Civil society, representation, states (was: [ox-en] Re: The role of civil society during the WSIS process)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 22:27:01 +0100
Hi Graham and all!
Thanks for these highly interesting questions! Indeed I have similar
questions in my mind for quite some time now.
Last month (45 days ago) Graham Seaman wrote:
On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Stefan Merten wrote:
As far as I understood this is one of the first summits where the
civil society has been / should have been included. And actually the
civil society organized quite well in preparation of the summit and as
far as I can see actually it created some far more substantial results
than the states. The states basically where caught in diplomacy making
and all kinds of contradictions whereas the civil society could
seemingly agree to some points.
Seems like some serious mystification is going on around the term 'civil
society'.
'The States' here means representative democracy, I think - as far as I
know these people are not 'neutral', state based bureaucrats, but members
of governments, or at least closely associated with governments; and apart
from China, mainly elected governments. .
Well, in the WSIS all states were at least invited. I don't know how
much the percentage of governments is which are democratically
elected. But this is not the point here.
Elected governments are meant to represent their peoples.
Yes.
Civil society,
in bourgeois theory, is what is represented by the elected government.
Yes.
But now you're telling us the representatives have failed
In the WSIS definitely, yes. However, if I look at this whole process
of a growing importance of civil society / NGO I recognize a failure
of another sort: The state based OHA system looses strength. The gaps
which people feel the states leave behind are filled by NGOs and other
civil society activities (LETS are another non-NGO example). Similar
to Free Software the ancien regime starts to accept these new players.
To me this is (one more) hint that the old state / industry / mass
society based system is on a decline.
and in their
place we have - what? direct democracy? the population of the world?
Obviously not, so what are they, what is this 'civil society', and why
does it work better?
Very important questions indeed.
- because it is more representative? Clearly not - unless by some magic
intution of the wishes of 99.999% of the population who aren't there.
I totally agree. But nonetheless I guess civil society / NGOs are
widely accepted by people. So there must be something why people trust
these people more than their elected governments.
- because it is not bound by national borders? Maybe, though from what's
been visible on then outside it looks like language and other divisions
have also been quite strong in 'civil society' - WSIS has looked very
different depending on which mailing list you read!
Of course there are divisions. However, they seem to be recognized in
a different way.
But the global stage some NGOs act on points to the fact that there
are topics instead of nations which bring together people. This is
very much like what we see in Free Software. Some years ago on the
German list I said something along the lines that NGOs could be seen
as a parallel development to Free Software in another area.
-because it's made up of people who are passionately interested in what
they're doing? This would be the 'free software style leadership can be
applied to anything' argument.
Of course I mostly welcome this interpretation ;-) .
A bit lacking in any kind of basis at the
moment though...
What kind of basis are you thinking of? The representation aspect? But
this is exactly the point that civil society / NGOs does not have this
representation aspect but is widely accepted by people nonetheless
(not so by states - in particular not those with non-democratic
governments).
Now you've seen them,
Very few actually because I have not been to the official event.
do you have any more idea how to justify the fact
that these particular people have some influence over the way things are
run?
I think the difference to state guys is that these people are far less
alienated to the topics than any bureaucrat can be.
However, they have also far less responsibility because they do
neither have the power nor the money states have. I wonder what
happens if say Greenpeace would overtake the German ministry for
environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety.
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