ABSTRACT
The emphasis of this chapter is upon social forces that respond to the patterns of behaviour associated with the phenomena of economic globalization. As a consequence, it seems preferable on balance to frame such activity by reference to ‘global civil society’ rather than to ‘transnational civil society’. Even so the word ‘society’ is definitely problematic at this stage of global social and political evolution, due to absence of boundaries and weakness of social bonds transcending nation, race and gender. Such a difficulty exists whether the reference is to ‘transnational civil society’ or to ‘global civil society’. But the transnational referent tends to root the identity of the actors in the subsoil of national consciousness to an extent that neglects the degree to which the orientation is not primarily one of crossing borders, but of inhabiting and constructing a polity appropriate for the global village. Such a nascent global polity is already partly extant, yet remains mostly emergent. (For helpful discussion of these issues of conceptual framing, see Wapner 1996.)
