The ambiguity of global civil society

The tendency to downplay the ambiguity of global civil society emerges in the aspirations that deliberative theorists hold for it as an agent that can influence the debates and decisions of global governance institutions. Global civil society is described as a solution, or part of a solution, to the problem of how these institutions can be made more receptive to the citizens whose lives they affect. This characterisation of global civil society as an agent that can have a meaningful impact on the world is unobjectionable in itself and, indeed, important. There is a risk, however, that deliberative approaches end up doing what they set out to avoid, namely: to make a fetish of decision-making in global governance, rather than engage with, understand and learn from actual deliberations within global civil society.

This danger, surprisingly given his anti-institutionalism, is apparent in Dryzek's approach. In his writings, he offers many examples, drawn from recent political practice and involving civil society actors, which illustrate his hopes for deliberative global politics. These examples, however, often arrive after the fact – after the politics of global civil society has been conducted – to provide a rationalisation of how civil society has apparently done what he hopes it can, namely contest or advance a discourse. For instance, he looks at how NGOs have created a ‘counter discourse’ to market liberalism which ‘eventually made its presence felt in the deliberations of international economic institutions’:

He notes with enthusiasm that ‘eventually the protestors were joined by Stiglitz’, who stated that ‘the protests have made government officials and economists around the world think about alternatives to the Washington Consensus policies as the one true way for growth and development’.Footnote ³⁶

This account argues, with some justification, that Seattle was a turning point in the discourse of global market liberalism, but the multiple perspectives that were actually generated by the protest movement, although alluded to by Dryzek, are ultimately downplayed in this narrative. Certainly it is important that Seattle (and many other moments in the history of alter-globalisation) ‘open[ed] space for recognition of varieties of local struggles against international economic regimes’. But this recognition invites, and perhaps requires, a deeper theoretical and empirical analysis of these local struggles. This analysis is surely compatible with Dryzek's broader theoretical framework, but his own interpretation of Seattle does not engage with the politics, disagreements, practical difficulties, ambiguities or fissures of the process he celebrates.Footnote ³⁷ For example, the inclusion of speakers like Joseph Stiglitz in the World Social Forum was regarded as highly controversial by many activists, and the ‘post-Washington Consensus’ that emerged was widely seen as a rhetorical legitimisation of ‘business as usual’ for neoliberal global governance.Footnote ³⁸ The irony is that Dryzek establishes a powerful and avowedly multi-perspectival conception of global civil society – a decentralised network with no common agenda – only to value it for having a singular ‘impact’ on the singular global discourse of market liberalism.

Why might this be a problem for theories of deliberative global governance? Why can't they simply do both: first celebrate plurality and second celebrate impact? To an extent, we believe that they can; indeed, deliberative theorists are establishing a rich and robust set of arguments on the back of such a ‘dual track’ approach. But we believe it is also necessary to go a step further and ask what is at stake in the pluralism of global civil society beyond its capacity to influence the decisions or contexts of global governance? Is the substantive content of the ongoing discussions in global civil society ethically or politically significant on its own terms?

In addressing these questions, suggestive connections can be established between theories of deliberative global governance and the vast and growing literature on the ethical politics of global civil society.Footnote ³⁹ A question raised by some contributors to this literature is whether the ambiguity of global civil society has value, per se, irrespective of whether it has a specific impact on global governance?Footnote ⁴⁰ As Louise Amoore and Paul Langley suggest, ‘[…] within a named and assumed civil society grouping there are tensions surrounding “who” is being empowered, or “what” is being resisted […] to deny these tensions in a search for a single galvanising manifesto or agenda is to miss the very heart of the politics of transformation.’Footnote ⁴¹ Similarly, Marieke De Goede argues that:

She cites Amoore and Langley in asking how we should think about the individual who is simultaneously a member of Amnesty International and a portfolio investor in Multi National Corporations, or the protestor in Seattle who was filmed kicking a Nike sign while wearing Nike shoes.

The point of these observations is not to take easy pot-shots at activists, but to caution against a temptation to reduce the diversity and ambivalence to be found in global civil society. De Goede argues that there is a political point behind this injunction:

Characterising global civil society as an agent which can be valued in terms of a singular impact on global governance may run the risk of claiming to represent people who are not sufficiently included in the discussion. For each activist who thinks that the WTO should be democratised and reformed to take account of environmental concerns, for instance one can find (many) others who think that the WTO should be collapsed, that global trade should be understood as a social structure that by definition harms the environment, and that we need to fundamentally re-think the entire logic of global capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁴ The tendency to analyse global civil society solely in terms of its impact on global governance institutions may therefore obscure the range of discussion and opinion that can be found within this realm.

The ethics of global civil society

This diversity and disagreement within global civil society poses further challenges for deliberative theory. The long-term goal of global civil society must be to forge transnational or global publics, communities of interest that can make their voices heard in global governance. Given the range of disagreement about political aims and strategies within global civil society, it is not clear that deliberative theorists provide us with a convincing account of how it can perform this function. In particular, in order to make good their claims about the role of civil society in global governance, deliberative theorists need to provide a richer account of the processes and dynamics through which civil society organisations promote egalitarian norms in the absence of pre-existing solidarity ties.

The difficulties that emerge in the absence of such an account can be seen in relation to the anticipated formation of transnational public spheres. Bohman identifies three necessary features of public spheres. First, the public sphere is a forum within which participants identify themselves as a public and engage in the give and take of reasons. Second, participants in the public sphere must manifest a commitment to freedom and equality. Third, deliberation in the public sphere must address an indefinite audience.Footnote ⁴⁵ These three features indicate that the public sphere is not merely a space for debate and discussion between strangers. It is, rather, a normatively rich concept, which designates a forum where a particular type of communication takes place between persons who understand their activities in a special way. The type of deliberation that takes place is not merely orientated towards public affairs, but is conducted in accordance with egalitarian norms of freedom and equality. In Bohman's conceptual framework, this is interpreted as a commitment on the part of all participants to the non-domination of all. The idea of a ‘public’ also implies that participants view themselves as having something politically significant in common, even if this ‘thing-in-common’ is merely their shared attachment to non-domination or their shared interest in a particular issue or crisis.

This interpretation of the public sphere reminds us of the magnitude of the task that Bohman ascribes to global civil society. It is not sufficient for civic associations to aim at stimulating public discussion and debate about global governance within and across national borders. Neither is it sufficient, as Bohman sometimes appears to suggest, for civil society groups to establish accessible forums, on-line or otherwise, where such discussion and debate could take place.Footnote ⁴⁶ Their aim must also be to promote a particular type of communication, in which participants manifest a commitment to norms of non-domination.Footnote ⁴⁷ Global civil society must encourage participants in transnational public spheres to view themselves as a public. This task is made all the more challenging given that most citizens continue to identify themselves first and foremost as members of national publics. The architects of public spheres that cut across national boundaries must, therefore, contribute to a transformation in the self-understanding of participants and audiences. The problem is that, in the absence of a sustained analysis of the internal dynamics of debate in global civil society, advocates of deliberative global governance cannot provide us with a compelling account of how this transformation in the values and attachments of citizens can be brought about.

The closest that Bohman comes to providing such an account is his discussion of ‘minipublics’, randomly selected citizens brought together to discuss particular issues.Footnote ⁴⁸ He describes the convening of such micro publics as part of an iterative and ongoing process through which transnational publics are forged. ‘Minipublics’, he says, ‘rely on experimental efforts to convene citizens and create self-consciously organized publics’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this instance, Bohman quite rightly reminds us that the opinions and preferences of citizens are not set in stone but are subject to transformation in and through their participation in public deliberation.Footnote ⁵⁰ At the same time, as valuable as they may be, the ‘institutional experiments’ discussed by Bohman are unlikely by themselves to forge the large-scale, inclusive and anonymous public spheres that he identifies as necessary conditions of global deliberative democracy. First, minipublics are, by their very nature, short-lived and only incorporate very small numbers of citizens. As Bohman acknowledges, global civil society, with its diverse range of associations that campaign over a wide range of issues, remains a key variable in the promotion of a more globally-conscious public. Second, and more importantly, Bohman's emphasis on minipublics reflects a general tendency on the part of deliberative theorists to emphasise political processes at the expense of political substance.Footnote ⁵¹ The claim that transformations in value horizons can be brought about in and through participation in political processes is certainly plausible, but it must be backed up through at least some exploration of the internal dynamics of these procedures. The capacity of processes to promote the egalitarian norms constitutive of Bohman's democratic publics, for instance, will surely depend on the extent to which at least some participants are already committed to these norms and able to promote them in and through political engagement.

Global civil society as an affective arena

In order to shore up the plausibility of their radical ambitions, deliberative theorists must pay more attention to the content of civil society campaigns and initiatives. It is necessary to explore whether and how actors in global civil society contribute to the creation of new publics. In other words, how do civil society actors go about appealing to and influencing citizens through their campaigns and activities? In addition, how does debate about internal disagreements reflect back upon the value horizons and political priorities of global civil society itself?

The aim of raising these questions is not to undermine the promising work being carried out by deliberative theorists, but to enhance their project by addressing questions and challenges that are posed by their accounts of global civil society. Our central argument, then, is that by their own lights deliberative theorists need to undertake a sustained investigation into the activities of and deliberations within global civil society. The research that is called for here must focus upon the nature and limits of the various strategies employed by global civil society in deliberation about global governance. The reflections that we offer in the rest of this article do not constitute a methodological blueprint for this research, but rather an attempt to illustrate how it might proceed. To fix ideas, we suggest that, instead of constructing global civil society only as a deliberative agent, it should also be construed as an ‘affective arena’. The notion of an affective arena has two related meanings.

First, it captures the sense in which civil society is a space of debate and activity. Activists in global civil society discuss issues of globalisation and global governance, organisational structures, appropriate strategies, and much else about the politics of resistance, including political orientation, power, and the dangers of co-optation highlighted by deliberative theorists. Global civil society organisations and the public spaces that they forge, like the World Social Forum, involve vast processes of deliberation geared towards deciding who and what issues are included, how funds are spent and what action might be taken. In describing global civil society as an ‘arena’, we are suggesting that it is already a type of ‘public’. It may not qualify as such on the stringent definition preferred by Bohman, given the difficulty of discerning widespread attachment to egalitarian norms among its participants. It does constitute a public, though, in the important sense that the actors within it understand themselves as participating within an ongoing communicative practice. The deliberation instigated by global civil society must, to be sure, aim to have an impact on the wider world. At the same time, this deliberation will also aim at negotiating the values and agendas of global civil society itself, particularly given the pluralism and variety of the actors within it.

The second meaning, which is arguably more important, is that discussions and activities within global civil society are not limited to reason and contestation, but also draw on affective modes of expression. One only need consider recent campaigns, like the aforementioned Make Poverty History, to see how music, film and celebrity are starting to move beyond mere window dressing to contribute to the actual stuff of civil society.Footnote ⁵² De Goede points to the importance of the affective qualities of global civil society campaigns and discussions when she argues that ‘ambiguity, laughter, and making strange can be important political projects in their own right which may not add up to a revolutionary project of global change, but which may constitute important transformations of peoples' experiences’.Footnote ⁵³ We might also look to the use of music, comedy, art and – as we argue in the next section – film as important elements in the affective arena of global civil society. Such forms and qualities are under-theorised by deliberative theorists, yet they are clearly playing an important role in the campaigns that are carried out within global civil society.Footnote ⁵⁴

Of particular importance is De Goede's reference to the capacity of these techniques to instigate ‘transformations of peoples' experiences’. In focusing on the use of affective modes of expression, we gain deeper insight into the capacity of global civil society not merely to challenge existing value preferences of global audiences, but to promote and forge new attachments and identities. Affective modes of expression aim at an emotional as well as a rational response; to use popular parlance, they appeal to the heart as well as the mind. In this respect, affective communication is perhaps better compared to certain types of political protest or even artistic expression. A protest or a work of art can, and often does, aim to communicate a clear message, in a similar fashion to a social movement or politician who advances an argument in the public sphere. At the same time, there is clearly another, arguably richer, communicative dynamic at work in protest or art, insofar as it aims to stimulate an emotional or affective response in its audience. An analysis of the complexity of the communicative utterances projected into the world by actors in global civil society, which focuses on their educative and sentimental content, may help us to better understand how civil society can perform the functions ascribed to it by deliberative theorists. In particular, it may help us to appreciate how global civil society might, after all, play an important role in the creation of new publics. It may also cast light on the means through which actors in the affective arena reflect upon disagreements within global civil society itself.

Campaign adverts

Perhaps the most obvious sense in which global civil society has experienced a turn to film is in the use of ‘campaign adverts’. These are generally short, relatively low budget film clips that identify a major issue area or problem and posit a particular campaign as the ready solution to these problems. In line with much of what Bohman and Dryzek argue, such films are capable of subjecting international institutions to a publicity of reasons that could perhaps democratise the discourses of global governance. For instance, the British NGO War on Want regularly condenses its campaign messages into short 5–10 minute films which can be viewed for free at its website and which campaigners often carry to forums and meetings.Footnote ⁵⁶ In particular, in a campaign video on the WTO, War on Want suggests that despite liberal rhetoric free trade policies have actually led to the loss of jobs, widespread internal migration from agricultural to urban areas, and the creation of poverty.Footnote ⁵⁷

In this way, campaign adverts probably fit neatly within the schematic sketched in previous sections about how global civil society can partake in deliberative global governance. Perhaps oversimplifying, Bohman's standard for the creation of democratic public spheres is probably met by the interactions between say, Make Poverty History and the G8, where media message and films played no small part.Footnote ⁵⁸ In a similar fashion, Dryzek's notion of ‘democratising a discourse’ can be adequately stretched to meet the kinds of roles and services that campaign adverts provide. Due to the reduced cost of making films and distributing them via the internet or social forums, it is quite possible for such campaign adverts to serve the deliberative function of educating, and provoking democratic deliberation over particular issues. Campaign adverts can identify an issue area which might be a suitable basis for forming a public around, such as climate change, poverty, animal cruelty, or sweatshops. In addition, campaign adverts can provide an interesting, if somewhat short, gamut of reasons for engaging with, deliberating about and perhaps reforming an aspect of global governance.

It is perhaps unlikely that deliberative theorists would want to attach too much significance to these forms. In the case of charities, campaign adverts are most famously (perhaps infamously?) associated with a mass market television approach which commonly depict helpless, starving, Africans, (usually women and/or women with children).Footnote ⁵⁹ Such campaign adverts have helped charities and other NGOs to deal with the twin objectives of gaining funds and ‘spreading the word’, but for some within civil society they have come at the expense of actually including those whom the charities claim to speak for. For instance, in opposition to the perceived elitism of the Make Poverty History Campaign, a coalition of Southern grass-roots organisations formed a counter campaign called ‘Not About Us Without Us’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this instance, the thicker egalitarian values sought by theorists like Bohman arguably emerged out of a contest within and amongst global civil society activists. Activists associated with Make Poverty History clearly focused, at least in part, on influencing decision-making (the G8), whereas their ‘opponents’ interrogated the discursive methods through which these political aims were pursued.

User-generated film

The rise of user generated film is perhaps more likely to speak to the deliberative values of inclusion and recognition. User generated film works on the straightforward principle that individuals are best placed to document their experiences and life chances/constraints. Indeed, certain civil society operations describe this type of film making as ‘participatory video’.

A key possibility presented by user generated film is a potential link to grassroots. In a now famous example, Indymedia provides a framework where anyone, anywhere in the world, can upload their own film commentaries on political events under the slogan, ‘don't hate the media, become the media’.Footnote ⁶¹ The aim of indymedia is to provide a web forum where activists could circumvent what they regarded as the one-sided reporting of anti-globalisation protests. Instead of the common narrative of protests – protestors throwing missiles and the police responding with ‘reasonable force’ – films document peaceful demonstrations which were then broken up by aggressive police actions.

Sometimes, the organisation of participatory video involves a ‘top-down’ promotion of ‘bottom-up’ practices. In line with deliberative themes of inclusion and recognition, participatory video often involves the practice of giving video cameras to marginalised groups like the urban poor, or people suffering with HIV, for instance, so that they can tell their own stories about their lived experiences.Footnote ⁶² Participatory video is seen as crucial aspect of including the dispossessed and the voiceless in the practice and deliberative process of deciding upon developmental goals and objectives. As Pat Norrish suggests:

In a similar vein, the World Bank has championed the benefits of participatory film making as a means of learning something about the people who many in global civil society claim to speak for, arguing that:

Of course, it would be easy to over sell this emergent form. Participatory video relies on the extension of information technology to poor communities often with a highly focused set of objectives, that is, to create economic growth. As Garrett Brown discusses in his contribution to this volume, the principle of multi-sectoralism is often tarnished by the way in which the initial debate is set up and how certain and particular sectors are able to dominate proceedings.Footnote ⁶⁵ An important issue is whether user generated film could explore the possibility of some form of hybrid between placing a radical emphasis on autonomy, such that film subjects are chosen by film makers, and the kind of funded, and highly focused, emphasis on development issues favoured by the World Bank, which perhaps privileges the economic dimensions of people's lives. However, the successful inclusion of the subjects of development in at least the deliberations over how development should proceed is surely an important spur for a deliberative approach to global governance.

Ethical documentaries

Finally, there has been a recent growth in the production of ‘ethical’ films and documentaries. Sometimes these are films funded by ethical entrepreneurs, such as Black Gold; others are films made with an ethical objective in mind. Films like Life and Debt and Darwin's Nightmare, for instance, each tap into an important critical issue within the discussion of globalisation that is both interesting for, and arguably constitutive of, global civil society. For instance, An Inconvenient Truth was instrumental in the generation of public energy towards the ‘Live Earth’ campaign.

A key example of this type of film is Black Gold, a documentary about the coffee industry with the subtitle ‘wake up and smell the coffee’. Black Gold occupies a space on a spectrum between film and global civil society. The narrative of Black Gold strongly endorses fair trade as a route beyond the pathologies of the Coffee Market. The film presents a stark image of a world coffee price predominantly governed by the New York Coffee Exchange which agrees a price to trade beans from developing country suppliers to developed world coffee processors. Of course the steps in the supply chain are far more complex. On the one hand, developing country suppliers buy from a large number of small farmers at a lower price even that the New York Coffee Exchange. On the other hand, the developed country suppliers can sell on to supermarkets and coffee shops at a much higher price. The resultant differential means that the price paid for one cup of coffee in Starbucks is roughly the price paid to farmers for two sacks of coffee.

In this context, the film tells a sympathetic narrative of how one developing country supplier has engaged in fair trade deals to guarantee a better price to farmers. Black Gold is therefore both a serious cinematic engagement with the issue of trade and a political endorsement of the Fair Trade campaign/movement/business. While such films are obviously important for spreading awareness about unfair trade practices and educating a broader public about the possibilities of fair trade practices, there is perhaps a sense in which Black Gold misses the possibility of deeper critique of trade. As a counterpoint, Darwin's Nightmare presents a root and branch deconstruction of the trade relation as it was felt in Tanzania. This film tells a far darker story of how a society can become structured around a single export product – the Nile Perch – fished and processed for trade to European markets. Because of the cash value of the Nile Perch, nearly all areas of society around Lake Victoria are either involved in the industry or parasitic upon it; including begging, prostitution, and the bastard industry of fish heads and fish bones for local people (that is, Tanzanians sell the meat and buy the bones).

The importance of Darwin's Nightmare is that it shows how the structure of the trade relation, emphatically endorsed by the European Commission as a route to development, is actually capable of disarticulating a community. The concentration of capital and profit draws male farmers from the rural areas to fish, while women often end up with little choice but prostitution. Moreover, the film makers structure their narrative around the transport planes which enter and leave everyday. They come in empty and leave full of fish. The Russian pilots are frequent and sometimes violent customers for the prostitutes and eventually disclose some of their other trade jobs, the principal among which is the import of arms. One pilot tells of how he once realised that at Christmas he was taking fish to the tables of children in Europe and guns to the child soldiers of Africa.

As an element within global civil society the film performs many, often ambiguous functions. On the one hand there is clearly an educative dimension to Darwin's Nightmare. In this way, film might provide an important site of ‘ontological deliberation’ over global governance. Against the ‘big questions’ of deliberative global governance, which focus on how global civil society can affect the WTO, for instance, this type of narrative might actually undermine the ethical basis of such a view, by levelling a foundational critique of global trade, per se. Indeed, there is something quite unnerving about the deliberative view that the inclusion of more voices in decision making can actually solve the large problem of what counts as non-domination on a global scale. How can democratising the WTO address the issue of the structural inequalities of the global trade relation? How can it address the issue of the relationship between global trade and environmental degradation? Perhaps it can, but we would require a far more explicit engagement with such fundamental dilemmas. On the other hand, the film had a paradoxical impact: French supermarkets refused to continue stocking the Nile Perch and the Tanzanian government began a crackdown on anyone who was involved with the film.Footnote ⁶⁶ Thus, a radical intervention had a negative, though unintended consequence.

In this way, the move to film has yielded not only a technical complement to the subject of deliberation within the arena of global civil society but also a set of substantive issues relating to the ethical and political priorities of deliberative global governance. This might equally occur via a greater engagement with social forum discussions and the protracted debates between the ‘horizontals’ and the ‘verticals’ (or the grassroots networks and the NGO's) over the proper organisation of the World Social Forum. But the point would remain the same: fundamental ontological and ethical disagreement about the shape and practice of global governance will not be overcome via pluralism alone. The aim of our argument, as we have emphasised, is not to reject deliberative accounts of global civil society. Our concern, rather, is to draw out, in a constructive fashion, what we see as serious empirical and political difficulties in these accounts. An example of these difficulties, neatly illustrated by our discussion of Darwin's Nightmare, is that incorporating a plurality of perspectives in global governance may not, in and of itself, promote the normative values that animate deliberative theories of global governance.