Transversal hegemony

In this chapter, the main features of a dialectical re-conceptualization of global civil society (GCS) are outlined while attention also turns to a consideration of the capacity of ‘transversal hegemony’ to engage in wider theoretical crossovers with potential benefits for the politics of resistance. As suggested in the introduction to this book, transversal hegemony is a confluence of meanings which prompts a reconsideration of the analytical consequences of demarcated structural and post-structural approaches most clearly seen in rapprochements between Gramsci and Foucault. Potentially, this points towards a new way of thinking which refutes the apparently antithetical nature of largely solitary enterprises and opens towards frank dialogue or conversation between approaches. Increasingly, the study of world politics and Global Political Economy (GPE) implicitly recognizes the necessity of, and potential benefits to be derived from, such fields of enquiry. It might no longer be the case that there is a lack of analytical instruments and sufficient understanding of collective actors involved in global contestation, but sustained reflexivity is required to conceptualize civil society and hegemony in the contemporary global political economy. A critical conceptualization of global civil society which is facilitated

through the dialectics of concept and reality is further understood through focusing on categories of research. Despite recent advances, social sciences are more amenable to exploratory forms of conceptualization than a focus on analogies, myths, stories, images and/or metaphors. Since conceptualization is nonetheless susceptible to a lengthening of correspondence between concept and reality, introducing the dialectic is an explicit attempt to overcome this. This is not to say, however, that analogies, myths, stories, images, transcripts, metaphors and so on are not significant-they have a striking capacity to encompass an appreciation of ‘the real’ and in their application to the social sciences also need further translation. Thus, for example, metaphorical allusion to the post-modern prince demands further means of translation to facilitate more tangible association to the forms, formats and conflicts inherent to resistance movements. The potential for aesthetic approaches to be included in a broadened range of legitimate approaches to studying world politics is the focus of recent work on using painting, music, poetry, photography and film

to ‘highlight how we understand and construct the world we live in’ (Bleiker 2009: 8).1 This may, for example, work to reduce the gap between scholarly discussion and the actual lives of indigenous people which was a clear issue in the production of the People’s Agreement at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, discussed in the previous chapter. At the same time that the merit of further conceptualization can be posited,

the denomination of the contemporary concept of global civil society as ‘an analytical mirage’—as at once too broad and too narrow ‘to provide an accurate picture of the changing political sociology of the contemporary world’ (Cerny 2006: 96-97)—clearly points to its failure to correspond to the ‘real’. Its location as exogenous to economic and political processes deceptively underestimates ‘the extent to which individual and group actors are themselves embedded in economic and political-institutional contexts’ (ibid.). Indeed, much of the literature on global civil society examined in this book gives credence to scepticism that an inherently benevolent global civil society is creating a new normative world order through operating tactically and strategically across a variety of levels unavailable to normal state and market actors (ibid.). What might be suggested, nevertheless, is that the analysis of global civil society in this book bears a relation to and potentially changes our understanding on Gramscian hegemony so that the form of transversal hegemony might be further considered. My focus on Gramsci and Foucault, in this account, takes its cue from existing studies which consider the theoretical potential of post-structuralism (e.g. de Goede 2006; Eschle and Maiguashca 2005; Maiguashca 2006) and existing integration of Foucault into Gramscianinfluenced approaches (e.g. Gill 2008; Jessop and Sum 2006; Sum 2009). Global civil society potentially captures the accumulated meanings and contributions of alter-globalization movements, the post-modern prince, global social movements, and associated dynamics of change and contestation which are broad, contested and mediated by relations of inclusion and exclusion.

Many of the studies that have been referred to in this book provide and elaborate responses to the problems of governance and world order through outlining the nature of hegemony in a framework of global governance. In contrast, global civil society, whether substantially or metaphorically integrated into such accounts, is significant for the purpose of this book, less for what it tells us about the processes and workings of globalization and contestation, for it does so poorly, and more for how vying conceptualizations reveal, first, the limited nature of critique itself and, second, calls for further attention to be given to hegemony. The limited nature of critique is to be found in the prevalence of narrow instrumental, and broader contrasting, voluntarist conceptualizations of civil society, which in their respective, although not strictly delineated governance and activist representations, ultimately serve to

limit the conceptual usefulness of global civil society. Some of these representations appear to lend credence to the suggestion that its invocation signals a retreat from politics or, even more seriously, that it is a reactionary response to hollow hegemony or the weakening of national hegemony (Chandler 2004a, 2009a). In this section, I focus on how a critical political economy conceptualization, drawing particularly on the Gramscian reference to categories of research-bound in the dialectical nexus with categories of movementquestions these assumptions and affirms the emancipative potential of global civil society in global contestation (see Box 2.1 in Chapter 2; Gramsci 1971). The emancipative potential of global civil society is not, however, axiomatically

assured. At its inception, the World Social Forum was considered to represent the globalization protest movements of the 1990s and, more recently, the global democratization movements of the twenty-first century (Teivainen 2007). Additionally, a recent collection on Global Democracy and the World Social Forums considers it a laboratory for global democracy (Smith et al. 2008: xii). Elsewhere, the nature of its informal organizational structures and decentralized forms of authority are considered to ‘make it one of the most promising civil society processes that may both contribute significantly to global democratization initiatives and work to constitute such an initiative in itself ’ (Byrd 2005: 158). Resistance movements, from multitude to the postmodern prince, are also intertwined with theories of transnational and global democracy. The principal stated aim of Multitude is to find a new conceptualization of democracy and possibility for politics as the old choice between sovereignty or anarchy is replaced by the ‘power of the multitude to create social relationships in common’ (Hardt and Negri 2005: xvii, 336). Just as multitude is considered to lie somewhere between war and democracy (while moving in the direction towards a new form of democracy), resistance movements are often implicitly characterized as occupying a similar space so that the most frequent outcome or benefit is presented in terms of democratization and, increasingly, new possibilities beyond territorial politics. However, democratic possibilities must be actively nurtured so that civil society does not detract from democracy (Scholte 2002: 281). This recalls the democratic challenges presented by civil society and the wider issues of elitism, funding, convergence, power and strategy which are examined in relation to global governance and the World Social Forum in Chapters 4 and 5. Clearly a positive initiative according to many accounts, it is less well

recognized that the WSF exerts a presence on the complex terrain of the global political economy and its participants engage in various modes of social relation in and towards it. The post-modern prince, multitude and/or dominant representations of global civil society are shaped in response to and because of this presence. Additionally, interactions between civil society and international institutions associated with global governance, coupled with the methods through which analysis emerges, are productive of, and significant in, the ‘making’ of global civil society. The categorization of research, in contrast, reflects a tendency towards instrumental and functional accounting

for global civil society or contrasting voluntarist methods of analysis. The absence of a dialectical nexus within and between categories of research, and indeed movement, presents an obstacle to furthering new thinking on the politics of resistance. In a wider and originally disciplinary sense a primary concern with the ‘global accountability problem’ (Scholte 2004: 233) has implications for the politics of resistance in denoting spheres of meaning to global civil society and related demands. The simple re-articulation of demands in the absence of ideological struggle, for example, can leave in place the dominant ideology and material inequalities (Maiguashca 2006), thus only succeeding in alleviating or smoothing over the global accountability problem.2 Studies of global civil societal modes of relation to the global political economy, whether civic-consensual, unitary, or in other form, potentially examine not only the re-articulation of demands-or the move from protest to articulation of democratic alternatives to neoliberalism in the case of the World Social Forum-but also significant material and ideological aspects of contestation. Equally, a focus on instrumental and/or voluntarist categorizations, in the absence of a critical conceptualization of an emancipatory global civil society, dissociates global civil society from state and market agency. The analytical contributions of global civil society are significant not when

global civil society is adapted to ‘fit’ explanations of global governance, but rather when the varied insights or ‘conceptual baggage’ that it brings to modes of social relation are closely integrated. Studies on the historicopolitical accumulation of meanings related to global civil society intervene in the dialectical nexus to give form and voice to the constituents of resistance (Chase-Dunn 2011; Chase-Dunn and Gills 2005; Drainville 2004, 2012; Gills and Gray 2012; Thompson 1963). The precedents of alter-globalization movements can be traced through historical parallels and contrasts that are neither spontaneous nor new and much can be learned from ‘the various strategic and tactical insights that incorporating history affords’ (Broad and Heckscher 2003: 726). These strategic and tactical insights disrupt decontextualized and non-historicized interpretations of global civil society and emphasize instead an historicized, diachronic, format of thought (cf. Cox 2002). The possibilities of global civil society in diachronic time are more clearly understood through categories of research. This framework recognizes that in the absence of ideological struggle, material and ideological demands may simply be rearticulated towards functional and procedural resolutions. The dialectical balance, therefore, between Scholte’s (2002) account of civil society and neo-Polanyian accounts of global civil society is the issue here. An extract from Gramsci’s discussion on organic and conjunctural movements, examined in more detail below, may be adapted to illustrate this balance: ‘In the first case there is an overestimation of mechanical causes, in the second an exaggeration of the voluntarist and individual element’ (Gramsci 1971: 178). A dialectical balance or category of research contributes to conceptualizing global civil society.