Global activism strengthens value of democracy

Zakiyuddin Baidhawy, Surakarta, Central Java

During the eighties many activists embraced a simple slogan: "Think globally, act locally." The message: In acting at the local level, one needed to understand how global forces affected local reality. In short, trying to tackle local issues without understanding the ever-increasing power of global processes was tactically inappropriate.

By the mid-nineties, activists began to question this logic. Devaki Jain, one of the founders of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, challenged this slogan. She asked whether this did not trap local people solely in local interventions when in fact many of the causes being pursued locally now needed to be advanced in the range of global forums and processes that have become so influential. She argued that perhaps we need to turn this slogan on its head and instead "think locally, act globally."

Rajesh Tandon, the former chair of CIVICUS, a civil-society organization, recently suggested that social activists needed to think both locally and globally and act both locally and globally since the realities of globalization now deprive us of the luxury of national parochialism. This rise toward global activism on a range of issues is happening precisely at a time when many citizens of the world have achieved representative electoral democracy at the national level. Even so, what we have is often only the forms of democracy but not the substance.

Democracy should not be reduced to the singular act of casting a ballot once every four or five years. Even in societies with longstanding democratic traditions, democracy is under threat, with high levels of citizen disillusionment and loss of faith in public institutions. Citizens active in various global alliances are challenging basic notions of governance and democracy, including the very nature of the nation-state.

There is a "power shift" in which governments and intergovernmental organizations are increasingly having to recognize that NGOs and other non-state actors have become real power brokers in various political, social and economic processes. Global associational revolution is as significant to the twentieth century as the development of the nation-state system.

Today we have a range of global civil-society actors. These include international membership organizations, such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace, but also autonomous international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch. Civil-society networks have arisen around specific areas of concern, such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Jubilee 2000, which campaigns for the cancellation of Third World debt. Numerous anti-nuclear civic action groups exercise an enormous influence over proliferation and security issues.

It is striking, however, that despite significant cultural, social, economic and political differences, there is a growing amount of common ground, including seeking to establish a code of ethics for the non-profit organizations, and the sharing of concerns about inequality and the environment. An important feature of this trend is the way NGOs and other civil-society groups have been able to push their agendas through important UN conferences. In all the major UN conferences during the nineties and thereafter, civil-society participation has been visible and effective.

This trend was quite evident at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil. Some 2,400 NGO delegates attended the substantive part of the conference alongside government leaders, as well as an NGO forum with about 17,000 participants. This was followed by the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen and the Beijing Women's Conference, both in 1995, and others.

What, then, is a global space? Far too often when people talk about global processes and the centers of global power, they are focused exclusively on Washington, New York, Geneva, Paris and London. This raises the question of the North-South divide within global activism. It is not uncommon to hear activists from the South criticize the manner in which they feel dominated by their counterparts in the North. Jubilee 2000 now has a specific component called Jubilee South: Activists from the world's poor countries wanted to carve out a space to engage in dialogue with one another without their Northern counterparts.

We recognize that this move toward global activity is not simply a phenomenon of the nineties and thereafter. Trade unions have long organized at the international level, as have religious movements. These trends are likely to continue, with several transnational networks and organizations emerging more rapidly. They will probably grow in sophistication and will also face a range of challenges pertaining to legitimacy, operational efficiency and political viability. In meeting these challenges, there will be many voices that will stress that at the heart of this enterprise is the struggle for accountable democracy.

As has been said, global activism may not be a substitute for democratic governance, but it can certainly play an important role in improving and strengthening it. For example, the formal institution of electoral systems does nothing to guarantee genuine democracy. We have the forms of democracy without the substance. In fact, electoral democracy runs the risk of becoming in many societies a preordained elite-legitimization process. To counterbalance this, strong citizen-inspired activism is going to be needed at the local, national and global levels.

The writer is Researcher of the Center for Cultural Studies and Social Change at Muhammadiyah University of Surakarta (UMS).