly provide us with an
alternative system. In tandem with the post-Washington Consensus, some global civil
society actors would humanise the capitalist system rather than think of another system
that may be able to deliver justice and equity. Therefore, they may reform the neo-liberal
 19

platform but they are unable to map a new course. And the anti-capitalist globalisation
groups are more romantic than pragmatic when it comes to alternatives. We seem to live
in a world of disenchantment where activists either refuse to dream dreams of an
alternative world system or are doubtful about what they want in its stead. For, as Scholte
put it in the context of Seattle, ‘halting a new round of trade liberalisation is not the same
as building a better world order’ (2000: 116). In the meantime liberalisation,
privatisation, and exploitation of Third World resources continue to coexist with the
rhetoric of human rights, environment, democracy, and what the World Bank now calls
the Comprehensive Development Framework.
When we come to the state-centric international order, we find that the
relationship between states and global civil society is profoundly ambivalent. It is true
that global civil society actors have through the techniques of ‘naming and shaming’
embarrassed individual states and even succeeded in overthrowing individual
governments. But it is equally true that states are not at all ceding their power over
matters that they consider crucial. Consider the response of the US to the mobilisation of
international public opinion in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York
and Washington. Political activists were connecting via the Internet, peace marches
dotted the landscape from Delhi to Washington to Berlin, and writers were authoring
impassioned pieces on why the Bush government should not punish the innocent people
of Afghanistan by bombarding the country. And yet the American government went
ahead and declared war on Afghanistan, adding to the already considerable woes of the
people of that country. The US, which incidentally claims to speak for the ‘free world’,
refused to heed the voice of global civil society and proceeded to violate the freedom of
the people of Afghanistan. The sovereignty of the US remained intact despite
considerable criticism by civil society actors.
On the other hand, global civil society actors need states and their institutions to
substantiate and codify their demands in law. Transnational organisations may critique
the practices of states in, say, the field of human rights, but they also require states to
create political and legal frameworks that facilitate setting up of the rule of law, civil and
political rights, or environmental protection. Women’s groups can hardly demand, say,
gender justice without the corresponding demand for state protection and the demand that
states set up appropriate institutions for protection of women’s rights. Alternatively, civil
society groups fighting, say, violations of civil liberties will need the state to punish
offenders. They simply will need human rights commissions, sympathetic judges, and a
sensitive police to realise their objectives. I could cite a number of other such examples;
the point, however, I hope is clear. Efforts in civil society will come to naught unless
states codify these efforts in the form of law or regulations. In effect, what I am trying to
suggest is that civil society actors will draw upon states both to redress violation of
human rights and to reform civil society itself through enacting laws restricting sexual
harassment in the workplace, for example. This again means—and this is a point that is
not generally grasped by many current advocates of civil society—that states constitute
the limits of civil society, as well as enabling political initiatives in global civil society. In
effect, the very states that global civil society supposedly opposes enable the latter in the
sense that only they can provide the conditions within which the civil society agenda is
realised. In effect, vibrant civil societies require strong and stable states as a precondition
to their very existence. After all, we hardly expect to find a civil society in countries like
 20

Afghanistan and Somalia, where the state itself leads a precarious existence as a result of
the civil wars that have wrecked the countries and their polities. The shade of Hegel, who
suggested that the state is a precondition for the existence of civil society, looms
especially large here.
Finally, we should recall that not only Third World governments but also
informed critics belonging to that part of the world argue that the values of global civil
society reflect those held by a narrow group of influential states in the international order.
Any attempt to institutionalise these values in states of the Third World, is seen as an
imposition. This is particularly true of human rights, which are considered to be
embedded in a set of norms and historical processes specific to Western Europe and the
US and therefore inappropriate for other societies. Incensed critics regard the imposition
of human rights upon societies that may possess other notions of how relationships
between individuals and governments should be arranged as an extension of imperialism.
Whether these critiques are valid or invalid is not the issue here; the point is that global
civil society actors, particularly human rights organisations, are seen as embedded within
an ideology that is highly Euro-centric: liberal democracy. For even though some of
these organisations have moved in the recent past to embrace ideas of social and
economic rights, which for long have been seen as the preconditions of meaningful civil
and political rights, it is the latter, not the former, that inform the consensus on human
rights.
This really means that global civil society actors reflect the consensus that liberal
democracy is the only form of democracy that remains of value in the aftermath of the
fall of communism in 1989. Therefore, even as we accept that global civil society actors
can launch, and have launched, a critique of the practices of some states, we must ponder
upon whether, in doing so, they do not codify values that belong to another set of states.
Can global civil society transcend the existing tension between the Western world and the
Third World that permeates the international legal, political, and economic order? Or will
it merely work within the parameters of a system that has already been laid down by a
few powerful states? Can global civil society ever be truly global? Or is it fated, as
national civil societies are, to function within the framework laid down by hegemonic
states?

Conclusion

In sum, global civil society has managed to give a new vocabulary to the state-centric and
market-oriented international order. The achievement is not meaningless, for at least
international financial and trade institutions have become more responsive to public
opinion, they have reformed earlier strategies of corporate managed globalisation, they
have added issues of social concern to their agendas, and they have called for greater
governance of globalisation. But notions of governance remain devoid of politics as self-
realisation even as global civil society fails to have an impact on the unequal distribution
of global wealth. In the meantime, the WTO concentrates on the widest and fastest
possible liberalisation of the flow of goods across borders.
Therefore, the notion that global civil society can institutionalise normative
structures that run counter to the principles of powerful states or equally powerful
corporations, which govern international transactions, should be treated with a fair
 21

amount of caution. Of course, actors in global civil society have made a difference, as
actors in national civil society make a difference. But they function as most human actors
do, within the realm of the possible, not within the realm of the impossible. Ultimately,
global civil society actors work within inherited structures of power that they may modify
or alter but seldom transform. But this we can understand only if we locate global civil
society in its constitutive context: a state-centric system of international relations that is
dominated by a narrow section of humanity and within the structures of international
capital that may permit dissent but do not permit any transformation of their own
agendas.

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