Civil Society, Global

Civil society has assumed new relevance in the context of globalization, as not only economies but also societies are becoming more intertwined. Few concepts in the social sciences can look back to an intellectual history longer than that of civil society—and few have experienced more prolonged periods of neglect, even obscurity, and fewer still have achieved a more spectacular revival. Indeed, a term little known among social scientists and policymakers until the 1980s, civil society has become a central policy issue around the world and a major theme in academia.

At one level, civil society has an intuitive meaning and connotes aspects of public civility, compassion, and voluntary participation of citizens in the infrastructure of communal and professional networks, associations, and organizations. At another level, civil society is also an abstract term that, in the words of Jürgen Habermas, constitutes a public sphere outside the state (as the seat of power) and the market (as the manifestation of self-interest).

The terms also have both an intuitive appeal and an abstract meaning in a globalizing world, where local communities are often under threat, where the role of government is undergoing a major reappraisal, where public administrations are shifting some of their tasks to voluntary associations, and where market forces, combined with [Page 199]technological developments, are shaping people's lives, often beyond their control. Today, and perhaps more so than in the past, the concept of civil society is employed for a variety of purposes, many of them normative, spanning the political spectrum. For example, politically conservative positions view civil society as the bulwark against the dominant state, emphasizing the capacity of society for self-organization, whereas the political left regards civil society as the locus of social participation, solidarity, and community building in the context of anonymous market forces.

In a globalizing context, the term civil society is used across national and cultural borders and historical periods, often as convenient shorthand to refer to whatever is part of neither government/state administration nor market firms/corporate capitalism at a particular place or time. Yet the diffuseness and flexibility of the term is as much its enemy as the normative use to which it is frequently put, and for many observers the concept seems to obscure as much as it reveals.