1. Introduction

The Fate of Democracy in an Age of Globalization¹

The late twentieth century has been accompanied by more and faster change than ever before. Military dictatorships have been overthrown in Latin America, communism has collapsed in Eastern Europe, the period of apartheid has closed in South Africa. At the same time as there has been a growth in liberal democratic régimes, outbreaks of ethnic violence have increased — 52 major conflicts were identified in 42 countries in 1993 alone. Even as medical science has reached new heights and the average age of Westerners increases steadily, nearly a third of the global population lives in hunger, malnutrition retards the physical or mental development of one child in three in the developing world, and six million children under the age of five died in 1992 from pneumonia or diarrhoea.²

Economically, the picture remains unsettled and inequity between rich and poor increases. Of the US$ 23 trillion global GDP in 1993, US$ 18 trillion is in the industrial countries, and US$ 5 trillion in the developing countries, which are home to 80 per cent of the world's population. The assets of the richest 358 people in the world exceed the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 per cent of the world population. In the last 30 years, the ratio of shares of global income between the richest 20 per cent and poorest 20 per cent of people has doubled — from 30:1 to 61:1.³ Developing country debt has multiplied, and even major Western countries now find large proportions of their national debt held by foreign investors.

The global economy has been integrated by a massive increase in international economic activity, particularly in the last 15 years by the concentration of world capital among transnational corporations (TNCs). At the same time the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) marks unprecedented power in a new global institution while the authority of the United Nations as an agent of global governance is diminished and its coffers are bare.

In this context, there is a view that globalization has not been accompanied by democracy but quite the opposite: globalization has put democracy at stake. In this view, the crucial role of civil society today is to advocate democracy against the rising anti-democratic tendencies of global capital concentration and a new international economic institution with a singular commitment to "free trade" as the primary basis for international economic relations.

Further, this view holds that it is the role of civil society to democratize global governance by harnessing the advantages that can come from globalization — such as new communications — while resisting its drawbacks, most specifically the centralization of economic power in the hands of TNCs and the international economic institutions — the WTO, IMF, and the World Bank.

This perspective holds that there is a deep sense of urgency about "the fate of democracy in an age of globalization" and a strong sense that its fate will be decided by the outcome of a new negotiation between representatives of international economic actors and representatives of civil society everywhere. This view lambasts "radical free market ideology"⁴ and "free trade" for transnational corporations, and is critical of the establishment of the World Trade Organization. In the US, John Cavanagh of the Institute of Policy Studies has argued that this "combination of strong 21st century global rights for corporations with weak 20th century national rights for labour and the environment [will result in a] return to a brutal 19th century capitalism".⁵ Ralph Nader, founder of the US organization Public Citizen, has argued that the new international trade rules "would establish world economic government dominated by giant corporations", on a completely new level, and unaccountable to the rule of law or to democratic principles.⁶

Martin Khor, Research Director of Third World Network in Penang, Malaysia, argues that the WTO has:

expand[ed] 'the economic and political space' in the world for transnational corporations and for transnationalizing the national systems of production, distribution and trade, and consumption. This transnationalizing process has been sought to be achieved by dismantling the power of nation states to manage and intervene in their economy, and in particular diminishing the rights and powers of Third World countries in their local communities.... The raison d'être for all this...is to restrict or dampen the competitive capacity of the enterprises and productive apparatus of the South in a world economy that is being 'globalized' in the interest of the Northern transnational corporations.⁷

In contrast to representatives of the new economic globalization, who see globalization, free trade, privatization and democracy as connected, key actors in civil society frame economic globalization as an adversary of democracy. Moreover, whereas the seat of democracy was previously considered to be the nation state, many now consider its fate to be in the hands of civil society.⁸ In the context of the WTO and the "unilateral liberalization forced" on the developing world through the IMF and World Bank, says the Indian Consumer Unity and Trust Society (CUTS), "it is now the burden of civil society to develop an alternative and proactive vision for a globalizing and liberalizing economy".⁹

There are two complexities that need to be added to this view. First, in the opinion of Joanne Landry of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, the end of the Cold War came about because the Eastern European states collapsed under their own weight, not simply because of the strength of civic opposition. Civil society may be unequal to the challenge — to rebuild democracy nationally, and contribute to democratic global governance internationally.¹⁰

Second, it is not the function — nor usually the intention — of civil society to usurp the functions of government. Its role may be to shape and steer public issues and public officers, to monitor the implementation of public policy, to deliver humanitarian relief. Its mission may be to ensure that governance is democratic, accountable, transparent, inclusive, participatory and equitable.¹¹ In this sense, domestic civil society relies on a strong state and functions best under strong government. Global civil society, in parallel, would rely on strong national government and strong international governance from a reformulated United Nations.¹²
 

The State and Civil Society in Global Governance

The crucible of modern democracy was the birth of the nation state in Europe in the eighteenth century. "Representation" of the officers of public office was decided in an electoral process, and in most cases a more permanent civil service was also established. The civil service was accountable to parliament, but responsible for the executive functions of the state — its legal system, taxation system and public affairs. It was this concept of democracy that was transferred into the international arena with the establishment of the United Nations, except that the power of the UN was always subject to the members' need to retain national sovereignty.

In a globalizing world, it has become clear that many local problems have global origins and need solutions that are both local and global. The problems of global governance clearly exceed the mandate and possibly the competence of national governments on their own or collectively. There is increasing evidence, for example, of global crises within national and local political processes. Crime, unemployment and environmental depletion in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro or Johannesburg are examples of major domestic crises of governance whose origins and solutions lie at transnational or international levels — in other words, they cannot be resolved only at the national political level.¹³

Many forces of globalization create contradictory trends that are placing enormous strain on the normal institutions of political governance: the nation state and the United Nations. The political authority of the UN is clearly in a period of nemesis. Limping along in the face of crippling financial and moral abuse from the United States,¹⁴ an almost financially bankrupt UN sees its status and role in international governance usurped by the new and ascending nexus of multilateral economic institutions. At the same time, it has never been so urgent, as it is today, that there be a strong, re-invented United Nations within a strong system of global governance.

An expanded and stronger concept of global governance is currently under development. The Commission on Global Governance concluded in its final report that:

Governance is the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co-operative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and régimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest.... At the global level, governance has been viewed primarily as intergovernmental relationships, but it must now be understood as also involving non-governmental organizations (NGOs), citizen's movements, multinational corporations, and the global capital market. Interacting with these are global mass media of dramatically enlarged influence.¹⁵

The authority and competence of the state, however, is also being challenged by globalization. As national and international government declines in authority and international economic institutions leap into the space of government, civil society not only has to grapple with what a democratic system of global governance may look like, but has to do so in the absence of active players willing and able to take on the executive roles of governance. Along with the incompetence of the state to deal with global issues, some civil society activists perceive a failure of will. Criticizing the inadequacy of government responses to plant genetic resources at the FAO Leipzig Conference on Plant Genetic Resources in June of 1966, Pat Mooney of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) commented that if governments refused to govern on this issue they might want to consider joining the non-governmental groups on the other side of the floor.¹⁶

With the decline of the authority of the state and increasing national and international levels of social crisis, there are loud calls from civil society for the stronger imposition of global governance (usually meaning the UN and its agencies) to balance the newly empowered economic governance to protect "free trade" of the WTO and international business. Responding to the formation of the WTO, five international development groups based in England¹⁷ made the case for the regulation of international business through the imposition of existing multilateral agreements and the revitalization of appropriate UN institutions and initiatives. Soon after, the New York-based international women's group, the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), produced a set of six educational primers on the implications for women and local issues of the new macro-economic trends and institutions, principally TNCs, the WTO and the World Bank.¹⁸ Apart from several specific campaign recommendations, the WEDO primers also made recommendations to strengthen the political governance institutions of the UN and its agencies, and to implement existing international agreements. Myriam Vander Stichele of the Transnational Institute has argued that "[t]he power of transnational corporations has dominated most of the discussions among NGOs during the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) so far".¹⁹ And Barbara Bramble, Director of International Affairs for the National Wildlife Federation/US, at a speech to the 1996 session of the Commission on Sustainable Development, called for international controls and regulations to be established for the conduct of international trade in order to assure that the goals of sustainable development are fostered rather than crippled by globalization.²⁰

As the Commission on Global Governance has observed, some of the issues that globalization has created for global governance are quite new. There are clearly, for example, transboundary or international dimensions to environmental problems, population, women's rights, human rights, social development and food security. A good example of a completely "modern" issue of global governance is provided by trade in human cell tissue, a market with substantial commercial interests, unpredictable military consequences, complex moral implications and unknown long-term human implications. In the words of co-author Mark Harrington, "[t]his is an example of how our "enlightened" concept of development still harbors the destructive seeds of colonialism" (see box 1).²¹

Without doubt, if not for the vigilance and persistence of civil society, many of these issues would not have reached international attention. The work of the Canada-based Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) on the trade in human cell tissue is a case in point. Here is a non-governmental organization systematically and creatively assembling disparate information from around the world and presenting a major new international public policy outrage where the forces of the market and the military are set to offend ethical values, circumvent binding intergovernmental agreements, and upset natural human genetic diversity, by the commercialization of indigenous peoples' genes. RAFI's resources are a small budget and the commitment of its staff. Their tools are the media and appeals for the implementation of existing international intergovernmental agreements and the creation of new ones — despite the fact that the very existence of this trade indicates that these agreements can be ignored as often as they are applied. The challenge raised by RAFI to the intergovernmental process is highly relevant: there is a job of global governance to be done, and both civil society and governments have discrete parts to play.

While the activism of civil society has also catalyzed international UN conferences, its capacity to affect global issues depends in many cases on the strength of the international political system to act effectively, and, as the current string of international conferences ends, there are real questions about how civil society will raise global issues in the coming period.

Debate has begun about the shape, form and future authority of institutions of international political governance.²² But there has been far less thinking on the role of civil society as an actor in global governance. The star of civil society is clearly ascendant. Civil society organizations proliferate at international and grassroots levels. They are increasingly visible at international conferences, where in many cases they were responsible for setting the agenda in the first place.²³ In many parts of the UN, they are being welcomed as legitimate contributors to global governance, as integral to the United Nations and its mission,²⁴ and, in many cases, as more efficient providers of social and humanitarian services than the state. For this latter reason, they are attracting ever more funding as development money is channeled away from national political entities and towards the voluntary sector. But the question of the mandate and competence of civil society in the face of this very large challenge is not clear, and Joanne Landry's cautionary note, cited above, should be heeded: civil society may not be mature enough to meet it.

Given the proliferation of NGOs involved in global issues, the new optimism for their role, and the complexities of community building, the question of the role of civil society in global governance remains crucial. This paper is structured around three related questions.

• Representation and participation: Who and what are civil society organizations? Who do they speak for? What is the agenda of civil society in global governance issues?
• Access: What access does civil society have to global governance? Broadly speaking, if the door is being opened at the United Nations, this is clearly not the case at the gates of the World Trade Organization or TNCs.
• Strategies and Impact: Given their uneven access to the institutions of global governance, what impact can civil society organizations or actors have? What can they achieve? What strategies are currently in place? Where are there new models of civil society working together, with what results?

1 This was the title of a conference organized at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA, March 1996.

2 UNRISD, States of Disarray: The Social Effects of Globalization, UNRISD, Geneva, 1995.

3 UNDP, Human Development Report 1996, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996, p. 2.

4 Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara, UNRISD presentation to the World Summit for Social Development, Copenhagen, March 1995.

5 John Cavanagh, keynote presentation at the Global Teach-In on The Social, Ecological, Cultural and Political Costs of Globalization, International Forum on Globalization, New York, 9 November 1995.

6 Ralph Nader, "Introduction: Free trade and the decline of democracy", in Ralph Nader et al., The Case Against Free Trade: GATT, NAFTA and the Globalization of Corporate Power, Earth Island Press, San Francisco, 1993, pp. 1-12.

7 Third World Network, The World Trade Organization, Trade and Environment, position paper of the Third World Network, Penang, Malaysia, 1994.

8 The meeting of the International NGO Forum (INGOF) in Manila, December 1995, established facilitating groups to perform a variety of functions, including drafting codes of conduct, environmental quality reports, and creating think tanks to "change the current trend of globalization to [attain] sustainability". (INGOF, Meeting the Challenge of the Emerging Global System, Manila, Philippines, December 1995). The International Forum on Globalization (IFG) put on a well-attended Global Teach-In on The Social, Ecological, Cultural and Political Costs of Globalization in New York City in November 1995. One of the key preparatory papers for the event grappled with the local implications of the trade rules that "supersede national law, restrict the authority of governments to set national standards [or] regulate TNCs".

9 "Raising living standards universally - the alternative agenda for UNCTAD IX", editorial in South Asia Watch on Trade, Economics and Environment (SAWTEE), No. 6, March 1996, a publication of CUTS, Calcutta, India.

10 Joanne Landry of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, statement at the plenary on intervention and peacemaking at the conference on The Fate of Democracy in an Age of Globalization, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 15 March 1996.

11 Thandiwe Dodo Motsisi, The Role of NGOs in Civil Society: Common and Opposing Interests in South and North, paper delivered to a seminar of the same title at the WSSD, NGO Forum, Copenhagen, 6 March 1995.

12 Martin Khor, A Greater Need for the UN in a Liberalizing, Globalizing World, NGO campaign flier, Third World Network, September 1995; see also the Global Policy Forum World Wide Web pages on socio-economic analysis of globalization and the crisis of the UN: http://www.globalpolicy.org; and also: Global Structures Convocation: Human Rights, Global Governance and Strengthening the United Nations, Washington, D.C., February 1994.

13 UNRISD, States of Disarray, op. cit.

14 Global Policy Forum, UN Financial Crisis Chronology: August 1994-February 1996, New York, February 1996.

15 Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood: The Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Oxford University Press, New York, 1995, pp. 2-3.

16 Pat Mooney of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), quoted at the International Technical Conference on Plant Genetic Resources, Leipzig, Germany, 17-23 June 1996.

17 Riva Krut and Harris Gleckman, Business Regulation and Competition Policy: The Case for International Action, Christian Aid, London, June 1994.

18 WEDO, Codes of Conduct for Transnational Corporations, Primer No. 1 was produced for the WSSD, March 1995; a subsequent edition of this primer together with five more were produced for the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, September 1995.

19 Myriam Vander Stichele of the Transnational Institute, "TNCs run amuck", in ECO/CSD, 29 April 1996, p. 1. The ECO newsletter has been co-operatively produced by citizens' groups since 1972 at all major international conferences.

20 Barbara Bramble, The Future of the CSD or Bringing Agenda 21 into the Twenty-First Century, statement on behalf of the National Wildlife Federation/US at the High Level Segment of the Fourth Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development, United Nations, New York, 2 May 1996. Bramble suggests that national regulation, monitoring and enforcement should encourage "voluntary" corporate initiatives.

21 Edward Hammond and Mark Harrington, "New questions about management and exchange of human tissues at NIH: Indigenous cells patented", RAFI Communiqué, March/April 1996.

22 Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood, op. cit.

23 James Gustave Speth, Administrator of UNDP, speech to the Women's Caucus on International Women's Day, WSSD, Copenhagen, 8 March 1995.

24 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, speech to the DPI Annual Conference, United Nations, New York, September 1995.