Global Civil Society 2007/8: Communicative Power and Democracy

The Global Civil Society Yearbook is an annual publication produced by the Global Civil Society Programme at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics (LSE). The 387-page volume for 2007-2008 explores advances in technology, stating that they have enhanced global mass media and permitted private worldwide communication while also facilitating civil society's own global presence. At the same time, "the democratic nature of global communication appears very open to question." (per Martin Albrow and Marlies Glasius, editors, as in their introduction, "Democracy and the Possibility of a Global Public Sphere". The below summary draws on this introductory chapter.)

The following illustration from the introductory chapter highlights some of the questions that contributors explore in their individual pieces: "Did the private video recording and global dissemination of the last living moments of Saddam Hussein, as he was led to execution, help to undermine the authority of the new representative democracy of Iraq by publicising the deep factional loathing that tears at Iraqi society? Or does it show that institutions imposed by force of arms are vulnerable to an even stronger force of global public opinion? Global civil society has reacted to the harassment that accompanied the execution with almost universal indignation....But the interpretation of what was objectionable about the execution has diverged widely....The Saddam images fed into a debate that immediately became global. But it has no global institutional locus. Is this the new global public sphere, where a global public opinion takes shape? Do the new communication possibilities realise democracy beyond the nation state or does the very proliferation of media channels result in a fragmentation that undermines any public sphere?...We ask whether developments in the media of communication and their use now require us to rethink democracy for global society."

Whereas, as one contributor later in the volume (Chapter 11) notes, communication in the political science realm tends to be associated with dialogue, exchange of views, learning, and even democracy, in the field of media studies - in the words of Albrow and Glasius - "we are constantly reminded of the use of communication as manipulation and spin, whether in nominally democratic or in authoritarian political settings. The multiple uses to which human communication can be put, which may even be in the eye of the beholder, have not fundamentally changed with the advent of global communications technology. But it may have eroded the force of monolithic messages from a single (state or religious) entity."

This Yearbook attempts to both describe (in language) and display powerful non-linguistic forms of global communication. For example, Chapter 10 describes the use of fiction in semi-commercial Nigerian videos to open up a range of social issues, as well as the use of "documentary" videos by radical Islamic militants to propagandise violent action in Iraq. Chapter 9 is devoted to a selection of diverse cartoon art. From the editors' perspective, this kind of diversity illuminates "the complex and contradictory tendencies we try to capture with the inadequate term 'global'. We can illustrate this by the very term 'global democracy': do we mean democracy for the world's population as a single political unit, for some an ideal aspiration, or do we mean democracy in its different national and local settings worldwide?"

Amongst the other components of the volume is Chapter 4's focus on donor communication in transition countries, where it might be difficult or impossible to find the "right" type of associations for promoting Western-style democracy. As the author of this chapter, Armine Ishkanian argues, donor agencies would "genetically-engineer" non-governmental organisations (NGOs) through training and project funding. Under these conditions of global communication, the types of aid projects Ishkanian describes have provoked a backlash against the twin projects of "building civil society" and "democratisation", often perceived as a form of neo-imperialism.

In Chapter 6, Miguel Darcy de Oliveira charts the transformation in Latin America, where NGOs and social movements spearheaded the struggle for democracy in the 1970s and 1980s, but where now the vitality of what he calls the "classical notion of civil society", its organised form, has declined. But, according to de Oliveira, they have left a legacy of democratisation at the very personal level; there is an enhanced capacity of individuals to think, deliberate, and decide which, he argues, is a consequence of the decline in diverse forms of authority based on religion and tradition. In the words of the editors, describing de Oliveira's position, he "finds that the institutional and organisational legacy of earlier democratic struggles is now subject to the challenges from an informed communicating public for whom new media of communication offer unprecedented opportunities to make their views known, and who demand openness and transparency."

"At the same time globality does not merely undermine liberal democracy in nation states," the editors point out. Chapter 5 show how illiberal regimes are equally vulnerable to global connections. Quoting the editors: "In the realm of communications, Iran, Saudi Arabia or China now try to 'get the message out', becoming, in Monroe Price's term, sellers in the market for loyalties (see Chapter 3). These changed parameters may also have consequences for the old debate as to whether to isolate or engage rogue states."

Albrow and Glasius highlight the loose and varied use of the expressions "global civil society" and "global public sphere", which they believe indicates that "we are only beginning to theorise the relationship....Most authors in this volume treat both global civil society and the global public sphere either as an existing reality, or at the least as an achievable ideal. But are such assumptions at all justified?" Because critiques of global civil society have been aired in many previous Yearbooks, the present volume gives some attention to critiques of the notion of the "global public sphere". The following excerpt from illustrates the communication-related aspects of this argument: "Access to global public spheres is still restricted by governments (see Chapter 5). Beyond deliberate obstruction by states, there is a wider problem with participation....Almost without exception, the 'voices of global civil society' belong to an English-speaking, university-educated, computer-literate middle class. Within that class access to information is limited again by the commercial logic of websites and search engines....As if universal access was not a tall enough order, a functioning public sphere also requires that all voices must be equally able to make themselves heard. Finally, the public sphere requires the actors in it...to be willing to abide by particular rules of process, and display a certain measure of respect for each other. At the minimum this would involve a rejection of using violence against each other....The National Rifle Association, discussed by Clifford Bob in Chapter 10, may be willing to abide by rules of non-violent debate, even if its ultimate aim is to arm everyone, but for the producers and publishers of Jihad videos, described by Thomas Keenan in the same Chapter, violence itself is the means of communication."

And yet, as the editors explain, "Global civil society as-is may not correspond to the ideal of a public sphere where free and equal deliberation takes place between all global citizens. But what one does find in global civil society is some adherents to the ideal, and numerous shaky attempts to practice it. The "hacker ethic" of the first generation of computer experts has an most enduring characteristic: the emphasis on 'open access' and free flows of information and communication. The broad movement has, the editors point out, spawned numerous other civil society initiatives built on the same norms, including the earliest internet- worked email networks, the free software and open source movements, the Indymedia centres, and Wikipedia. They also cite the opening phrases of the World Social Forum Charter, now adopted by hundreds of regional, national, and local social forums: "Six years on from the first World Social Forum, our data suggest that the majority of social forums tend to survive, and new ones continue to be founded....Deliberative democracy has flown off the pages of the theorists' scholarly works and become a real-life aspiration for civil society activists."

That discursive model, as the authors of Chapter 7 illustrate, has its impact in turn on the practices of NGOs, sensing the demands of a global public opinion and responding to the urgings of activists. An example of the shifting locus of accountability is: "The self-critique of capitalist organisations [like Enron, which] looks suspiciously like the demand for participatory democracy and the checks and balances that advocates of communicative power to the people have long demanded....It is in the practices of activists themselves where we find responses adequate to the challenge posed by the unprecedented levels of the power of capital. For instance, as Victor Pickard describes in Chapter 10, Indymedia is committed to radical democratic practices in its networks both locally and globally, yet whether this is adequate to the task of democratising global governance is open to question when, as Clifford Bob shows, the same technologies are open to the National Rifle Association and, as Thomas Keenan describes, are central to the idea of global Jihad. [James] Deane shows that activists are now going beyond attempts to practice deliberative democracy within their own spaces, to address global governance structures with the new norm of a 'right to communicate.' Yet that right has to be guaranteed in some way....Global civil society is forced to engage with state structures if it is to secure their democratisation. It has to take communicative democracy to the centre of state power if it is to build global governance and redress the inequalities that stand in the way of adequate action on a global scale."

Several of the chapters examine whether the climate change debate provides evidence for a global public sphere. As the editors explain, "There is no doubt that the environmental mainstream would in fact like to close part of the debate, namely that part that still questions whether climate change is occurring and whether it is caused by human behaviour, in order to move on to discussing policy and behavourial change. Continuing to give air to the climate change sceptics gives politicians somewhere to hide, and obstructs progress on the latter half of the agenda. But from the vantage point of the public sphere as a form of democratic practice, any attempt to shut down other voices is problematic. What, if any, should be the limits to what can be debated in a global public sphere, and who sets the limits?" Pointing to several examples from contributors to the volume, the editors assert that "It does seems likely that there are multiple global public spheres when it comes to climate change, partly determined by political boundaries and partly by political predilection, but they do stand in connection with each other....However, participation is very uneven, causing actors in global civil society to do much perilous speaking 'on behalf of' potentially threatened populations in parts of Africa or the Pacific islands..."

Concluding words from the introductory chapter: "It is the associational diversity of civil society that provides the basis for communicative democracy and a fertile contrast with the monolithic citizen-state relationship of representative democracy. On past experience the new institutions will only develop and become adequate for the tasks ahead if global civil society debates democracy and communication for itself and the world at large as explicitly as did theorists of democracy for the modern age that has past."

Table of Contents

Introduction: Democracy and the Possibility of a Global Public Sphere - Martin Albrow and Marlies Glasius

Concepts
Chapter 1: Democracy, Global Publics and World Opinion - Vincent Price
Chapter 2: Democracy and Globalisation - Mary Kaldor
Chapter 3: Civil Society and the Global Market for Loyalties - Monroe E Price

Democracy
Chapter 4: Democracy Promotion and Civil Society - Armine Ishkanian
Chapter 5: Global Civil Society and Illiberal Regimes - Mary Kaldor and Denisa Kostovicova
Chapter 6: Deepening Democracy in Latin America - Miguel Darcy de Oliveira
Chapter 7: Accountability in a Globalising World - Helmut Anheier and Amber Hawkes

Communicative Power
Chapter 8: Democratic Advance or Retreat? Communicative Power and Current Media Developments - James Deane
Chapter 9: Voices of Global Civil Society: Cartoonists, Comic Strip Artists and Graphic Novelists
Chapter 10: Media Spaces: Innovation and Activism - Clifford Bob, Jonathan Haynes, Victor Pickard, Thomas Keenan, and Nick Couldry
Chapter 11: Language and 'Global' Politics: De-naturalising the 'Global' - Sabine Selchow

Records
Diffusion Models and Global Civil Society - Helmut Anheier, Hagai Katz, and Marcus Lam
Data Programme
Chronology - Jill Timms