Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civil Society

Millennium - Journal of International Studies

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 1992, Pages 389-420

  Lipschutz, Ronnie D ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84970683813     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298920210031001     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Marshall Berman, AH That is Solid Melts Into Air (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 15.
2. Alan Wolfe, ‘Three Paths to Development: Market, State, and Civil Society,’ Paper presented to the international Meeting of NGOs and the UN System Agencies, Rio De Janeiro, 6-9 August 1991, p. 1.
3. An example of the latest stage in this debate - between constructivism and realism -can be found in Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Polities’, International Organization (Vol. 46, No. 2, Spring 1992), pp. 391-25; and Markus Fischer, ‘Feudal Europe, 800-1300: Communal Discourse and Conflictual Practices’, International Organization (Vol. 46, No. 2, Spring 1992), pp. 427-66. and citations therein.
4. This notion is borrowed from Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO”. Lynne Rienner, 1991). 1 will also argue below that anarchy is, in fact, a fiction.
5. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Studv of Order in World Politics (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 254-76.
6. James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
7. ‘Heteronomous’, in this case, implies that these networks are differentiated from each other in terms of specialisations: there is not a single network, but many, each fulfilling a different function. For a discussion of the term in the medieval context, see John G. Ruggie. ‘Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis’. World Politics (Vol. 35, No. 2, January 1983), pp. 273-4. ‘
8. The term is from Benedict Anderson who writes: ‘Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically - as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship.’ imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6.
9. Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 1976), p. 66. The state-centred systemic model is a ‘transforming theory’ or model that originates in the practices of state diplomacy, is appropriated by those who study these practices and which, in turn, influences those practices. See David Dessler, ‘The Use and Abuse of Social Science for Policy’, SA1S Review (Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer-Fall 1989), pp. 222-3.
10. See. for example. Jonathan Schell, ‘Introduction,’ in Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985); and Zbigniew Rau ed.), The Reemergence of Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991).
11. See, for example, the attack on ‘local foreign policies’ by Peter J. Spiro, ‘Taking Foreign Policy Away from the Feds’, Washington Quarterly (Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1988), pp. 191-203.
12. Stuart Hall has developed this idea in detail. See, for example, ‘Brave New World’. Socialist Review (Vol. 21, No. 1, 1991). pp. 57-64, and especially pp. 62-3.
13. ‘Ecological issues are in many respects politically and ideologically unoccupied territory; and thus the object of attention from diverse ideological standpoints.’ Alan Scott, Ideology and the New Social Movements (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 107.
14. Peter Haas (ed.), ‘Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination’, International Organization (Vol. 46, No. 1, Winter 1992), special issue.
15. The notion of networks is briefly addressed by Sidney Tarrow, ‘National Politics and Collective Action: Recent Theory and Research in Western Europe and the United States’, Annual Review of Sociology (Vol. 14, 1988), pp. 431-3. For a more formalistic description of networks, see David Knoke, Political Networks; The Structural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) esp. pp. 76-81.
16. See, for example, Paul Wapner, Making States Biodegradable: Ecological Activism and World Politics, Draft Manuscript (American University, Washington, DC, 1991).
17. See Gareth Porter and Janet Welsh Brown, Global Environmental Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), pp. 56-60.
18. There is a growing literature on the importance of such groups in a local context. See, for example, David Korten, Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1990); Alan B. During, Action at the Grassroots: Fighting Poverty and Environmental Decline (Washington, D.C.: WorldWatch Institute, Jan. 1989); and Robin Broad, John Cavanagh and Walden Bello, ‘Development: The Market is Not Enough’, Foreign Policy (Vol. 81, Winter 1990-91), pp. 152-60.
19. See the informational brochure provided by Centre for International Development and Enviroment of the World Resources Institute, ‘From the Ground Up: Improving Natural Resource Management by Documenting Grassroots Experience in Sustainable Development’, no date; and also issues of the NGO Networker, a newsletter published by the World Resources Institute (Washington, D.C).
20. Conversation with Frances Spivy-Weber. Director, UNCED U.S. Citizens Working Group on Forests, 7 March 1992.
21. Nira Broner Worcman, ‘Local Groups Think Globally’, Technology Review (Vol. 95, No. 7, October 1992), p. 36.
22. See, for example, Edward A. Gargan, ‘India Rights Group's Cry: Police Rape and Torture’, New York Times, 14 October 1992.
23. For an overview of the roles of non-governmental organisations in human rights work, see Henry J. Steiner, Diverse Partners: Non-Governmental Organizations in the Human Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law School/Human Rights Internet, 1991).
24. Jan De Vos, seminar. University of California, Santa Cruz. De Vos’ work is only in Spanish. See, for example, La pas de Dios y del rey: la conquista de la selva lacandona, 1525-1821, 2nd ed. (Mexico, D.F.: Secretariat of Education and Culture of Chiapas, Foundation of Economic Cuture, 1988). What is ironic about efforts by the Maya to consolidate their sovereignty claims along North American Indian lines is the fact that the sovereign Indian tribes of North America did not possess territorial sovereignty, or even a tribal identity, prior to the arrival of Europeans. The governments of Britain, France and the United States more or less ‘created’ them via the various treaties concluded during the nineteenth century. The loop does not end there. Various ‘nations’, such as the Iroquois, did exist prior to the European arrival. To a large degree, however, Europeans imposed (or imagined) sovereignty and territory where none had previously existed. But it is interesting to note the claim that the Iroquois ‘created’ the United States, proposing that it be developed along federal lines. See Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (New York, NY: Crown, 1988).
25. John Brown Childs, ‘Rooted Cosmopolitanism: The Transnational Character of Indigenous Particularity’, Stevenson Programme on Global Security Colloquium, University of California at Santa Cruz, 19 October 1992.
26. See, for example, Roger Coate and Kurt Will, ‘Social Networks Responding to Aids: Travel Restrictions and the San Francisco Boycott’, Paper prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Atlanta. Georgia, 31 March-4 April, 1992.
27. See, for example, David Meyer's paper, ‘How the Cold War was Really Won: A View From Below’, Paper prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1991; and David Meyer and Sam Marullo, ‘Grassroots Mobilization and International Politics: Peace Protest and the End of the Cold War’, Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change (Vol. 14, 1992), p. 99-140. A number of other observers and writers have begun to speculate on action within these political spaces. See Chadwick F. Alger, ‘The World Relations of Cities: Closing the Gap Between Social Science Paradigms and Everyday Human Experience’, International Studies Quarterly (Vol. 34, No. 4, 1990), p. 494; and Paul Wapner, ‘Ecological Activism and World Civic Polities’, Paper prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association Conference. Atlanta. 31 March-4 April 1992.
28. Buzan, People, States and Fear, op. tit. in note 5, pp. 174-81.
29. Stephen Krasner (cd.), International Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Unviersity Press, 1983). The concept of ‘regime’ can, of course, be applied in many contexts, domestic as well as international. Indeed, according to Oran R. Young, a regime is simply one form of social institution that has been given a distinctive name. See, Resource Regimes: Natural Resources and Social Institutions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982). To be sure, tftere are international regimes administered by non-governmental organisations (for example, the CITES regime), but they are still the creation of states.
30. Bull, Anarchical Society, op. est. in note 6, pp. 13 and 264-76.
31. Indeed, Raymond Cohen has recently argued that, because of the spread of the state system beyond Europe, the notion of diplomatic culture is no longer very useful at all. See. Negotiating Across Cultures (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1991).
32. ‘Neoliberal Institutionalism: A Perspective on World Polities’, pp. 1-20, in Robert O. Keohane. International Institutions and State Power, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), p. 1.
33. Other provocative analyses of the ‘globalization’ of politics are: Evan Luard, The Globalization of Politics: The Changed Focus of Political Action in the Modern World (London: Macmillan, 1990); and Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System: Social Change in Global Perspective (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Luard maintains a focus on the primacy of the state; Sklair uses neo-marxist ideas to describe the ongoing battle of societies against global capitalism.
34. James Mayall argues, albeit in a somewhat different context, that the universalisation of the state represented an attempt to ‘“freeze” the political map and bring history to an end…[which] seems unlikely to succeed’. Nationalism and International Society {Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 56. The Cold War brought some degree of stability by freezing the political map; its end signals the restarting of history.
35. This point was suggested to me by Alan Gilbert. As argued below, global civil society may be a reaction to the Gramscian hegemony of the state system.
36. John G. Ruggie, ‘International Structure and International Transformation: Space, Time, and Method,’ in E.O. Czempiel and James N. Rosenau (eds), Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989), p. 31.
37. Daniel Deudney, ‘Global Environmental Rescue and the Emergence of World Domestic Polities’, in Ronnie D. Lipschutz and Ken Conca (eds), The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993).
38. Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements- and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, in J. Keane and Paul Mier (eds). (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), pp. 74 and 86.
39. The globalisation of liberalism, along with a number of other integrative processes, is actively transforming the classical nation-state. This process and recognition of it is not new, but it does seems much more conspicuous than it once was. See Roland Robertson, ‘Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as a Central Concept’, pp. 15-30, in Mike Featherstone, (ed.), Global Culture (London: Sage, 1991).
40. Richard W. Mansbach, Yale H. Ferguson and Donald E. Lampert, The Web of World Politics: Nonstate Actors in the Global System (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), p. 8. It is probably safe to say that the process was not this sudden. Remnants of the common fields in England continued to exist into the nineteenth century; enclosure of the commons began long before 1648. See, for example, William N. Parker and Eric L. Jones, (eds), European Peasants and Their Markets: Essays in Agrarian History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
41. The end of the Soviet Union, possibly the last great empire, seems to confirm the triumph of state sovereignty, as the individual republics go their separate ways. It is unlikely, however, that the type of sovereignty these republics will exercise will be anything like the absolute domestic sovereignty excercised by the main combatants of the Second World War or the two Superpowers in the post-war period.
42. Ruggie makes the point that, ‘…in its proper modern usage, [sovereignty! signifies a form of legitimation that pertains to a system of relations.’ ‘Continuity and Transformation’, op. tit. in note 9, p. 276.
43. Thus Waltz sees anarchy as an enduring feature of the international system. By implication, only a world state, the emergence of which is unlikely in a system regulatied by the balance of power, could put an end to anarchy. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 159.
44. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), p. 111.
45. As 1 point out in When Nations Clash: Raw Materials, Ideology, and Foreign Policy (New York, NY: Ballinger/Harper and Row, 1989), p. 244, Waltz goes on to argue that there are no rules constraining either corporations in the market or states in the international system. This is however disingenuous. As far as the market is concerned, this assertion is put to rest by Robert Heilbroner in his, Behind the Veil of Economics: Essays in the Worldly Philosophy (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1988).
46. These definitions of anarchy are taken from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1981).
47. On the difficulties of collective action, see Mancur Olsen, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Russell Hardin, Collective Action (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). For critiques, see Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 1. On the possibilities of cooperation under anarchy, see the work of Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York, NY: Basic, 1984).
48. These include not only regimes as commonly defined, but other mutually observed practices as well. See the discussions in Friedrich V. Kratochwil, Rules. Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989).
49. Albert Bergesen, ‘Turning World-System Theory on its Head’, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990), p. 76.
50. Buzan, People, Stales, and Fear, op. tit. in note 5, p. 176-7.
51. This is not to suggest that peace is necessarily at hand; only that inter-state war is becoming much less common, while intra-state war is increasing in frequency. Conflict may also be reconstituted in other, non-state spheres of human social relations, for example culture. For a provocative suggestion of this, see William S. Lind, ‘Defending Western Culture’, Foreign Policy (No. 84, Fall 1991), pp. 40-50.
52. Gene I. Rochlin, ‘Jacking Into the Market: Trans-National Technologies and Global Securities Trading’, Paper presented to the Third International Conference on Large-Scale Systems, Sydney, Australia, July 1991, pp. 6-7. My emphasis.
53. It is possible that the emergence of the universal norms of liberalism - which places a premium on individual ‘self-help’ - is a driving force behind the declining competence and willingness of governments. 4
54. Charles Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds). Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 175.
55. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations- and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 21.
56. Alan S. Milward, War, Economy and Society 1939-1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977).
57. Thus, the growing move toward privatisation of municipal services in the United States, as well as efforts to privatise health services in Britain and reduce welfare services in Scandinavia.
58. This contradiction is evident in the central command bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union. Many of the original management agencies, such as the United States Forest Service, were established to conserve resources through rationalised management, but not for purposes of protection. See, for example, Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (New York, NY: Atheneum, 1980).
59. This point is developed in greater detail in Ronnie D. Lipschutz, ‘Local Action, Bioregional Politics, and Transnational Collaborative Networks in Policy Responses to Global Environmental Change’, Invited paper delivered to a panel on ‘Global Environmental Change: The International Perspective’ as part of a symposium on ‘The Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change’ at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 3-6 September 1992.
60. Note that the upper echelons remained in elite hands until well into the 1960s and even 1970s; see, for a discussion of this, Richard Barnet, Roots of War (Baltimore. MD: Penguin, 1972).
61. This continues to be the case today, as evidenced by the high proportion of non-American citizens receiving doctorates in scientific and engineering fields.
62. The mad rush by a wild variety of experts to offer advice to the republics of the former Soviet Union on a private basis reflects, on the one hand, this diffusion and dispersion of expertise and, on the other, the desire to experiment with their solutions in a promising social laboratory. Or, it may just be a ‘full-employment’ programme for these people. See Robert Blackwill and William Hogan, ‘An Army of Experts-in Residence’, The New York Times, 11 September, 1991.
63. David Meyer has pointed out that ‘international educational networks are transnational and cosmopolitan by nature’, bound together by international languages, research methods and hardware. Personal communication, 6 November 1991.
64. See, forexample, Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); Michael F. Maniates, Organizing for Rural Development: Improved Cookstoves, Local Organizations, and the State in Gujarat, India (Berkeley, CA: Energy & Resources Group, UC-Berkeley, Ph.D. Dissertation. 1990), pp. 26-32; and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, (ed.), Borrowed from Our Children: Ethics, Economics, and Ecological Sustainabiiity for a Secure World. Ch. 2, (manuscript in review).
65. Fax machines were supposed to have provided an important communications channel during the Tiananmen protests in Bejing in 1989 and the August 1991 coup attempt in the USSR. In both cases, the social organisation was in place to use the information flowing out of the fax machines.
66. This does not imply a homogenisation of culture, however, since new forms of social organisation are often adapted for local conditions. For a fascinating exposition of this process, see Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture (London: Sage, 1991). pp. 295-310
67. See Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labour and Capital; A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
68. Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1990).
69. Certainly, this seemed to be the stance of Michael Jordan at the Barcelona Olympics, when he refused to wear the United States national uniform because it was supplied by Nike and not by the company that he endorsed.
70. David Harvey, ‘Flexibility: Threat or Opportunity’, Socialist Review (Vol. 21, No. 1, January 1991), p. 77.