ABSTRACT
The idea of there being a moral and civic dimension to globalisation is, as I have argued, presupposed by debates in respect of human rights. This increasingly punctures the ‘fiction’ that civil society can be unproblematically subsumed within the idea of exclusively organised nationally orientated civil realms. According to Manuel Castells (2010), there is a growing gap between ‘our’ shared concerns and the national domains of politics that aims to address them. This can be detected in a number of global problems that have no local solutions like poverty, global warming, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In addition, the growing distrust and disillusionment with national politics, the decline of citizenship, the rise of identity politics and the fall of secure and egalitarian national societies all add to the complexity of the global age. Within this setting it has been voices outside of ‘mainstream’ politics that have articulated more global concerns and priorities. For Jurgen Habermas (2012), human rights acts as a significant means of ensuring respect for human dignity in that they offer standards to judge the inclusive nature of different human communities. The idea of human rights offers a break on more utilitarian forms of calculation that may be tempted to violate the rights of others to achieve certain ends. As Habermas argues, this often gives arguments and debates in respect of human rights a certain Kantian quality. Indeed Hannah Arendt (2000), who famously argued that the rights of the person depended upon citizenship rights without which universal rights meant very little, never entirely gave up on the idea of rights by virtue of being human. In Arendt’s (1992: 76) essays on Kant she argues ‘in the last analysis one should take one’s political baring less from the actuality of rights, but more the idea of human rights within a shared human community’. However, while respecting the philosophical importance of the Kantian arguments in respect of human rights, they have too little to say about what E.P. Thompson (1980) might have called the ‘making’ of global civil society. If Thompson (1980: 213) sought to stress the active agency of ‘free-born’ Englishmen in the struggle for rights by the working class movements of the past, then the same could equally be said of his commitment to the peace movement and the making of global civil society in the 1980s. Within this view, global civil society does not come into existence because of a new set of social relationships ushered in by globalisation or because of changing institutional arrangements,
but depends just as much as Chartism and the early trade unions did upon the creativity of social movements acting from below. In other words, global civil society is not the effect of human rights treaties but rather becomes constructed from below by different cultural and political passions and engagements. E.P. Thompson (1968), as a significant if somewhat neglected thinker on social movements and global civil society, is perhaps best known for his work on class. What was significant was his recovery of class identity being formed through agency, rather than it emerging out of structural arrangements. Thompson was keen to argue that the working class had turned themselves into a class by seeking to resist capitalism and inventing their own radical culture. This is significant in our setting, given that the possible emergence of more critical forms of global consciousness does not emerge out of the fact of globalisation, but will require construction by radical social movements, intellectuals as well as educational and artistic initiatives. However, as we shall see, I am not sure that even this view goes quite far enough in exploring some of the more complex and affective means of making civil society. Here I explore the more performative aspects of Thompson’s own position to suggest that the ‘making’ and the ‘doing’ of global civil society requires a thicker account of cultural and affective processes. In addition, we also need to consider some of the moral and cultural resources that Thompson drew upon which played a large part in helping ‘make’ Thompson as an activist as well as theorist about the peace movement.
