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Global Civil Society and Its Discontents

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Abstract

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

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Notes

  1. According to the media database Lexis Nexis, which has the search category “major world newspapers.”

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

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

  4. Ronaldo Munck (2002) suggests a similar approach to global civil society regarding it as a “Sorelian myth” similar in function to the myth of the general strike for syndicalism. Munck sees global civil society as functioning 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 depends upon which political forces have successfully hegemonized the term.

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

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Ostre Farimagsgade 5, DK-1014, Copenhagen K, Denmark

    T. Olaf Corry

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Corry, T.O. Global Civil Society and Its Discontents. Voluntas 17, 302–323 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-006-9025-1

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