Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Global civil society?
As the notion of Beck’s Risk Society illustrates, some sociologists have
addressed the extent to which globalization has changed our conceptions
of society but, for the purposes of this book, a more important question is
whether there is emerging some kind of genuinely global society, and, if so,
what is its nature? A number of individual writers and schools of thought
have answered the first of these questions in the affirmative, and there is
now a burgeoning literature on the notion of ‘global civil society’, including
a very useful annual, the Global Civil Society Yearbook.
The notion of ‘civil society’ emerges in eighteenth-century thought and
denotes the idea of a social space organizing itself separately from, and
potentially set against, both the state and the extended family, the two social
institutions that previously dominated human existence. This notion –
developed by Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and, in a different way, 
G. W. F. Hegel – was revived in the 1980s and early 1990s in response to the
fall of communism, which, many argued, had been deficient precisely
because it systematically denied the possibility of the existence of such a
space. The idea of a ‘global civil society’ developed in parallel with the insti-
tutions of global governance described in Chapter 7. The institutions act as
a substitute for the state, while global civil society itself is partly signified by
the existence of informal, non-state, transnational pressure groups (often in
the area of the environment, but also encompassing human rights, animal
rights, the anti global capitalist movement, pro-capitalist groupings such as
Davos and Bilderberg, religious movements, transnational political parties
and so on), and reinforced as a global phenomenon by cross-cultural global
trends in consumption, entertainment and ‘infotainment’. This latter point
is very important; the existence of global branding and global media is one
of the most striking features of our world. McDonald’s arches have become
symbols of one world brand, although nowadays Starbucks has replaced
McDonald’s as a more sophisticated example of global branding, and the Nike
‘swoosh’ is equally well-known – Michael Jordan, the basketball-playing
symbol of Nike, has some claim to be the most recognizable man on the
planet, except, as it happens, in the UK, where basketball has not yet
become a mass television sport (LaFeber 1999).
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Understanding International Relations

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There are several features of this account of global civil society that are
worthy of note. First, it should be noted that nearly all of the global brands,
and most of the transnational pressure groups, originate from a very small
number of countries in the advanced industrial world. As to the former, the
notion of a globalization of world culture has certainly become fused with the
idea that the world is becoming ‘Americanized’. Certainly most of the global
brands are American in origin, as are most of the players in the infotainment
business – although in the Arab world the Al Jazeera network has eclipsed
CNN (and the BBC) – and it has become customary for opponents of global-
ization to regard these forces as the instruments of American cultural
imperialism; trashing a McDonald’s or a Starbucks has become the twenty-
first-century equivalent of the traditional protest of attacking the local
American Embassy. On the other hand, globalization is, if anything, more of
a threat to American culture than to that of the rest of the world; French
bistros and cafés will remain, but the American road-side diner is rapidly dis-
appearing. Also, in parenthesis, the extent to which global brands actually
extend choice and improve quality ought not to be forgotten; the success of
McDonald’s in many parts of the world rests precisely on the standardization
of quality disapproved of by gourmets – the certainty that the hamburgers
they are eating are made of materials that pass stringent health tests is a major
attraction for many consumers in parts of the world where this cannot always
be guaranteed. Similarly, Britons and Americans who enjoy good coffee have
every reason to be grateful for the existence of franchises such as Starbucks and
the Seattle Coffee Company. There is a wider point here; the success of global
brands rests ultimately on the consumer, and even when the consumer acts for
reasons which are not as rational as that imputed here to British coffee-lovers,
there is no justification for failing to respect their choices.
Of perhaps greater long-run significance is the generally Western origin of
the transnational groups that are at the heart of the notion of global civil
society. Very frequently these groups claim to act on behalf of the poor and
dispossessed of the world, and, in many cases, do important and necessary
work – but there is, nonetheless, an element of de haut en bas about this
activity, Lady Bountiful distributing charity to the peasants. This feeling is
amplified by the fact that these groups are different in kind from their
immediate predecessors. Transnational groups such as the Red Cross made
a point of their neutrality and non-judgemental approaches to conflict –
sometimes taking this attitude to extremes, as in the Red Cross’s refusal to
comment on the Nazi death-camps in the second World War, focusing instead
on the conditions of regular Prisoners of War. New groups such as Médecins