The "beauty" of Civil Society
These days, it's hard to imagine anything that sounds less threatening than "civil society" in the developing countries. The term has been used to describe everything from grassroots social organisations to larger movements for the ouster of established governments that are unacceptable to the "international community." How did this third force come into being for unseating the traditional hierarchy of state and subject is the question to be focused on with particular attention to finding out ways for avoiding the glittering traps set by the architects of imperialism.
Recently, western governments, the global financial institutions, the western mainstream media, relief agencies, and the activist groups of every variety have embraced the concept of "civil society". Entire institutions have sprung up for the sole purpose of nurturing the seeds of civil society. The "civil society" is supposed to be the gold-paved highway upon which foreign aid from wealthy countries can be transferred to the wretched people. The "civil society" system has come to symbolise a new enlightenment at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The question, however, is that what fruits have we reaped so far and what improvement has been made over "uncivil" society?
The growing interest in "civil society" stems from the belief that aid is more effective when provided to private bodies than to government ministries. However, only rarely is the term defined. "Civil society constituents are functioning intermediary organisations between the citizen and the state," advises one text, a newsletter published by the UN-funded International Council on Management of Population Programmes. "The civil society offers an option apart from government and refers to self-organisation of citizens."
This artful explanation seems to imply a complete transformation of the political process in the developing countries, a movement away from existing political hierarchies, and a voice for "real people." It is no coincidence that the rise of "civil society" has been accompanied by a proliferation of so-called non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and a flood of meaningless rhetoric about "transparency" and "empowerment."
Indeed, the NGO is the cornerstone of civil society. But the NGO-based civil society is based on the fundamentally apolitical, or even antipolitical, concept of single-issue activism. Unlike elected leaders, such organisations are accountable to no one except the members and those who provide them with funds. Thus, the "civil society," which has neither a treasury nor a legislature nor an army of its own, can ever be expected to deal with the challenges of Western hegemony in the name of globalisation? Apart from being unable to check foreign interventions in disguise, is not the "civil society" destined to be torn by the rivalry that separates the interest groups that make up the whole of the civil society establishment?
To an impartial observer, like famous historian David Rieff, civil society has become "the new medievalism, with the leaders of the NGOs as feudal lords," who like politicians "do not have to campaign, hold office, allow the public to see their tax returns or stand for re-election" (The Nation, Feb, 22, 1999). The civil society might indeed undermine state authority in less-developed regions, but at the same time it vastly expands the influence of powerful western governments over the same people. When foreign donors can channel their money to carefully selected NGOs rather than to national ministries, they are able to bypass democratic institutions and invest their money directly with those groups whose activities they endorse. It is evident that the cagey use of "private" agencies to take over the legislative function of elected leaders has become the cornerstone on which civil society is built.
Likewise, the donors can refuse to acknowledge those organisations not to their liking, perhaps going so far as to create new groups to counter them. Thus, by eroding the position of elected leaders who are - at least in theory - accountable to the people, civil society goes one step beyond the colonialism of the past. Doesn't it partition societies into factions willing to act as proxies for their overseas sponsors, and eliminate from the public consciousness any notion of "common good"? Isn't it the money donors who decide which groups represent the people?
Civil society got a major boost at the UN's 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, where a controversial Plan of Action stressed the use of NGOs as a means to encourage the use of contraceptives. Indeed, the "civil society" premise is so closely linked to population control that most groups involved in civil society projects have either a direct or indirect relationship to the western population programme. And that, too, is hardly coincidental.
It was the population "policy development" activities of the 1980s that provided western policy makers a laboratory in which to experiment with ways to "privatise" political change. A particularly interesting example is the Centre for Applied Research on Population and Development in Bamako, Mali, commonly known by its French acronym, CERPOD. It was created without fanfare in 1988 "to promote the development of appropriate national population policies and programmes in the nine countries of the Sahel," in the words of a grant agreement written at the U.S. Embassy in Bamako.
While CERPOD officially called itself "independent," it was, in reality, a creation of the USAID and dependent on the US government for most of its budget. In fact, the founding document states that implementation of all CERPOD projects "will require USAID/Bamako's supervision and assistance."
CERPOD was initially touted as a private research centre that could provide advice on a variety of population-related issues to the governments of the nine Sahel states - Mali, Guinea, Senegal, Niger, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Chad. Ultimately, outside donors and lenders insisted that the countries adopt the recommendations of CERPOD, and even demanded that CERPOD be called upon to assist in programme implementation.
The process was more than just underhanded. It was borne out of the desperation of western policy makers who had tried fruitlessly for 20 years to bring population control to Africa. By creating CERPOD as an "independent" institute, staffing it with local people schooled in the west, supplying the bulk of its budget, and finally compelling heads of state to submit to its mandates, the U.S. was able to create a surrogate institution that could effectively legislate political change. CERPOD assumed the decision-making role of the ambivalent civil servant who balked at introducing "large scale" family planning. And the fact that the policy decisions themselves came from a proxy outfit rather than directly from a foreign government gave them false legitimacy.
In fact, if the goal of civil society is to create "intermediary organisations between the citizen and the state," it is a logical outcome not only of CERPOD-type intrusions into internal politics, but also of an era in which aid agencies have taken over many of the tasks formerly reserved for intelligence bureaus. According to a recent issue of the Economist (Jan. 29, 2000): "As the staff of foreign embassies shrink, and the need to keep abreast of events abroad increases, governments inevitably turn to private sources of information. In some benighted parts of the world, sometimes only NGOs can nowadays reveal what is going on."
The constituency-building process inherent in civil society programmes bears an eerie similarity to cold war-era clandestine operations. Official "deniability" for covert operations, says Harry Rositzke, an ex-official of the CIA, in a book called The CIA's Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage and Covert Action, was sought in many ways. "Funds were passed to foreigners through secret contacts. Private organisations were established, both in the United States and abroad, ostensibly by private citizens with private money, and funds funneled to them through dummy foundations and benefactors. Official Americans participating in "unofficial" actions acted as private citizens. Proposed covert operations were equipped with cover stories supplying an innocuous explanation. The aim was always to find proxies."
Without doubt, there are supporters of "civil society" reforms who neither wish to replace national self-determination with a new feudalism nor turn the world into a playground for the CIA. There are organisations that are working closely with the government but such organisations are then condemned by other organisation by labeling them as government NGOs and do not consider them part of the "civil society." The idea of a society built on voluntary organisations does have its appeal. But a closer look at the principal groups behind this latest re-invention of politics suggests it is anything but the "people-oriented" idea its advocates think it is.
Civitas, the premier organisation involved in the promotion of "civil society," was founded partly on the initiative of the US Information Agency, the propaganda arm of the US government. The stated goals of the group include "fostering civic participation in Iran," working to "loosen the grip of hardliner clerics" in the Iranian government, and helping to "facilitate relations with the West."
Even more interesting is an Internet web page maintained by the Philosophy and Religion Department of Montclair State University in New Jersey. Called "Philosophy and Civil Society," its opening manifesto proclaims the need for "civil society" reform as a means to preserve western ideals in the face of competing cultures in the east.
"The West today is losing irretrievably its former global hegemony and is increasingly challenged economically and culturally by East Asian and Islamic civilisations," it explains. "During the period in which Europe and America enjoyed global hegemony, the cultural vehicle of their economic and political power was the universalist and secularist world view of the Enlightenment. During this period, Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge spoke with the same authority as Western bombs and machines. Where Western technological and military superiority made itself felt, there spread also the influence of the Enlightenment conceptions of nature, freedom and truth that defined cultural modernity."
The same text notes that while the western world "still enjoys technological, military and economic superiority over most non-Western nations," this advantage is "bound to diminish." Evidence of the erosion of western influence can be found in the fact that it is "no longer necessary" for other societies to "speak the cultural language of the European Enlightenment in order to prosper in a global market economy."
The document is predictably vague when it comes to explaining how just civil society will supplant "bombs and machines" as a means to foster the appropriate "conceptions of nature, freedom and truth." But it seems to suggest that western civilisation be redefined in such a way that it has relevance across cultural and civilisational boundaries. Thus, "civil society" becomes a way to let other peoples retain their cultural identity while diffusing any ambitions they might harbour about challenging the status quo.
This is a far different interpretation of "civil society" than the one offered by most aid agencies. But herein lies the beauty - and the danger - of "civil society": it means whatever one wants it to mean. And guess who gets the last word?
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