Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Sans Frontières (MSF) – formed by French doctors as a breakaway from the
Red Cross during the Biafra conflict of the late 1960s – are explicitly political
and aim to act as advocates internationally for those who are suffering,
which inevitably involves interfering in local politics.
Globalization
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This raises a second set of questions about global civil society. The groups
of which it is composed are, in a literal sense, irresponsible – that is to say,
not that they behave irresponsibly, but that they are responsible to no one.
One of the features of the original idea of civil society was that it presumed
the existence of an effective state, which would prevent any one group in
civil society from exercising too much power – such a constraint is much
more hazy at the global level. Groups such as MSF and Greenpeace
International exercise as much power as they can by appealing directly to
(Western) public opinion, often over the heads of democratically elected
governments. Progressively-minded people of good will might not be too
worried about the activities of these particular groups – although, as we
have seen, Greenpeace International is as capable of getting the science
wrong as anyone else – but, of course, global civil society is not simply com-
posed of progressive groups; fascists, drug-dealers, and religious extremists
also form transnational groups and are rather less benign, while it is not
only groups like Greenpeace that can use ‘direct action’ in support of their
policies. When French farmers block roads throughout France in order to
preserve agricultural subsides that are against the interests of the developing
world, they too are part of global civil society, as are the British truck-
drivers who blockaded power stations in the Autumn of 2000 in opposition
to environmentally-friendly taxes on petrol consumption. Sauce for the goose
is sauce for the gander, and well-meaning demonstrators who gaily break
the law in the interest, as they see it, of the wider good ought not to be
surprised when others use the same tactics for different ends.
Still, the fact that global civil society can be profoundly anti-democratic
and patronizing to the poor, although interesting in view of the progressivist
credentials of most of its promoters, does not address the core issue, which
is how significant this phenomenon actually is. Does the notion of global
civil society have real explanatory power? The ‘Stanford School’ of sociolo-
gists argues that nation-state identities, structures and behaviours are
increasingly shaped by world society, and that ‘world culture celebrates,
expands, and standardises strong but culturally somewhat tamed national
actors’ (Meyer et al. 1997: 173). This is quite a strong claim – although it
ought to be noted that English School writers on the idea of International
Society also talk about the ‘taming’ of national actors. In the nineteenth
century this was known as imposing the ‘standards of civilization’ on
regimes that did not practice the rule of law, or respect property rights in
ways that the members of the, then predominantly European, society of states
considered adequate; ‘cultural taming’ is a rather good, albeit somewhat
euphemistic, term to describe this process (Gong 1984).
Before global civil society can do much work, however, there are three
features of the current world order that need to be taken on board, and
which will be the subject of the next three chapters. First, globalization
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creates uniformity, but it also creates resistance to uniformity – a new
international politics of identity is emerging, the subject of Chapter 10.
Second, if a global civil society is to emerge, it must be on the basis of some
kind of normative foundation, possibly in international law and the inter-
national human rights regime, the subject of Chapter 11. Finally, global civil
society must be read in the context of US power, 9/11 and the War on Terror –
the subject of the final chapter of this book. Before moving on though, a
question dodged throughout this chapter can be avoided no more – what,
exactly, is globalization? Jan Aart Scholte offers the following as the first of
his core theses on the subject: ‘globalization is a transformation of social
geography marked by the growth of supraterritorial spaces but globaliza-
tion does not entail the end of territorial geography; territoriality and
supraterritoriality coexist in complex interrelations’ and, as we have seen,
both the initial definition and the qualifier get to the heart of the issue
(Scholte 2000: 8).