Setting up a global civil society network

By Budiawan

SINGAPORE (JP): Many facets of today's social reality are becoming more and more global in nature: from environmental issues to human rights violation issues, from exploitative child labor to political violence.

To this end, building a strong civil society network among NGO activists across the world is an increasingly urgent agenda.

This is based on a belief that it is society itself rather than state institutions that has to struggle for social rights. The dominant institutions -- both state and supra-state -- which are supposed to protect social rights, have not only failed to do so but also have played a significant part in creating those global problems. It is because these institutions have been subjected to the imperatives of what prominent American economist and social activist David C. Korten calls the "money world", as opposed to the "living world".

Korten's recently published book, Globalizing Civil Society: Reclaiming Our Right to Power (Seven Stories Press, New York, 1998), stems from a basic argument that the money world is a human construction, whereas we -- human beings -- are creatures of the living world; and it is the sustainability of the living world that enables the sustainability of human existence. That is why money should be (re)positioned as the servant, not the master, of life.

Korten, whose works have been popular in Indonesia since the 1980s, sees that there is an increasingly critical gap between the money world and the living world.

In the former, so-called societal progress is measured by economic and financial indicators. Limitless and ceaseless economic growth and expansion have become the imperatives of the money world. These all have constituted the bases of the public policies of both supra-state and state institutions. The outcome is indeed the enormous progress in technology and organizations as the primary instruments of economic growth and expansion in the last half century. But, this success is achieved not without any costs. The very cost of all of this success is the destruction of the "other" world, that is, the living world.

The living world is the world of real and everyday life for billions of human beings on this planet. It is not a virtual world of a few share brokers, currency traders and global financial and economic policy makers generated by the logic of capital.

It is the world subject to the laws of nature, in the sense that there are natural imperatives that cannot be denied, if we still want to keep this world sustainable and suitable as a common living space.

These imperatives are such concepts as balance, diversity, sufficiency, synergy and vitality for regenerating the world itself: imperatives which are in fact strongly rooted in the so- called "traditional wisdom". Yet, these are all now being threatened and eroded by the practices of the money world; and this process will continue to get worse unless there is a well- organized and systematic movement to resist it.

It is in such a context that the agenda of building a strong network of global civil society has its relevance. To borrow the phrase of political scientist Robert Putnam, such a strong network of civil society could make up a "social capital". It is in such a strong civil society one can find a high social cohesiveness, which could encourage the flowering of mutual social trust and cooperation; and this will constitute a social form of efficiency in human relations both economically (in the market place), and politically (in governance).

In other words, this could serve as a social bastion to minimize the intervention of various external institutions of all levels.

The very embodiment of such a social capital is the life of local communities, local not only in a geographical sense, but also on an organizational level. It is in these communities social bonding can still potentially be maintained in such a way to empower people vis-a-vis the destructive elements of the global money world, as implemented through state institutions, among other things.

Yet, the emphasis on social bonding does not necessarily mean a denial of social competition. Social bonding with no competition will only produce stagnation and a lack of innovation, which in turn can make communities vulnerable to external intervention.

On the contrary, competition without social bonding will only create anarchy and violence, direct or indirect results of the practices of -- and also easily co-opted by -- the money world. Thus, there must be a balance between these two aspects of society. In other words, these are not mutually exclusive, but complementary.

The building of such a social bond as a form of social capital will hopefully constitute a strong base for a just and sustainable society. This implies that it is individuals within society who have to struggle to regain their rights to regulate themselves; and this struggle will be helped by a strong global civil society network.

Thus, one way of achieving a self-regulating community is to rebuild the social capital at the local level but, bond it in a global network. Perhaps the cliche "think globally, act locally" is relevant in this context. But, why a global network? Will it create another form of "interventionism" and "expansionism"?

Such a worry could come true if the so-called "global network of civil society" embodies itself in a "North-South" relationship like that in the money world. It would be just another form of "imperialism"; or, the social shadow of "economic and financial imperialism", fighting each other. How can a shadow oppose that which produces the shadow?

Based on such a critical perspective, it is not enough to simply propagate a global civil society, but we should also be concerned with the mode of the network. How can we achieve a just and sustainable society, if the nature of the network is unequal and unfair?

The writer is a Ph.D student in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore.