What would global civil society
(GCS) look like if we were to
conceive of it visually? It would
probably appear as a gigantic marketplace
in which various ideas, projects, causes,
issues, campaigns and movements are on
offer; the space of perchance limitless
political options, and the sphere in which
activists and democrats can choose which
particular mast they would like to hoist
their flag onto. A word of caution may be
necessary at this point: like any space in
which multiple projects unfold, global civil
society is both plural and contested. Not
all projects sit comfortably with each other,
many speak past each other, others jostle
with each other, and yet others are involved
in struggles for hegemony. The
politics of GCS is about the politics of
affirmation as well as that of conflictridden
encounters, the politics of solidarity
as well as that of confrontation. Here
we see protests against globalisation as
well as struggles that seek to render
globalisation softer. Kaldor, for instance,
accepts that only a few of the protestors
at the by now famous “battle for Seattle”
were actually against globalisation; the
others wanted to reform international trade
and financial institutions as well as make
them accountable. [1] And the same phenomenon
is echoed at various World Social
Forums. “Another world is possible”, goes
the slogan. However, according to one
newspaper report, “delegates bristle at the
WSF being called the ‘anti-globalisation’
meet”. They argue that they are not meeting
here to register protests but to work out
concrete proposals that will be superior to
what will be floated at the New York
meeting of the World Economic Forum
(WEF). [2]

But this is what the generic concept of
civil society is about; civil societies possess
no one attribute, no one core, and no
one moral disposition. Civil societies are
spaces which house a mélange of different
projects. This may be the strength of civil
society; it is also possibly one of its major
weaknesses. For if the forte of civil society
is openness and accessibility, then can we
assume that everything that is good makes
it way into civil society, and that other not
so desirable projects are barred entry? I
am reluctant to believe this, much as I
would like to, simply because some of the
most odious and openly fascist comments
against religious minorities in India, are
to be found in cyber-networks which bring
non-resident and resident Indians together
in the politics of resentful and angry
majoritarianism. And that global networks
also connect patriarchal, racist, and
“terrorist” groups is not unknown.

In other words, there is nothing intrinsically
democratic about civil society.
Civil society has to be rendered democratic
in and through sustained engagement
with undemocratic groups. It is this
precise understanding of civil society; as
a deeply contested domain that had been
foregrounded by Hegel. For Hegel, the
inhabitant of civil society is the “concrete
person who is a totality of wants and a
mixture of caprice and physical necessity”.
 [3] Here, emancipated from familial
bonds, men tend to follow their own
gratification and behave selfishly. The
project of civil society can easily be
wrecked. Yet modern bourgeois society
provides the means of its own redemption.
In the course of the actual attainment of
selfish ends...there is formed a system of
complete interdependence, wherein the
livelihood, happiness, and legal status of
one man is interwoven with the livelihood,
happiness, and rights of all. [4] This
countervailing tendency in civil society
enables universality to moderate and prevail
over rank selfishness. But this principle
of universality, suggests Hegel, is
implicit rather than explicit, implied rather
than articulated and recognised. It, therefore,
needs to be consolidated and institutionalised
through a system of mediations.
The space for the reconciliation
between distinct and even incompatible
projects of particularity and universality
is civil society. For these reasons civil
society is the theatre of history. [5]

Let us, for the argumentative moment
at least, wish away the uncomfortable fact
that “actually existing” global civil society
is not only plural but also polarised and
disconnected, and hoist our particular flag
onto campaigns for human rights, humanitarian
aid, anti-war, anti-nuclearisation,
anti-poverty, and anti-authoritarianism, all
of which seek to deepen democracy. These
campaigns (I am reluctant to term them
social movements because the groups
involved in these campaigns do not
politicise people or search for a mass base)
can be considered to be democratic, but
considering that practices often, if not
invariably, deflect from the text, should
democrats not be engaging with this activism
from the vantage point of the concept
of democracy? This of course begs the
question: what exactly are we speaking of
when we speak of democracy? And what
is the vantage point that our preferred
version of democracy brings to bear on the
evaluation of global civil society? I deal
with this question in the latter part of the
paper, here let me hasten to add that to
critically engage with the practices of
global civil society from the perspective
of democracy, howsoever partial this
perspective may be, is not to suggest that
we would be better off without activism
in this sphere and of this sphere. Much of
this activism has made the world less horrid,
less exploitative, and less gloomy for the
inhabitants of the south.

However as Gramsci had warned us,
whereas civil society is a necessary prerequisite
of democracy, actually existing
civil societies do not always promote
democracy. Gramsci had argued that the
state institutionalises invisible, intangible
and subtle forms of power through multiple
social practices in civil society, through
educational, cultural and religious systems
and other related institutions for instance.
Political society disciplines the body
through its penal codes and prisons, but
civil society disciplines the mind and the
psyche. [6] For this reason, civil societies,
particularly global civil society which exerts
so much influence over us, have to be
appraised from the perspective of what the
basic presuppositions of democracy are.
This is what this essay seeks to do.

 I. Global Justice and Global Civil Society

The concept and the practices of global
civil society have been in much of current
literature, associated with globalisation,
global governance, and cosmopolitan
democracy. [7] I would suggest that the
deeper logic that informs activism in
global civil society is that of global justice.
Why would activists and international
NGOs (INGOs) spend much of their time
and physical and mental energy struggling
for justice for the worse off in remote parts
of the world, unless their activism was
inspired by a deep sense of obligation
towards the impoverished, the oppressed,
and the marginalised? Certainly the rich
conceptual domain of global justice cannot
be reduced to the practices of agents
in GCS. In any case, practices prove a poor
measure for engagement with theory,
simply because practitioners seldom stick
to the script authored by reflective and
critical philosophers. Yet engagement with
these practices might conceivably aid us
in adding some, perhaps significant, footnotes
to these theories. Undoubtedly these
footnotes might not appear all that significant
to philosophers who are involved in
the time-consuming and back-breaking
task of trying to summon up a more just
world. But as a fellow traveller, who is
simply fed up with excessive theoretical
concentration on closed and claustrophobic
ethnic communities as an alternative to the
depredations of the nation state, and who
is in search of wider horizons of human
commitment, I might just have the right
to add such a footnote. Let me at least try.

Though the concept of global justice has
been approached from different perspectives,
philosophers generally agree on the
following three interrelated and overlapping
propositions. One, that our commitments
to others cannot be confined to
members of our own national community,
simply because national borders are arbitrary
and therefore morally irrelevant.
Besides in today’s globalised world, our
lives in some way or another touch the
lives of people who are the unknown and
perhaps the unknowable. As O’Neill
argues, each of us pursues our interests
and goals in full consciousness that others
do the same, within the space of shared
practices and specific institutions. Our
pursuit of interests is, in part, based upon
the actions of others insofar as we are
dependent upon them, because we formulate
our goals and our tasks and our expectations
of outcomes in the context of
other human beings. In a world of global
interconnectedness, the scope of the actors
we implicitly assume in many of our actions
is global. Our actions are conditioned by
and contribute to institutions that affect
others, and their actions contribute to the
functioning of institutions that affect us.
“In our world, action and interaction at a
distance are possible. Huge numbers of
distant strangers may be benefited or
harmed, even sustained or destroyed, by
our actions, and especially by our institutionally
embodied action, or inaction.
Perhaps we have obligations not only to
nearby but to distant strangers, or rights
against them. Many people – let us call
them (loosely) cosmopolitans – think that
we have such rights and obligations, and
that justice extends beyond borders”. [8]
Because our actions assume others as
conditions for our actions, we have made
moral commitments to these persons.

Secondly, as Pogge [9] in great detail and
to great effect has told us, transnational
social structures, which govern the multiple
transactions of an interconnected
world, are heavily tilted in favour of the
already advantaged and against those
persons who are already disadvantaged.
Since the central idea of moral cosmopolitanism
is “that every human being has a
global stature as an ultimate unit of
moral concern,” those of “us” who are
committed to justice, would do well to try
and rectify these wrongs. This can be done
in two ways, by (a) critiquing unjust global
arrangements, and (b) by recognising our
obligations to those who suffer the consequences
of this highly inequitable world
order.

Thirdly, it is time that the principles
of justice, originally designed for national
communities are extended to people across
borders. [10] In short cosmopolitan philosophers
argue that there is a deep asymmetry
in the global sphere inasmuch as some
people are rendered more vulnerable to
coercion, domination, and deprivation by
structured relations. Whereas everyone in
the system of structural and institutional
relations stands in circumstances of
justice that give them obligations with
respect to all the others, those who are
situated in positions that allow them to do
more to ameliorate the conditions of the
vulnerable, should do so. [11]

I think these formulations have wrought
a marvellous transformation in the way we
conceive of our relationship to others, who
might well be the unfamiliar, the unknown,
and the potentially unknowable, but to
whom we are connected in various ways,
by globalised structures of production and
reproduction of material, symbolic, and
cultural goods, and by unfair structures of
international institutions which favour the
already fortunate and disfavour the already
unfortunate. Our obligations to others stem
from the fact that we are unable to conceive
of ourselves, our projects, our values, in
abstraction from other human beings
wherever they may be situated in terms of
national communities. The problem, however,
is that some human beings are unable
to pursue their own projects. They are
condemned to, at the most, aiding other
persons when they seek to realise their own
projects.

Let me put this point across in another
way. We value human beings, simply
because human beings are capable of
making their own histories, even if the
history they make is not the one they chose
to make in the first instance. But numerous
human beings are simply not in a position
to make their own histories; they are but
compelled to provide support structures
that enable other privileged human beings
to make their histories. Think of ill-paid
children and women who work in unhygienic
and badly lit sweat shops in the
metaphorical “Third World”. Their life
job is to help others – the owner of the
sweatshop who wreaks a profit out of
cheap child labour, the trader who
exchanges products for a profit, and the
shop owner in search of profit – realise
their own life plans. What do we owe these
human beings, what do we owe undernourished
children who work in the export-
oriented carpet factories of India
because the owners of these factories refuse
to employ adults? What do we owe families
of farmers who have committed suicide in
India in the last two years because the state
bound by a global contract not to subsidise
farmers in the third world, has drawn back
from its obligations to the rural poor? And
what do we owe workers in the abusive,
revolting and dehumanising informal sector,
who fulfil the desires of customers at
home and abroad for designer items?

There are two ways in which we can
answer this question, and both these ways
are not exclusive of each other. We could
argue, firstly, that those who are in a position
to make their own histories, or at least
those who benefit from the ways in which
our collective histories are made, are
obliged to those who lose out because
(a) the latter are unable to make their histories,
and (b) because they have lost out
in the collective histories that are produced
and reproduced in and through a myriad
of transactions, some material, others symbolic,
and yet others midway between the
material and the symbolic. [12] Secondly, we
could believe, with some justification, that
our life job is to think out the ways in which
the victims of history can realise agency,
so that they can speak back to a history
which is not of their making. Though the
two resolutions of this question are not
exclusive and unconnected, I suspect that
the main thrust of global civil society
activism lies in the answer to the first
question, and pays scant heed to the latter.
There may be very good reasons for this
choice, I am here more concerned with the
implications of this choice. One of these
implications is that a preoccupation with
obligations can crowd out other dimensions
of the human condition. These dimensions
are best discerned through an inquiry
into the practices of global civil society.

 II. Consolidation of Global Civil Society

Global civil society has heralded,
according to many scholars, a major shift
in world politics in a number of ways. [13]
For one, by mobilising against multilateral
institutions in particular, and globalisation
in general, international NGOs who tend
to dominate global civil society have
foregrounded the tremendous imbalances
of the world system. The most dramatic
manifestation of global civil society was
to appear in what came to be known as
the “battle for Seattle”. At the end of
November 1999, massive protests involving
some 700 organisations and about
40,000 students, workers, NGOs, religious
groups, and representatives of business
and finance brought the third ministerial
meeting of the World Trade Organisation
(WTO) at Seattle to a shuddering halt. The
WTO was prepared to set in motion a new
multilateral round of trade negotiations.
But collective anger at the relocation of
industries to the south, at the unsafe and
abusive work conditions in the factories and
sweatshops found there, at environmental
degradation, and at widespread exploitation,
which exploded in a series of angry
demonstrations, brought this to a stop.

These demonstrations were hailed by some
scholars as “globalisation from below” or
as the herald of a new internationalism. [14]
There were two aspects of the “battle for
Seattle” that proved significant for the
consolidation of global civil society. First,
for the first time hitherto single-issue groups
coalesced into a broad-based movement to
challenge the way the world trade and
financial system was being ordered by
international institutions. Second, whereas
in the late 1960s protest groups in the US
and in western Europe had targeted the
state, at Seattle they targeted global corporations
and international economic institutions.
The protests themselves bore the
mark of collective ire and resentment at
the way in which globalisation, which had
been set in motion two decades earlier, had
intensified inequality and injustice. And
matters did not stop here. Mass protests
have become a regular feature of annual
meetings of the WEF, the IMF, the World
Bank, and the WTO.

For instance in July 2005, angry antiglobalisation
protestors fought a running
battle with the police, as the G-8 or the
leaders of the richest nations gathered in
Gleneagles for the purpose of tackling
poverty in Africa. Several activists attacked
shops and businesses that they saw as
symbols of unbridled globalisation; and
others accused leaders of the developed
world of exploiting the issue of poverty
to improve their own images. Hundreds of
protestors planned to lay siege to the venue
of the summit, even as Bob Geldof, the
pop celebrity who spearheaded the
campaign, vowed to snatch victory for the
cause. The meet was presaged by concerts
to focus attention on the persistence of
poverty in the countries of the south particularly
sub-Saharan Africa. A web site,
www.g8rally, allowed people to participate
in an online protest. By the first day
of the meet on July 7, 2005, more than
65,000 people had signed the protest circulated
on the web site. [15] From June 6-
8, 2007, even as the leaders of the G-8 met
in Heiligendamm, Germany for the annual
summit, a series of protests, which had
swept the world in the months leading to
the meeting, threatened to wreck the meet.
The venue of the meeting was closed off to
the outside world, and no one could approach
it by air, sea or land. Novel methods
and vocabularies of protest against unjust
processes of globalisation have captured
the attention of the international media,
and generated considerable excitement at
the idea of renewed political activism. And
the phrase “global civil society” has
become an integral part of political,
corporate, and technical vocabularies.

The other issue that has been catapulted
onto the global agenda is that of norm
setting. Traditionally, states, holding aloft
the banner of sovereignty and state security,
have resisted any intervention by
outside agencies in matters concerning their
own citizens. Today global civil society
actors act as guardians of a morally informed
consensus on the minimum that is
due to human beings, across borders. For
this reason alone, global civil society agents,
particularly INGOs, have acquired tremendous
legitimacy and authority as upholders
of a moral canon [16] against power hungry
states and profit-driven markets. It is not
surprising that when global human rights
organisations speak, the rest of us, particularly
those of us who live in the south,
listen. When these organisations suggest
(through non-targeting) that human rights
are alive and kicking in our part of the
world, we are reassured. And when human
rights INGOs testify that violations of rights
have taken place in a particular country at
a particular time, the government of that
country has reason to quake. And it should
quake, but that is not the issue at hand.

The issue at hand is a different one.
Activists in global civil society claim to
“stand in” for the inhabitants of worlds
scarred by exploitation, poverty, and illbeing,
and claim to speak for their interests.
It would definitely be churlish to
dismiss these claims, but perhaps we as
democrats concerned about the moral
standing of persons in conceptual and moral
frameworks, need to ask this particular
question: what is the status that is accorded
to persons whose needs and interests are
being represented in global civil society?
After all INGOs more often than not have
their own ideas of what should be done
and how should it be done, what constitutes
a human rights violation and what
does not, how environmental issues need
to be tackled, and how women and other
marginal sections should be empowered.
INGOs more often than not have their own
pre-programmed agendas, they more often
than not speak a highly specialised language
that may well be incomprehensible
for the inhabitants of the very worlds which
they “speak for”, and they definitely have
their own ideas of what is politically
permissible and what is not. Do persons
whose needs are being “represented” have
any voice in the forging of these agendas?
On the contrary, human beings who have
experienced injustice in their daily lives
are perhaps denied the opportunity to frame
their responses in their own terms, on their
own ground, and in their own languages,
simply because the political initiative has
been hijacked by often bureaucratic and
well-organised INGOs. To phrase the point
starkly, associational activity at the global
level tends to acquire a life of its own, a
life that may well be quite distinct from
the everyday lives of persons who do not
speak but who are spoken for. People are
arguably disempowered rather than empowered
when highly specialised, professional,
civil society actors tell them what
is wrong with their daily existence and
how they should go about resolving the
problems of their collective lives. [17]
Admittedly, some global civil society
actors have initiated novel ways of bringing
the problems of everyday existence of
poor and impoverished people of the third
world onto international platforms, and
propelling them into the glare of the media
spotlight. But can all this substitute for an
activity we call democratic politics? This
question of course begs another question,
what is democracy about? Let us briefly
turn to the idea of democracy to see what
is being missed out in the general euphoria
of global civil society.

 III. The Idea of Democracy

Democracy is of course the elusive
concept in the vocabulary of political
theory; the veritable will o’ the wisp, which
defies most endeavours to pin it down in
either neat categories or definitions. Focus
on minimalist conception of democracy;
that democracy establishes peaceful procedures
for the transfer of power from one
set of elites to another, and we are confronted
with the troubled question – is that
all that there is to democracy? Is it enough
that citizens come out of their homes, their
workplaces, and their recreational spaces
to vote for their preferred representatives
once in five years, and then withdraw from
the public realm? Or we can argue that
substantive democracy is about equality
and freedom, rights and justice at every site
of human interaction, whether the household,
the workplace, or social associations.
But then, what is so distinctive about
the field, the activity, and the project of
politics in the democratic mode?

Though, always, the fuzzy line between
politics in the public domain and politics
in the private domain, has been successfully
challenged by feminists, as well as
those who confront social marginality in
the form of race, class, or ethnicity, arguably
the rules of every activity in society
are set by an activity the ancient Greeks
called “political”. [18]] For unless the political
sets appropriate rules, workplaces or
the family might not have a whiff of a
chance to achieve democracy. Correspondingly,
it is at the site of the political that
particular and discrete projects of a society
are able to realise coherence.

Let me phrase the point this way; a given
society consists of a number of distinct
projects, say, the household, the economy,
the public sphere of civil society, and
culture. But society is not a sum of these
distinct projects; it is not an additive entity,
simply because the political lends unity to
projects marked by different sorts of activity.
This is because the political provides
a broad framework for these activities.
Various projects are rendered coherent
because political activity seeks to
(a) unearth and hold up for inspection rules
that govern the social whole, (b) interrogate
and engage with these rules if necessary,
and (c) move towards the forging
of new rules that are just, precisely because
they are oriented around normative values
such as freedom, equality, rights, and
justice. Conversely, the process of sighting
rules, interrogating them, reworking and
constituting new rules grounded in justice,
freedom, equality and rights, is what constitutes
the political in a democratic mode.

The search for new rules, which are politically
feasible as well as normative, sets the
frame for other activities: social, economic,
cultural, and even personal. [19] Democratic
rules, in other words, enable us to interrogate
as well as recast practices in discrete
fields of human activity.

But, rules, howsoever normative they
might be, cannot be produced and reproduced
once and for all. There is, in democratic
politics, no notion of an original
Hobbesian social contract which binds
citizens in perpetuity. The terms of the
contract have to be constantly renegotiated,
even as new insights on what it means
to be a citizen in a democratic world emerge
onto political horizons. Is the right to private
property an absolute good, or should it be
balanced by social well being? Should a
democracy promote the rights of cultural
communities to maintain and replicate their
distinct practices? And if so, what is the
relationship between the right of the individual
to freedom, and the rights of
cultural communities? How do we resolve
the tension between the right of society to
benefit from goods such as energy and
irrigation which big development projects
bring in their wake, and the right of
communities that are displaced, to their
habitat? Should capital punishment be
outlawed in civilised societies? Should a
society officially sanction abortion,
euthanasia, or pornography?

These are contentious questions and need
to be debated at different times and places,
in light of fresh perceptions, and the fashioning
of new political angles on the issue.
Democratic politics is not static, it is
processual. Notably, it is not that important
that a democratic political community
arrives at a final decision on various issues,
it is more important that participants keep
a dialogue going. For it is precisely participation
in shared discourses that is of
value because it allows citizens to make
their own histories, and makes for agency
because it allows these citizens to speak
back to a history which is not of their
making. Secondly, political activity
encourages citizens, who may be otherwise,
far removed from each other by the
exigencies of everyday life, to come together
and participate in a shared discourse
on what a good society is, and how it can
be realised. Economies, societies, and cultures
might well divide people, but democratic
practices enable citizens to transcend
constructed divisions and symbolic
boundaries; howsoever invisible and symbolic
these boundaries may be. Thirdly,
participation in a shared, public, and accessible
discourse, establishes the “political
Economic and Political Weekly July 21, 2007 3020
competence” of ordinary men and women.

This again is valuable, because the activity
establishes that it is not the state that has
monopoly over definitions of what is
democratic, the political public can do so
as well, and perhaps better. Fourthly,
participation compels state accountability.
It is difficult to think of modern states,
possessing as they do, an inexorable “will
to power”, voluntarily submitting report
cards to citizens, unless a strong and vigilant
press, public opinions, campaigns,
and movements compel them to do so.
This notion of democracy might perchance
help us to answer the question
raised above – what are the other dimensions
of the human experience that we
need to take note of? What do human
beings dream of, need, and aspire for?
Though there are no easy answers to these
questions; it seems to me that liberal theory
provides us with one answer: human beings
desire to pursue projects which make their
lives worthwhile. To repeat the point made
above, human beings desire not only to
make their own history; they wish to
negotiate histories not of their own making
in order to effect the transformation from
subject to agent. Democracy promotes this
particular end because it lays down procedures
and establishes institutions, so that
human beings can participate in the making
of decisions that affect their individual
and collective lives.
This may not always happen, and states
which claim democratic credentials can
prove alarmingly constricting, but then
democracy is a project, which does not
have a determinate end because citizens
inspired by democracy are constantly in
search of new possibilities, new goals, and
new strategies that can help seek emancipation
from all that hampers the human
spirit. Like all projects, the project of democracy
requires as an essential precondition
intentional and purposeful action by ordinary
citizens in the space of civil society.
And it is this purposeful intentional action
that makes for aware and self-confident
human beings because these human beings
acquire agency in and through politics.
And thereby ordinary men and women
make the transition from subject to citizen.
Of course a direct relationship between
the citizens and the state, or direct participation
in political activity, the way Aristotle
conceived of it for instance, may well be
a non-starter for three reasons. For one,
most societies are too large and too complex
to admit of direct participation, secondly
demands/perspectives/interests are
plural as well as conflicting, and thirdly
the specialised and highly inscrutable
nature of modern legislation, and administration,
proscribes direct control over
policy. Consequently, interests need to be
represented by an agent who mediates
between the two basic protagonists of our
democratic text, the citizen and the state.
For these reasons, the representative forms
the key player in democratic systems.
Democracy is presumed on a triadic relationship
between (a) citizens, or rather the
interests citizens hold and assert in, and
sometimes against, the body politic, (b) the
democratic state, the legitimacy of which
institution is premised upon its responsiveness
to popular demands, and (c) the
representative who mediates between citizens
and the state. Although representation
has chronologically preceded democratic
participation, guilds, aristocracies,
and professional groups have been represented
in proto-democracies (for example
in the English Parliament, before the extension
of universal suffrage), ever since the
establishment of full blown democracy,
democracy has been seen synonymous
with representative democracy.
On the other hand, the institutionalisation
of representative democracy has propelled
anxious questions about representation:
how is the representative expected to
discharge his or her mandate, as an advocate,
as a mediator, or as a proxy? Since
a given constituency will necessarily contain
plural and oft conflicting opinions,
perspectives, needs, and interests, how does
our representative go about representing
these plural interests in forums of decisionmaking?
Do agents in the business of
representation represent all these interests,
or do they filter through the brew of interests,
privilege some, downgrade others,
articulate some, and leave others unarticulated?
That is, do not representatives
exercise an enormous degree of autonomy,
and thereby power, when they select which
of these interests is to be represented? Is
this choice perchance dictated by party
agendas? And what of the interests that
remain unrepresented? Are these interests,
perhaps those of the disprivileged sections
of society – women, the poor, ethnic
minorities, and in India the lower castes
– fated to be unrepresented in and through
the power equations of a particular society.
For it is well nigh impossible that representatives
are untouched by power equations,
which constitute societies, and which
thereby influence all arenas of human
activity. Moreover, are representatives
capable of advocating the interests of that
section of the constituency to which they
do not belong? Can, for instance, a male
representative put forth the interests of
women? Is it possible for him to understand
women’s life experiences before or
even as he represents her needs and interests?
Can an upper class/caste representative
do justice to the interests of the lower
classes/castes? Can someone belonging to
the majority community even comprehend
the needs, desires, and aspirations, or indeed
the oppression of ethnic minorities?
Whatever be the doubts expressed about
the satisfactoriness and the competence of
modes of representation, anxieties about
questions about representation are always
concerned about deepening democracy.
How best can we ensure citizen participation?
How best can we assure that the
representative represents the multiplicity
of opinions, particularly the voices of the
marginalised which are articulated in the
participative sphere of democratic politics?
How can we make certain that citizens
and their interests are best represented,
and through what procedures and
modalities? The constant fear among
democrats is that representatives might
water down democracy. Today the paradox
of contemporary democracy is constituted
by the fact that whereas representatives
have not proven democratic, agents
in global civil society particularly INGOs,
which are in the business of deepening
democracy, are not concerned with representation
or indeed with the antecedent
activity of democratic participation.
For it is precisely participation that is
devalued, when global civil actors commandeer
political initiatives, and constitute
human beings as consumers of agendas
finalised elsewhere. For we must ask
this uncomfortable question of even the
most well-meaning of NGOs: who was
consulted in the forging of agendas? When?
And how where the persons spoken for
consulted: through what procedures and
through what modalities? Were they consulted
at all? Do, in short, global civil
society actors actually represent people,
particularly of the third world? Or are they
self-styled spokespersons of people who
do not have even a remote chance of
influencing these agendas? What we, in
short, see is the collapse of the idea that
ordinary men and women are capable of
appropriating the political initiative. What
we see is the appropriation of political
programmes in favour of the agenda of the
global civil society actor. Frankly, it is
Economic and Political Weekly July 21, 2007 3021
unclear whether INGOs strengthen or
weaken the political competence of
ordinary women and men.
Take the other staple of representative
democracy: accountability. To whom we
may ask, are the international NGOs accountable
to? Witness, for instance, the
response of Lori Wallach, whose
organisation Public Citizen orchestrated
the battle for Seattle. In an interview
published in Foreign Policy, she was asked
the following question: “You’re referring
to the idea of democratic deficits in
multilateral organisations...Some people
argue that nongovernmental organisations
(NGOs) like yours also have a democratic
deficit – that you also lack democracy,
transparency, and accountability. Who
elected you to represent the people at
Seattle, and why are you more influential
than the elected officials...?” Her answer
was the following: “Who elected Mr
Moore? Who elected Charles Barshefsky?
Who elected any of them?” [20] This, to put
it mildly, is no answer simply because it
evaded the issue. In another question she
was asked who the Public Citizen is responsible
to. “Our members”, she replied.
“How do they express their oversight?”
“Through their chequebooks”, she replied,
“they just stop paying their membership
dues.” [21] Note that no longer are people
expected to realise selfhood in and through
associational life, their participation is
confined to the payment or withdrawal of
membership dues.

We have cause for unease. For much of
the leadership of global civil society organisations
appears to be non-accountable to
their members, many of whom are passive
and confine their activism to signing petitions
circulated via e-mail. Also note that,
whereas we see huge crowds during demonstrations
against the WTO or in alternative
forums such as the World Social Forum,
between such episodes, activity is carried
on by a core group of NGOs. It is possible
that participants in demonstrations are
handed a political platform and an agenda
that has been finalised elsewhere. This is
hardly either democratic or even political,
it may even reek of bureaucratic management
of participatory events. It may even
render people, as suggested above, consumers
of choices made elsewhere.

We also need to wonder how democratic
the organisations of global civil society are
given the great inequalities of resources
between the north and the south. “If western
civil society is the core of global civil
society, just as the western state is the core
of the global state”, argues Shaw, “how
do non-Western voices become heard? (…)
How far can non-Western voices make
themselves heard directly? In what ways
are they filtered by western civil society,
and how is their representation affected
by the specific characteristics of western
civil institutions?” [22] In short, since a great
many of these organisations are beyond the
reach of democratic representation, the
idea that a definable system of authority
is even notionally answerable to the democratic
will has been seriously compromised.
All evidence suggests on the other hand
that organisations are not internally democratic
or weakly so, that they promote
conformity, and that they are indifferent to
notions of democratic citizenship. [23]

 IV. Wrapping Up

Though the critique of global civil society
is certainly not applicable to theories
of global justice, the question remains the
same. According to the philosophers of
global justice, the fact that we belong to
a common humanity gives us enough reason
to owe others who are badly off, or that
living a good human life requires serving
the community by helping human beings
who are in need, by promoting the concept
of justice and universal human rights, just
political institutions, and equitable market
relations. The moral commitment to helping
human beings, the majority of whom
belong to the postcolonial world, or the
duty to help foreigners who are starving
or suffering, are sharply opposed to theories
which stress exclusive duties to compatriots,
and reject parochial cultures. The
position is unassailable, but we must, for
reasons of democratic necessity, add a
second string to our conceptual bow: what
about the persons who have lost out? Apart
from being subjects of obligations, do they
have any other status in moral theory?
Do they not have the right to acquire agency,
to speak back to history, to make their
own histories

Certainly, the world will be a much better
place if wars are prevented, if the demands
of energy companies do not result in wars
against oil-rich states, if human rights can
be promoted, if the depredations of capitalism
in eternal search of profit are held
off, if poverty is abolished and the right
not to be poor enacted, if the environment
is made liveable for future generations,
and if steady income, health, and education
is provided to all in and through
formulations on the globality of obligation.
The world might even become democratic
if people were provided with basic
goods to satisfy their basic needs, so that
they do not have to beg for what is rightfully
theirs. But do our democratic imaginaries
stop short at this? Surely democracy
is much more than x owing y a deep sense
of obligation, though this sentiment is certainly
an essential prerequisite for a democratic
society based upon equal concern
and respect for other human beings. This
is the minimum we expect of democracy.
But democracy is also about enabling
people to articulate their needs, their aspirations,
their desires, their interests, and
their perspectives, so that they can participate
in the making of a good
society. Democracy is about recognising
the political competence of the public to
set agendas, and to put forth alternative
visions of what a desirable society looks
like. Democracy is about engaging with
the state, it is about the right to protest,
and above all it is about the right to participate
in the political domain. It is this
aspect that might have gone missing in all
the elegant and passionate prose on global
justice.

I have little to offer by way of wrapping
up this argument, in any case no argument
is fully wrapped up, argumentative communities
are communities of fate, condemned
to replay and repeat arguments
that have been conducted earlier in the
same space or in other times and spaces
in the same or in related guises. All that
I wished to do is to unravel the global civil
society argument to perceive the one factor
that theories of global justice ought to take
into account. This observation, let me
hasten to declare, is not dictated entirely
by the fact that I belong to the south in
which many of the unfortunate victims of
history that philosophers feel so strongly
about live, though it may well be. But what
is the issue is that our strongest formulations
on what we owe people, can, with
the best of intentions, lapse into formulations
that do not conceive the recipients
of obligations as actors in their own right.

There is certainly no reason why philosophers
based in the west should battle
with anything else than their own uneasiness
at the mess created by their own
countries. But coming from India where
a majority of people live in utmost misery,
disempowerment, and hopelessness, I am
more concerned about the ways people can
stand up and speak back to history. Not
that they do not speak back to history,
perhaps we caught up in our own vocabularies
given by modernity cannot recognise
these voices. But I would like to see a
perfectly just world, where the inhabitants
of the south can also begin to think what
they also owe humanity, and when they
can side by side with the inhabitants of
the north engage in discussions about what
is a just social contract. Is this an impossible
dream? Not I hope for defenders of
global justice.