Problems in the Theorisation of Global Civil Society

Gideon BakerUniversity of Salford

Existing theories of global civil society are problematical for two reasons. First, they assume thattransnational organisations can assist world-wide democratisation without questioning either therepresentativeness of such organisations, or their accountability, or the potentially negative ramifications of their actions for international political equality. Second, despite placing newemphasis on political agency outside of the state, many accounts of global civil society ultimatelyreproduce statist discourse by reducing action in global civil society to a struggle for rights. Thismisrepresents global civil society since arguments for rights are, inter alia, arguments for the state,whereas the agency of global civil society immanently questions the legitimacy of the state.

There are at least three major types of institutions which comprise theemergent global civil society: formal organisations linking national insti-tutions (organisations of parties, churches, unions, professions, educa-tional bodies, media etc.); linkages of informal networks and movements(e.g., of womens, gay and peace groups and movements); and globalistorganisations (e.g., Amnesty, Greenpeace, Mdecins sans Frontires)which are established with a specifically global orientation, global mem-bership and activity of global scope (Shaw, 1994b, p. 650).

For an increasing number of theorists, global civil society represents nothing lessthan the outline of a future world political order within which states will no longerconstitute the seat of sovereignty, a status first bestowed on them by the Treaty ofWestphalia in Europe (1648) and subsequently exported around the globe. RichardFalk, for example, suggests that global civil society recasts our understanding ofsovereignty as the modernist stress on territorial sovereignty as the exclusive basisfor political community and identity [is] displaced both by more local and distinctgroupings and by association with the reality of a global civil society withoutboundaries (1995, p. 100). Lipschutz also sees the transnational political networksput in place by actors in civil society as challenging, from below, the nation-statesystem. Indeed, the growth of global civil society represents an ongoing projectof civil society to reconstruct, re-imagine, or re-map world politics (1992, p. 391).The factors enabling such a role for global civil society are identified by Lipschutzas: the fading away of anarchy among states in an increasingly norm-governedglobal system; the functional inability of states to address certain welfare problems;and the growth of new forms of non-statist social and political identity such as areprovided by human rights and environmental groups, for example (1992, p. 392).

Few projections of such a post-Westphalian order assume that the state will ceaseto be an important actor in global politics, however. More nuanced accounts see

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the emergence of global civil society as in part a response to the transformation ofstate power, rather than simply its erosion. Along these lines Shaw argues that theappearance of global civil society is at once a reaction to and a source of pressurefor the globalisation of state power, which exists de facto in the complex of globalstate institutions [that] is coming into existence through the fusion of Western statepower and the legitimation framework of the United Nations (1994b, p. 650).Khler also suggests that the transnationalisation of civil society activities is intrin-sically related to the states increasing commitment to intergovernmental cooper-ation (1998, p. 233). Yet this very process also undermines the Westphalian orderof state sovereignty in that once legitimacy and recognition are granted to transna-tional coalitions, interest aggregation and policy formulation ... cease to be nationalaffairs, subject to the indivisible loyalty requested by the state (Khler, 1998, p. 246). Extant global civil society is then, it seems, both an outcome of and a stimulus for the transformation of the states system. The question is: can it bemore than this? In particular, can it serve as a constituent part of, even a meansto, a democratised world order?

This article assesses answers to this question that are in the affirmative. It proceeds,first, by categorising relevant models of global civil society before, second, explor-ing some theoretical problems involved in positing global civil society as connectedto the democratisation of the world order as these models variously do. The coreargument, presented third, will be that there is a continuing, if largely implicit,statist bias involved in most instances where global civil society is invoked. Thisnarrowness of vision, it is argued, results in part from the idea that to embed globalcivil society requires a framework of rights, which is to miss the movement char-acter of transnational action in civil society and to risk domesticating such action.The turn towards a rights discourse is problematic also, it is suggested, for requir-ing some fixed points of sovereignty from which to bestow such rights (institutionsof global government), which constitutes a return to statism at precisely the pointwhere an alternative enaction of the political is being suggested, struggled for even.

Models of Global Civil SocietyThe growing interest in the prospects for a global civil society should be seen againstthe backdrop of a number of developments. Crucial first is the conviction of manyanalysts that democracy cannot be maintained while tied exclusively to the nationstate. This is because the nation state is understood to be increasingly losing itscapacity to facilitate self-determination in a world of growing economic and cul-tural globalisation. Allied to this is the argument that the connection between thenation state and democracy is anyway only a historically contingent, rather thana necessary, one. These observations, in turn, have helped focus attention on theemergence of transnationally active social movements, which appear betterequipped to organise around global policy issues such as ecology and human rightsand, according to the very nature of their political practice, to transgress the spatialboundaries that have confined politics to the sphere of the domestic state. Thus,for Richard Falk, while we cannot yet

testify to the emergence of a global civil society inclined towards cos-mopolitan democracy ... such a potentiality exists at least to the extent

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that the statist, territorial character of international society is being deci-sively superseded by a large variety of technical, economic and culturaltrends (1998, p. 328).

Whether or not the state is increasingly redundant as globalisation theorists claim(and this remains a contentious thesis), it is important to note the normative aspectof much of the talk about global civil society, which is motivated as much by theconviction that global power should be democratised as by the empirical claim thatpower is increasingly globalised. Yet just what part is civil society understood toplay here?

One response to this question is provided within the model of cosmopolitan democ-racy. In perhaps the most well known of such models from David Held (1995), civilsociety provides for the public spheres which, taken together, operate as a basis fordispersed sovereignty in a system of global governance; generate critical resourcesdirected towards the institutional power required by such governance;1 and provideopportunities for voluntary association at the local level. Nevertheless, civil societyis by no means self-governing in Helds model, being constrained within a widerframework of cosmopolitan democratic law that delimits the form and scope ofindividual and collective action within the organisations of state and civil society.Certain standards are specified ... which no political regime or civil association canlegitimately violate (Held, 1993, p. 43). Of course, for this cosmopolitan democ-ratic law to have any authority, global-level sovereign institutions are required,though Held imagines these also being constrained by such a law, particularly bythe principle of subsidiarity (which disperses sovereignty), but also through ensur-ing that these are representative global institutions.

Held summarises his model as involving the call for a double-sided process ofdemocratisation in both political and civil society. Thus although Held sees civilsociety as one of the agents of democratic global governance, it is as much actedupon as actor, object as well as subject of his cosmopolitan democracy. This featureis replicated in the theory of other cosmopolitan democrats. Archibugi, for instance,wants global civil society to participate in political decision making through newpermanent institutions, but then states that such institutions would supplementbut not replace existing intergovernmental organisations. Their function would beessentially advisory and not executive (1998, p. 219).

Yet although cosmopolitan democrats may not identify global civil society as par-ticularly active within the post-Westphalian order that they desire, it remains necessary to such an order since, as another cosmopolitan, Andrew Linklater,acknowledges, post-Westphalian communities are needed to promote a transna-tional citizenry with multiple political allegiances and without the need for sub-mission to a central sovereign power (1998, p. 181). Indeed, Linklater himselfpositively identifies these post-Westphalian communities as including non-governmental associations, social movements and national minorities [that] canenjoy membership of an international society which is not just a society of states... (1998, p. 209).

The second key approach to global civil society, although similarly cosmopolitan inintent, is focused far more directly on nascent global civil society itself on the

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potential for world democratisation from below, via the moral advocacy oftransnationally operational social movements focused on human rights and theenvironment, for example. The global civil society approach is thus chiefly con-cerned with forms of political action and organisation operating outside of the stateand international law, where these forms are, by contrast, very much in the back-ground for cosmopolitans:

The predominant way of thinking about NGOs in world affairs is astransnational interest groups. They are politically relevant insofar as theyaffect state policies and interstate behaviour ... I argue ... that [they] havepolitical relevance beyond this. They work to shape the way vastnumbers of people throughout the world act ... using modes of gover-nance that are part of global civil society ... [T]he best way to think aboutthese activities is through the category of world civic politics ... clarify-ing how the forms of governance in civil society are distinct from theinstrumentalities of state rule (Wapner, 1995, pp. 3367).

Starting from the standpoint of global civil society leads to questioning of theimpression given by cosmopolitan democrats like Held that democratic global gov-ernance can be instituted almost in spite of action in civil society, through the neo-Kantian appeal to some supposedly already existing world politics or universalethics, as if the grungy skin of modern statist politics can be cast off to reveal someessential or potential humanity beneath (Walker, 1994, p. 673). Walker in particu-lar criticises the cosmopolitical attempt to read off social movements as agents ofthis revelation:

More interestingly, perhaps, it is possible to appeal to a rather less abstractand apparently more politically engaged account of an emerging globalcivil society. Indeed, much of the recent literature attempting to makesense of social movements/world politics has begun to draw quite heavilyon the notion of a global civil society, not least so as to avoid falling backon some pre-political or even anti-political claim about an already exist-ing ethics or world politics through which social movements can actwithout confronting the limits of modern politics in the modern state(1994, p. 674).

Walkers critique here is interesting because it is true that Held, typically of cos-mopolitical theorists, says very little about global civil society as such, focusinginstead upon the role in global governance of more or less local or domesticatedcivil societies. From the global civil society perspective, Held and other cosmopoli-tan democrats thereby face the problem of accounting for agency in the transitionto democratic global governance. This problem can be seen with Linklater, forexample, who, having set out a fulsome normative defence of a cosmopolitan ethic,then makes only the following very general comments about its realisation:

Cosmopolitan citizenship requires international joint action to amelio-rate the condition of the most vulnerable groups in world society and toensure that they can defend their legitimate interests by participating ineffective universal communicative frameworks ... Cosmopolitan citizen-ship acquires its most profound praxeological significance when it is

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regarded as a guide to the moral principles which should be observed inthese circumstances (1998, pp. 2067).

From the standpoint of global civil society theorists, more problematic still is thatsuch voluntarism involves wholesale retreat from questions about the political itselfat the global level. This retreat is evident from Linklaters summary of recent workon cosmopolitan citizenship as seeking nothing more ambitious than to defend thenormative project of uncoupling citizenship from the sovereign state so that astrong sense of moral obligation is felt to all members of the species (1998, p. 204).The problem here for critics is that to stop at a normative critique of the conjunc-tion between citizenship and the state is to fall short also of an assessment of politi-cal possibility in terms of identifying potential new forms of citizenship.

Ironically, although Linklater and Held want to move beyond Westphalia (statesovereignty), states appear to be the only actors likely to be in a position to initi-ate their proposals. Linklater (1998, p. 207) actually concedes this, arguing that a post-Westphalian configuration of states committed to the ... transformation ofpolitical community is the most involved system of joint rule which can be realisedin the present era. For Walker (1994, p. 696), such a tendency to shy away froma non-statist definition of the political is actually one reason why claims for globalcivil society are currently burgeoning, as a partial response to the dearth of waysof speaking coherently about forms of political life that transgress the bounds ofthe sovereign state.

Falk illustrates this hope in the agency of global civil society with his call for glob-alisation from below through the activities of transnational social movements.Globalisation from below is seen as an alternative to the hegemonic globalisationfrom above imposed by elites through a world-wide normative network premisednot on human needs but on the needs of capital (neoliberalism). For Falk, echoingcosmopolitans like Held, there can be a democratic global normative framework, alaw of humanity. Yet unlike Held, with his weak notion of agency, Falk sees globalcivil society as the only means to this humane law as the hopeful source of politi-cal agency need[ed] to free the minds of persons from an acceptance of state/sovereignty identity ...(1995, p. 101). Furthermore, such global governance, contraHeld who seeks to achieve it from above (his cosmopolitan law), must be builtfrom the ground up and continue to be anchored in global civil society itself. Thisuniversalism from below is also sought by Paul Ghils, who wonders whether theuniversality of action in association a phrase reminiscent of Meluccis plane-tarisation of action (1989, p. 74) makes civil society and its transnational net-works of associations ... the universum which competing nations have neversucceeded in creating (Ghils, 1992, p. 429). It is present also in the work ofYoshikazu Sakamoto, who believes that democracy needs to be globalised frombelow, via the creation of a global perspective and values in the depths of peopleshearts and minds, establishing the idea of a global civil society (1991, p. 122).

The core global civil societarian objection to the cosmopolitan perspective, then, isthat the latters emphasis upon juridical power cosmopolitan law no less wouldlead to a plethora of (top-down, statist) legal regulations and institutions, whichcould be read as anathema to political agency in civil society (Hutchings, 1999, p.168). It might be noted at this point that despite objecting to the statist implica-

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tions of cosmopolitical theory, global civil society theorists at least share the cos-mopolitan concern for the emergence of a global democratic politics. Crucially,however, understanding of the political differs dramatically with each approach.Cosmopolitans, despite a dramatic shift in the level of analysis, remain true to theliberal democratic emphasis on mechanisms of law as the framework for a globalpolity. Global civil society theorists, meanwhile, look instead to the agency ofbottom up, solidarist transnational social movements to the struggle for a globalethic more than the construction of a global polity.

What is meant by a global ethic here? Simply that the growth of an increasinglynorm-governed world system appears central to claims for an expanding role forglobal civil society. Writing on transnational civil society and human rights, Risse,for example, claims that the growing influence of the former on the latter stemsfrom the power of global civil societys moral authority and accepted claim toauthoritative knowledge (2000, p. 186). Such moral authority and disinterested-ness on the part of civil society is presumed also by Archibugi who, while recog-nising that one states interference in the domestic affairs of another may beinstrumental, believes that civil society can and should so interfere (1998, p. 218).

Finally, it would be helpful to look briefly at one other conceptualisation of globalcivil society that does not fall within the two categories outlined above, this beingthe neo-Gramscian approach. Prominent here is the work of Robert Cox, whointernationalises Gramsci in the sense of seeing civil society itself as a field of globalpower relations involved, that is, in the reproduction of global capitalist hege-mony but as also containing the potential to organise counter-hegemonically at thislevel. Thus in the first instance states (as agencies of the global economy) and cor-porate interests seek to use civil society in order to stabilise the social and politicalstatus quo that is globalised capital, for example through state subsidies to NGOswhich orientate the latter towards operations in conformity with neoliberalism(Cox, 1999, p. 11). Yet in the second dimension, and Cox is another to use thephrase bottom up to describe this,

civil society is the realm in which those who are disadvantaged by glob-alisation of the world economy can mount their protests and seek alter-natives. This can happen through local community groups that reflectdiversity of cultures and evolving social practices world wide ... Moreambitious still is the vision of a global civil society in which these socialmovements together constitute a basis for an alternative world order(Cox, 1999, pp. 1011).

Cox sees something moving in this direction across the globe as a counterweightto hegemonic power (global capital) and ideology (neoliberalism), but is also quickto admit that such movement is still relatively weak and uncoordinated. It maycontain some of the elements but has certainly not attained the status of a counter-hegemonic alliance of forces on the world scale (1999, p. 13).2 Such elements asare found occur when, following the resurgence of civil society, there is transna-tional coordination of popular movements.3 Crucially for Cox, the forces of a trans-formatory civil society must operate globally since this is the level at whichhegemony prevails (1983, p. 171). In resisting this hegemony, however, the goalof civil society-based global action and here Cox again follows Gramsci is to

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effectively challenge and replace political authority in the system of states (1999,p. 16, pp. 278).

Whether or not global civil society can transform the class character of state poweras Gramscians like Cox anticipate is, for now, a moot point. No less difficult ques-tions remain, however, when returning to our original focus on the relationshipbetween global civil society and world-wide democratisation. It is to more scepti-cal analyses of the putative connection between these two processes that we nowturn.

Critical PerspectivesAdvocates of global civil society are keen to highlight the lack of formal account-ability of the interstate system to nascent global society. Theorists such as Archibugisuggest that global civil society is therefore the only vehicle for representing indi-viduals on global issues, since national political parties are irredeemably tied tonational questions. Global civil society, on the other hand, can represent global citizens demands by holding governments to account through campaigning andmedia pressure (Archibugi, 2000, p. 146). In the words of former UN Secretary-General Boutros Ghali, civil society organisations are a basic form of popular rep-resentation in the present-day world. Their participation in international relationsis, in a way, a guarantee of the political legitimacy of those international organi-sations (cited in Khler, 1998, p. 232).

However, the cosmopolitan citizens supposedly represented by global civil societydo not actually gain new powers of democratic accountability since the organisa-tions of transnational civil society are themselves in no way formally accountableto any citizen body. Arguing this case, David Chandler (2001) makes a number ofimportant observations including, first, that it is hard to see how civil society canconstitute a new mechanism of accountability when there is actually little agree-ment in the first place on the extent to which civil society groups can influencegovernment policy-making. Shaw, in agreement here, notes that it is difficult formovement leaders to ensure that the peak of a mobilising cycle coincides with thegreatest opportunity for influence on the state. Leverage is often a somewhat hit-and-miss affair (1994b, p. 656). On the global level, of course, it is even less clearwhat the influence of transnational civil society is on policy-making not leastbecause global civil society has no equivalent to the domestic state to representitself to. To the extent that there is an emerging de facto global state, this, as wehave seen, is arguably the Western state writ large with all the problems that thisposes for the representativeness of the transnational civil society organisations thatcan hope to influence it:

From the viewpoint of many groups in non-Western society ... beinginvolved in global civil society is in fact a way of connecting to Westerncivil society and hence of securing some leverage with the Western statewhich is at the core of global power ... The question that arises is whosevoices are heard and how? If Western civil society is the core of globalcivil society, just as the Western state is the core of the global state, howdo non-Western voices become heard? ... How far can non-Westernvoices makes themselves heard directly? In what ways are they filtered

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by Western civil society, and how is their representation affected by thespecific characteristics of Western civil institutions? (Shaw, 1999, p. 223)

Second, and here our target shifts specifically to the cosmopolitan approach,because civil society organisations (such as pressure groups, NGOs, grassroots campaigns, single issue groups etc.) operate almost by definition outside of formalpolitical structures, it is not clear how they could be incorporated into some cos-mopolitan democratic framework without either demobilising them as genuine civilsociety institutions or violating the principles of democratic accountability andequality. For as Chandler points out with regard to the latter objection, we are notall equally involved in civil society, we do not vote for civil society policies and wecannot hold civil society to account (2001, p. 7). Thus to formalise global civilsocietys input into international policy-making may only further entrench opaqueglobal governance in a situation in which structures of authority and accountabil-ity simply do not exist at a transnational level. Falk, for example, wants to makethe activities of [the UNs] principal organs more accessible to qualified represen-tatives of global civil society, but says nothing about how, or by whom, such qual-ified representatives might be selected (1998, p. 319).

As Canovan remarks, there just is no uniform global legal order from whichhuman beings ... can claim uniform rights (2001, p. 212). For this very reason, inthe absence of some global political framework it is arguably simply mistaken toconceive of the transnational public sphere as an extension of the national one(Khler, 1998, p. 233). Only once organised around international deliberative in-stitutions could a public sphere of democratically organised international associa-tions ... shift the location of sovereignty in the international sphere from nationsback to citizens (Bohman, 1997, p. 196). To put the point another way, only withthe onset of global democratic institutions can national citi-zens become true worldcitizens. It is therefore difficult to see what official role global civil society couldhave in providing for world citizenship, given that most of its organisations are notstructured democratically.

For Chandler (2000), the post-1945 framework of formal sovereign equalitybetween states, while imperfect, at least upheld the principle of political equalityon the international stage. Yet the global society perspective is implacably opposedto state sovereignty, seeking to trump it with the ethical demands of global civilsociety (for instance on behalf of human rights and the environment). Shaw, forexample, argues that it is necessary

to face up to the necessity which enforcing these [ethical] principleswould impose to breach systematically the principles of sovereignty andnon-intervention ... The global society perspective, therefore, has an ideological significance which is ultimately opposed to that of interna-tional society (1994a, pp. 1345).

However, when ethical demands from global civil society are identified as thedriving force of an emerging world civic politics, questions about accountabilitysurface again. In an account of transnational civil society from Risse, its growinginfluence is put down to the power of moral authority and the accepted claimto authoritative knowledge. The example used is that of the human rights area,where it is enthusiastically proclaimed that, today, Amnesty International, Human

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Rights Watch and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights define what consti-tutes a human rights violation (2000, p. 186). This is a clear example, as Rissereadily admits, of transnational civil society creating international norms, whichmust also mean, if true, that the norm-setting agenda for global politics is in noreal sense under popular control (although Risse nowhere comments on this wor-rying, if unsurprising, feature). Taking a wider perspective, it is worth questioninghow institutions that assert moral authority can ever be held to account democra-tically, particularly when this is tied up, as it must be, with claims to special knowl-edge. Anyway, as Walker observes, who exactly has the authority to act in thename of rainforests and dolphins is difficult to specify (1994, p. 675). More certainis that meaningful control by global citizens of institutions that would have theirlegitimacy defined in these highly moralised terms is unlikely.

In particular, it appears disingenuous for cosmopolitans, Archibugi in this instance,to posit that one states intervention in the domestic affairs of another has no legalfoundation and may be instrumental only then to state baldly that the cos-mopolitan model entrusts civil society as opposed to national governments withthe task of interfering in the domestic affairs of another state (1998, p. 218).Why global civil society can interfere in other states without legal foundation whenthis is forbidden to states themselves is not clear, nor is it apparent why Archibugiis so confident that civil society organisations, unlike states, will never act for theirown narrow ends:

The transnational activity of [civil society organisations] is interpreted asevidence that an all-inclusive ethical base of world politics exists fromwhich it is possible to appeal to governments as a supplementary elementin the world community. In such a vision, the question of what exactlyconstitutes the political in the international system becomes unclear.Accountability is replaced by shared responsibility towards commonethical imperatives. The requirements of loyalty and conflict limitationare thus set a priori; they do not, that is, result from political discourse.Conflicting interests seem to disappear together with the political dimen-sion of any transnational public sphere (Khler, 1998, pp. 2412).

Besides, the overruling of sovereignty in the face of the ethical demands of globalcivil society may in practice be more tied up with inter-state politics than advo-cates of global society would like to admit. One enthusiast for a globally interven-tionist civil society unintentionally divulges as much when claiming that, giventhe right circumstances, including, tellingly, a specific interest on the part of amajor power capable of using force, civil society might be able to play a role ingetting rid of nasty dictatorships (Kumar, 2000, p. 136). Generally speaking, wecan observe that states and global civil society are mutually implicated in eachothers affairs:

[A] state may seek the support of its civil society in implementing itsforeign policies vis--vis another state ... [A] state may appeal to CSOs[civil society organisations] abroad or support them indirectly in theirefforts to influence the policies of their state ... CSOs may seek the assis-tance of their own state in furthering activities in others states (Khler,1998, p. 245).

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What stands out here is that even if global civil society is taken to be the ethicaldriver behind the overriding of the principle of state sovereignty, in practice it isonly states that are likely to have the capacity to enact these ethical demands vis--vis other states. Shaw, as one advocate of global society, lets this slip whenstating that it is unavoidable that global state action will be undertaken largely bystates, ad hoc coalitions of states and more permanent regional groupings of states(1994a, p. 186). But which states have such a capability? For Chandler, in prac-tice, the prosecution of international justice turns out to be the prerogative of theWest (2000, p. 61).

Proponents of a role for civil society in global governance seem therefore to havea blind spot in their analyses, which is that in celebrating the ability of global civilsociety to make ethical demands on individual states, they miss the potentially dele-terious effects of this on the right of equal sovereignty between states (which hasalso been crucial in upholding the principle of self-determination). This ought tobe of particular concern given that, on the basis of the uneven spread of powerand resources, most global civil society organisations are actually thoroughlyWestern (many based in, even resourced by, Western states) and the majority ofthe worlds citizens are more adequately conceptualised as objects rather thansubjects of such organisations. Shaw unintentionally acknowledges this when hewrites that the activities of globalist organisations, such as human rights, human-itarian and development agencies, make a reality of global civil society by bring-ing the most exposed victims among the worlds population into contact with moreresourceful groups in the West (1994b, p. 655).

Such obliviousness to the implications for equal sovereignty and by extension tothe principle of self-determination of providing carte blanche to global civil societyis widespread in the literature. It figures in Linklaters work (1998, p. 208), forexample, when he remarks approvingly on the powerful developmental pressuresin international society that are shaping the dialogue between states, before com-menting, on the same page, that [t]he grounds for denying non-Western societiesthe right of equal membership of the society of states have been eroded in thetwentieth century. Absent here is any reflection on how the growing influence ofa Western-dominated global civil society might actually undermine the principlesupholding the right of equal membership of the society of states. Falk, meanwhile(1998, p. 327), advocates the emancipation of the UN from the control of statesin order to make it more responsive ... to pressure from transnational social forcesexpressive of global civil society. What Falk does not consider is that his proposalcould well lead to even further concentration of political influence in the Westernsocieties once the principle of control of the UN by (all) states is supplanted by theprinciple of lobbying by (mainly Western) civil society organisations.

Visions of Global Civil Society: still Statist?Claims about an emerging global civil society ... usually reveal the repro-ductive powers of statist discourse more than they do the capacity ofsocial movements to challenge that discourse (Walker, 1994, p. 674).

Regardless of the precise role attributed to global civil society in the constructionof the hoped-for world civic politics, it is notable that across the range of theo-

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retical debate commentators conceive of the telos of this form of political action asa global framework of rights. Thereby implicitly asserted, it is argued next, is theprinciple of state sovereignty over all other claims to political possibility preciselywhen global civil society presents such a possibility (Walker, 1994, p. 670). Inexploring the implications of this turn to rights, it will be suggested also that theattempt to fit a theory of global civil society into a discourse on rights constitutesa procrustean bed apropos the self-determining, movement character of action inglobal civil society. The danger, as Walker identifies it more generically (1994, p.695), is one of positing extant ethical traditions instead of asking how emergingpolitical practices confront and reconstruct such norms:

If social movements are to be taken seriously in relation to claims aboutworld politics, at least some attention will have to be paid to ways inwhich they do, or do not, challenge the constitutive practices of modernpolitics. It is futile to gauge the importance of social movements withoutconsidering the possibility that it is precisely the criteria of significanceby which they are to be judged that may be in contention ... This is notleast because whatever they are ... social movements are usually desig-nated precisely as movements, as phenomena that are explicitly at oddswith the spatial framing of all ontological possibilities ... that have madeit so difficult to envisage any form of politics other than that associatedwith the modern state ... (Walker, 1994, pp. 6723).

Conceptions of civil society that are constrained by hegemonic statist categories,rather than being informed by action and self-understanding in civil society itself,take a general form. They assume the necessity or inevitability of centralised, hierarchical institutional structures of authority, in effect uncritically accepting thediscourse of sovereignty in its resort to a non-negotiable, unitary source of unques-tioned authority as a response to the issue of legitimacy (Schecter, 2000, p. 82).However, the recourse to the idea of sovereignty is inherently problematic since,as Schecter notes, the source of the political legitimacy of the state is the will ofthe people; but where does the legitimacy of the will of the people come from the state? (2000, p. 123). The questionable appeal to sovereignty, though veiled,is implied in the ubiquitous instrumentalisation of civil society for the state in polit-ical theory, as if the former could not possibly be considered outside the frame-work of the latter. Habermas, for example, states that the public opinion that isworked up via democratic procedures into communicative power [in civil society]cannot rule of itself, but can only point the use of administrative power in spe-cific directions ... (Habermas, 1994, pp. 910).

Yet, prima facie, theories of global civil society are far from being state-centric. Sowhat could it mean to say that their emphasis on rights makes them ultimatelystatist? Before turning to this question it is necessary first to demonstrate the uni-fying role that rights play in otherwise fractured thinking on global civil society.The shared understanding, as already indicated, is that a settled structure of rightsis required for such a civil society to come fully into existence. For cosmopolitandemocrats, a truly global civil society would not only be dependent on such arights-framework but would actually be partially constituted by it. The paradig-matic example here is Helds model, where all groups and associations are attrib-

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uted rights of self-determination specified by a commitment to individual auton-omy and a specific cluster of rights ... Together, these rights constitute the basis ofan empowering legal order a democratic international law (Held, 1993, p. 43).In another example of the cosmopolitan approach, Bohman (1997, pp. 1801)argues that cosmopolitan right, emerging from a federation of nations, creates theinstitutional conditions necessary for a cosmopolitan public sphere and an inter-national civil society. While this cosmopolitan right does not have the characterof the supreme coercive power of public right in the state, it is a formal principleof publicity that would ultimately reorganise existing republican institutions andpolitical identities by formalising such a right within new, sovereign, internationalinstitutions.

It is unsurprising that cosmopolitan democrats take a rights-approach to global civilsociety. Yet the same is true, more unexpectedly, for theorists of global civil society,because these theorists see democratisation in terms of ethical advocacy (regard-ing the environment and human rights, for example). Although by a differentroute, this aspiration to entrench a particular global ethic via the agency of globalcivil society also leads to demands for rights. Risse (2000, p. 205), for example,contends that

transnational civil society needs the cooperation of states and nationalgovernments. To create robust and specific human rights standards[international nongovernmental organisations] must convince enoughstates that international law needs to be strengthened ... Transnationalcivil society also needs states for the effective improvement of humanrights conditions on the ground.

Falk similarly calls for the transnational social forces that constitute global civilsociety to work towards individual and group rights within the structure of thestates system of world order (1995, pp. 114, 183). Kaldor too sees the concept ofglobal civil society as equated with the notion of a human rights culture and evenwrites that civil society issues such as peace, gender equality and the environment... can easily, and in some cases rather usefully, be reconceptualised as human rightsissues. Kaldor states it quite explicitly global civil society is an adjunct to humanrights; in her own words again: the language of civil society ... adds to the humanrights discourse the notion of individual responsibility for respect of human rightsthrough public action (1999, pp. 21011).

Yet, returning to our main line of argument, there is a real predicament involvedin reducing the role of global civil society to the pursuit of a rights-agenda, whichis that arguments for rights produce arguments for the state, not civil society(where statism is understood as the appeal to any structures of centralised, hier-archical authority legitimated by the ideology of sovereignty). First, the discourseof sovereignty central to the states claimed monopoly of legitimacy can absorb allchallenges to its authority posed by strategic rights-claims given their articulationin terms of interest and identity terms that implicitly seek recognition from thestate (Schecter, 2000, p. 135). Second, once in place rights represent a crystallisedconfiguration of ethical learning, which is a completely different moment of thepolitical from the fluid forms of critical practice characteristic of movements inglobal civil society that instead challenge existing ethical patterning, for example in

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the name of the environment. Third, structures of rights are compromises securedthrough legal contract and valid contracts presuppose a sovereign state, except thistime presumably on a global scale (Schecter, 2000, p. 134). The response that whilethe state is the agency of the legalisation of rights, it is neither their source nor thebasis of their validity misses the point here (Cohen and Arato, 1992, p. 441). Foralthough the state is undoubtedly not the source of rights or of their legitimacy, itremains the agent without which rights cannot be instantiated. The state is there-fore functionally indispensable to a rights-agenda. Fourth, once rights become themeasure of all things politically, then, in addition to the monopoly of the use ofcoercion required for their enforcement, it is even more fundamentally the casethat, if my conception of rights clashes with yours, we need the state to adjudi-cate between our claims; we are now in need of protection from one another bythe state (Schecter, 2000, p. 130). Thus (global) rights necessitate but also stimu-late the growth of the (global) state. Yet it is interesting that few, if any, theoristsof cosmopolitan democracy or global civil society actually want a world state orthink that such an institution would ever be desirable (given seemingly insur-mountable problems of popular control and accountability at such a level of removefrom individual citizens). This raises the question of whether advocates of thevarious rights-based approaches to global civil society have thought through fullythe implications of their attachment to rights as the means to global democratisa-tion, a move that effectively places the onus on actors in global civil society to makea case for recognition while excusing states their own legitimacy crises.

There is thus an important sense in which the valorisation of rights implicitly legiti-mates, takes as given even, a statist reading of the political. This is ironic since itis precisely the reduction of the political to actions associated with the state thatmany of the same theorists claim is being challenged by nascent global civil society.International civil society works to remind us of the transient nature of politicallegitimacy (especially in its new social movement aspect where previously mar-ginal issues such as the environment are placed on the political agenda frombelow), so it seems disingenuous to argue that the way to consolidate such anemerging world public sphere is through the bestowing of rights by statist forms,as if the legitimacy of these forms was a given feature of the world-political land-scape that nobody would want to question. Blaug (1999, pp. 1201) in particulardraws our attention to the ways in which civil society and this is as true of globalcivil society has to operate from a position in which state power is extant. Thusaction in civil society has, of necessity, historically involved the struggle to winback power from states struggles which, when successful, come to be expressedin the form of rights that guarantee freedoms and set out the limits of state power.Yet these rights are merely the outcomes of a struggle that started with the ques-tioning of the states legitimacy, so in a sense they represent the siphoning off ordisplacement of suspicions of illegitimacy away from their intended target (thestate). That is, rights are bestowed by states as if the state itself operates abovethe struggles that these suspicions of illegitimacy generate, when in fact it is theiroriginal object. Rights offload the burden of proof regarding legitimacy in thewrong direction, from state to civil society rather than from civil society to state:

[T]he state, being a construct of merely strategic and functional origin,need only address the issue of legitimacy in terms of ex post rationalisa-

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tions and the management of appearances. When the moral outrage of[oppressed] individuals and minority groups expose the legitimationdeficit, the state is only too happy to engage in a legalistic argument overrights. States thus functionally encourage the process of displacement ofquestions regarding their legitimacy into arguments over rights. Theresulting displacement serves to occlude their legitimation deficit, and tochannel the utopian energies of the lifeworld away from the search forinstitutional structures that ... might more genuinely treat the legitimacyof the state as an inherently entropic affair. Rights are, therefore, just theplace a state would wish to fight its (now highly distorted) battle for legiti-macy (Blaug, 1999, p. 121).

By extension, for as long as the actions of global civil society are channelled, bothin theory and practice, into struggles for rights, global civil society will be effec-tively engaged in seeking recognition from the system of states. This is hardly thesort of activity that calls into question, or offers alternatives to, politics as it is prac-tised by states. It is hardly the sort of activity that constitutes global civil society asan end in itself, which is exactly how many of the very same advocates for globalcivil society want it to be seen. Thus although from the global civil society per-spective there is justified scepticism of the statist implications of the cosmopolitanattempt to structure democratic global governance from the top down, theattempt to say global civil society with rights implies much the same structure oflaw and overarching sovereignty as in the cosmopolitan model. Whether from thestandpoint of cosmopolitan democracy or global civil society theory, then, transna-tional civic action loses its self-determining character and, with this, its ability toreshape our understanding of the political. This is a particularly regrettable failurein theory since it is precisely this re-enacting of the political that many groups inglobal civil society self-identify as their practice.

ConclusionAs they stand at present, there is a shared problem with the otherwise diverse theo-ries that postulate global civil society as a means to a democratised world order.This consists in their failure to transcend statist visions of the political and of democ-racy in terms of the rights-orientated telos attributed to action in global civil society.Yet as Subcomandante Marcos spokesperson for the revolutionary Zapatistamovement in southern Mexico reminds us in an account of his movements talkson indigenous rights with the Mexican government at San Andres, states can turnrights-discourse to their gain and civil societys loss:

The Hydra of the State-Party system tries to completely fill the smallboxing ring at the table of San Andres not only to capture center stageand display all its trappings, but to keep any rival from stealing the showor winning. In this way, Power forces the others into the fight, but theyare admitted only as losers (Marcos, 2001, p. 148).

For the Zapatistas, who identify themselves very strongly with a wider anti-statistmovement in global civil society, democratic struggle must therefore operate noton the states but on civil societys own terms underground or subterranean

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in their words, because it takes place among those below and underneath insti-tutional movements (Marcos, 2001, p. 162). From the perspective of the partici-pants in the struggles of global civil society themselves, then, the focus on winningrights is perhaps not as straightforwardly transformatory as it seems to theorists.Albeit unintentionally, by reducing political action to interests that can find expres-sion in statist forms, namely through rights, these theorists are affirming a dis-course of state sovereignty. Yet the project of global civil society as understood bymany of the actors concerned (the global network in support of the Zapatistas inMexico is just one example here) is precisely a response to the legitimacy deficitof the state a contestation, through self-organisation, of the states legitimacyeven (see Baker, 2002).

From this perspective, movements in global society must remain just that move-ments that flourish for as long as they or their causes are deemed by their partici-pants to be legitimate but which wither and die once their claims to legitimacyossify. For, once the myth of sovereignty has been exposed, legitimacy must beseen as an inherently entropic matter that cannot be captured by rights. Statesthen, given their involuntariness and attempts at a permanent domination of thepolitical, almost certainly cannot be legitimate. Movements in global civil societypotentially can be, but only for as long as they resist incorporation into the statistglobal framework of law and rights advocated for them by theorists.

(Accepted: 23 April 2002)

About the Author

Gideon Baker, Politics and Contemporary History Department, University of Salford, GreaterManchester M5 4WT, UK; email: g.b.baker@salford.ac.uk

Notes1 Bohman, working within the same Kantian tradition, argues that in the cosmopolitan public sphere

the emergence of which parallels the development of international civil society the public opinions of world citizens can be made known and recognised in such a way that even the supremepolitical authorities of the state cannot avoid acknowledging them (1997, p. 181).

2 Stephen Gill, whose work is close to Coxs, also sees counter-hegemonic action through transnationallinks in civil society as more promissory than actual: [E]merging global civil society ... might thenprovide the political space and social possibility to begin to mobilise for the solution to deep-seatedproblems of social inequality, intolerance, environmental degradation and the militarisation of theplanet (Gill, 1991, p. 311).

3 This non-hierarchical mode of coordination represents the postmodern alternative to the steeringrole allocated by Gramsci to his Modern Prince the Communist Party (Cox, 1999, p. 15).

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