The Crisis of Political Legitimacy

In April 2004, a report issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and directed by Dante Caputo, on “Democracy in Latin America” found that 54.7% of people surveyed would prefer an authoritarian regime if it would better help alleviate poverty and economic difficulties. Only 43% of Latin Americans fully supported democracy, while 30.5% conditioned their support to their living conditions, and another 26.5% were critical of democracy. These attitudes came from a continent that has suffered for decades from the lack of democracy. Yet, the widespread popular feeling is that instead of a democratic culture, what has arisen in Latin America is an electoral culture manipulated by the political elites. These findings are not specific to Latin America. Indeed, in recent years, considerable evidence points to the increasing alienation of citizens vis á vis their political representatives, and the institutions of representation. Such a trend seems to be present worldwide, with the significant exception of Scandinavian democracies. These were the findings of the two worldwide surveys of representative samples of the world population that Gallup conducted in 1999 for the Millennium Assembly of the United Nations and in 2002 for the World Economic Forum. In the 1999 survey, 62.1% of the 57,000 persons interviewed in 60 countries believed that their countries were not governed by the will of their people. When asked to select a term that would better describe their perception of the government, their main choices were “corrupt” and “bureaucratic.” The sample included citizens in the United States and Western Europe. In the 2002 survey, the percentage of people who thought they were not governed by their will was 52% in North America and 61% in the European Union. Fifty-one percent of people in the world found little or no trust in parliaments, a proportion that increased to 59% in the European Union. The least trusted institutions were multinational companies, parliaments, political parties, and governments. The most trusted institutions were the armed forces, NGOs, and the United Nations. Similar results can be found for European democracies in the Euro barometer. The World Values Survey, directed by Ronald Inglehart at the University of Michigan, also showed that from 1997–2001 in the countries included in the survey of political attitudes, the majority of citizens thought that their “government was run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” In the U.S., this proportion in 2000 was 63.2%. On the other hand, on the basis of evidence provided by a variety of surveys, a high percentage of people feel able to change the world. But they feel empowered not through the political system but through autonomous mobilization. This search for political alternatives is changing the political landscape, although not always in the direction of democracy. In country after country around the world, in the last decade people have turned to political outsiders, punished the incumbent leaders, or voted in dwindling numbers. In California, according to polls directed by Mark Baldassare for the Public Policy Institute of California in 1998 and 2000, 70% of citizens believed that “government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves,” and 39% thought that “quite a few people in government are crooked.” This attitude undoubtedly influenced the public decision to recall and replace California's elected governor was used in California with an outsider who promised to “terminate” the professional political class, despite being a candidate of the Republican Party. The voter revolts in France and the Netherlands in 2003 had similar tones. While ideologies change in each context, the common trend is the rejection of the political establishment and the expression of political protest.

This widespread crisis of political legitimacy threatens to undo the democratic system, and with it, the ability to manage the problems and issues of a world in turmoil. But unless we acknowledge the crisis and understand its roots, the rejection of populism and demagogy will not be taken as the defence of our principles but as the proof of our hypocrisy. At the source of this crisis are a number of well known factors concerning the emphasis on simplified image making induced by media politics: domination of interest groups due to the system of campaign financing; expensive media and marketing politics that push parties to use illegal financing, and, at times, corruption; and what John Thompson has labelled scandal politics, based on character assassination and exposure or fabrication of wrong doing as a weapon of choice. But I contend that the crisis of legitimacy has a deeper structural underpinning: the increasing inability of the political system anchored in the nation state to represent citizens in the effective practice of global governance and the ascendance of global governance as an increasingly essential component of national and local governance.

In this lecture I will develop this argument and I show how the emergence of a global civil society is related to the attempt by the people to regain political control under the new conditions of power making and governance.

Globalization and the State

The concept of globalization is that we live in societies in which the core functions are determined by globally articulated processes that have the capacity to operate as a unit on a planetary scale in real or chosen time. Communication and transportation technologies, the globally inter-related media, and the worldwide diffusion of the Internet and other computer networks, as well as the spread of wireless communication, are the material backbone of a global interdependence that, of course, was not technogically driven but technologically mediated. It is not necessary to analyze here the origins and features of the process of globalization—a number of academic works, some of which are cited in the references, have settled the issue.

In this lecture the reality of the process of globalization is just an empirical starting point. This includes:

• The existence of a global economy, meaning: a) global interdependency of financial markets; b) internationalization of production, management, and distribution of goods and services around a core of multinational corporations and their ancillary networks; c) largely as a result of b, international trade (reflecting the internationalization of production) as a key component of economic growth; d) internationalization of science, technology, and know-how at the source of productivity and competitiveness for firms, regions, and countries; e) segmented internationalization of the labor force, with the formation of a demand-driven global labor market for the high end of talent and a supply-driven international migration of labor for all levels of skill.
• A global media system, characterized by the interrelation of global and local processes of communication in an interdependent, multilayered system. The global media system is at the heart of the emergence of globally diffused, locally appropriated cultural processes.
• The management of the environment as a planetary issue characterized by the irreversible damage caused by unsustainable development, and the need to counter this deterioration with a global, long term conservation strategy.
• The globalization of human rights, and the emergence of the issue of social justice for the planet at large.
• Global security as a shared problem, e.g., proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, global terrorism, and the practice of the politics of fear under the pretext of fighting terrorism.

Overall, the critical issues conditioning everyday life for people and their governments in every country are largely produced and shaped by globally interdependent processes that go beyond the realm of countries as defined by the territories under the sovereignty of a given state. Under such conditions, a number of processes constitute the new landscape of global politics. There is a growing gap between the space where the issues are defined (global) and the space where the issues are managed (the nation-state). This is at the source of four distinct, while related, political crises that affect the institutions of national governance:

• Crisis of efficiency: problems cannot be adequately managed, e.g., major environmental issues, such as global warming; regulation of financial markets; or counter-terrorism intelligence.
• Crisis of legitimacy: political representation based on democracy in the nation state becomes simply a vote of confidence on the ability of the nation state to manage its interests in the global web of policy making. It cannot be a specific mandate, given the variable geometry of policy making and the unpredictability of the issues. Political representation is increasingly distant, with greater between citizens and their representatives. This crisis of legitimacy is exasperated by the practice of media politics and the politics of scandal as the privileged mechanisms to access power. Image making substitutes for issue debating, partly due to the fact that major issues can no longer be decided in the national space.
• Crisis of identity: as people see their nation and their culture increasingly disjointed from the mechanisms of political decision making in a global, multinational network, their claim of autonomy takes the form of resistance identity and cultural identity politics as opposed to their political identity as citizens.
• Crisis of equity: The process of market-led globalization often increases inequality between countries, and between social groups within countries, because of its ability to induce faster economic growth in some areas while bypassing others. In the absence of a global regulatory environment that compensates for growing inequality, existing welfare states come under stress as a result of economic competitiveness, and countries without welfare states have greater difficulty compensating for structurally induced inequality because of the lesser capacity of national institutions to act as compensatory mechanisms.

As a result of these crises, and of the difficulties for governments to act upon them, non-governmental actors become the voices and the movements that defend the needs, interests, and values of people at large, thus undermining even further the central role of governments in responding to the stress induced by globalization and structural transition.

New Projects of Governance: Utopias, Ideologies, and the Pragmatic Emergence of Global Governance in the form of the Network State

The increasing inability of nation states to confront and manage the globalization of the issues central to their governance leads to alternative projects of governance proposed by various actors. The most relevant of these projects are: a) The constitution of a world government, on the basis of current international institutions, creating a system of institutional relationships between current nation states and international institutions, and leading to a human rights-founded world constitution with institutions of global governance established over a period of time. This is Jürgen Habermas'dream. Indeed, the federalist project for the European Union, put forward by the German Green Party and other influential forces and leaders in Germany (e.g., Ulrich Beck, Joshka Fischer), is a transition step to the world government. However, as both Habermas and Beck acknowledge, what they call a cosmopolitan system of governance could only be the result of the rise of a cosmopolitan culture in civil societies around the world. In fact, public opinion data and political trends point in the opposite direction, in Europe as elsewhere. There is considerable reluctance in Europe to surrender more attributes of national sovereignty, and this is unthinkable in decisive countries such as the United States, China, Russia, India, Japan, and Brazil. Thus, for global governance to succeed it must find ways other than from the mechanical transposition of the federal state to the international stage.

b) Nation states are confronted with increasing managerial difficulties in the age of global networks. Two often dovetailing solutions have recently arisen to deal with this issue:

• The market takes care of economic growth and equilibrium, with minimal supervision and correction from government.
• The global civil society, made up of NGOs and other forms of aggregation of interests, organizes popular expression and representation, connecting to the government as the processor of these projects and demands in the institutional system.

Therefore, the de facto system of governance is broadening through citizen participation in the political dimension, and through public/partnerships in the management of the economy and of major global issues (e.g., social rights, the environment).

c) In the extreme, neo-anarchist tendencies in contemporary social movements seek the dissolution of the state and its replacement by Internetenacted networks of people, NGOs, and grassroots organizations in all levels of society.

However, nation states, in spite of their multidimensional crisis, do not disappear, they adapt to the new context, and their pragmatic transformation is the real agent of change in today's landscape of politics and policy making. This transformation is influenced, and fought over, by the alternative projects and models I have mentioned: they are cultural/ideational material on which political and social interests work to enact the transformation of the state. By nation states I mean the institutional set comprising a national government: the parliament, the political party system, the judiciary, and the state bureaucracy. In each country, this entire system transforms itself in respond to the crises, by three main mechanisms:

1. By associating with each other and forming diverse networks of states falling into three categories: multipurpose and constitutionally defined, such as the European Union; focused on a set of issues, generally trade issues, e.g., Mercosur or NAFTA; or spaces of coordination and debate, e.g., APEC or ASEAN. In the strongest networks, the states share sovereignty.
2. By building an increasingly dense network of international institutions and supranational organizations to deal with global issues. These constitute two types: general purpose institutions, e.g., United Nations; and specialized institutions, e.g., WTO, IMF, World Bank, NATO, etc. There are also ad hoc international semi-institutions defined around a set of issues, e.g., the treaties on the global environment and their institutions.
3. By decentralizing power and resources in the hope of increasing legitimacy, and by connecting with people's identity, through devolution of power to regional governments, to local governments, and to NGOs that extend the decision making process in the civil society.

All in all, the emerging network state is characterized by:

• shared sovereignty and responsibility
• flexibility of procedures of governance
• greater diversity of times and spaces in the relationship between governments and citizens

However, the whole system develops in a pragmatic way, by ad hoc decisions, ushering in often contradictory rules and institutions, and making the system of political representation much more obscure and removed from political control. Efficiency improves but the legitimacy of the nation state suffers, although overall political legitimacy may improve if local and regional institutions play their role. Yet, the growing autonomy of the local and regional state may bring the different levels of the state into contradiction against each other. It remains that the response of nation states to the crises of global governance is the constitution of a new form of state, the network state. In turn, this form of state induces new problems.

The Problems of the Solution: The Contradictions of the Network State

The practice of global governance through ad hoc networks, has a number of major problems derived from the contradiction between the historically constructed nature of the institutions that come into the network, and the new functions and mechanisms they have to assume in the network, while still relating to their nation-bound societies.

A coordination problem, with three aspects: organizational, technical, and political.

An ideological problem: coordinating a common policy means a common language and a set of shared values, for instance against market fundamentalism in the regulation of markets, or acceptance of sustainable development in environmental policy, or priority of human rights over the raison d'etat in security policy.

A geopolitical problem. Nation states still see the networks of governance as a negotiating table to impose their interests. There is a stalemate in the intergovernmental decision making processes because the culture of cooperation is still not there. The overarching principles are the domination of the personal/political/social interests in the commanding heights of each nation state. Global governance is seen as a field of opportunity to maximize each nation state's own interests, rather than a new context for political institutions to govern. In fact, the further the globalization process proceeds, the more the contradictions it generates (identity crises, economic crises, security crises) lead to a revival of nationalism, and to the primacy of sovereignty. Although this is a general trend for all countries, the key issue nowadays is American unilateralism, the policy of preemptive action, and putting national security first without concern for the destabilization of the world at large. This American hegemonism must be seen, however, as a specific policy of the Bush administration and its surrounding circle of neoconservatives. This was not the policy of previous administrations. While the damage wrought by Bush unilateralism may last for some time, it is essential to differentiate structural, long-term trends, and short-term aberrations in the policy of a major power, even if we know that aberrations may change the course of history. In other words: our world is multilateral, but Bush, at least until 2004, did not seem to know it. And the neoconservatives, who know it, are trying to reverse the trend for the benefit of their own ideological agenda. However, Bush may come to understand that his legacy will depend on returning to multilateralism. If this would be the case, the neoconservatives would be sacrificed on the new altar of a moral America. Yet, as long as these geopolitical contradictions persist, it is impossible for the world to shift from a pragmatic, ad hoc networking form of negotiated decision making to a system of constitutionally accepted networked global governance.

Tentative Paths Towards the Reconstruction of Democratic Governance in a Global Context

The reconstruction of a democratic political order on the international scene cannot be based on a multilateral agreement on the characteristics of a new world order. This would imply that the problem has been solved. We are at the preliminary stage: agreeing on how to manage disagreements. The most urgent issue in global governance is how to govern in a process of shared sovereignty assuming current disagreement; thus instituting processes of bargaining and control, with feedbacks in real time, on various dimensions: political, organizational, procedural, technical. If we start from observed practice in recent years, procedures to tackling problems of global governance include:

• Public/private partnerships.
• The development of a global civil society, with an increasing role for nongovernmental actors in managing issues at the international level, thus bridging legitimacy in public opinion with global issues management.
• The emergence of the global movement for global justice that has forced a debate on issues and on mechanisms of representation.
• The redefinition of the role and organization of international institutions, and particularly of the United Nations, introducing into their practice public/private partnerships (e.g., UN Global Compact), particularly with multinational companies, and reaching out to the global civil society and to the global network of local governments.
• Attempts at defining a Universal Charts of Rights, leading to the formation of a Global Social Contract, as in the project of the International Labor Organization (ILO). There is a fragmented, global constitutional process, with treaties on the environment, on social rights, on labor rights, on children's rights, on women's rights, and on human rights at large. This has no teeth in itself, but then NGOs and civil society take it up, becoming the actors that process the principles into the media, then in the political system.
• Attempt to build new institutions on specific issues, e.g., The International Penal Court (albeit undermined by the refusal of the U.S., Russia, China, and India to acknowledge its jurisdiction); the Climate Change overseeing institutions; the WTO competition authority, etc.
• Media exposure and media campaigns as the inducers of a new culture, ultimately impacting the political system.
• Internet as a global, horizontal means of communication provides a public space, both as an organizing tool, and as a means for debate, dialogue, and collective decision making. Wireless communication increases autonomy of networks of communication.

Indeed, before 9/11, 2001, significant progress was being made toward the multilateral management of global issues, based on networking between national governments, international institutions, and the civil society. The threat of terrorism and the politics of fear practiced by several governments have temporarily derailed the prospects of international cooperation. But citizens around the world are not giving up, and in some cases, as in Spain in March 2004, they are transforming the political climate, inducing the conditions to restart cooperation and dialogue as predominant ways to tackle our problems, including security issues. Ultimately, the power of global civil society acting on public opinion via the media may overcome the resistance of state apparatuses to limit their power in exchange for increasing their legitimacy, and, ultimately, their efficiency.

The Multidimensional Global Civil Society

The crisis of legitimacy and the increasing difficulty of managing the world's problems on a global scale have induced the rise of a global civil society. However, this generic label lumps together several forms of organization and action, which are quite different, and even contradictory in their goals and effects. A distinction must be made between:

Grassroots organizations, community groups, labor unions, and interest groups, that, in every country, defend local or sectorial interests as well as specific values against or beyond the formal political process. Some analysts, particularly Robert Putnam, argue that this form of civic engagement is on the decline, as individualism ascends as the predominant culture of our societies. In fact, the reality is highly diverse in different areas of the world. For instance, community organizations have become a very important part of the social landscape in almost every Latin American country. The difference is that the sources of social organization are increasingly diversified: religion, particularly non-Catholic religious groups, plays a major role. In some cases, criminal organizations build their support networks in poor communities in exchange for patronage and forced protection. Or, people in the community, or women groups, or ecologists, or ethnic groups organize to have their voice heard and assert their identity. However, traditional forms of political and ideological sources of voluntary associations seem on the decline almost everywhere, although the patronage system continues to surround each major political party. Overall, this process amounts to a shift from the political system to informal and formal associations of interests and values as the source of collective action and sociopolitical influence. This is a strengthening of the local civil society to face the problems resulting from unchecked globalization. Properly speaking, this is not the global civil society, although it constitutes a milieu of organization, projects, and practices that nurture the growth of the global civil society.

A second trend is represented by the rise of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with a global or international frame of reference in their action and goals. This is what most experts would name as the global civil society. These are private organizations (albeit often supported or partly financed by public institutions) that address global problems outside government channels. Often they affirm values that are universally recognized, but politically manipulated by governments in their own interest. In other words, international NGOs claim to be the enforcers of the unenforced human rights. A case in point is Amnesty International, whose influence stems from the fact that it is an equal opportunity critic of all cases of political, ideological, or religious repression, regardless of the political interest at stake. These are fundamental, uncompromising values that defy argument: torture is always wrong. The notion here is that even to fight evil, adopting evil practices is to offer victory to the very sources of destruction we are against. The affirmation of human rights on a comprehensive, global scale gives birth to thousands of NGOs that cover the entire span of the human experience, from poverty to illnesses, from hunger to epidemics, from women's rights to the defense of children, and from banning land mines to saving the whales. Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Greenpeace, and so many others, are well known examples. The annual reports prepared on the matter by the London School of Economics' center for the study of the global civil society provide ample evidence of the quantitative importance and qualitative relevance of this growing trend that has already altered the social and political management of global and local issues around the world. To understand the characteristics of the international NGOs, three features must be emphasized:

1. In contrast to political parties, these NGOs have considerable popularity and legitimacy, which translates to substantial funding through donations and widespread volunteer work.
2. NGOs focus on practical matters, specific cases, concrete expressions of human solidarity: saving children from famine, freeing a political prisoner with name and face, stopping the lapidation of a woman, blocking the destruction of indigenous culture by unsustainable development in one particular spot of the planet. What is fundamental here is that the classical political argument of rationalizing every decision in terms of the overall picture of politics is denied. Goals do not justify the means. The purpose is to act to undo evil or to do good in one specific instance. The positive output must be considered in itself, not as a way of moving in a positive direction. Because people have come to distrust the logic of instrumental politics, the method of direct action on direct outputs finds increasing support.
3. The key tactics of NGOs to achieve results, and build support for their causes, is media politics. It is through the media that they reach the public mind and mobilize people in support of these causes. So doing, they put pressure on governments beholden to the voters or on corporations fearful of consumer's reactions. Thus, the media become the battleground for NGO campaigns. Since these are global campaigns, global media are the key target. The globalization of communication leads to the globalization of media politics. The public space of the global civil society is the global space of communication structured around interdependent media.

The third type of reality that concurs to the formation of the global civil society is made of social movements that aim at controlling the process of globalization, and in doing so they build networks of action and organization to induce a global social movement for global justice, as the movement calls itself (what the media labelled, incorrectly, the anti-globalization movement). The Zapatistas, for instance, were a social movement insurging against the economic, social, and cultural effects of globalization (represented by NAFTA) on the Mexican Indians and on the Mexican people at large. To survive and assert their rights, they called upon global solidarity, becoming one of the harbingers of the global network of indigenous movements, itself a component of the much broader global movement. In other words, the movement for global justice is not just one movement: it is concurrently a global trend of local resistance, a connection between many of these movements in a global network of debate and coordination of action, and a formalization of some of these movements in a permanent, but changing, network of social initiatives aimed at influencing the character of the ongoing process of globalization. Such a process is now characterized by social movements as being in the hands of corporate interests and their surrogate governments. Yet, the movement for global justice, inspired by the motto “another world is possible,” is not a sum of nationally bound struggles. It is a global network of opposition to the values and interests currently dominant in the globalization process. Its nodes grow and shrink alternately, depending on the conditions under which each society relates to globalization and its political manifestations. This is a movement that, in spite of the attempts by some of the moment's elites to build a program for a new world order, is better described by what it opposes than by a unified ideology. It is essentially a democratic movement that calls for new forms of political representation of people's will and interests in the process of global governance. In spite of its extreme internal diversity, the movement indeed voices a common critique of the management of the world by international institutions made up exclusively from national governments. It is an expression of the crisis of legitimacy, transformed into oppositional political action.

There is a fourth type, the movement of public opinion, made up of turbulences of information in a diversified media system, and of the emergence of spontaneous, ad hoc mobilizations using horizontal, autonomous communications systems. A meaningful example was the spontaneous mobilization of thousands of youth in Spain in March 2004, against the manipulation of information by the Aznar government in the days following the barbarian massacre conducted in Madrid by Al Qaeda. Using instant electronic communication through SMSs, their publicity campaign reached enough of the electorate to change the result of the election. In the U.S. context, the success of the Howard Dean campaign in 2003, in spite of the limitations of his candidacy and his eventual demise, showed the potential of the Internet as a medium of autonomous organization independent from a command and control center, as it is the case in practically all political campaigns. The implications of this phenomenon at the global level, as exemplified by the simultaneous peace demonstrations around the world on February 15, 2003, are full of political meaning. Internet and wireless communication, by enacting a global, horizontal means of communication, provide a public space, both as an organizing tool, and as a forum for debate, dialogue, and collective decision making. The global civil society now has the technological means to exist independent from political institutions and the mass media. However, the ability of social movements to change public perception still depends, to a large extent, on their communication strategies vis á vis the mass media.

In the last analysis, the will of the people speaks. And people decide their will on the issues that affect their lives, as well as the future of humankind, from the messages and debates that take place in the public sphere. The public sphere in our time is largely dependent on the communication media system, which includes not only television, radio, and the print press, but a whole variety of multimedia and communications systems, among which the Internet is of increasing importance. There is a shift from a public sphere anchored around the institutions of society to a public sphere constituted around the media system. This is neither good nor bad, but this shift does have considerable consequences on the practice of democracy, and on the relationship between civil society and the state.

The media system nowadays is simultaneously local and global. It is organized around a few media business groups of global reach. But, at the same time, it is dependent on state regulations, and focused on narrowcasting on specific audiences. By acting within the media system, particularly by creating events that send powerful images and messages, transnational activists induce a debate on the hows, whys, and whats of globalization, and on societal choices. It is through media politics that nonstate actors influence people and foster social change. Ultimately, the transformation of consciousness does have consequences on political behavior, on voting patterns, and on the orientations of governments. Here again, I do not make value judgments about how positive the choices thus influenced will be. But it is at the level of media politics where it appears societies can be moved in a different direction from those already institutionalized in the political system.

Thus it is essential for state actors, and for intergovernmental institutions, such as the United Nations, to meet civil society not only around institutional mechanisms and procedures of political representation, but in public debates in the global public sphere built around the media communication system. To some extent, the series of major conferences that the UN organized in the 1990s on several major issues of humankind (from the condition of women to environmental conservation), while not very effective in terms of designing policy, were essential in fostering a global dialogue, in raising public awareness, and in providing the platform on which the global civil society could come to the forefront of the policy debate. Therefore, for the states and international institutions to meet the demands and projects of the global civil society, they must stimulate the consolidation of this media-based public sphere, stimulate the dialogue with specific initiatives, and record, on an ongoing basis, this dialogue's contributions, so that they can inform policy making in the UN itself. Harnessing the power of the world's public opinion is as important as broadening institutional, political participation, in the fruitful, synergistic connection between the government-based international institutions and the global civil society.