The Significance of Civil Society in Contemporary
World Affairs (I) - Western Political Theory

Prof. Hugh MacDonald

Palestinian state is an imminent creation. However disputed the immediate circumstances of its birth it will come about principally through agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, with some important input from outside. Exactly when and what will be its size and its powers are leading questions, but not my concerns here.

Palestinians, Israelis and the rest of the world meanwhile need to explore a range of questions which concern the theme of civil society: that is to say, how might a Palestinian state govern and regulate itself; and how might it be regulated by its own domestic society; how might it behave and what forces will act upon it in the international system; and, lastly, what models of civil-military relations and conflict resolution might provide useful insights for Palestine’s external relations?

Every state and society has unique structures. Every society is in important respects culture-specific. Different societies at equivalent levels of development view the world comparatively. This provides an intrinsic human capacity to actualize and transcend ‘difference’. My themes are, therefore, as follows. First, traditional Western political theory and strategic thought provide important insights for those who are engaged in the crucially important task of building civil society in the Palestinian space. Second, that a world society is emerging, in which the traditional Western-dominated international system and its rhetoric of globalization will play a diminishing role in terms of power, though both will continue to be influential in terms of ideas, technology, and capital. Third, that there are better and worse models of civil-military relations in the world, which crucially affect the affluence and well-being of entire populations; and among these it is worth considering the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Civil society and western political theory

It is pointless to define civil society as having any precise form. The shelves of the great libraries are lined with tens of thousands of works that discuss the nature of the obligations of the state, of citizenship, of the individual, and of the welfare society. Altogether these works signify a project which, over the last three millennia, has occupied the minds of all of the best philosophers and jurists, and a high proportion of political thinkers, leaders, diplomats and soldiers. But if that statement is sufficient to establish the universal importance of the project itself, two qualifications are needed to situate its cultural context.

The first is that with the rise of the West to global predominance from the 16^th Century onwards, it has been a project infused and conditioned by the religious and secular sub-dominant value systems of that civilization, which have included (sometimes important contending variants of) Roman Catholicism, Reform Protestantism, Judaism, Liberalism, Socialism, Fascism, and Nationalism. The second qualification is that during the last hundred years, and particularly since World War II, the rise of mass society and the (largely reluctant) acceptance by states of new legal norms and obligations in international relations have begun to create a new context, that of world society. World society is, however, at an early stage in creating its own history, and has by no means resolved the incompatibilities of differing traditions and value systems in regions, countries, nations and civilizations which do not share the historical experience or the perceptions of universalism entrenched in the West’s contemporary approach to civil society and international order.

Entering these qualifications hopefully establishes that the significance of civil society both is and is not self-evident. But two themes of this voluminous literature stand out in importance; deserving to be examined in some depth as central and constant considerations in and following the establishment of a Palestinian state. The first is that of a contract between the authority of the state and the will of the people. The second is that of human and welfare rights.

Contract Theory and Some of Its Difficulties

The great English thinker Thomas Hobbes, writing in the middle of the 17^th Century against a background of civil war and disputed legitimacy, suggested that constitutions, once made, could not be altered by popular will alone, as a sufficient condition of political change. He thus accorded to the state absolute powers to maintain obedience to law and order and in defense of the realm. He wrote that,

"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man."

Hobbes was not suggesting the state can treat its people in whatsoever fashion it wants. His argument is that the essence of a state is a covenant between individuals, the purpose of which is to end an anarchic struggle for power by creating an agreed government. Once a government is established, it must have sufficient strength to protect the original contract against change imposed from within society. Commentators often fail to note that Hobbes was seeking to limit the scope for civil violence and political revolution, rather than prescribing a particular form of authoritarianism. Actually Hobbes upheld freedom of thought and pluralism of belief between and within societies. He was interested neither in the supremacy of any type of government, nor in the construction of a systematic ‘world order’, but in determining those conditions in which a political order can be sustained in the face of contending political factions, where there has also come to be a recognition of the rights of individuals to pursue their personal, disparate and frequently contending goals. The justification of the strong state therefore stems from consideration of what is needed to satisfy the want of sustainable political order:

"They that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government."

In his work De Cive, which we would translate as On Civil Society, he showed that different peoples will have different forms of government; that there is no one form of government that is morally right or superior to all others; and that a strong state comprises the best guarantee of stability for the enjoyment of civil rights and freedoms, which could then, and only then, be enjoyed by citizens without undue interference by the state in their daily lives, and without the risk of constant constitutional revisions inciting civil war. Interestingly, Hobbes saw shared religious belief as a consolidating force within political society, though he also observed the dangers of an ‘official’ religion resulting in a repressive state:

"They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy: and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion."

Hobbes’s thought is notable for this kind of empirical-realism. In one of his most quoted generalizations he wrote:

"I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death."

Yet to see this as the entirety of what we call ‘Hobbesian logic’ is to miss the richness and complexity of his philosophy. This establishes the priority of legitimate order over that of having a distribution of power within society; it makes the state primarily responsible for the conduct of relations among states; and it abolishes the claims that the state’s authority comes from a higher source than the will of the governed, or that the purpose of government is anything more than the maintenance of a social framework within which people may enjoy their private and civil rights. According to Hobbes the issues of good government can be debated meaningfully only after, and not before, the establishment of strong government. Yet strong government is not a substitute for good government. Good government entails the maximum enjoyment of private and public goods within the framework of laws designed to maintain collective, social, security. If a ruler so far abuses this framework as to precipitate a rebellion by the people, then he (or she) has no legitimate recourse if the consequence is civil war and the transfer of power to another more acceptable ruler.

This problem of power and order, which at least since Plato has been central to the discussion of what constitutes a civil society, was answered by other modern political theorists in different ways. Most notably perhaps, Machiavelli, writing over a century before Hobbes, contended that great men make history, and therefore political morality. In so doing he drove a wedge between the components of idealism and realism which had held together in the Western tradition before him, and invented a dialectical divide between the justification of the state and the justification of rights. In Machiavelli’s scheme, civil society is the bounds beyond the direct control of the ruler of a state: he (or she) must be wary of its autonomy and independent strength; but insofar as political morality exists, its content entirely subserves the purposes of gaining and keeping political power. Indeed for Machiavelli, moral values have no independent place in politics, and those who seek to explain or to govern in the name of spiritual values are bound to fail and to bring poverty, misery and military disaster upon their peoples.

As we have seen, Hobbes tried to transcend this divide in what was for his time a novel way, by subjecting the political ideal to social regulation, while at the same time insisting on its privileged nature and primacy as part of the ‘private’ realm. We might term this attempted solution ‘the common-law approach’. It was developed and reinforced during the era of British world power by a series of pragmatic liberal thinkers and statesmen, notably including Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Edmund Burke, William Cobbett and William Ewart Gladstone.

Nonetheless, the divide itself was to reappear in a more powerful form and in a more thoroughly secular era following the French Revolution. The issue that provoked it was the opposition between action and thought as contending foundations of right in a context of political revolution and counter-revolution. In practical terms, how could that revolution have failed and led to such protracted warfare if its ideals were appropriate to the development of mass society; had been built on the foundations of enlightened individualism; appealed to universal characteristics of men and women; yet had been decided by warfare among states principally concerned with gathering power and imposing order in the world?

The philosophical systems of Hume, Kant and Hegel, the three greatest philosophical minds of the later Enlightenment, were preoccupied by this, the question of how to ground a moral order independently of the state. All therefore crystallized important new ideas about civil society. For Hume morals were nothing more than conventions, nor was the state. For Kant the just society could only be a republic in a republican world. For Hegel the state must through struggle become the form of civil society, which itself ideally reflects the plurality of cultures in a world that is in touch with its spirit.

The broad outcome of their different enterprises was a long-running opposition between a materialist critique, which broadly sub-divided between revolutionary and reactionary components; and a critique emanating from idealism, which broadly sub-divided between liberal empiricism and historicism.

Marx, Darwin and Spengler approximated the range of positions occupied by materialism, which was sustained by the development of economics, sociology and other ‘social sciences’. Although materialism clearly situated mankind at the center of all consciousness of society, and therefore made civil society a matter of social facts and structures, its antipathy to idealism meant a more or less unavoidable embrace of moral relativism. This was comparatively unproblematic for social Darwinians and others, who could view international wars or the class struggle within societies in a perspective of ethical detachment. But when industrial war and social revolutions threatened the steep social hierarchy of fin de siecle Europe, the intellectual shortcomings of such detachment became suddenly and disastrously evident. In such a situation Marxism, a revolutionary materialist critique, might have been expected to supply the missing answers. But though it was framed in a historical telos, Marxism suffered the same essential shortcoming of being morally relativistic.

Hence when workers of the world were faced with the claims and sacrifices of a higher socialist morality, and according to Marx’s analysis of social facts and structures were required to take decisive action against the capitalist states which repressed them, they instead followed the logic of the here-and-now, which meant, for the most part, acting only within the context of their local or national systems. Only in Russia, where power actually fell out of the hands of the ruling elites, was there a revolution. In general, the action-oriented approach to explaining political change failed; and it did so on the basis of its own in-built refusal to distinguish between facts and values. This left the state almost everywhere as the guardian of political morality in the realm of material facts, and produced a vast though not permanent retreat from the world of affairs by those of strong religion.

In contrast, the idealist spectrum was marked out by J. S. Mill, the German post-Kantians, Hegel, and the frequently overlooked French poet and thinker Josef de Maistre. The diversity of their systems illustrates the lack of any common epistemology. Yet they shared a concern - also reflected widely in the Romantic movements across Europe - to reject justifications by force majeure or unreflective action; and to formulate programs for reforming society in the direction of human ideals. Mill fits into this spectrum, though closest to Hobbes in his justification of the state, on account of his liberal convictions about the perfectibility of human nature, and the universal validity of one type of government.

It is a crude generalization to assert that, despite their intellectual and cultural associations, idealism and romanticism were alike but not akin, and hence made unsuccessful political alliances everywhere. There were notable triumphs: from the Greek independence movement of the 1820s, throughout the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Russia, and in the Italian Risorgimento. Yet in the Chartist movement in Britain, in the failed German, central European and French revolutions of the period 1848-71, in the Kulturkampf and later German parliamentary struggles, and in the Dreyfus affair in France, this broad intellectual movement which was seeking in diverse ways to discover and re-establish the absolute outside and beyond the grasp of the state, lost out in the face of other, more pragmatic, political forces.

These dominant intellectual critiques, materialism and idealism, fed the subsequent development of mass ideologies, which in the 20^th Century acquired distinctive organizational features of their own. A preoccupation with ‘power politics’; an emphasis on ‘the nation state’ as the ‘natural’ framework for order and justice; a growing appetite for representative and supposedly responsible government: these were the main features of the development of domestic politics and the spread of colonialism, and its corollary nationalism, in Europe, North America, and across the world in the later 19^th and 20^th Centuries.

At the same time, political movements and parties became more important than political ideas. Though each party leadership paid homage to some leading thinker in the past, this encouraged - there were other root causes - the notion that the leader and the movement should become the form of the state. Only after the defeat of Fascism - a distinctively Machiavellian challenge to the consolidation of political pluralism - has there been something like a consensus that mass political movements and the state must permit a strong and autonomous social morality to exist independently of the political sphere.

Hence everywhere in the developed Western world, including Britain where the self-image of ‘being different’ remains strong, the social contract has taken on a semi-administrative form. In this, most commonly, organized groups compete for and exchange power of government through elections, while the state itself continues a strictly temporary autonomous existence, guaranteed by a constitution and managed by an administrative elite and bureaucracy that are not subject to election.

This highly complex contemporary form of the fundamental political idea of a contract between individuals who thus constitute a government, and a government which in consequence of the contract acquires power over them, has taken over three hundred years to evolve. It is an imperfect concept, subject to much contention. It has been widely challenged by other approaches to the state and political morality. It rests on the values of freedom of thought and privacy of the personal realm. It takes from, and encourages, much underlying cultural and religious organization. The experience of war, and absolutist ideologies, have done much to erect it into the most successful form of government in the world today. For all of that, its future is not guaranteed. But it is crucial to recollect that the basis of the entire edifice is this notion: that the relationship between government and those who are governed is one of reciprocity, in which the governed know, and can articulate, what the government is obligated to afford if it is to retain its legitimacy. Civil society can exist, but cannot flourish, without this.

From the Social Contract to Universal Rights

The other theme, which has always existed in the literature on civil society, is that of human rights existing independently of and in some sense prior to, any social contract between governed and government. These have been discussed through the centuries under the general theme of justice; and most particularly as epiphenomena of natural law and its secular variants. Locke, Kant and Hegel adopted positions, which subject the forms of any specific social contract to pre-existing conditions of humanity. Hume’s more radical skepticism contended that there is no ‘society’ with which 'individuals' could make a contract. In holding that social morality is conjectural rather than real, he foreshadowed much of the sociology and phenomenology of contemporary times. But opposition to social contract theory developed most effectively through 19^th and 20^th Century liberalism, which held that government is a necessary but voluntary adjunct to civilization.

Liberalism in political theory and international relations rose to predominance through British and later American influence in world affairs. Essentially, liberalism carried forward Enlightenment rationalism. But it added the theories of laissez-faire economics and representative and responsible government. This circumvented the dilemmas of the strong versus the weak state, and good versus bad political morals in government, by contending that economic growth and absence of war are corollaries of a common humanity. This common humanity would be constructed out of the general process of social development, which was explicitly global, but only at best implicitly ‘universal’. Moreover the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political and international theory attached a different and peculiarly neo-Marxian sense of ‘species being’ to this concept, whereas Kant and the continental idealists usually referred to values rooted beyond time and place.

As James Mayall has convincingly argued, by casually patronizing pluralism and nationalism, without having to think through their consequences, liberalism thereby circumvented the questions that the French Revolution had urgently posed, of what is and what is not universal. There were three main driving forces in this liberal-led development of mass society.

First, the state increasingly intervened in society to regulate economic affairs, most often with the proclaimed objective of improving conditions for the disadvantaged. This generated a long-running conflict between welfare economics and market economics, during which the triumph of market theories was consistently accompanied by the extension of welfare practices.

Second, international society developed norms and laws to identify and counter violations of the laws of war and crimes against humanity. The corpus of Hague and Geneva law, and more recent international legal regimes for the sea, outer space, the seabed, extend these legal regimes, though most international political and economic behavior remain and beyond regulation or legal recourse.

Thirdly, the categories of genocide, ethnic minority, and civil rights were created to explain and justify liberalism’s responses to the failures of globalization during the great wars of the 20^th Century. These classifications pointed towards a new kind of ‘understood’ or ‘known law’, which harks back to natural law and (largely unacknowledged by Anglo-American liberals) to the Kantian reformulating of what inter-connects ideals and universals.

Even if this process was for a long time uneven and politically contentious, the world economic recession of the 1930s and World War II brought Keynesian economics and the welfare state to the center-stage of the most developed societies and their political systems. On top of this, the Cold War meant an ideological struggle in which capitalism needed to deliver more than its socialist alternative. In short, liberalism, until recently, simply pre-supposed the universality of civil society. The broad outcome across the world over the past 60 years, as many new states were created, has been an increase in political centralization, and in the growing powers of the state to regulate society through such economic instruments as fiscal and monetary policies.

The Dilemma of Civil Society in the Contemporary World

There is an abundance of evidence from all continents suggesting that the state can do these things justly and efficiently only if there is a strong social and political culture capable of criticizing public policies, and making public authorities accountable. If this is not present, then the governing classes, including executives in public service, tend to make and apply regulations suiting their private or class needs. Whether we call it ‘crony capitalism’ or by some other name, this represents a specific and widespread form of corruption: the illicit transfer of private gain from one group of individuals to another group through the abuse of powers of taxation granted in the public interest. As the previous discussion has shown, a traditional or modern political culture which is incorporated by the state, typically through the personal dictatorship of a predominant leader, will be ineffectual in sustaining collective or individual rights in opposition to such a state system.

The problem for civil society is, therefore, that the priorities of a strong state conflict inherently with those of human and welfare rights. Unless public authorities can be held accountable for their use of resources granted through powers of taxing and spending in the public interest, this means that the expansion of civil society, which is clearly entailed in the widening recognition and entrenchment of rights, will always lead to the strengthening of the state. This may or may not be desirable in the perspective of such rights, depending on whether a stronger state leads to a better government. Otherwise, liberalism has created an insoluble paradox in which, if good government means strong government, then it will also mean a corrupt government that plunders the public purse. This tends to be the justification advanced by military dictators in supplanting weak civilian regimes. But we have already dealt with such claims in the preceding section, arriving at the conclusion that they are circuitous.

At the same time, however, even administrative, uncorrupt, governments will not automatically deliver good government. The stimulus to sustain good government in such a system, indeed the very meaning of that term, can only come from a social morality which takes root in the values espoused by the culture, and its forms from the organizations that most effectively interface with a strong state. These may include not only political movements, but also pressure groups and interest groups.

Such groups as business and trade organizations, banking and financial services, foreign traders, other governments, multinational corporations, are adept at making representations with states. Those who are not adept include the very young and the very old; the uneducated; those who are ill or suffer disabilities; women in many if not all societies; ethnic and religious minorities; the poor; refugees; and people and groups in societies where there is a civil emergency, a civil war, or some other condition of insecurity that encourages or entitles the state to exercise emergency powers.

This brief discussion allows us to establish the parameters within which civil society can treat those matters and issues that are its own.

First, strong government may be a precondition for sustainable good government. But many strong governments are corrupt personal dictatorships, and may use popular legitimacy to serve the narrow interests of a highly organized party-state machine.

Second, good government has its own necessary and sufficient conditions. In the contemporary world these have involved, on one hand, obviating the extremes of political ideology and organization that lead, by diverse routes, to totalitarianism; and, on the other hand, asserting the reciprocity required by individuals of the government if it is to fulfil its obligations.

Third, in this century the centralized state has taken on many new obligations towards its citizens, particularly in the sphere of social and economic welfare. These entail a redefinition of rights in several respects: from individual rights to those of groups (e.g., those of pre-school age) or classes (e.g., the unemployed); from rights entrenched by common law, local custom and practice or religious provenance, to administrative law; from local and national to ‘universal’.

Fourth, the nation-state, particularly but by no means exclusively under conditions of development since World War II, has proven to be inefficient and prone to corruption in taxing and spending on behalf of society. This condition may be prevalent even in pluralistic, open, societies.

Fifth, the ambit of civil society has expanded, and continues to expand. New claims to rights are articulated, recognized, and given organized form, in terms of which the state lays down its claims to our loyalties and taxes. This development is stimulated by the growth of the world economy and transnational society.

Finally, although we are a long way from the centuries of Machiavelli, Hobbes and later thinkers in the Western classical tradition, it is importantly if by no means exclusively from these sources that we get our basic concepts and definitions of the primary state-society interface, It is a puzzle, but also a fact, that in the contemporary Western world there is little fresh thinking about these fundamentals. But this may be understood as part of the failure of liberalism and globalization.