Dev Raj Dahal, Kathmandu, Nepal

He felt that it is through a feeling of being equal to others that allows citizens the mutual respect needed to stimulate beneficial participation in political life.

The desire of citizenry to form informal institutions, groups and voluntary associations for open public debate can counter atomization and alienation of individuals engendered by modernity and cultivate the habits, opinions, norms and capacities of citizens to set up democratic governance.

Informal cooperation between individuals had the traditional moral virtues of truthfulness, keeping of promises, reciprocity and carrying out of social duties.

It radiates the level of trust in society for cooperation and contributes to a stable peace.

Karl Marx claims to liberate human being from religion and oppression of all kinds. He notes that the universal pretension of the bureaucratic state often conceals the particularistic interest of bourgeois civil society and its hunt for individual profits, impersonal laws and de-politicization of society.

What is important for him is who participates in the determination of civil society’s sovereignty over the state and political process.

Marx clearly pointed the need for freedom from want but ignored the incongruity between the state and relatively autonomous civil society under capitalism that marked the birth of citizenship, liberal economy and modern nation-state.

Similarly, civil society has generated universal norms to redefine state-society relations. In the nineteenth century civil society was characterized by citizenship, social contract and ethical choice governed by a system of rights, rule of law and universal reason.

Egalitarian and self-chosen social associations were considered to be more efficient in generating trust and loyalty for strategic action than the instrumental rationality of the system that barred rational discourse in everyday life.

In most of the democratic movements until late 19th century, however, “popular sovereignty was basically a male preserve” (Eley, 1994:314).

The famous work of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) has outlined an agenda of education, civil rights, access to occupations and political rights and persuaded women to acquire mental and physical power.

John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and the Subjection of Women (1879) and the writings of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir formed much of the critical arguments for latter social theorists and civil rights movements, which eventually re-envisioned the representation of women and historically disadvantaged groups into civil society.

Rebirth of Civil society in Modern Era:

The twentieth century thinkers rediscovered civil society to temperate the destabilizing currents of popular nationalism, balance the power of hyperactive socialist and welfare state and moderate the appetite of rulers.

The renewed vision enabled the capacity of civil society to generate values, ideas, symbols, identity and alliance and execute democratization and progress.

Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualization of civil society as an independent political space to contest and end hegemony maintained by ruling elites through education and culture inspired citizens in the 1970s to incubate free societies so far constrained by traditions of legal institutionalism,

Cold War and Marxism.

The rebirth of civil society in the Soviet Union, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Moldova during this period can be attributed to the development of a “third way” between reforms of the Communist system from above and peaceful opposition from below by mobilizing what Vaclav Havel calls “the power of the powerless” (1990:125-214).

Regaining the freedom of social, economic, religious and political life against the all-encompassing totalitarian system through “negotiated, peaceful self-revolution” (Michnik, 1999:3) and the construction of citizenship were the main concerns of Eastern European intellectuals and activists.

Gyorgy Kukacs, Leszek Kollokowski, Jacek Kuron and Adam Michnik emphasized the self-organization of society and the self-limiting character of their velvet revolution.

The prime movers of social movements tried to recover the suppressed aspirations of citizens, redefined the links between the state and society based on immediate concrete situation and aspired to overcome state strategies that sought to demoralize state organizations by cultivating cynicism of citizens.

The patterns of civil society developments in Eastern Europe have, therefore, limited universal significance to only those countries where society is either suppressed by party-mindedness of political leaders, or polity or even the state.

Vaclav Havel and Gyorgy Konrad invented anti-politics as a free space where individuals declined to work for the communist regime assuming that a communist system cannot be reformed in a rational way.

Konrad’s civil society appears “as an alternative to the state, which he assumes to be 10 unchangeable and irredeemably hostile” (Walzer, 1995:21). Sustained underground political education and social energy, such as unity, coherence and action of citizens’ power led the breakdown of totalitarian, praetorian, authoritarian and oligarchic regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America in the 1980s.

This great political transformation set off by the civil society boom liberated the states from regime control, shifted sovereignty from the state to citizens and built vibrant intermediary institutions to socialize citizens into democratic norms, habits, participation and leadership training.

The social democratization at the grassroots had a bigger impact on the party-builders in many cases.

But, it also led to disenchantment with the democratic arrangement because post-democratic leaderships failed to respond to legitimate aspirations of citizens.

Civil wars in Balkan, Czech, Slav and Chechen lands provoked a velvet divorce.

Like in Eastern Europe where civil society emerged against party-controlled polity and the state, the enthusiasts of civil society in Latin America and Asia especially led by human rights NGOs and professional associations tried to transplant civil society against political parties, political systems and states, articulated the contamination of politics by political leadership, assumed to be the genuine representatives of citizens and sought to substitute functions of political parties and the state.

As a result, growing civil society activism against the state disembodied from particular historical and cultural settings has sapped the necessary energies of the state to create public order, social justice and peace, eroded the ideological base of political parties and fostered the cult of a small group of hyper mobile individuals freed from national responsibilities.

This was especially stark in the case of underdeveloped and weak states unwittingly caught in the crossfire of the global political games.

In short, a general lack of social interest made such civil society incapable of becoming a mediating force between individuals, groups and the state.

A similar development had emerged against the social democratic states in France and Germany in the 1970s.

 

The French Socialist Party and the German Green Party asserted the need for the reconstruction of the political society to link the citizens with the state through the concept of common security, ecologically sustainable growth and greater responsiveness to gender equality.

Political society represents an arena where public demands are addressed by political parties, the political system, the state and social movements directly engaged in defending civil society, expressing dissent and offering alternative public choices for the representation of social diversity into decision-making.

The neo-liberal and conservative theorists embracing the “public choice” theory made sharp critique of “rent-seeking” tendencies of the political class controlling the state and envisioned voluntary associations to replace some welfare functions of the state.

The U.S. and the British conservatives thus rediscovered civil society in 1989 to control the rent-seeking tendency of the governing class and preferred a minimalist state.

Liberals were, however, chiefly troubled by the injustice of rational choice built on the purposive rationality of individuals because it shattered the confidence of the mediating structures of society and weakened the government’s political commitment to social justice for the poor, excluded and marginalized.

Inequality in access to social justice has deconstructed the notion of citizenship equality and devalued the purpose of public politics.

A world of growing markets and receding states means more conflicts and less problem solving resources within the state. Pluralists, therefore, insist on the autonomy of politics from the social and economic interest groups of society assuming that political will and public opinion are continuously shaped in this arena, political processes serve as a representative link between society and the state and policies and decisions are legitimized.

The Post-Modern Version of Civil Society:

The new pluralism that flourished in the late 1970s in Eastern Europe underlined the representation of society’s all legitimate groups, positions and identities to address the deficiency of state and market power, cope with rapid change induced by the information revolution and carry out the vision of a participatory democracy.

The transformed shape of the civil society articulates the emancipatory narratives of political pluralism by offering space to groups with diverse interests and worldviews for cultural contestation, communication, networks, initiatives, social movements and the formation of a civic public sphere beyond the classical nation-state.

Globalization is creating the possibility of a post-national solidarity of civil society built on a system of global rule governed by the principles of human rights, public international law, international morality, international organizations and non-violent strategies of conflict management which demand the inclusion of others.

The new pluralists are very intimate to neo-Tocquevillians identified with Robert Putnam, R. Inglehart, G. A. Almond, Sydney Verba and Francis Fukuyama’s writings.

Emphasizing on the irreducible plurality of civil society, they presumed that social conflict could best be mitigated at the level of locality, place of work and community rather than the state.

They also found that social capital plays a key role in driving social, economic and political outcome and established a connection between citizenship, democracy, human rights, development and peaceful resolution of conflict.

The neo-Tocquevillians favored the principles of subsidiarity and defended a political framework suitable to achieve the devolution of public power at the grassroots level.

They also stressed on democracy through citizenship equality, participation, deliberation as well as building transnational networks.

The realization of human rights requires a global civil society to overcome the state of nature that exists in international arena and a balance between the political sphere, which thrives on absolute equality, and the private sphere, which makes it difficult to realize.

But globalism is a term with more hype than substance.

Those that thrive on globalization are economic and financial entities as they have the wherewithal to do so, enabled by their autonomy from social or political responsibilities.

The semblance of a political superstructure that the United Nations and its affiliates provide too cannot be a good model for the global civil society.

The UN system has proved itself to be unable to 11 meet even its basic Charter’s commitment of people’s sovereignty, in spite of the overwhelming support it receives from all round the globe.

The basic problem is state-centeredness of the UN. In this context, the global dimension of the civil society is fraught with insurmountable hurdles. Global operation will be a virtual impossibility given the fact that they cannot acquire the autonomy available to financial networks to expand outwards.

Neither can global political consensus be easy to come by for their agendas, as is apparent for the UN, especially at a time when civil societies are pursuing specialist agendas which are not always politically neutral.

Most of those that do operate globally are closely linked to financial or political entities of states and acting at their behest which have gone someway towards moderating the security dilemma.

They cannot be said to be embedded into the society they are working for. Hence, the idea of globalism for civil society is more of a utopia than anything rooted in the ground realities at present.

A central consequence of the rights-based civil society movement in poor countries like Nepal is that it has radically devalued local knowledge, authority and social capital and made citizens entirely dependent on outside knowledge, skills and resources.

Even the impositions of ‘universal’ or good values lose their universality if the society is foreign to the ideals that come with it.

It has a disruptive consequence as local societies have lost the connection with the national institutions and organized sector has dominated the life of unorganized and informal sectors of society.

One can gauge the extent of the disruption if it is understood that underdeveloped countries are underdeveloped because large swathes of the society remain unorganized.

This has led some donors to shift civil society’s autonomous role from “democracy, human rights and development” towards “partnership and cooperation” with grassroots organizations and the political society including the state.

Civil society’s contribution to democracy can only be guaranteed when its diverse interests do not become a source of conflict. Those who pit the civil society against the state, political system and political parties are essentially anti-political.

They cannot become an instrument of collective action on behalf of the diverse citizens and cope with the effects of globalization. The confrontational, pre-political, anti-political and de-politicized nature of civil society has actively opposed party politics and weakened the ability of the state to create and enforce rules that govern everyday business.

Competition for scarce resources among civil society organizations has nourished a mentality of “we” and “they,” restricted their own potential to generate impersonalized trust and eroded the ability to act as a bridge across social, economic, cultural and political divides.

Especially in fragile states civil society has tended to fragment the political community, deepened the already existing cleavages and stirred tensions.

The absence of a sense of community defied the functional requirement of large-scale cooperation.

We mentality is essential to maintain communication and conflict resolution.

# Thanks to the distinguished author Mr. D. R. Dahal. The third part to be published on April 22, 2022: Upadhyaya.

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