Global civil society as a new actor of international relations

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Global civil society as a new actor of international relations

K. Tryma

The article tackles upon the problem of global civil society, this structure has formed within the national states but now it functions in the international level and it has a number of principal characteristics which make it different from national civil societies. One can distinguish among them following: It has a horizontal vertical structure, there is no any kind of its center and it is aimed to protect human rights and freedom without reference to the national location.

The basis which is necessary for the formation of this structure are not only the transformation processes in the system of national civil societies and the output of their functioning on a new level, but it is also connected with the changes that have occurred in the realm of national sovereignty, allowing structures of global civil society rather actively intervene into the aspects relating to the domestic sphere. But they also tackle upon the interests of the entire international community, for example, in the environmental issues. It happens in the form of interaction between public organizations operating internationally with local or national representatives of public bodies for solving a specific problem. This phenomenon is accompanied by limited cooperation permanency in the sphere of problem management specific problem; it is not a kind of systematic cooperation, at least in most cases.

Gradually, the structure of global civil society are transformed with the help of modern information and communication tools into informal supervisory body of the planet, it has a capacity to participate in today's political process as an equal actors. But there still exist some outstanding issues: the definition of the legal status of global civil society and a clear delineation of its relationship with the nation-states. It is not possible now, because the dynamics of the creation of additional global civil structures remain relatively high.

Key words: civil society, global civil society, national state, international relations

The growth of global interdependent communication relations has been greatly accelerated by the advent of decentralizing communication technologies such as Internet networking. This kind of communication relations linked to what can be called cross-national initiatives which take place in various forms: from personal chating to more complex organizational forms, civil organizations. These non-governmental elements started to be called «global civil society», new structure which is functioning on the understate level basing on a number of the principles which are distinctive to the traditional national civil societies. Moreover, global civil society has become a new political power, It is interesting that this unity does not have any constitutional authority but it effects upon the activity of states and even governmental organizations. So, global civil society now represents a new force in international relations. The present article is aimed to highlight the some theoretical concepts of global civil society as a new participator of world politics in the course of modern historiography.

From the industrial age to the present, mercantilist and power political interests pushed civil society to the edge. In most countries, civil society even lacked its own channels of media communication. It was speechless and powerless, isolated behind the artifice of national boundaries, rarely able to reach out and gain strength in contact with counterparts around the world. What we now call the «NGO Movement» began in the middle of the last century with a trickle of organizations and has now become a flood of activity. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) today encompass private citizens and national interest groups from all spheres of human endeavor. Their huge increase in number and power is due in no small measure to the development of globe-girdling communications technologies [3].

As Dutch social theorist Cees J. Hamelink has written, we are seeing a new phenomenon emerging on the world scene - global civil society, best articulated by the NGO movement [4, p. 5-8]. New communications technologies now facilitate communication among and between the world's national civil societies, especially within the fields of human rights, consumer protection, peace, gender equality, racial justice, and environmental protection. From Earth Summit to GATT, from the United Nations General Assembly to the Commission on Human Rights, NGOs have become the most important embodiment of this new force in international relations.

The development of communications technologies has vastly transformed the capacity of global civil society to build coalitions and networks. In times past, communication transaction clusters formed among nation-states, colonial empires, regional economies and alliances - for example, medieval Europe, the Arab world, China and Japan, West African kingdoms, the Caribbean slave and sugar economies. Today new and equally powerful forces have emerged on the world stage - the rain forest protection movement, the human rights movement, the campaign against the arms trade, alternative news agencies, and planetary computer networks. global civil society

The continued growth and influence of global civil society face two fundamental problems: increasing monopolization of global information and communication by transnational corporations; and the increasing disparities between the world's info-rich and info-poor populations. Global computer networking makes an electronic «end-run» around the first problem and provides an appropriate technological solution to overcome the second.

Hamelink observed that the very powers that obstructed civil society at the national level - markets and governments also controlled most of the communication flows at the global level. Government monopolies still control a huge share of the world's air waves and telecommunications flows. Even worse, a handful of immense corporations now dominate the world's mass media. If present trends continue, Bagdikian predicted, by the turn of the century «five to ten corporate giants will control most of the world's important newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast stations, movies, recordings and videocassettes» [1, p. 805]. Telecommunications infrastructures and data networks must also be included in this gloomy account. Today's «lords of the global village» are huge corporations that «exert a homogenizing power over ideas, culture and commerce that affect populations larger than any in history». Neither Caesar nor Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt nor any Pope, has commanded as much power to shape the information on which so many people depend to make decisions about everything from whom to vote for to what to eat» [1, p. 807].

Why is this happening? The most fundamental reason is that fully integrated corporate control of media production and dissemination reaps vast profits and creates huge corporate empires. Already more than two- thirds of the U.S. work force is now engaged in information- related jobs. Almost half the Gross National Product of the 14 most industrialized countries, and one-quarter of all international trade, comes from services. Telecommunications services grew by 800 percent worldwide in the 1980s [6, p. 11]. According to UNESCO, the total world information and communication economy in 1986 was $1,185 billion, about 8 to 9 percent of total world output, of which $515 billion was in the United States [9, p. 1-2]. Growth in this sector is accelerating and it is no surprise that a few large corporations now predominate in the world's information flow.

So global civil society is seen by many analysts as an extension of the rule of law and political community, societas civilis, beyond national boundaries. For its most radical advocates, global civil society is about political emancipation, the empowerment of individuals and the extension of democracy. Mary Kaldor, for example, argues that the end of the global conflict of the Cold War «allows for the domestication of international relations and the participation of citizens, and citizen groups at an international level which was previously the preserve of governments [7, p. 13]. For John Keane, «brand new democratic thinking - implicit in the theory of global civil society - is required in the face of the growing lack of accountability of global governance» [8, p. 126].

Over the last 15 years it appears that the international realm has been transformed, no longer the sphere of violence and competition of the «war of all against all», the international is the sphere of transnational values and transnational actors increasingly able to influence and overcome the selfish and narrow interest of national elites. Analysts of global civil society argue that a new normative and ethical international agenda demonstrates the waning influence of the sovereign state pre-occupied with national concerns. For Jean Grugel: «The global civil society approach represents an overt attempt to blend normative theory with international relations» 3]. Along similar lines, Kaldor asserts: «The new meaning of civil society offers expanded possibilities for human emancipation» [7, p. 143].

Every campaign group, political party, NGO, government and local authority is busy making international links and «making a difference» at an international level. Why is it that the international sphere holds such an attraction for individuals and groups involved in politics? For some cynics it is merely the foreign junkets and chance to travel on per diem expenses which draws the attraction of our globalised political classes. For others, it is the new openness of the post-Cold War world, with less barriers to travel and fewer visa restrictions (for some at least). For others, it is the cheapness of air travel and mass communications which have encouraged global consciousness and new broader political horizons. In the past, domestic and international political tzpes of activism were closely correlated. However, today the decline of domestic political engagement and the rise of international activism appear to have marched hand-in-hand.

It is concerned that one of the constructors of global civil society can be the US. The British scientist, D. Chandler says: «Constructing global civil society pursuit of US national interests, US power could no longer be projected with moral certainty. The American establishment no longer had a belief in their «manifestdestiny». However, the «postmodern» state was born not in military humiliation in the Far East but in the disintegration of the moral certainty of US national interest at home. The lack of consensus over Vietnam reflected the lack of collective identification with US «national» interests. As Christopher Coker astutely notes, it was not the failure of intervention in Vietnam in itself that made the assertion of US national interests problematic, but the domestic response to the war. Reflecting broader social trends of individualisation or, in Ulrich Beck's terms «reflexive modernization», the decay of traditional social bonds and values meant that the nation-state could no longer be seen as an end in itself. The «postmodern» shift was a product of a lack of confidence in the innate superiority of the American way of life» [2, p. 21]. So, as a type of global morality organ, global civil society can be linked to a pro-American body but it' complexity and flexibility hardly ever can give an opportunity for this structure to be considered only as an American political project.

The international sphere was once dominated by real politic and the «struggle for power», while the domestic sphere was seen as the sphere of ethical and normative concerns of «the good life». Today, in contrast, it is held that the sphere of power and contestation has been `colonized' by the domestic sphere of ethics and civility. For global civil society theorists, it is non-state actors which are held to have overcome the empirical and ethical divide between the domestic political realm and the international. The empirical case for many commentators, «Power Shift», the title of Jessica Mathew's article in Foreign Affairs, aptly sums up the seismic shift which has taken place in international relations since the ending of the Cold War. Rather than the end of the Cold War resulting in a shift in power relations among states, there is alleged to be a `no viler distribution of power' away from states towards global civil society. The most important empirical trend since the end of the Cold War is alleged to be that of the development of a global civil society because it brings with it emancipatory alternatives and new ways of doing politics and of establishing political and moral communities. As Ann Florini states: «The state system that has governed the world for centuries is neither divinely ordained nor easily swept away. It is, however, changing, and one of the most dramatic changes concerns the growing role of transnational civil society».

What do these findings mean? They show us that we deal with a new specific element in the system of international relations. Global civil society coincides in some positions with what we call national (or traditional) global civil society but it is different. It has a horizontal but not vertical structure, there is no any kind of its center and it is aimed to protect human rights and freedom without reference to the national location. The most logical explanation for global civil society is that structure appeared after the national state had dramatically changed its nature. Now global civil society has become a new rather powerful member of modern political structure but to establish its position in the world political system requires some more time. The reason is that global civil society still is being formed as a holistic organization.

References

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