ENTRY # 172
That nations dwell in eternal anarchy has been one of the defining assump tions that have shaped the socialisation of several generations of students of international relations. While political struggle inside the state takes place in the shadow of the law (conceived as the sovereign's command), this mediation was thought to be absent in the international arena. However, the demise of the Soviet Union and the increase in the volume, scope and speed of transnational interactions challenged this traditional assumption of anarchy and non-co-operation. Departing from the presumption that war was now a less plausible defining characteristic of the international arena, and the subsequent subversion of the foundational distinction between “internal” and “external” arenas, it was naturally tempting to conceive of these fundamental changes as constituting a transformation of the inter- national system into a global or “world society”. This chapter will consider to what extent this argument is valid.
Several strands of argument converged to produce this new “synthesis” of global change. First, so successful was realism's imposition of its own conception of the world system that, when the premises of anarchy were called into question, it seemed that no other vocabulary was as readily available as that of a “society”. Second, the failure of socialism seemed to prove the impossibility of an alternative to the liberal political project and thus sug- gested the “end of history”. Third, the “sociological” vocabulary also pointed to a way out of the conceptual impasses of earlier debates, in which states were conceived of not only as rigid billiard balls but also as “containers” for their respective societies. The focus on complex networks of policy-making, rather than clearly defined central decision-making centres, was thought to provide a more accurate picture of these processes in the internal and the international arenas than when they were observed through the conceptual lenses of sovereignty and the autonomy of the “state”. Finally, it seemed possible to distinguish between government and the broader notion of “governance”, the former being only one specific historical form of the latter.
However, this sociological vocabulary masks some deeper conceptual problems. Issues of reference and self-reference are crucial in the discourse of “society”, since the meaning of terms in political and social discourses is derived from their relationship to other terms — to “the state”, for example, or the public, citizenship and participation — rather than from some “correspondence” between a concept and the phenomenon thereby named. Precisely because “constitutive” issues and explanations are thereby raised, their clarification cannot be reduced to empirical observations of the workings of dependent and independent variables in a causal pattern, or to a harder look at the “facts”.
Thus a type of critical analysis becomes necessary that rests on conceptual clarification and the satisfaction of historical contextual criteria, rather than on the collection of further “confirming” evidence or instances of refutation. As is the case with any analogy, the validity of the conceptualisation — of the state as a “contract”, for example — depends on the similarity of certain relationships among the crucial concepts, and not on the discovery of some similarities through a point by point comparison. In other words, to find a similarity between A and B in two different domains is not enough to estab- lish validation; what is required is to discover a similar relationship between A and B: as A:B, so C:D. This logical requirement points to the importance of the historical context. We have to understand the “puzzles”, of which the analogy is part, and which issues are thereby brought to the fore and which ones recede into the background. To that extent, the “social contract” (and its distinction between “society” and the “state”) arose from the dissolution of the estates society, in which “rule” (dominion) was shared and “belonged” to individuals as members of a certain status; now what was emphasised was the impersonal nature of the public order. It is also clear that the shift from the master metaphor of a “body politic” to the metaphor of a contract cannot be understood as having reached greater descriptive “accuracy” or fit with social reality (because a state is neither a “body” nor a simple “contract”). The new metaphor is part of a different political project, in which the nature of the association and the nature of “rule” are fundamentally altered.
One could now argue that exactly the same conceptual moves are now under way when we consider the emergence of a global society. The first conceptual move implies, therefore, the severance of the notion of a “society” from that of a state in order to allow for its reconstruction at a higher level. Here, the forces of globalisation are invoked as having undermined the close connection between the territorial state and the existing political community. This move paves the way for the argument that for (democratic) rule to be effective, a “cosmopolitan community” has to be estab1ished.1The opposition of state and society is thus transferred from the national to the global scale, whereby a differentiation between the steering or “governing” and society (which has historically occurred through the formation of the state) is awaited: this is the cosmopolitan project. However, the problem with the analogy is that there is neither a world state in the offing, nor is there much evidence that the “local” identifications of hiStoriCal communities have lost their significance in practical life, as advocates of cosmopolitanism suggest.
As Hobbes pointed out, the “state of nature” at the international level need not give rise to a Super-Leviathan, because the possibility of collective defence by the organised community alleviates the security dilemma considerably and thereby undermines the “necessity” for a global government. But if no world state is necessary or likely to develop, it is unlikely that a world society will emerge. The issue is not only how the “unity” or the horizon within which the interactions of states take place has to be thought of — typically as a “system” or a community of a special kind such as a “republic”, or a “society” of states — but also how a “thicker” institutionalisation of this particular common horizon can be achieved, even though its experience is (still) mediated by identifications with more circumscribed communities. After aIl, the state remains deeply ingrained in most of our political and social practices. It is the ever-present “third person” Hobbes discerned in all bilateral transactions among the members of a society,’ while no such systematic presence seems accorded in our political life to cosmopolitan concerns. We see instead a variety of trends: the decay of the state and rule by intermediaries, as in many regions of Africa and the former Soviet empire, and a new type of “sub” politics that not only involves a “renaissance of political subjectivity” in the West, but also transforms traditional binding decisions on behalf of a community into “options” for private individuals. This “privatisation” and the pervasive scepticism towards traditional structures and identities makes it difficult to interpret this new politics as the harbinger of a new form of global citizenship. Finally, since even the most principled “advocacy networks” have to pick and choose their fights carefully, their activities give rise to at best a spotty pattern in the pursuit of cosmopolitan concerns. Finally, the nature of public goods seems also relevant in this context. Consumption goods obviously invite transnational activity, and distributive goods might also spawn greater transnational activity, but when “redistributive” public goods are at issue we seem trapped in classical national decision-making structures.
The concept of world society does not usually rely on a “lowest common denominator” argument. Rather, as evinced by Meyer et al. (1997), it is a claim that an ensemble of cultural forms has become universal as part of a modernisation process encompassing the whole globe and vir tually all dimensions of social reproduction. However, even if it is true that the form of political associations, the enterprise of knowledge generation, family life, sexual practices and so forth have all been revolutionised, we still have to look at the practices that are informed by these forms but are hardly ever mere performances of a given script. Given the ample local variation and considerable blending of rather heterogeneous cultural forms that characterise the reproduction of the social world, a concept of a world society must identify two things if it is to help in the diagnosis of our present predicament. The first is the important elements of the ongoing processes, including the analysis of iiomogenisation and the emergency of new patterns of differentiation — sometimes described problematically as the re-tribalisation of primordial ties; and the second, the levers for action, even if — or rather because — the “projective” character of the term remains a part of its grammar.
The issues of discerning, defining and describing society emerge when we enquire into the understandings and practices of actors and of the “boundaries”, inclusions and exclusions that are always part of and form the back- ground to our practices. They are also raised when we examine the increased density in scope and domain of boundary-transcending transactions and try to understand these processes within a larger whole, even if the actors themselves are not (or are only vaguely) aware of these influences. To that extent, the notion of a world society is a “projection” of processes of transformative change that predates its actual emergence in the vocabulary of actors in the closing decades of the last millennium. The term “world society” ought not to be dismissed because of its “fuzziness”, because identical or quite similar problems will be encountered after substituting other terms — “system” for “society”, for example, as in Wallenstein's approach, or after engaging once more in structural-functional analysis. Ultimately, the idea that the terms of political discourse function like “labels” that more or less describe the elements of the social world rests on a mistaken assumption: that is, that we are dealing here with analogues to “natural kinds” and that it is the “fit” between concept and phenomenon that decides the question of truth and/or utility. However, while the notion of natural kinds is already highly con- tested and problematic in the sciences, the meaning of concepts in the social world is derived from their “use”, that is, what they do and how they function in practice, rather than what they designate. To that extent, these con- cepts are more like signals, telling us how to “go on”, rather than labels for things.
The most interesting question, therefore, is not whether a world society exists, but what the “gap” between the practices and the vocabulary means, and what a critical reflection is able to disclose when we, because of this gap, can no longer “go on”. To that extent, neither the projective anticipation of “one world” as the last horizon of a common human consciousness, nor the processes of system integration and disintegration, are sufficient. Instead, we have to reflect critically on the links between these practices and their conceptualizations, without privileging either process, that is, viewing one as essentially determined by the other. Admittedly, this might not make for an analysis that satisfies or comes close to the ideal of a social “science” that is concerned with the discovery of universal laws or constant causal mechanisms. Nevertheless, it might be all that we can do to capture the open-ended nature of mankind's “history” and to provide a diagnostic for appraisal.
From these initial remarks the plan for this chapter can be discerned. The next part will be devoted to a discussion of global governance as it has emerged in debates over the claims of movements and international networks to be part of a newly emerging sphere — that is, a global civil society — and from the programmes and practices of international organisations. In the following, third part of the chapter, I attempt to show the paradoxes of global governance as a “practice” that has replaced “development”, and to provide a preliminary assessment. The chapter concludes with a brief analysis of the “diagnostic” limitations of this novel liberal universalism.
From globalisation to global governance
If one examines the discourse on globalisation during the last two decades, one notices a decisive shift from a notion of an encompassing process that, like a tidal wave, casts aside anything in its way,‘ to a notion that emphasises again the possibility of choice. For the latter, the rather amorphous notion of “governance” becomes the dominant term of reference. Even in the indus- trialised world, the events of September 11, 2001, shifted the emphasis away from earlier “atopian” notions’ of networks and exchanges, of transnationally organised movements and an emerging civil society, to an analysis of the “performance” and (in)efficiency of intergovernmental networks — from courts to routinised police collaboration — and regulatory institutions' ensuring “governmentality”, transparency and accountability. Instead of the former “resistance” to globalisation by societal groups and NGOs, their changing role as norm creators or service providers is now more often the focus." Nevertheless, there seems to have emerged a substantive agreement on what “globalisation” is.
The most important element of the globalisation discourse has been the nearly overwhelming recognition of change in all areas of social life. In fact, “globalisation” has become a container for various complex processes of transformative change. Although as such it cannot act or cause anything, it does become some “actant”, an acting unit, which is adduced to make the observed changes intelligible. Three specific aspects of change are associated with this sense of transformation. First, at the most basic level, there is the communications revolution engendered by digitalisation and telematics (linking computers to new information networks) that has resulted in the compression of time and space to an extent never before imagined. Without such a new way of handling information, the modern forms of “flat” organisational structures, observable in many multinational corporations, just-in-time production and the global diversification of production and of products according to customer demand, could not be imagined.
Second, the development of financial markets and thus of credit creation on a global scale would not have been possible without the continuous and virtually frictionless linking of established financial markets into what is effectively a single institution operating on a twenty-four hour basis. This development, in turn, has raised two further problems. One concerns the explosive growth of financial transactions: for each dollar changing hands on the basis of trade, sixty are exchanged in financial transactions. The other deals with the connection of markets and the rest of.the political and social system; here “liberalisation” engendered a debate on the loss of “steering capacity” by state institutions. Hence the fear that the classical welfare state is being undermined from below through its shrinking capacity to provide for “redistributive public goods”” while it is also being hollowed out/rot above, since globalisation has removed many policy issues from national institutions to international fora or bureaucracies (Zuern 1998).
The more sanguine view is that new forms of control and influence by the various stakeholders result in the internationalisation of the statei’ which, in turn, makes its democratisation necessary. The prospects for such develop- ments are auspicious since the third process lumped together in the container “globalisation”, namely, the circulation of ideas, has reached explosive proportions. Notions of individual rights, governmental accountability, minimum standards and so forth have not only been unlversally diffused, but also have acquired a virtually exclusive legitimacy in all societies." Besides, as cultural optimists have suggested, new public spaces are likely to emerge that are no longer tied to territorially organised societies. Instead, common concerns are now founding new communities (Ekins 1992) existing in virtual space or linked transnationally through a network of “movements”. Thus, cosmopolitan ideals — until now limited perhaps to certain elite strata — appear in this interpretation as the logical conclusion of the democratic revolutions that formerly needed nationalism and the territorial state to integrate viable societies. However, nowadays looser but more complex formations typical of a global civil society might do (Falk 1998) or, as James Rosenau has suggested, global civil society might become a “functional equivalent” to the classical territorially defined democracy (Rosenau 1998: 41).
The political project associated with the issue of governance arose as the autonomy of these transformative forces was contested and the question of “regulation” was raised. The identification of options for control and the search for levers for action marked the shift in focus from “globalisation” to “governance”. Three factors have proved decisive in this shift. First, earlier claims about the inevitability and inexorability of globalisation have been replaced by more fine-grained approaches. As the studies of Hirst and Thompson (1996) and Scharpf and Schmidt (2000) clearly indicate, choices and decisions are still available and they need to be made, even though, interestingly, the arena is no longer restricted to individual nation states alone. A second crucial factor has been the attempt to rescue both the failed states of the South, which experienced mass violence, and the “transition states” of the former Soviet empire. The place for this debate has been the UN and the ever more complex missions of “peacekeeping” and “peacemaking” in which it has become involved. Here, “governance” means, above all, a disciplining of state institutions — as long as they still function — through greater transparency and accountability. If state structures have ceased to world, alternative systems for the delivery of services and certain public goods such as health care, schooling and disaster relief must be established. NGOs have offered themselves as an alternative to the corrupt and inefficient delivery systems of states, and also serve as advocates for local, often silenced voices, which now can be heard because of their links to the internationally organised advocacy networks. As Paris (2002: 638) observes:
Without exception peace-building missions in the post Cold War world have attempted to transplant the values and institutions of the liberal democratic core into the domestic affairs of peripheral host states ... In this respect, the contemporary practice may be viewed as a modern rendering of the mission civilisatrice the colonial era belief that the European powers had a duty to civilize thelr overseas possessions. Although modern peace-builders have largely abandoned the archaic language of civilized vs. uncivilized, they nevertheless appear to act upon the belief that one model of domestic governance — liberal market democracy is superior to all others.
Here, two additional terms that are part of the governance discourse become important. One is the concept of "transition". It differs from earlier notions of political development because its broader scope for transformation includes institutions and practices in the public as well as the private realm. The other is "transparency" (often meaning "accountability" rather than merely the enhancement of visibility), which has become a major issue in social, political and economic realms, and which can also be fitted neatly under the term "governance" when issues of corporo/e governance attain new salience. Thus "governance" is reformist in a much wider sense than earlier attempts at establishing a functioning "developmental state". Its goal is not only the establishment of a viable democracy, but also human rights and a "liberal market-economy", thereby subjecting large swathes of social and economic life to international scrutiny and discipline. Moreover, even though international governance programmes address mainly state institutions, the reforms rely for their legitimacy on arguments about the efficiency gains achieved by a "lean" state, and on the disciplinary control of all aspects of social life through the creation of transparency, benchmarking and reporting. As politics is largely dissolved into technique, the problem of "rule" (dominium, Herrschaft) is mystified, making it appear that it is all about "rules" that either work. by themselves — because they are "clear" and "precise" — or, if there is still the need for some form of "direction" — politics consists in "delegation” to some form of dispute settlement “mechanisms". These range from the WTO to the ICJ, to the global "network of courts”" or chmbers of arbitration, so that the problem of the rule of law is "operationalised", in a way, as rule by experts.
This "removed" and neutral stance, however, hardly squares with the dif- hculties engendered by the complex problems of transitions, because the via- bility of local structures is decisive. Local knowledge therefore seems more important than expertise in, or familiarity with, procedures for "helping" that have been developed in other contexts but are of little use, given local circumstances. Thus, a third factor accounting for the rise of a governance discourse is the result of the demise of development pI;inning. The realisation that projects based on the reigning orthodoxy had done little to achieve the goal of jump-starting economic development was sobering but incontrovertible. Feasibility studies notwithstanding, many gtand projects of yesteryear, such as dams, turned out to be of dubious economic value, usually having quite a detrimental environmental impact, and leading to incteasingly vocal and active local resistance. Likewise, the traditional structural adjustment loans of the IMF, which had already been connected with obtrusive interventionist policies of "conditionality", did not prove effective. Despite the administration of many bitter pills, the IMF encountered again and again the problem of "slippage": a noble circumlocution for the fact that the programme had failed to induce the changes thought to be necessary. Money disappeared into the covers of local “elites" and loans had to be rescheduled for political reasons. But neither the IMF nor the government could afford to admit failure. The government needed access to funds; the international financial institutions needed recognition of their expertise for legitimising purposes. Mounting criticism of these practices finally led the World Bank to reconsider some of its programmes, introduce poverty reduction as an important objective, and institutionalise some form of "dialogue" with local groups and transnational activist networks. Participation at both planning and implementation levels seemed to be a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for success.
These ideas dovetail neatly with the argument that a global civil society is able to provide governance not only by outbanking the increasingly corrupt state structures but also by creating new forms of participatory politics and accountability. "Governance" is seen as a new type of public management that increases accountability through local involvement and through the introduction of managerial and market-based methods into public service provision. Thus "good governance" for the World Bank involves efficiency in public services, the rule of lay' with regard to contracts, an effective judiciary, respect for human rights, freedom of the press and a pluralistic social and institutional structure. These goals, in turn, require the marketisation of public service, a reduction of public sector staffing, budgetary discipline, the decentralisation of administration and the participation of local and transnational NGOs. The emerging structure is one of a network that straddles not only the classical boundary between the inside and the outside of the state but also the boundary between the public and the private realm.
The paradoxes of "global governance"
Strangely enough, little attention has been paid by the governance discourse to problems that arise from the multiplicity of goals that might work at cross-purposes, such as when an expansion of participation might make greater “efficiency" a hard goal to achieve. Even more significant an oversight is the failure to take account of how the participation of elements from “civil society”, such as NGOs, in the governance project is affected by the introduction of “market elements” — competitive tenders and short-term renewable contracts — for providing services in failed states or transitional countries. Competition in these contexts need not be a boon. With a plurality of bidders for the same project, there arises the “multiple principals” problem of serving more than one master, while there can also be races to the bottom affecting the quality of services. Conversely, co-operation should not be treated as a consumption good, as those who are subject to mafia—like cartels of “co- operating” local actors are likely to find out. Finally, having to compete incessantly for funding displaces the time and energy of NGOs, detracting them from their actual goals, for example health care or schooling. Not only will there be a disincentive to report problems with the programmes one administers, but the scramble for funding might also lead to dysfunctional behaviour, such as undermining a competitor, and clientelistic practices (via side payments) towards the recipients of the service.
Thus, a different picture of “civil society” and of the chances for a new and more effective form of governance emerges. Unfortunately, it is not necessar- ily one of benevolence, burden-sharing and joint commitments to common causes. Arguments that competition among NGOs demonstrates the “vibrancy” of civil societ3, and that the ever-increasi B number of NGOs exemplifies the force of this civic vision and of a new form of cosmopolitan politics, are clearly exaggerated. They simply take no account of possible negative externalities. While it might be considered obscene to charge humanitarian or “principled” organisations or activist frameworks with self- ish interests, it would be ideological in the worst sense, not to say foolish, to assume that humanitarian organisations are toto caelo to other organisations because they pursue some ideals or goals of which we approve. As Cooley and Ron (2002: 17, 22) suggest, after having examined several aid projects with substantive NGO involvement:
Calls for IO and INGO coordination are ubiquitous in the humanitarian aid literature, prompting the periodic creation of new UN coordination studies and agencies. Recurring coordination problems are, however, not caused solely by poor communication, lack of professionalism, or the dearth of coordinating bodies. They are also — and perhaps chiefly - produced by a crowded and highly competitive aid market in which multiple organizations compete for contracts from the same donors. Interorganizational discord is a predictable outcome of existing material incentives .
The lack of coordination is not a product of ill will or poor organiza tional culture. Rather it is increasingly generated by the marketized environment in which IOs and INGOs feel required to demonstrate their ability to spend monies and win in8uence, regardless of broader project outcomes.
Hegel's inkling that civil society would not lead to integration on either the individual or the systems level, but that for such an integration the “state” was needed, was perhaps not far from the mark, even though the first part of the sentence seems much less controversial than the second. After all, the “mediation” by the state that Hegel himself proposed was largely entrusted to the “bureaucracy”, that is, a group with a special ethos and knowledge. Given the different trade-offs between competing policy goals the differential impact a policy is likely to have on different groups, and the likely disagreements over the timing and implementation of the measures under consideration, the idea of “one best solution” based on technical expertise quickly shows its phantasmagorical quality.
A good illustration of these problems is the exmple of help to Kyrgyzstan to reform its institutions in accordance with “governance” benchmarks. During the discussion of how to privatise Kyrgyz Energo, the former state-owned energy monopoly, USAID wanted to dismantle the firm completely, whereas the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development wanted to keep it intact, provided a foreign partner could be found who could then initiate gradual reforms. The World Bank, which had sided originally with USAID, shifted later to endorse the European position. Meanwhile, the Kyrgyz officials stalled, as the donors vied for influence and proposed strikingly different strategies. Much of the disagreement among the agencies and contractors, who had developed their strategies essentially by placing different bets on the future, rested on the question of which monitoring and statistical data collection method should be adopted, making it appear that the basic difficulties were only “technical” in nature.
The obvious lesson is, however, that since these problems are not technical in nature the appropriate strategy is to ensure that all stakeholders of a policy are brought together. This shifts the emphasis from expertise to political participation. Sometimes it was on the basis of this strategy — adopted enthusiastically by transnational social movements — that the emergence of new political spaces and participatory structures was expected. Again, the actual record is rather mixed and gives much food for thought. On the one hand, the establishment of the developmental dialogue by the World Bank, and the adoption of the WTO Council's Guidelines for Arrangements with Nongovernmental Organisations (1996), has increased the legitimacy of NGOs by allowing them to attend plenary sessions (but not formal or informal negotiating sessions). The meeting at Seattle (1999), which was attended by 739 accredited NGOs, who — aside from protests — organised a whole progrmme of workshops and symposia to which the WTO delegates were invited, represents the apogee of NGO activism.
While these numbers are certainly indicative of a changing political landscape and a new agenda, the question remains whether spectacular events and even mass violence translate into political influence, or constitute the emergence of a new particular political space. The numbers alone should make us a little suspicious. How can one speak of a meaningful debate and participation with such numbers? True, many NGOs espoused similar positions, so that the'problem of quot capita too sententiae need not arise. However, how can one speak of participation and the emergence of a public if not even the agenda is known, or if access is not granted to the ministerial meetings where the decisions are being made? Given the entrenched position of the WTO and its success in representing issues of far-reaching social and political import as belonging to “trade”, one has to wonder whether the democratisation of its procedures — weak as it is — is not bought at a heavy price, that is, by .undermining both national and international politics. David Kennedy's laconic remarks about why anyone should be excited and celebrate “the expansion of participation in an emasculated policy process” seem rather apt (Kennedy 1999: 54).
The real question is whether the potential for meaningful democratic polit- ics is merely dependent on an increase in information or even of “transparency”, or whether such a strategy has perverse effects. Zizek's (1999: 388) suspicion that “our deepest commitments to equality and participation bind us into practices whereby we submit to a global capital” may be very well founded. In other words, the institutions where the choices are actually made have successfully insulated themselves from public scrutiny and account- ability by creating fora for endless debates and “arguing” (Risse 2000) but with no possibility of participation in or influence on decisions, or of exercising effective control over those in power.
Even if we admit that the inclusion of “stakeholders” improves the input and possibly also the output legitimacy of a decision by opening up the process of deliberation and bringing to the negotiation relevant information that otherwise would not have been available, the unresolved issue remains that of how stakeholders are identified in the first place, and thus, whether or not the necessary level of representation has been achieved.“ Furthermore, we know from the corporatist literature that diffuse interests, though extremely relevant for the viability and the welfare gains derived from negotiated settlements, are difficult to organise. Corporatist “partnerships” are frequently subject to “capture” by narrow but well-organised interests, particularly if one group has an important asset, such as information that others lack, or can provide the necessary episteme, which integrates otherwise separate issues and links them to particular strategies. Some studies of the influence of European business on EU trade policy — to the virtual exclusion of other groups of civil society — suggest that these two factors, that is, information provision and episteme-definition, are the most important ones in explaining actual policy outcomes.” Transplanting such “corporate” arrangements from the national to the international level obviously does not by itself enhance either the quality of the decisions or their legitimacy. As Ottaway (2001: 266) has pointed out:
Despite the claims that tripartite agreements wi]1 introduce greater democracy in the realm of global governance, it is doubtful that close cooperation between essentially unrepresentative organizations international organizations, unaccountable NGOs and large transnational corporations — will do much to ensure better protection and better representation of the interests of populations affected by global policies.
It is perhaps no surprise that, despite the high expectations from global policy networks, only very few of them satisfied the original criteria for public/private partnerships. And questions could be raised even in the “satisfactory” cases such as the Apparel Industry Partnership (which was charged with formulating standards for the US apparel industry and its subcontractors), since only the presence of the US government was envisaged, but its participation was practically non-existent during the negotiations (Bobrowski 1999). Two other rather satisfactory projects were the World Commission on Dams (WCD), which resulted from a Workshop sponsored by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union, and the ISO 14000 Project (Clap 1989), tasked with developing standards for environmental management systems (EMS).
Evaluations of the democratic dimension of these projects are rather mixed, although the Dam project apparently fared much better (Dubash et al. 2001). But even here its identification of stakeholders and the confidentiality of its proceedings can be criticised. The ISO 14000 was, in effect, a closed meeting between governmental and industry representatives from the northern hemisphere. Although developing countries had to come on board and held an effective veto position, given the nature of the enterprise they lacked know-how and access to information, and therefore possessed no clout at the bargaining table. For many NGOs and developing countries, the process appeared to them, as Virginia Haufler states, “opaque, expensive and industry led” (Haufler 1999: 25).
The bitter truth for much of the “Third World” is that its traditional fear of exploitation and colonialism is increasingly being replaced by the practical irrelevance of entire parts of the globe for the “global” economy, while they increasingly create problems for the society of states and its public order. This can perhaps best be seen in the privatisation of security and in the development of a new form of predatory state that we encounter in many regions of the world. Marauding militias and mercenaries at the command of sub- national actors and warlords who have access to globalized networks of (misused) aid, as well as to international crime, increasingly determine the life of many “failed” or “transitional” states.'4 When, with the failure of the “developmental state”, which attempted at least to integrate society and pro- vide the structures for political and economic accumulation, the resources channelled through official structures cease, it is inevitable that the state apparatus decays. More and more officials take bribes and the system ofclientelism and patronage, prevalent in many societies, quickly generates new para11e1 structures for social reproduction. The resulting pattern is that of rule by a variety of intermediaries — “big men”, traditional leaders, ethnic entrepreneurs, religious fundamentalists, and so on.
Examples abound, ranging from Pakistan and Uganda to the successor states of the former Soviet empire. Thus, a Ugandan “minister” owned the central train terminal in the capital, had a private security service which protected embassies, TNCs and NGOs and, at the same time, did not hesitate to use his “private” force to disperse and coerce protestors who had taken issue with his licensing practices for “servicing” the railway station. In Paki- stan, the military the only remaining state institution that is still somehow functioning at the price of representing a state within the state — had, in 1999, to use 30,000 soldiers to collect water and electricity bills, restore the networks by capping illegal taps and arrest corrupt officials. When the public education system broke down, nobody even knew how many schools actually existed, as many teachers had jobs in phantom schools. Elements of “civil society”, such as the largely fundamentalist brotherhoods, filled the gap, providing their pupils more with indoctrination than education.
These last two examples clearly illustrate the serious problems that the new emphasis on “governance” and “civil society” hides. Attempts at curbing corruption and making the state more efficient by relying on the capacities of private actors and civil society were, of course, quite in tune with Western ideas about liberalisation and a “lean” state. However, the beneficial effects of such a retrenchment of the state could not be realised in most developing or transitional countries. Instead of improving the efficiency of the existing state apparatus, such a “downsizing” contributed to its further decay and to the development of parallel networks of power. It curtails the chances for a politics in which the state as an arbiter can make legitimate and binding decisions. Contrary also to the hopes of anti-statists and the advocates of the democratic potential of civil society, who often insisted on the superiority of private ordering, we notice the re-feudalisation of these societies and the emergence of an entrenched and internationally well-connected kleptocracy. This leads to predatory rule by intermediaries and warlords who have commoditised the main function of the state, namely, security (with all the implications for responsibility, legitimacy and accountability), and who have “communalised” other traditional state functions, such as education and welfare, by transferring these responsibilities to local and international networks of civil society. Even if we put a more optimistic gloss on these rather sobering experiences and assessments, one thing is evident: no general emergence of a “global public sphere”, or of a space for cosmopolitan democratic practice, seems to be in the offing. Although we do notice the emergence of new actors and claimants attempting to establish some institutional framework, the appropriateness of the civil society analogy is rather doubtful.
Morals
The above analysis not only explains why homogenisation and differentiation are part and parcel of the same process of transformative change but also suggests that the function of “civil society” in both contexts is rather different. Increasing reliance on these NGOs by Western states and international organisations in the name of “governance” is not likely to have the expected beneficial consequences, particularly if this involves dealing with “big men” and contending with the networks and structures of kleptocratic regimes. Far from creating the conditions for a flourishing global civil society, the result could be the emergence of new parastatal forms of rule in which predatory elites are even less dependent upon their “subjects” than before, precisely because they can link to international networks (criminal ones and legal ones) that provide them with the necessary resources. Similarly, the idea that, through the organisation of all the stakeholders, new political spaces could be opened up, or at least more legitimate and effective regimes could be created, reflects a distorted optimism that ignores the difficulties involved in identifying the appropriate stakeholders and the problems with corporatism writ large.
Thus the question arises as to why the liberal project's promotion of the autonomy and legitimacy of civil society seems powerful and persuasive, despite its obvious flaws. There are several reasons that can, on their own and in conjunction, explain this. One is the inherent abstraction of the perspective that systematically eliminates differences, or declares them unimportant or in need of justification. Unsurprisingly, then, all the problems usually associated with social differentiation do not appear in the model, because they have been ignored in the first place. The most obvious problem is that, for a theory of democracy, the liberal paradigm has no way of providing a coherent account of the role of boundaries in establishing and maintaining existing communities. It either simply assumes that “we, the People” exist, or that it does not matter whether or not people are constituted as “a people”.
The shortcomings of this liberal perspective are best illustrated by Rawls’ attempt to rely on either the specification of the transcendental conditions of a rational choice (behind the veil of ignorance) in order to derive the criteria for a just society, or on the assumption of an existing community. In the second case, some form of “overlapping” consensus is supposed to provide the grounds for the establishment of an order that assigns precedence to the right over the good. Here, historical contingency enters the picture and the identification of an overlapping consensus means empirically examining which structures prove viable under what circumstances, an enterprise that undermines, however, both universalism and the notion of absolute foundations. Thus, given the contingent historical practice, the existence of societies that resemble those of free associations under the rule of law are extremely rare: they are exceptions rather than the rule. Furthermore, as Habermas (1998: 115) suggests:
Since the voluntariness of the decision to engage in a law giving praxis is a fiction of the contractualist tradition, in the real world who gains power to define the boundaries of a political community is settled by historical chance and the actual course of events — normally, by the arbitrary outcomes of wars and civil wars
A second and, of course, equally important reason for the success of the liberal project is the concept of the individual that is taken as the ultimate entity for the construction of the social world. Although such a move entails usually a naturalistic fallacy, there is an intuitive, even if mistaken, plausibility to this position. Here I do not want to renew the debate between com- munitarians and liberals. I simply want to point out that the construction of the individual who “owns” himself, and is, therefore, the bearer of subjective rights, mystifies in the concept of “property” the exercise of power that comes with the granting of subjective rights. In addition, it skews the discussion of a whole host of socially important questions about the nature of property rights, the limits of their exercise and their coercive character, by providing powerful “trumps” in debates. In this way, a comprehensive rights discourse can be constructed in which virtually all problems can be recast as issues of subjective rights. Any interference with them, for instance by regulatory measures, can be “debunked” as improper interference, as the recent controversy about the patents for AIDS medicine in developing countries shows.
The upshot of these remarks about the liberal project is that, by making it appear that certain social arrangements work like natural forces, the project in the end subverts itself and becomes ideological. It projects a universality that is neither normatively nor historically justifiable, as it discounts both the inherent potential for diversity and the existence of several paths to modernity. lt also mystifies power and its need for legitimisation and accountability by making it appear that the particular arrangements we have arrived at are somehow the outcome of nature's plan, and thereby deserve to be universally accepted. Furthermore, by selectively focusing on some aspects of global transformation, e.g. the spread of certain cultural forms, or on transactions, such as capital movements, and by not paying attention to the local mediations that occur, a curious narrative is created in which the elements of the Western tradition, from natural law to modernity, are reconfigured. To what extent they can still serve as templates for a world of our making remains to be seen.
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· Friedrich Kratochwil (2011). The Puzzles of Politics. Inquiries Into the Genesis and Transformation of International Relations. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 262-276.
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