Introduction

This volume explores the relationship between the concepts of democracy and civil society through a comparison of their meaning and function in different historical and cultural contexts. As such, it is a study in empirical political theory with a comparative twist. Our reason for undertaking this complex task is the widespread conviction among academics and practitioners alike that globalisation poses a serious challenge to the institutions of modern democracy. The unrestricted flow of information and the increased mobility of people brought about by globalisation have made the idea that political communities ought to be socially and culturally homogenous hard to uphold in our contemporary world. And since the existence of such homogeneous communities long was thought necessary for democratic institutions to be considered legitimate, the nameless forces of globalisation are believed to be inherently detrimental to modern democracy. While many political theorists are likely to agree about the basic features of this predicament, there is no agreement about how to maintain democratic values and institutions in a world in which political communities no longer can be assumed to be territorially bounded and culturally homogeneous, and in which political communities no longer can be neatly classified according to geographical location or cultural criteria (Tully, 2002; Rosanvallon, 2006). In the present context, we will focus less on how processes of globalisation have affected democratic institutions, but more on how to reconcile the outcome of these processes with basic democratic values and practices. Thus we are less concerned with globalisation proper, and more concerned with its end state, globality. This concept and its cognates are commonly used to describe a condition characterised by the existence of a single socio-political space on a planetary scale. Our reasons for positing globality as our starting point are both methodological and moral. As a consequence of intensified transnational flows of people and information, the principles of spatial and cultural differentiation have lost some of their analytical purchase and moral import in our contemporary world. This has made it necessary to posit a level of analysis over and above that constituted by the sum total of individual societies, and beyond that of putative and misleading geographical and cultural divides, such as that between ‘East’ and ‘West’ (Shaw, 2000; Albert, 2007). This volume explores – and to some extent also overcomes – the tensions between such a globalist perspective and the basic

assumptions of modern democratic theory, that democracy is possible only within relatively homogeneous political communities, not across or above these. But how, then, can democratic values and practices be safeguarded in a global context characterised by radical diversity? Existing solutions to this problem range from vain efforts to fortify national political communities by minimising foreign influences, to heroic efforts to institutionalise democracy on a global level by increasing the transparency and accountability of global governance institutions. While the former strategy might preserve the illusions of national identity at the expense of socioeconomic development – we might be poor, but at least we are pure – the latter strategy has to confront the obvious absence of anything resembling a political community at the global level. Contemporary global society can hardly be described as a political community in any recognisably modern sense of this term. There is no common cultural identity and no common historical memory to support a global Gemeinschaft, and no universal agreement on basic values and few common interests that could provide the foundations of a global Gesellschaft. Instead, the politics of identity continues to reinforce particularistic allegiances that make any hope for an agreement on basic values seem vain, and gross disparities in wealth and power effectively prevent the formation of common interests in those issue-areas in which action by global institutions seems most urgent. In the absence of a genuine and inclusive world community, any global political authority becomes difficult to justify in terms that are themselves democratic. Hence, in the aftermath of the globalisation debate, the old paradoxes of democratic theory have returned with a vengeance, reminding us of the contingent character of national political communities and their spatiotemporal boundaries (Wendt, 1999; Näsström, 2003, 2007; Benhabib, 2007; Honig, 2007; Bartelson, 2008). The contributors to this volume have responded to this intellectual and political challenge by exploring different ways of understanding and developing democratic practices and values beyond the master distinction between the domestic and the global realms, and by trying to rethink how democracy might be possible in a variety of geographical and cultural contexts. Rather than merely projecting the conditions of modern representative, state-centric democracy onto the global realm and hoping for its imminent realisation, the contributors to this volume propose ways of rethinking these conditions in terms of human diversity and difference, without reinscribing too familiar and too convenient binary frames of reference that conceal more than they reveal. This is done by exploring conceptions of democracy that reconcile radical plurality with democratic practices, and by using a number of examples and perspectives ultimately framed by a global context rather than by assumptions of immutable geographical and cultural differences between, say, East and West. Thus, rather than simply being a study in domestic democratic practices, or an attempt to transpose the preconditions of domestic democracy to the global realm, this volume shifts focus from these levels to the actual dissemination of democratic values and practices across a wide variety of geographical and cultural spaces freshly conceived. Rather than being caused by present transformations of world politics, many of the challenges confronted by modern democratic theory derive from its under-

lying assumption that political communities have to be sufficiently homogeneous in order for democracy to work. Yet many of the attempts to escape the ensuing paradoxes have focused on one notoriously ambiguous concept: that of civil society. While civil society has been repeatedly recycled throughout the history of political thought and has accumulated a range of incommensurable and even incompatible meanings, it has attracted renewed attention in the effort to overcome the paradoxes of democratic theory made acute by the discourse on globalisation. The basic idea behind much of its current usage is that civil society – however defined – can provide a source of democratic legitimacy and a site of political action in the absence of sufficiently cohesive demoi at both the national and global levels (Keane, 2003; Scholte, 2004). The concept of civil society has attracted renewed interest for at least two different reasons. First, although the concept of civil society historically has been used to describe social relations within bounded political communities, it carries less statist connotations than many of its competitors, and has therefore been easier to apply to the international and global realms without any apparent contradictions or any significant loss of meaning. Even if the concept of civil society seems to presuppose the presence of political authority as a condition of its meaningful employment as a counter-concept, the source and locus of such authority is not a priori restricted to that of the sovereign state. Hence the meaning of civil society can be stretched to fit other forms of political life than the modern sovereign state. The ontological plasticity and ethical versatility of the concept of civil society is also indicated by the ease with which it has been disseminated. The present resurgence and global spread of the concept of civil society have been greatly facilitated by the fact that there already exist several different receptions of this concept within cultural and intellectual contexts outside that of Europe and the United States. As subsequent chapters will make plain, the concept of civil society has enjoyed an intriguing fate in different national contexts, often being the centrepiece of sophisticated interpretations of the Enlightenment, and its promises of equality and freedom from domination. Hence many contemporary efforts to extend the range of reference of the concept of civil society beyond the confines of bounded political communities like nation-states can capitalise on the fact that this concept has already been in currency outside the original context of its emergence, and that it has been actively involved in the shaping of political institutions in different cultural contexts as well. Quite apart from the problems involved in conceptualising a global civil society, the concept of civil society itself has been at least partially globalised. Second, the concept of civil society carries less nationalist bias in comparison with other ways of re-conceptualising political community in contemporary political theory. In most of its usages, the concept of civil society does not presuppose the presence of a culturally homogeneous community. Rather, this concept is frequently used in order to explain how common values and social cohesion necessary for the smooth functioning of political institutions can be created and upheld in the relative absence of a shared cultural identity or entrenched communitarian norms. This inherent ability to accommodate cultural

diversity has perhaps also been crucial to the successful spread of the idea of civil society into other cultural contexts, sometimes with rather unexpected results. As will become clear from several contributions to this volume, the concept of civil society has taken on radically new meanings as a result of being grafted onto different cultural and political contexts, substantially enriching the Western tradition of political thought in the process. For the sake of analytical clarity, we would like to distinguish at the outset between three different conceptualisations of civil society in the contemporary debate. First, there is the traditional notion of a domestic civil society, firmly separated from other similar civil societies by geographical boundaries. Much scholarship on civil society and its relationship to democracy have focused exclusively on the domestic context, and the extent to which civil society contributes to democratisation and the smooth functioning of democratic institutions (Putnam, 1993; Walzer, 1998). Second, there is the notion of an international civil society being formed through intercourse between distinct domestic civil society agents across national boundaries, to the point of blurring or even eroding the latter. Such an international civil society is sometimes believed to be a source of global change and democratic legitimacy for multilateral institutions (Price, 2003; Ruggie, 2004). Third, there is the more recent idea of a global civil society, categorically distinct from both the domestic and the international modes of civil society. While the emergence of a global civil society might be seen as the final outcome of internationalisation, it is believed to be relatively independent from the domestic and international contexts. Global civil society is composed of agents such as nongovernmental organisations that are able to operate independently of territorial boundaries and state authorities, and which can exercise a modicum of influence on global governance institutions (Walzer, 1995; Keane, 2003; Scholte, 2004). While much interest has been focused on domestic civil societies, and more recently, on global civil society, less attention has been devoted to the comparative study of different traditions of civil society, and how these affect the prospects of a genuinely global civil society coming into being. Many of the contributors to this volume seek to amend this situation by exploring the intellectual foundations of different conceptions of civil society within different cultural contexts, and how these cultural contexts also pose distinctive challenges and limits to the meaningful usage of this concept in the present. The ultimate horizon of a global civil society would therefore be where the core functions of civil society happen to converge across different cultural contexts. By implication, this would also be where the foundations of a sustainable global democratic practice were to be found, in the area where different traditions and understandings of civil society happen to overlap as a matter of empirical fact. We contend that a global civil society cannot be achieved simply by extending the range of reference of the concept of civil society by means of a series of domestic analogies, but only as the cumulated consequence of the actual global dissemination of the idea of civil society and its gradual instantiation in political practices worldwide. Whether such a development will benefit democratisation and democratic institutions remains an open question.