The Significance of Civil Society in Contemporary
World Affairs (II) - Global Governance,
Development and Change

Prof. Hugh MacDonald

To explain the puzzle described in the previous chapter, we need to look at certain features of international relations. Most importantly, we should ask these questions: how might a Palestinian state be influenced by the international system, and the contending influences of particular states and regimes; and how might a Palestinian state affect its neighbors, and act most effectively in the international system?

The Western System and Global Governance

The Western international system and its corresponding domestic values are declining. In view of the West’s enduring contributions to a theory of civil society and the state, which we discussed in the foregoing, this may seem contradictory. But we have seen that the liberal approach to the state, ‘domestic’ politics and international relations contains a number of contradictions; and that its influence rests upon, though it is not to be confused with, the ascendancy of the Anglo-American powers. Moreover, throughout history we find cultures being unaware of the imminence of decline, and decline being masked by the political complexity of major civilizations.

The estimation of decline is relatively easy. Current World Bank statistics measure global GDP at $30,000 billion. World population totals 5.6 billion souls. Of these aggregates, nearly $25,000 billion of GDP is produced by the most developed countries of North America, Western Europe, and Japan, whose combined populations total no more than 900 million souls. This huge disparity between the productivity and average incomes of a minority living in highly organized and technologically powerful societies, and the productivity and incomes of a vast majority whose states and civil societies are prone to political corruption, technological backwardness and the predatory regularity of external economic shocks, is an immediate cause of such pervasive instabilities as international terrorism against the symbols of Western dominance; the spread of weapons of mass destruction; the persistent search by other regimes to acquire such weapons; and national separatist states and movements which are usually if not always revisionist towards the status quo defined by the core Western powers.

Those Western powers, despite their wealth, find it increasingly difficult to uphold the prevailing norms of international order. Indeed in attempting to do so, the norms themselves may be violently ignored, as recently when the US sent sea-launched cruise missiles through the sovereign air space of Pakistan, en route to attacking the bases in Afghanistan of terrorist forces implicated in the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In this contest of wealth versus numbers, and the technological versus the religious, competing justifications are being advanced for indiscriminately killing innocent and uninvolved people.

It is impossible to see how, over the longer term, the Western powers can retain their present advantages without increasingly resorting to such extreme means. But that will undermine the values which Western leaders espouse.

Even if non-Western cultures reconcile to Western values because of their ‘universality’, they will not be willing to accept the Western organized hierarchy of states once their economic strength grows to a level more in keeping with their numbers.

If the Western powers do retain their advantages, compel other states to follow suit, and prevent a global spread of technology and wealth, that will occasion ever fiercer revolts by the masses of different countries and regions against their own dominant elites, who will be held responsible for having ‘sold out’.

Given the examples of a Suharto or a Yeltsin losing power, and by doing so compelling the international banking and monetary systems to accept and pay for the failure of their grossly indebted economies, what would follow? If it becomes the worldwide realization that bankers need to lend as much if not more than the under-developed need to borrow, there could be a protectionist stampede to escape from debt, which would drastically affect all economies in the world system.

It is crucial to understand that ‘globalization’ for the vast majority of the world’s peoples today means neo-colonialism on terms no better and arguably worse than half a century or a century ago. If expropriated and given the moral force of ‘equal shares for all’, this, the self-same slogan that has justified the widening of the gulf of development between states and societies in the ‘West’ and those in the ‘South’, has the potential to justify a protracted anti-Western struggle. Let us remember, for example, that it was the adoption of Islam by the Turks that afforded to their numbers the justification, which ultimately destroyed Byzantium.

This is an argument that the West no longer possesses a dominance that is categorical, not that there is an 'inevitable' clash of civilizations. All developing states and their domestic societies are absorbing a great deal of the Western legacy of political and social values. Most developing states most of the time seek to change the status quo by peaceful competition, not by terrorism and war. Yet the precipitous nature of the economic divide between ‘West’ 'East' and ‘South’ makes it impossible for all to enjoy everyday social and economic security.

The values, which this insecurity engenders, are not those of 20^th Century social pluralism as one might discover it in, say, southern California. Rather, they are the values of Machiavelli or Hobbes as these were described earlier.

In such a context, the aim of the East and South must be strong government and an increase in social possessiveness. The objects of that aim are things the Western societies today virtually monopolize: wealth, technology, military power, global influence, and everyday security. International terrorism against Western societies will not attain these objectives. Yet it symbolizes that the contest is a deadly one, and that the battleground is control within the international system.

The end of the Cold War brought about the end of the Western illusion that the end of the Cold War would bring ‘the end of history’. This widespread but misguided notion, promoted by the Trilateral Commission and other bodies, is associated with a book by Francis Fukuyama which argued that from now on political conflict would be confined to economic competition that would not spill over into bloody contests over ideas or land or military power.

How misdirected his analysis was is shown by the absence of any new international order. Indeed seven years after Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf War of 1991, Saddam Hussein remains the defiant anti-Western leader of that country. Two American presidents and two British prime ministers have fallen. The foreign policies of their countries have followed an ever more sinuous course in seeking to maintain a united front on sanctions by the international community against Iraq.

Fukuyama went on to publish a second book explaining the success of the Asian societies in building economic strength on a form of trust which, being non-contractual in the Western legal-commercial sense, saved entrepreneurs and political leaders the enormous costs of writing everything down in front of lawyers, and thus contributed to building 'social capital'. Beginning where his previous argument had ended, he claimed that, '… virtually all political questions today revolve around economic ones …"

He ended this second work with the ringing conclusion that:

"Social capital is like a ratchet that is more easily turned in one direction than another; it can be dissipated by the actions of governments much more easily than those governments can build it up again. Now that the question of ideology and institutions has been settled, the creation and accumulation of social capital will take center stage."

A couple of years afterwards, the Asia-Pacific economies crumbled under the weight of ‘crony capitalism’. The governments of those societies must now rebuild trust with their peoples, which will take quite a few years of re-modeling governments and ‘the social contract’, unless, that is, popular discontent leads instead towards a new kind of authoritarian national separatism.

It may take several years for the political consequences of the Asia-Pacific economic depression to show up in foreign policy behavior. But in the case of Russia, those consequences are now becoming clear. Russia may need the West, and its leaders echo the language of free-market reform. The society, however, has become divided and balanced between a return to reform communism and a reversion to national separatism. The Russian state plays the Western economic game, because there is no immediate alternative; but it also plays military-strategic games of its own in central and south Asia, and would do so elsewhere too if it possessed greater resources.

These cases illustrate the almost simultaneous collapse of the explanations of world events advanced by left-wing critics of the prevailing capitalist democracies, and by right-wing opponents of socialist collectivism. Clearly, communism as practiced by the Soviet-type states ruined its opportunities through inefficiency, political mendacity, and by making war against the spiritual values in social organization. Equally obvious now, unfettered capitalism and political liberalism has failed to deliver solutions to issues which were presumed to be 'global' or 'universal' only because of their temporary historical predominance.

This has resulted in a peculiar and probably temporary state of affairs in the politics of Western societies.

On the one hand there is a poverty of ideas about leadership and morality. This is shown in the loss of authority by many Western leaders including the president of the US, recent prime ministers of Japan, and their ‘client leaders’ in such countries as Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil. It is also apparent, as the references to Fukuyama’s work show, in a virtual abandonment of history as a source of meaningful interpretations of contemporary affairs. This engenders a mounting struggle on the part of interests which claim to represent ‘the moral majority’ to bring politics in Western societies ‘back to basics’.

On the other hand, there is some agreement for the first time among different constituencies of political action within the West, whether political movements, labor organizations, churches or national administrations, about the origins, development and fundamental features of the Western international system.

This is now understood to comprise a ‘world system’, which has been enlarging itself for several centuries. It is primarily dominated by Western forms of civilization, which have subjugated other often older and anyway equally original civilizations, by conquest or by other means. The system is driven by a common capitalist economic infrastructure, comprising a world society of trade, finance and growth-services. This economic sub-system has no social morality beyond that of market behavior, which, as economic theory insists, is value-free. The superstructure of the system also drives it, and comprises a wide variety of national cultures and political orders. The spread of nationalism and the nation-state idea are its most easily recognizable political features. This political sub-system is somewhat coherent, rule-bound, and possesses prominent but legally and economically weak common institutions. But manifestly there is a dichotomy within the system, between its economic and political dynamics.

The resultant clash of economic and political sub-systems requires continuous management, which conflicts with both the autonomy of economics and the autonomy of politics. In large part because of this need for a high degree of management of differences between economic and political dynamics in the system, dissimilar cultures have evolved in common the central features of the state, and the central features of a group of international organizations. Their in-built weaknesses have been subjected to a leisurely inter-state discussion of the need for reform.

It may be surprising that such a basic theoretical consensus did not exist earlier. Actually, it did not, because until World War II the Western powers competed amongst themselves in terms of exclusionary national-imperial outlooks (Weltanschauungen); and then during the Cold War there was bitter sub-division within all Western societies over the implications of the revolutionary materialist critique of Western culture advanced by Marx in the mid-19^th Century. Hence, as noted earlier, there is now a rush towards the ideas of globalization, global governance, and a 'third way' between capitalism and social democracy. So what of these ideas?

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, in view of the continuing predominance of the Anglo-American partnership, NATO, the European Union (EU), and the incorporation of Japan into the Western alliance, it is an updated version of liberalism. First, there is the idea of one world at peace, and the condoning of past tragedies. Second, the idea that all peoples everywhere can gain enough that is new from what is new - in technology, in concepts of development, in a worldwide secular morality of efficient public organization - to create a global society. Thirdly, there is the belief that this proto-global society based on Western examples and structures can be strong enough to reconcile continuing national, cultural and religious differences on a worldwide basis. Fourth, there is the notion that global society can entrench universal respect for choice and difference in individual lifestyles and beliefs, and in all other aspects of what we have referred to as pluralism.

The International Political Economy and Its Perils

So, if there is a new consensus, and it is represented by a rhetoric of globalization and global governance, what does this mean - or anyhow what might it mean - in practice for a Palestinian state and society?

To tackle this question fully one would need to take account of critical explanations of the dynamics of the economic and political sub-systems in world affairs. This we cannot do here. But a few key points can be made.

At this time of nearly-worldwide economic recession, there is estimated to be 30 times more monetary liquidity in the international economy than is needed to finance the volume of visible trade. Whereas this might suggest money should be cheap and readily available, it is so only on the ‘wholesale’ markets. For consumers and savers of modest means, interest rates remain high.

Structural unemployment in most regions is high, and tending to rise, essentially because automation of production processes is leading to a crisis of over-production. At the same time, average family incomes in developing countries are too low to absorb the production surplus. It is likely that the crisis extends even beyond over-production to over-investment in plant and equipment, at least in some sectors of the global economy such as automobiles and consumer electronics. This phenomenon tends to chase investment out of fixed and into liquid forms, exacerbating the liquidity dilemma.

Currency fluctuations are difficult to predict, but in the last six years have affected every regional economy and many particular countries with great severity. The only major exception is the US, whose currency is the reserve and transaction currency of choice. But it should not be thought that the US dollar is the political currency of choice for, say, Chinese or Arab or Russian or Iranian investors, particularly if these are governments. Hence, there is an economic time bomb implicitly affecting the strategic policy options of the world’s only superpower.

But for the time being, this has meant that the American economy can run a massive trade deficit financed largely through the inflow of foreign funds. But the end of the Cold War also brought the largest ‘peace dividend’ to the US, which has been able to profoundly restructure its major industries, and to use comparatively inexpensive venture capital supplied by foreigners to launch large numbers of new ‘technology corporations’ onto the stock market.

The problem, outlined earlier, is that too much production, wealth and income is concentrated in too small a population. The rest is heavily indebted, usually faces structurally biased terms of trade, and lags in technological know-how. Yet to the extent that the handful of most developed countries monopolize foreign direct investment flows, capital markets, multinational corporations, and all the main international lending institutions, as well as the UN Security Council, countries seeking development are compelled to adopt and emulate Western models and practices.

For the Middle East this matters a lot in terms of options possessed by national economies over the coming period. The Palestinian Authority has already experienced some of these changing influences. It is likely to do so even more in the near future.

The picture for Asia-Pacific developments is deeply problematic. Japan's elites are in a condition of passive resistance against radical economic reform. Much of the rest of the region is in social and economic turmoil, and needs Japan to act more decisively. As a major investor in the region, Japan might contemplate creating a yen-zone through refinancing the collapsed economies of South East Asia. But it is inconceivable that the Japanese could quickly create a regional bloc like the EU, or a reserve currency with the strength of the American dollar. Hence any new course of action faces Japan with enormous political-economic dilemmas. Moreover, in the face of China, Russia and unstable Korea, Japan is compelled to be constantly vigilant, which adds to its sense of economic vulnerability.

Meanwhile, China has emerged from isolation with startling rapidity, but it is by no means obvious what regional and international role that country will seek for itself. For the time being the coexistence of an unreformed communist elite with an economic structure that is increasingly driven by market forces can continue. But for how long? The Chinese government has been accumulating vast overseas holdings of capital, the unremitted portion of export trade deals settled in hard currencies but remitted back to China in less valuable national currency. This gives China an important if limited stake in international economic stability, but one that is balanced by the risks of importing either inflation or deflation, depending on how it responds to the declining value of other regional currencies, and their corresponding increase in competitiveness in developed world markets.

Russia has declined so terribly in economic terms that its GDP is now said to be worth less than the annual turnover of a medium-sized multi-national corporation. Yet Russia remains a formidable military power and possesses vast natural resources. If its economy should collapse to a point where the viability of its military system was jeopardized, there could be a military takeover. Alternatively, a new government might be persuaded by the reform communists to abandon Western-style 'supply side' economic reforms, and go-it-alone, calculating that its size and worldwide importance will continue to attract support from international lending institutions.

The evolution of the EU will gradually modify the prevailing pattern of American-centered trade and monetary dominance. The Euro is likely to become a second ‘reserve currency’. European high technology companies can in certain areas challenge their American counterparts, for instance in biotechnology, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, civilian aviation or computer software/hardware interfaces and design. But Europe remains more dependent on the world economy for trade and the importation of natural resources, and lacks the political cohesion to act with one voice on strategic issues. It is likely that, in view of these underlying weaknesses, the Europeans will seek to shield their economies and fragile new single currency behind protectionist barriers, rather than risking their hard-won forms of integration in a struggle for a more open but less stable world economy.

The implications of this political-economy analysis are straightforward. Regionalism will certainly strengthen in economics. This will affect security. A world society is gradually emerging. But even if it is not destabilized by economic collapse, or war, globalization and global governance can neither explain nor cause the processes of gradual convergence that are involved. The liberal vision of one world at peace is still a distant and improbable prospect.

At the end of the day, therefore, international economic options for a Palestinian state are likely to be restricted. Alignment with one or other of the Western blocs seems indispensable, and the EU appears to be the emerging regional neighbor. Fraternal relations with Arab and Islamic states will continue to be of crucial significance to developing the infrastructure and institutions of Palestinian society. But in terms of volume of trade these are unlikely to be as significant as trade with neighbors. Trade with neighbors is complicated by still uncertain political and security issues. Presently there is a loose political-economic alignment between Turkey, Israel and Jordan, and perhaps an even looser one between Egypt on one side and Syria and Lebanon on the other. In the worst case these patterns of relations could harden, and become subject to differing external influences. In the best case, all of these states could form a 'customs union' modeled on the EU, and with much assistance from that source. But these economic alignments will be subject to the working through of defense and security issues. Useful but more distant links with China, Japan, Russia, India, Iran or other central Asian states may develop, though the absence of significant quantities of oil or gas in Palestine is likely to prove a constraint on more ambitious foreign economic relations.

Out of all of this could come a foreign policy of non-alignment. But as Fidel Castro once put it, "To be non-aligned is to be aligned with someone." Therefore the establishment of normal and even broad-based international trade and payment arrangements is unlikely to substitute for, and could make more urgent, the issue of what kind of international political alignments Palestine might have. But here we find ourselves returning to first principles: the kind of foreign relations that will prove most congenial are likely to be those which most closely correspond to the characteristics of a Palestinian state and its civil society. Broadly speaking, a strong state with an open government and a vigorous civil society is less likely to want to enjoy exclusive political or security relationships with states that are notably authoritarian, have strong national separatist movements, or sponsor international terrorism. But the converse might also be true if Palestine is unable to form normal security and trading relationships with its nearest neighbors.

The Enduring Problem of Security for a Civil Society

In the face of these difficult theoretical and practical policy issues, the world is beginning to look for answers to more specific questions about a Palestinian state. These questions include the following. Will the new Palestinian state be well governed or badly governed? Will it be preoccupied with ideas about injustice, origins, modes of behavior prescribed by tradition, and the era of armed struggle? Will it have forward-looking ideas about itself, and if so what will these be? Will its external relations with neighboring states and societies be comparatively open, or comparatively closed? Will its state-society interface be more or less stable? Will Palestinian society want the new state to be mainstream or marginal in the processes of regional development? Will Palestinian society be more or less status quo as opposed to more or less revolutionary with regard to the wider international system and the main global and regional state actors in it, including the US, EU, Russia, China, Turkey and Iran?

It may seem impractical or even unjust to tie these questions exclusively to Palestinian society in isolation from world society; or to a peace process which, given the history of conflicts in Palestine, will principally reflect the power balance between a Palestinian entity and more powerful neighbors to the west, east and north. But that, for better or worse, is what will happen as soon as a Palestinian entity achieves substantive attributes of sovereignty. Indeed already, in many of the issues which have touched on security and state-formation, Palestinians have been pushed to take responsibility for matters that are partly or largely beyond their control.

No new state in this century - and since the end of World War II over 130 new states have been created - has successfully worked out in advance answers to questions such as those posed above. Many new states have subsequently suffered civil strife or war, which (with all respect to such outstanding imaginative thinkers as Edward Said) it is only partly correct to attribute to the legacies of colonialism. In any case, acquiring sovereignty is the beginning, not the end, of the struggle for any society to define its own identity.

The risks of getting it badly ‘wrong’ are observable in many cases of continuing internal strife and external interference, particularly in Africa today. But a number of important examples of the working out of civil-military relations could be taken from other, larger states, such as India, Pakistan or Turkey. In all of these cases, in different ways, there are problems today which directly affect on one side the balance between civil society and the security apparatus of the state, and on the other impact upon international relations. India and Pakistan, having decided to invoke nuclear options, are affected by sanctions imposed by the international community. In Turkey, where the military has several times invoked its constitutional right to intervene in domestic politics, it is clear that much of the country’s foreign policy is being run by the military, even though the military is outside the government. This has had a major negative impact on Turkey’s strategy for acceding to the EU.

On the other hand the benefits of getting it mainly ‘right’ from the start are stunningly evident in the examples of postwar Western Europe and Japan, and in other cases. But it is also important to note that these were the cases in which the dominant Western powers had the most direct influence in establishing the postwar political and economic structures of these countries. More than 50 years after World War II, and in view of the problems which the Western international order is suffering, where should Palestinians place their hopes?

The most frequent story for the multitude of new postwar states is one in which the building of viable state-society relationships in a context of internal and external socioeconomic change proves difficult and protracted. As international comparisons are likely to be useful, some references can be made to a different but parallel and maybe somewhat comparable case, namely that of Ireland, where overcoming divisions and widening economic horizons has only become thinkable after the conclusion of a long chapter of armed struggle.

Conflict in Ireland and Some Implications of Its Resolution

In Ireland today we see the example of a popular revolutionary armed organization gradually coming to terms with the logical consequences of winning a limited war. This logic is that victory cannot be absolute and therefore must be shared with the former enemy. But of course political logic is not everything. Indeed the great German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz demonstrated that war has no logic of its own, beyond that of escalation to absolute triumph or defeat. Otherwise, the language of war must borrow the logic of politics if it is to have shape and coherence; or, as Clausewitz put it, if a rational means-ends relationship is to be established and sustained through the period of armed struggle and into the process of post-war settlement.

It will take at least one generation of leadership change for this logic to be followed through in Ireland. During that interlude some or all of the following features will remain salient. The Irish Republican Army (Provisional IRA) will continue to have arms and an organization to resume the forms of action it is most familiar with. The IRA through Sinn Fein, its political arm, will continue to have a popular support base, which, perhaps surprisingly, will probably remain stronger for longer in the south of Ireland than in the north. Adversaries of the IRA, including some armed nationalist, republican and religious groups, in addition to some Protestant loyalist militants, will continue in a shadowy existence.

In other words politics and government in Ireland will continue to be susceptible to risks of organized violence for some considerable time to come, maybe 20 and at least ten years. This is a personal estimate based mainly on two factors. Firstly there are the maximum and minimum time-scales for those who have been strongly socialized into violent inter-communal conflict to experience sufficient peaceful change for their attitudes and activities to alter. Secondly, there is the probability that socioeconomic change under new conditions will itself generate some new causes of inter-communal political tension and reinforced nationalisms (e.g., perceptions of winners and losers).

Nonetheless, with the British and Irish governments in fundamental agreement, supported by the US and EU, an aspiration for peace, reconciliation and shared economic development among the conflicting Christian communities is most likely to prevail. This should translate itself gradually, by specific performance of agreements and acts of cooperation, into the actuality of an Ireland unified through economic integration rather than by the triumph of military-political will.

In this new and not yet well-formed civil society in Ireland, which will most definitely develop cross-border structures expressing the growth of cross-border transactions, future constitutional arrangements will remain open-ended for the time being. Any new constitutional arrangements, beyond those specifically agreed in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, will need to come about through Protestants and Catholics deciding that what gives them the possibilities of sharing an identity in terms of the part of the world they live in, namely the island of Ireland, is at least equal and maybe superior in importance to their existing religious-national identities. Let us note, here, the significance of some history:

Modern nationalism in Ireland was initially led by Protestants and remained cross-religious and pan-Irish until the 1880s. The north-south divide in Ireland was strongly associated with the rapid industrial development of two major cities in the north, Belfast and Derry, where Catholics and Protestants were forced to live closely alongside. The British preference from around 1880 was to return Ireland to unified self-government, which would have provided at least the same conditions for future national independence as in, for example, Canada, where Protestants and Catholics of Irish and Scots descent prevented their religious differences from determining the shape of the state. The 1921 partition of Ireland, which originated civil war and subsequent periods of armed struggle by the IRA, has always been stated in UK legislation to be dependent on the will of the majority living in Northern Ireland.

Despite a long history of violent struggle between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, most of the peoples of contemporary Ireland, including those who migrated to the US, Canada and elsewhere, see themselves as sharing an identity - expressed most clearly in music, poetry and literature - that they do not share in the same way with other peoples of the British Isles. At the same time, society in the UK and in Ireland has continued to be interdependent, influenced by economic conditions, much shared history, a common language, similar political institutions, parallel membership of the EU, etc.. Moreover, there is a secular trend away from religious extremism and violence among the younger generations across the communal divide in Northern Ireland, and between north and south in Ireland. This convergence has been based on superior civil rights in the north and growing economic prosperity in the south. Gradually, therefore, society in Ireland has been emerging from a religious cocoon.

In all of these terms the importance of peaceful, organized, competitive persuasion and popular political choice will most likely gradually displace the 70 years of intermittent armed struggle and conflict between Protestants and Catholics and, indirectly, between Britain and the Irish Republic. But this will not, and cannot, happen overnight. Nor will it happen entirely naturally. There is no natural bridge between war and peace. Even when a bridge is built, as with a peace agreement, it may be fragile. Even when it is crossed there may be those who want to go back. With ongoing socioeconomic change flowing around the bridge like the current of a strong river, there will be risks of a collapse. This will encourage opponents of change and those with a nostalgia for war to await opportunities to destabilize the emergent new structures.

Towards a Definition: Civil Society Today

What is meant by civil society and why it matters in contemporary world terms may now be clear. It is a form of society that is contrasted with, and juxtaposed to, war, military society, armed struggle and the logic of absolute victory. Rather, it is committed to a self-image of peaceful internal change and social tolerance, and to external relationships rooted in commercial transactions and conflict resolution. But of course I am also showing that such a model of civil society is not self-sufficient, or immune from external conditions.

Each civil society must, on the one hand, prepare itself to be somewhat vulnerable and interdependent. England was hurt several times by military activities by the IRA in recent years. It is interesting to consider why the IRA chose to focus its operations in the most secular and pluralistic middle and south of England, but not in the more religiously divided north, or in Scotland. Yet despite the fact that tens of thousands of citizens of the Irish Republic live and work in London and the south of England, and that Irish companies have sometimes been used by the IRA to transport weapons and explosives, or to provide intelligence and launder money, there were no civil outrages against this technically foreign minority. The British government encouraged no intolerance. Irish clubs and societies were free to organize and to espouse the cause of Irish unity. In the city in which I live, parts of Oxford University and a number of the pubs and clubs in downtown Oxford have long been closely associated with Irish republican nationalism. Even in the times when British soldiers were being killed in Northern Ireland, these events could be cheered in such places. It takes a strongly entrenched practice of tolerance for any civil society to encompass and remain stable in the face of such differences of political identity.

On the other hand, each civil society must know how to protect its core values against violent disruption or other forms of corruption. As well as removing self-government from the province of Northern Ireland in 1974, introducing anti-terrorism legislation, and using the army in large numbers to support the civil authorities, the British state has waged an active secret war against the IRA and its international sources of support. We do not yet know much of the detail of this, but assuredly at times it involved considerable dilemmas of civil-military decision-making, as when the military advisors recommended internment by the army of all suspected members of illegal paramilitary organizations, but based their planning on faulty intelligence data drawn up by the largely Protestant police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Since the end of the Cold War we have seen Russian society becoming prone to violent crime, corruption, the organized Mafia, and other activities that were held in check by the old Soviet system. The consequences have not been confined to Russia. Not far from the main Palestinian centers, some of the 900,000 economic migrants of Jewish origin who fled Russia and other parts of the ex-Soviet bloc have brought these problems into a neighboring society, and they affect also societies in the Gulf and elsewhere whose economic relations with new countries in the former Soviet bloc have increased.

Clearly, transition processes in these former communist dominated countries have stressed economic reform at the expense of socioeconomic stabilization of civil society. The costs of that short-sighted priority will have to be borne by numerous quite vulnerable societies for a long time to come, as well as by the desperately unfortunate people of Russia.

What is being argued is that in some respects civil society must structure itself to be vulnerable to visible challenges that challenge its tolerance and self-identity, because vulnerability is a necessary condition of openness, and openness is indispensable to a strong civil society. In other respects civil society must structure itself to be invulnerable to threats that are non-specific, or that may stem from unanticipated changes in its environment or its own society.

This difficult problem of organization is not about moral vision in the first instance. Rather it is about the sensible and robust partitioning of responsibilities between the civil power, which must command and control the police and ensure that they answer initially and fully for their actions to the courts and legislature; and a professional military-security establishment which must be imbued with an ethos of serving the state that will mean, in all but the direst emergencies and contingencies, obeying the legitimate government and duly constituted civil power. In return for this loyalty, the military-security establishment is entitled to expect that the confidentiality of its normal operations will be shielded by the civil government from the full rigors of legislative oversight and accountability. Of course if this privileged position is abused and the military becomes corrupt, or intervenes habitually in domestic politics, then the character of the state and its relationship to civil society will alter. The most likely sacrifice will be openness of political endeavor and organization.

We can observe many cases and variations along this spectrum. Obviously the geopolitical position as well as the political culture of a state may shape its state-society interface. The presence or absence of threatening neighbors; or, conversely, the influences exercised by allies, which are not always benign, can crucially affect the scope of civil society.

In today's world, therefore, as Hobbes argued more than 300 years ago, there is no single, ideal, form for civil society, or for the shape of this partition between the civilian and military-security arms of the executive power. Rather, this interpretation of his work in contemporary conditions points to three factors that will matter most during the creation of a Palestinian state. The first is the initial constitutional arrangements and the associated development of a specific, national, political morality that stipulate what should be the relationship between state and society. Second, civil-military relations can never be easy: in facing major security dilemmas, the nexus of security between state and civil society requires mutuality and flexibility. Last but certainly not least, whatever documents and laws say, it is the spirit of a people to possess or not to possess an open society, to which they belong and which belongs to them, that is the true catalyst for the quality of a state’s government.