Martin
Shaw
Civil
society
From
Lester Kurtz, ed, Encyclopaedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict,
San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 269-78 (offprints available: email me)
Contents:
- glossary
- I The meaning of civil society
- II Civil society on a global scale
- III Civil society, violence and war in historical
perspective
- IV Civil society and the Cold War
- V Civil society in contemporary war and peace
- bibliography
Civil
society: a sphere of association in society in distinction to the state,
involving a network of institutions through which society and groups within it
represent themselves in cultural, ideological and political senses.
Global
civil society: the extension of civil society from national to global, regional
and transnational forms, involving the development of globalist culture,
ideology and politics.
Global
political crises: local crises, typically wars, which come, often through media
coverage, to have global political significance.
Hegemony:
the cultural, ideological and political dominance, in civil society, of a
social class or group or bloc of social classes and groups.
Post-military
society: a society which has ceased to be dominated by war-preparation, and in
which mass military mobilization and participation are replaced by
high-technology professional militaries.
Social
movements: collective actors in civil society distinguished by mass
mobilization or participation as their prime source of social power, typically
concerned to defend or change society or the relative position of a group
within society.
Total
war: a mode of warfare based on the mobilization or participation of society as
a whole, in which society becomes both a major resource and a major target and
warfare tends towards total destruction and genocide.
Civil
society refers to a sphere of association in society in distinction to the
state. The term has been used in a variety of ways, and this article will
explore the meaning of civil society by examining the understanding of it in
the modern social sciences and its relevance to the understanding of of
violence, peace and conflict in major periods of modern history.
The
origins of the concept of civil society lie in key phases of modernity in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then writers in classical
philosophy and political economy began to distinguish systematically between
the spheres of state and society. In feudal society, the same social relations
between superiors and inferiors had embraced both production and family life,
on the one hand, and political and military authority, on the other. With the
dissolution of feudal relations, these two areas of social life became more
clearly demarcated in modern conditions as ‘society’ and ‘state’. The term
civil society was first used to distinguish a sphere in which social relations
were based on the free association of individuals, rather than a fixed
hierarchy of legal institutions. For classical writers like the philosopher
Georg Hegel and the revolutionary theorist Karl Marx, civil society was an
inclusive concept of ‘society minus the state’, and very definitely included
what we would now call ‘the economy’. Civil society was defined, indeed, by the
emergence of a distinct political economy in which individuals related to each
other as independent agents rather than as people who filled prescribed social
roles.
The
major classical theorists had, however, different ideas about civil society and
about its relation to the state. Hegel saw civil society as a sphere of
contradictions which could be resolved in the higher institution of the state,
which embodied the highest ethical ideals of society. Marx believed, in
contrast, that civil society was a sphere of conflicts between competing
private interests, and that far from being reconciled in the state, these
conflicts would take the form of class struggles in which the state itself
would be overthrown. (In Marx’s later work, the concept of civil society is
largely replaced by that of the capitalist mode of production.)
Although
these classical ideas of civil society are still influential, as we shall see,
the concept has been refined by later writers in ways which have made it, while
still a broad concept, arguably more relevant to contemporary social analysis.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing in the 1930s, referred to civil
society in a more specialised sense than that of ‘society minus the state’. He
argued instead that ‘between the economic structure and the state with its
legislation and coercion stands civil society’ (Gramsci, 1971). Civil society
for Gramsci was a set of institutions through which society organised and
represented itself autonomously from the state. Although representative
institutions of the economic sphere, such as employers’ associations and trade
unions, were among the institutions of civil society, there were also churches,
parties, professional associations, educational and cultural bodies. The
economic sphere itself, with its functional institutions (firms, corporations)
responsible for organising production, was not on this definition part of civil
society.
Gramsci
built a comparative theory of political change on this concept of civil
society. He argued that whereas in the East, where civil society was weak,
revolution might have succeeded through a direct violent assault on the state (as
in Russia in 1917), in the West, where civil society was strong, this would not
be possible. The institutions of civil society formed the ‘outer earthworks’ of
the state, through which the ruling classes maintained their ‘hegemony’ or
dominance in society. It was necessary to transform civil society, indeed to
create an alternative hegemony of the subordinate classes, before it would be
possible to challenge state power.
Gramsci’s
hegemonic theory of civil society saw transformation as a cultural, as well as
political, process, and specified an important role for intellectuals.
According to Gramsci, each class developed its own intellectual groupings.
While some traditional groups, such as priests and lawyers, continued from
previous phases of society, many new groups had been created ‘organically’
through the development of capitalism - managers, educators, social workers,
etc. These groups, playing central roles in the institutions of civil society,
contributed to maintaining the existing hegemony. A counter-hegemony, which
Gramsci conceived of in Marxist terms as led by the working class, would
require its own organic intellectuals and beliefs.
Gramsci’s
ideas were newly influential in the 1970s, both among Western social-science
academics and in inspiring the ‘Eurocommunist’ strategy of the Italian and some
other West European Communist parties. Another strong stimulus to the
development of civil society thinking came around the same time from
oppositional thinkers in the Communist states of East-Central Europe. In an
interesting advance on Gramsci’s ideas, many oppositionists believed that
because the authoritarian character of the Communist regimes made a direct
challenge to their legitimacy very difficult, it would be easier to develop
civil society based on cultural institutions which made an indirect challenge
to the values of the system.
In the
repressive atmosphere of the late 1970s and early 1980s, even this was
difficult - although in Poland the autonomous trade union Solidarity developed
as a mass national movement. In the more liberal situation of the later 1980s,
however, civil society mushroomed in many Communist countries. The growth of
autonomous cultural and social institutions played the role of preparing the
foundations for a challenge to political power - very much as Gramsci had
argued. As Communism collapsed and competitive party politics developed,
however, key intellectual elites often moved from civil society to parties and
the state, leading to a crisis of civil society practice and thinking.
Nevertheless, the more advanced Central European countries, especially, are characterised
in the late 1990s by much more extensive civil societies based on voluntary
associations than was the case a decade earlier, although the political
significance of these civil societies has changed.
Implicit
in these ideas of civil society was the notion of it as a sphere of peaceful
civility in contrast to the coercion, authoritarianism and violence of
non-democratic states. At the end of the twentieth century the development of
civil society is coming to be seen, therefore, as a significant criterion of
the development of democracy. Democracy is seen as involving not merely the
formal establishment of certain rights, institutions and procedures - important
as these are - but also the consolidation of the social relations which support
these. These supports include the development of an educated middle class and a
framework of civil institutions which can support democracy. Just as in former
Communist states, so in many countries of the ‘Third World’: as democratisation
has advanced in the last decade of the twentieth century, the creation of civil
society is widely viewed as a concomitant of democratic change.
Similarly
in the West, the strength of civil society is often seen as a criterion of
democratic health and stability. A central question in Western analysis,
however, is the role of mass media in civil society. Traditional representative
institutions of civil society, such as trade unions, parties and churches, have
decayed in many Western societies, with membership and participation rates often
(although not always) in decline. Even where some of these institutions remain
strong, they exercise their representative functions to a large degree through
mass media, above all television. Participation in Western civil societies (and
democracies) increasingly depends on the openness of communications media.
Media can be seen both as constituting the framework of contemporary civil
society and as powerful actors within it. The centralized mass media of the
early twentieth century are partially giving way to more participatory media,
in which civil society is renewed.
There
are key differences between media and other institutions, to do with the
informational character of much media activity and the quasi-instantaneous
communication between communicators and audiences. Most other institutions
largely take for granted the information which their members or audience
possess and are more concerned with influencing the value framework within
which information is evaluated. Media, on the other hand, are always heavily
concerned with communicating information, and have highly divergent
relationships to evaluation. Much television eschews open commitment to
value-frameworks (except those concerned with information), while at the other
extreme, many newspapers are highly committed to propagandising particular
values. In participatory new media like the Internet, a diversity of both
information sources and opinions transforms these tensions.
Frequency
of communication between media and audiences is another key differentiator
between them and other institutions. Many newspapers publish daily, and
television and radio broadcast continuously, sometimes updating news and
interpretation hourly or even more frequently. Computer communication is
virtually instantaneous. Political and religious leaders, educators, movement
activists and other civil leaders, on the other hand, communicate with their
audiences intermittently and update their analyses of specific situations
episodically; they are not required in the same way to inform or comment
regularly on any given situation. A related difference is that media news
analysis claims, implicitly or explicitly, to provide a total context of
information relevant to given situations (whether or not media do this is, of
course, another matter). The views of political and religious leaders,
educators, activists and others are ‘parts’ while the media provide the ‘whole’
picture. In this sense media contextualise and relativise the outputs of other
institutions.
A
primary tension in the development of civil society has been between the
universal values which civil institutions have often professed - and which some
see as characteristic of civil society as such - and the national forms of
civil society which supplies much of their real content. Both religious
ideologies like Christianity and secular political ideologies like liberalism,
socialism and conservatism have fostered universal beliefs. Nevertheless,
institutions like churches, parties, trade unions, schools and media have
characteristically been highly national institutions during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Indeed, civil society as a whole has been a national
sphere, generally involved in mutually sustaining relationships with the nation-state.
Civil institutions have generally fostered national versions of universal
belief-systems and values, including loyalty to the state, and have been
supported in turn by states.
In the
second half of the twentieth century, much of the nation-state framework of
civil society has been transformed. During the Cold War, both state and civil
society changed in the West. National forms were maintained, but they lost much
real significance. There was a huge internationalization of Western military,
economic, cultural and ideological power. Western states increasingly shared
frameworks for organising their monopoly of violence and their management of
economic life. They created the conditions for massive processes of economic
and cultural globalization. In this context, the old national civil society
declined. The weakening of many of the forms which were most characteristic of
it in mid-century - churches, mass political parties and trade unions - was
partly related to this transformation of the national context.
Civil
society has been partially renewed in new institutions which are less formal,
less tied to particular social interests and less national. Sociologists have
given most attention to ‘new’ social movements (i.e. those based not on class
but around other social axes or issue interests). Mass-participatory social
movements tend to be episodic, but there are other institutions - single-issue
campaigns and voluntary organizations, especially global development and human
rights agencies - which are more enduring if often less activist-based.
These
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are particularly important not only in
that, although based in the West, they operate across the globe, but also
because many (e.g. Amnesty, Greenpeace, Médicins sans Frontieres) are
‘globalist’ organizations with a specifically global orientation, membership
and activity. There are however other major types of institutions which
comprise the emergent global, regional and transnational civil society. These
include formal organizations linking national organizations of parties,
churches, unions, professions, educational bodies, media, etc.
The
growth of mass media has also tended to transcend the nation-state context, and
not simply because of trends towards transnational ownership and diffusion.
Media also have different relationships to the tension between the universal
values (religious, political, educational, informational, etc.) on which civil
society institutions claim to be based, and their essentially national character,
based on the aim of representing nationally-defined social interests and
viewpoints. Insofar as media fulfil their function of providing information on
the widest possible (i.e. global) basis, they inevitably tend to transcend the
national limitations of state and civil society.
Although
the worldwide expansion of civil society - in eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union, and parts of Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere - has often
taken highly national forms, it has rested on the globalizing forces of
education and cultural diffusion. The present growth of civil society combines
global and particularistic aspects - even the nation is a universal idea in the
modern world.
These
changes in civil society - the decline of some traditional national forms, the
rise of global (or globalist) social movements, NGOs and media, and its
worldwide expansion - have led many to discuss a movement from national to
global civil society. Recent debates in international relations have extended
the analysis of civil society to the transnational and global levels. They have
often ascribed to it considerable normative and political importance, although
they have not always dealt with the empirical problems involved in
hypothesising ‘global civil society’.
Civil
society and social movements have become leading concepts of critical theory,
more sociologically-based approaches and especially of radical political
visions in international relations. As international theorists have moved
beyond not just realism but also neo-realist ideas based on economic
interdependence, they have increasingly seen social movements as a third major
category of international actor after states and transnational corporations.
These movements have been seen as especially significant forms through which
society outside the state is represented in the global and international
arenas.
Social
movements are seen as having unique characteristics, but in reality they have
many features in common with the other civil society institutions to which we
have referred. It cannot be assumed that social movements are more effective
than other bodies in civil society: their relatively informal, spontaneous
character brings advantages but also disadvantages in both the mobilization of
support and the achievement of leverage. Linkages of social movements and
informal networks (e.g. of women’s, gay and peace groups and movements) are
only one kind of global development.
A
particular problem in the definition of global civil society is to specify its
relationship with state forms. The emergence of global civil society can be
seen both as a response to the globalization of state power and a source of
pressure for it. There is no one, juridically defined global state to which
global civil society corresponds, even if a de facto complex of global state
institutions is coming into existence through the fusion of Western state power
and the legitimation framework of the United Nations.
The
emergence of global civil society in fact corresponds to the contradictory
processes of globalization of state power, and the messy aggregation of global
and national state power which comprises the contemporary inter-state system.
The forms of global state power are often inadequate from the point of view of
civil society organizations - e.g. power can be mobilized to deal with what is
seen as a problem for Western strategic interests (e.g. Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait) but not coherently to deal with genocide, environmental crises, or
world poverty. Civil society organizations often find themselves, at the end of
the twentieth century, arguing for a different kind of crystallization of
global state power from those favoured by state elites.
The
development of global civil society, as of the global state, is moreover still
limited. Civil society institutions are still generally defined in terms of
national bases, and because of this there is a deep structural difficulty in
their relationship to inter-state relations, let alone transnational forms of
state power. These problems are especially significant in the case of social
movements. Whether social movements are demonstration-based or mobilize
utilizing a wider range of methods, they rely more on cultural impact than on
articulated connections with the political system. The cultural strength of
social movements derives partly from their location outside the formal party
and parliamentary structures of the state; but this can also be a weakness when
it comes to seeking particular concessions from the state.
The
political power of social movements does not arise from occupying positions
within formal political institutions (as in the case of parties) but largely
depends on their cultural mobilizing power, i.e. the extent to which they can
achieve symbolic impact on the streets and/or in the media. In the case of
demonstration-based movements, leverage is dependent on the relationships
between physical mobilizations and media coverage. There are cycles of
mobilization within social movements, mediating the internal momentum of the
movement and the politico-cultural context in which it is operating. It is very
difficult for the leaders of a movement to ensure that the peak of the
mobilizing cycle coincides with the greatest opportunity for influence on the
state. Leverage is often a somewhat hit-and-miss affair.
If
social movements generally have such difficulties with the state, then clearly
they are greatly magnified in relation to interstate (rather than intrastate)
politics. To influence interstate relationships, social movements need to move
beyond the national base which is still their most common framework. They need,
implicitly, to influence all of the states involved in a particular set of interstate
relations, which in turn requires equivalent movements within each state and
developed transnational linkages, including ideally a common strategy. All of
these requirements represent an inherent strain on the resources of social
movements, which typically respond locally, regionally and nationally to
issues, expressing feelings and beliefs within these limited frameworks. The
problem of international leverage expresses the general contradiction between
the modes of bottom-up and top-down politics in its most extreme form, since
interstate relations have traditionally been the area of politics most removed
from popular or electoral influence.
Given
these structural limitations of social movements within interstate politics,
how should their role be understood? From the point of view of states (and
hence also of statist theorists of international relations), social movements
represent a relatively unpredictable (often even ‘irrational’) intrusion into
the balance of power. From the standpoint of a broader conception of
international politics, in which states are the organizing but not the only
level of analysis, the effects of including social movements (and other civil
society organizations) are to complicate ‘pure’ interstate relationships. James
N. Rosenau (1991) has gone so far as to argue that we need to talk of
‘postinternational’ rather than international politics.
In this
perspective, international politics is one sub-context of the larger framework
of global politics. States can be seen as parts, in Justin Rosenberg’s (1994)
phrase, of the ‘empire of civil society’ within which they originated and on
which they depend. In this context, rather than seeing social movements or
other civil society organizations as intruders, or categorising them residually
as ‘non-state actors’, they are recognized as normal actors within global
politics. As the increasing ‘turbulence’ of global politics and the relative
decline in state autonomy break down the insulation of international politics
from politics in civil society, international relations theorists are finding
the ‘conceptual jailbreak’ to postinternational - indeed global - concepts more
and more necessary.
Within
recent international theory, both substantive and normative arguments have been
developed concerning the significance of global civil society. It has been
argued that international governance, in the late twentieth century, involves
international organisations and global civil society as well as the system of
states. The moral and political significance of global civil society has also
been elaborated, in two principal ways.
On the
one hand, writers like the Marxist Rosenberg and the Hegelian Mervyn Frost
(1995) have revived classically inclusive concepts of civil society and argue
correspondingly (in the former case) for a broad social transformation as the
context of changing international relations and (in the latter) for an
‘ethical’ approach to international order. On the other hand, however, a
broader range of radical writers have argued for approaches to global politics
based on a concept of civil society closer to the narrower Gramscian approach.
Richard Falk (1995), for example, argues for a ‘humane global governance’ based
mainly on civil society, in the sense of civil associations and especially
social movements, as opposed to the ‘inhumane global governance’ of states and
multinational corporations. In his project, civil society is the core of a
democratic ‘globalization from below’ to be counterposed to the dominant trend
towards an authoritarian ‘globalization from above’. In this humane
alternative, the development of civil society is seen as working against the
militarism of the state system towards a democratic world peace.
This
positive reading of the role of civil society in war and violence is only
partially supported by a reading of the historical evidence - although is not
to deny that the emerging global civil society of the early twenty-first
century may have different relationships to war from those of the national
civil societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps because of
the positive reading of civil society which characterises most of the
literature, virtually nothing has been written on the role of civil society as
such in the violence of the European empires and the world wars. We can however
construct an argument from the vast historical literature on all aspects of
social life in the wars of this period.
The
study of ‘war and society’ has been a staple of modern historiography. Vast
literatures analyse the ways in which warfare has hardly been an exclusive
concern of states and armies, but has transformed and been transformed by
social relations. From the mid-nineteenth century especially, warfare has been
industrialised - adopting technologies from the civilian economy, as well as
functioning as a motor of technological change in the economy as a whole. The
relations between states and arms corporations have been a central facet of
political economy since the late nineteenth century.
Beneath
the surface of the pacific commerce which mostly reigned in Europe from 1815 to
1914 (if not in the United States where the civil war foretold later horrors),
the industrial capitalist societies which developed in the nineteenth century
engendered the classic modern form of militarism. Everywhere in Europe towards
the end of the century, militarist ideologies flourished in social life: from
the propagandist militarism of army and navy leagues to new paramilitary youth
organisations and the militarist saturation of popular culture.
In this
climate, no institution or profession of the national civil societies of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries escaped militarization, although the
degree and forms varied. Industry, schooling and religion showed the influence
of military methods and values. Newspapers and advertising, and later radio and
cinema, were often enthusiastically and voluntarily militarist, before they
were conscripted to the cause of the nation-state. The paradigmatic social
movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the
social-democratic parties and trade unions, fell under the sway of militarism,
putting aside the pacifist tendencies of their ideologies once war was declared.
In total
war, civil societies took almost wholly national forms. The
internationalization of professions and science, which had a long history even
before the nineteenth century, largely succumbed to the nationalism of the
early twentieth. As in almost all civil institutions, national content
prevailed over universal forms. Internationalization prevailed only within
military alliances, and even then was often limited by nation-state interests.
The most that could be claimed was that the universalising values of civil
society lent a special character to the war aims (and later Cold War aims) and
political-intellectual culture of the democracies - as opposed to totalitarian
Fascist and Communist states, where autonomous civil societies ceased to exist.
The historical
sociologist Michael Mann (1996) has pointed out, moreover, that civil society
hardly had a pacific character in colonial wars. Settler civil societies were
often more militaristic (and racist) even than colonial empires. They generated
their own systematic violence against indigenous populations across the
continents wherever Europeans migrated, whether in North or South America,
Africa or Australasia. Settler societies were often more aggressive towards
pre-existing societies than were colonial states. They continued as sources of
violence into the era of decolonisation, playing key roles in wars to defend
white ‘European’ power from Algeria to South Africa.
Guerilla
war involved a special version of the total-war militarization of civil
society. Guerillas fought directly in and through civil society, hiding behind
civil institutions just as states sought to secure them against guerilla
takeovers.Guerilla war, even more than total war between conventional state
military forces, was a form of warfare centred on the shape and control of
civil society.
Total
war, in both its major inter-state and minor guerilla forms, transformed
civilian populations and their institutions into factors in warfare. Civilians
and civil society became both instruments and targets of war. Total war thus
developed an implicitly - and in cases like the Nazi Holocaust, explicitly -
genocidal character. Wars were fought against peoples and cultures (for Hitler,
the war was against the Jews as well as his conventional state adversaries).
Attempts were made to physically exterminate peoples, to eliminate their ways
of life and histories, and to abolish their civil society and institutions. In
the militarization of civil society by total war, some versions of civil
society triumphed, others were destroyed; all changed.
We have
already seen that during the Cold War there was a significant
internationalization of economy and society as well as of the state in Western
countries (in the Soviet bloc, Communist internationalism was experienced as
forced and led therefore to the reassertion of nationalism on the system’s
demise). There was also, moreover, a major transformation of warfare. Total war
in the form which had dominated the first half of the twentieth century
declined. On the one hand, the total destructiveness and the genocidal
character of war were accentuated by the development of nuclear and other
weapons of mass destruction. On the other, however, these same systems made
redundant the mass mobilization and participation of the total war era,
inaugurating a ‘post-military society’. Civil society began to develop
therefore beyond its dominant national and militarized forms in international
and global directions, in which a new post-militarist character was strong.
We also
noted that during this period, ‘new’ social movements developed often with
implicitly or explicitly transnational and global reference. Some, like women’s
movements, were movements with broad social and cultural aims which had a wide-ranging
influence on international politics. Others, however, like peace movements
represent the opposite case: movements with very specific political goals
designed to affect the workings of the interstate system and particularly to
affect the dangers of war and the possibilities of peace. The genocidal
character of nuclear warfare, with its total threat to society, stimulated new
mass participatory movements against state strategies.
Although
peace organizations of various kinds have existed continuously for many
decades, peace movements have tended to arise because of particular conflicts
or crises. In recent times, they have been of two main types: to halt or
prevent particular wars (most notably the Vietnam war) and to oppose particular
weapons developments (chiefly nuclear weapons). Where women’s movements have
grown in diffuse ways since the 1960s, peace movements have tended to rise and
fall quite dramatically in conjunction with particular international crises.
Nuclear disarmament movements for example emerged, primarily in Western Europe
and North America, in two main periods (1958-63 and 1979-85) but almost
disappeared in the intervening years and again in last years of the twentieth
century. The movement against the Vietnam war, peaking from about 1966-72, was
a quite distinct movement from the two nuclear disarmament movements, with as
many political and organizational differences as similarities.
I shall
concentrate on the example of the most recent phase of nuclear disarmament
movements. These movements arose almost simultaneously in 1979-80 in a number
of Western European countries, following the NATO decision to introduce new
nuclear systems, especially cruise missiles, into five states (the United
Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium).
From the beginning, although anti-nuclear campaigns arose locally and
nationally within each of the states, the common framework of the NATO
decision, while varied according to the missile installation timetable and
national political situation, imposed a common agenda on the new European peace
movements: to prevent the deployment of the new systems. In European states not
directly affected, such as France and Spain, parallel movements arose with
different national agendas. In the United States, a similar movement arose
around the broader demand for a ‘nuclear freeze’.
These
movements were successful in mobilizing large-scale demonstrations and
influencing public opinion. While they imposed some delays in implementation,
they failed however to prevent deployment of the new missiles, which was mostly
completed by 1984; or in the American case, to secure a general freeze on new
nuclear deployments. Ironically, new disarmament proposals between the
superpowers, which developed from 1986 after the coming to power of Mikhail
Gorbachev in the USSR the previous year, appeared after the peace movement had
gone into fairly rapid decline as a mass movement.
On a
short-term balance sheet of the peace movements the failures were substantive
and the successes, largely symbolic. Their influence on European public opinion
was substantial: in all states designated for the deployment of cruise
missiles, opinion poll majorities consistently opposed the deployments. They
also influenced established civil-society institutions like social- and
liberal-democratic parties, media and churches. The movements partially
succeeded in their cultural goals: movement culture, in which pacifist,
environmentalist/green and feminist strands were strong, which had a powerful
impact on some groups of young people.
At a
deeper level, the peace movements were less successful in shifting support for
existing nuclear systems or for NATO, or in deflecting the broad US and Western
nuclear strategy. The movements stimulated a different political climate around
nuclear weapons issues, forcing governments to justify and debate their
policies; the bottom line, however, was that they failed in their manifest
political aim of preventing missile deployments. A major reason for this is
revealing: despite the movements’ influence on both public opinion and
opposition parties, the parties which adopted or were more influenced by their
demands were resoundingly defeated in national elections (notably the German
Social-Democratic Party and British Labour Party in 1983, the American
Democrats in 1984).
The
structural problems of social movements in the context of interstate politics
largely account, too, for the failures of the peace movements. The mutual
solidarity of NATO governments helped them to withstand the separate (and
variable) pressures of their national peace movements. The European peace
movements faced the difficulty that the major centre of NATO decision-making,
the USA, was outside their reach. The difficulty of stimulating a large-scale
parallel peace movement in the Warsaw Pact states was a major additional
factor, since it enabled NATO governments to claim that for them to halt their
deployments would be ‘one-sided’ disarmament in the face of Soviet weapons
modernization.
Nonetheless,
although the disarmament of the later 1980s arose primarily from interstate
politics and from the domestic politics and economics of the Soviet Union, the
peace movements were an important part of the context which produced these
changes. First, the the peace movements stimulated strong popular support in
Western Europe for detente and disarmament and so ensured Gorbachev of a
positive Western European response to his disarmament proposals. Second, Ronald
Reagan’s ‘zero option’ proposals for eliminating intermediate nuclear missiles,
initially produced as a propaganda measure to help counter the peace movements,
were picked up by Gorbachev and became an important element in the move towards
agreement. Third, the small independent peace and human rights movements in
Eastern Europe, stimulated by deliberate actions of the Western movements,
helped to lay the foundations for mass opposition to the Communist regimes.
This led in turn to the East German and Czechoslovak revolutions of 1989 which
overthrew the system and completed the ending of the Cold War.
The
1980s began with one kind of social movement, the peace campaigners, on the
streets of Western European capitals, and ended with another, the movement for
democracy, on the streets of Eastern European capitals. These two movements,
together, represented important moments in the complex processes - both within
civil society and within and between states - which unravelled the Cold War
system. Neither set of social movements could by itself claim direct and
decisive responsibility for this change; but their actions contributed both
directly and indirectly to the change. Any account of the end of the Cold War
which seeks to interpret it without reference to them is certainly lop-sided.
Peace movements and the wider civil society context which they helped to
transform were significant factors in the processes of transformation.
With the
end of the Cold War, there have been new, dramatic transformations of global
politics, the longer-term results of which it is difficult to foresee in the
late 1990s. Economy and culture have become significantly more globalized, due
particularly to the removal of the major political barriers between the former
Communist states and Western-led world economic and communications systems. War
between Russia and the West has become almost as unthinkable as war between the
major states of North America, Western Europe and Japan had become during the
Cold War, although relations have not been fully stabilised (nor has the
internal political structure of Russia).
The
power of states has been widely seen as in relative decline - although these
remain the pivotal and in many senses still the most powerful institutions of
global politics. Many states have been subject to fragmentation. The Communist
multinational states of the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia have broken up
- the first two amidst major wars. Many African states, including Somalia,
Liberia, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Zaire, have disintegrated at least partially
through large-scale violence. Even Western states like Canada, Belgium, Italy
and the United Kingdom have been subjected to disintegrative strains, even if
those have so far been managed largely by peaceful political means.
The
trends towards, and debate about, global civil society have developed
significantly in the last decade of the twentieth century. Civil society has
also had a new centrality to the what have been called the ‘new wars’ of the
1990s. With the diminution of classic inter-state conflict, most major wars of
this first post-Cold War decade have been wars of state-fragmentation. In these
wars, the central issues have often been the very composition of society and
the character of civil society, as well as of the state. Two visions of civil
society and its relations with the state have been in contest. On the one hand,
ethnic nationalists have sought to define civil society and state in
exclusivist terms. On the other, pluralists and democrats have contended for
open and inclusive ideas of society and the state.
Ethnic
nationalism has arisen because political elites - in many cases fragments of
old (especially Communist) elites in new guises - have sought to maintain or
carve out political power. They have exploited old ethnic differences to
mobilize support and maintain legitimacy, and have utilized parts of the state
and military apparatuses to create ethnically homogenous mini-states or
fiefdoms. Many wars have been, like Hitler’s war against the Jews, wars against
civilian populations and against civil societies and cultures. While these wars
have often been against ‘other’ ethnic cultures, plural civil society has also
been a key target of ethnic nationalism. In Bosnia, multi-ethnic Sarajevo,
where intermarriage and ‘Yugoslav’ identification was relatively high, were a
prime target of the Serbian nationalists. Intellectuals who organized pluralist
civil institutions - local officials, teachers etc. - have often been prime
victims of the new genocidal politics. So-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ - since the
term derives from the Serbian practitioners of mass killing it is hardly
adequate for social science - has targetted pluralists as well as people of
other ethnicities.
Although
many of these elements of the ‘new wars’ are not really novel - the history of
the last 100 years is littered with genocides - the particular configuration of
the genocidal fragmentation-wars of the late twentieth century is distinctive.
The trends towards global and transnational forms of civil society work in
these wars in a number of different ways. On the one hand, protagonists in
these wars typically mobilise ethnic-national civil society in a trans-state
and global manner. The Israeli state, for example, has long been dependent on the
American Zionist lobby. More recently the Palestinians have also organized
themselves with increasing effectiveness as a diaspora - not merely in the
refugee camps of neighbouring states but in the wealthier West too. Irish
Republicanism has long depended on Irish-American support; there have also been
signs recently of its Unionist opponents organising in the USA. Serbian and
Croatian ethnic-nationalisms were trans-state in the dual sense of being
organised on a trans-republican basis within the former Yugoslav territory, and
in drawing on the global Serb and Croat diasporas, again in North America but
also in Western Europe and Australia. In these and other contemporary cases,
the organization of civil society on an ethnic-national basis threatens to undermine
the idea of a plural, often pan-ethnic civil society not only in the zones of
conflict but also in areas of the advanced West where diaspora communities are
strongly organized. The role of these civil societies in wars and even genocide
shows a heightened tension between national and universal interpretations of
civil values, which we noted existing in earlier periods.
On the
other hand, some new wars have been transformed into global political crises in
which civil society linkages have generated real support for victimized groups.
Not only the protagonists of plural civil society, but the representatives of
abused ethnic minorities, have begun to pressure Western states and legitimate
international institutions to provide aid against genocide and violence.
Because Western states often fail to perceive traditional strategic interests
in the plights of victims of war and genocide, and are reluctant to commit
people and resources to helping them, the appeal of the oppressed is often
directed at Western civil society, and linkages between civil society in zones
of crisis and in the West are strengthened. These links can be seen as elements
in the forging of global civil society.
Two
kinds of responses originating in Western civil societies have been crucial in
generating support and protection. On the one hand, mass media have been the
main agencies through which some (but by no means all) wars have become
recognized as global crises, and through which political pressure for aid and
intervention has developed. While the attention of mass media, especially
television, to wars is undoubtedly selective, brief and episodic, and often led
or circumscribed by the access for cameras and portable satellite dishes which
determine picture availability, there is no doubt that it can have powerful
effects. The intensive television campaign by news broadcasters during the
Kurdish refugee crisis following the Gulf War, for example, helped push the
American and British governments towards an unprecedented ‘humanitarian intervention’
in northern Iraq, which reversed their previous stance of non-intervention. The
possibility and success of this campaign depended very much on the prior nexus
of responsibility between Western leaders and Iraq, and in this sense was
atypical. But elsewhere, media have still nudged governments, however unevenly,
towards interventions, and once intervention has taken place, have made them
aware of the responsibility that goes with it.
On the
other hand, humanitarian agencies and campaigns and other non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) have been principal means both of mobilizing political
pressure within Western societies, and of delivering aid within zones of
crisis. Aid organizations mediate between donors and victims: in the zones of
crisis, they are the physical representations of a substantial minority of
Western publics who donate and raise funds for the downtrodden in war zones;
within Western societies, they are the symbolic representatives of the victims,
seeking to mobilize support. Aid organizations have some of the aspects of
social movements: the goal of mobilizing a large popular base, and the aim of
changing (if only in a limited ameliorative sense) social conditions. Of
course, many agencies have longer-term development as well as short-term aid
objectives, and some seek to organize people in a more campaigning mode to
alter general perceptions of third-world problems. To this extent, these
organizations operate in a social-movement mode; and yet their primary
relationship to their supporters is a passive financial one. To this extent,
they fail the participatory or mobilizing test of a social movement.
The
international crises of the 1990s have indeed failed to precipitate classic
social-movement responses in Western societies. The Gulf War produced only
brief intimations of anti-war movements of the kind seen in previous Western
wars (above all Vietnam); there have been few significant social movements in
response to other global crises. It seems that movements arose over nuclear weapons
and the Vietnam war because these issues could be presented as simple
moral-political questions, in which the issues of responsibility were direct.
Despite the enormity of the mass killings in Bosnia, Rwanda, etc., which were
extensively publicized in the mass media, these sorts of situations neither
appeared as simple, nor was there a clear nexus of responsibility involving
Western governments. Their challenges did not fit, moreover, into established
Cold War ideological paradigms: Western governments could not be represented so
easily as ‘imperialist’, nor could the demand for military intervention to
protect victims of genocide be accommodated simply within the pacifist, or at
least anti-militarist, traditions of most social movement activism.
Traditional
representative institutions in national civil societies, however, have hardly
proved very responsive to global crises. Just as the zones of crisis,
nationalist definitions of civil society have been partly reinforced, so in the
West most civil institutions remain national rather than global in orientation.
National ideologies are much more passive and open than in war zones, but
parties, churches and other groups respond more to those crises which have
national significance, for example where national troops are involved, than to
the problems of victims. The transition from national to global civil society
appears, from the experience of the new post-Cold War crises, to be in its
early stages.
On the
edge of the twenty-first century, therefore, profound changes in world politics
are posing new dilemmas of war and violence in which the nature and role of
civil society is very much a contested issue. Civil society is central to the
new world politics of peace, but the relations between the plural, democratic
idea of civil society and the national framework in which it has been cast
require radical rethinking in a global era.
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