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| Can We Have a ‘Global Civil Society’? |
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So despite cosmopolitan theorists establishing that global citizens require new rights due to a 'governance gap', the stakeholders in a global village end up with no more rights than they began with:
"The additional rights upheld in the cosmopolitan framework turn out to be a chimera (ibid., p338)".
As a result of these issues Martin Kohler argues the very notion of a global civil society is itself 'misleading' adding:
"The transnational public sphere itself cannot be conceived of simply as the extension of the national one. The very concept of the public sphere is intrinsically bound up in structures of authority and accountability which do not exist in the transnational realm…As long as the state continues to be the only site of political authority in international relations, it is impossible for a transnational public sphere…to emerge (Kohler, 2003, p. 336).
It is manifest that we cannot have a global civil society without a transnational public sphere and the cosmopolitan project therefore requires a new model of governance.
A theoretical limit to democracy
We find authority to be indispensable for any political project. Even though cosmopolitans elicit much sympathy from those who agree with the mission founded in late modern thinking to expand democracy into the transnational sphere even those rooted in Enlightenment culture query efforts towards resolving the shortfall in sovereignty or what cosmopolitans refer to as a 'democratic deficit'. With supra- or transnational authority missing it is increasingly popular to believe it is a fundamental error to expect organs external to the nation-state to conform to democratic norms. In fact, attempting to foster democracy without the requisite authority in the transnational sphere is fraught with such difficulty it would appear certain that the theoretical scope of democracy is limited to the state structure alone. Robert A. Dahl, perhaps the world's foremost authority on democracy, is especially sceptical that international organisations can ever be democratic (cf. Dahl, 1999) and renowned political scientists Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr. are exceptionally scathing:
"International institutions are seen essentially as instruments that states use to achieve common purposes. To hold them to domestic standards of democratic procedure is to engage in what philosophers call a "category mistake". It makes no more sense to ask whether an inter-state organisation is "democratic" than it does to ask if a broom has a nice personality" (2003, p. 387).
Even hard-bitten democrats are arguing that democracy can go no further than the nation-state even in the global age where solutions are required. It is plain that any quest for resolving the 'democracy deficit' in the transnational sphere will ultimately be unrewarding. The cosmopolitan project of extending democracy into the transnational sphere to resolve the 'governance gap' appears to be at a dead end.
Legitimacy
The second analogy, that between domestic civil societies and a global civil society, suffers when we are reminded that the cosmopolitan project is built upon the desire to give the citizens of the world a voice. It therefore requires legitimacy.
The global civil society aims to 'represent' people and act as 'intermediaries' for them in transnational institutions and forums. The notions of representation and intermediation in the global arena are, in fact, an inversion of the national sphere where domestic civil society actors make no pretence of representation or intermediation. In fact, domestic civil society actors eschew efforts towards acquiring legitimacy as they claim to represent none other than themselves, relying on free speech and the ability to persuade others to their view. (cf. Anderson & Rieff, 2004). The question of legitimacy becomes vexed when we consider that without systems of accountability these global actors have no legitimacy to be representing and intermediating on our collective behalf. After all we are surely correct to ask who chose them to do so?
A global civil society is predicated upon legitimacy to act on behalf of others who have not selected them. The actors in any civil society, even a supposed global one, are instead self-selected. They act of their own volition and literally anyone can choose to act within this sphere. Most studies of civil society transparency do not engender confidence and Jan Aart Scholte's work on a global civil society was not alone in raising serious concerns:
"Many legal business associations, community groups, labour movements, NGO's, religious bodies and think tanks have not made clear who they are, what objectives they pursue, where their funds originate, how they reach their policy positions etc. Many civic groups have not issued annual reports of their activities or have not made them readily available to the public" (Scholte, 2000, p.280).
Cosmopolitan advocates have yet to convince us that we should be so innately trusting of transnational civilian networks as no mechanism exists for the rest of us to hold global civil society actors to account. They may be warm and loveable, committed and brave but they may also be intolerant, bigoted, incompetent and criminal and we are in no position to manage them. They may turn into what has become known as 'ugly citizens' (cf. Beck, 1999) subverting the processes for their own ends, working to pursue their own interests.
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