Interlocking but separate bodies

Interlocking but separate bodies

Global civil society is a vast, interconnected, and multilayered social space that comprises many hundreds of self-directing or non-governmental institutions and ways of life. Through its cross border networks global civil society is constituted of chains of interactions linking the local, regional and planetary orders. This new social world is constituted by networks, coalitions, partnerships and social movements but NGOs are commonly taken as the key actors. They are playing multidimensional roles in global civil society. In so far as to connect all actions emanating from global civil society to find reflections in all activities of NGOs.

The growth of NGOs has been exponential since the midnineteenth century and they now constitute a formidable number of social agents at all geographical scales. It has recently been reported that just under eighteen thousand NGOs are international or internationally orientated.

Obviously NGOs remain a point of departure for social activities and a starting point for describing the geography of global civil society because of their explicit mode of operation beyond states, illustrating trans-state world city networks. But NGOs also feature in discussions of global governance as it involves steering behaviours in a multilayered framework of relations in which NGOs are key contributors to a global informal politics. In terms of practice, therefore, it is the combination of these formal state based and informal institutions as a set of interlocking but separate bodies that produce the system of global governance. Civil global society looks very much like the informal half of global governance where both parts are composed of diffused networks that transcend sovereign territories with NGOs featuring prominently. Undermining the state at a global scale means eroding twentieth century radical geography outcome as decolonisation.

Suggestions that global governance operates through more horizontal power structures is disputed. Westphalian inter stateness, with its diffusion of diplomatic circles to all states, is actually a relatively horizontal benchmark that neither global governance nor global civil society results are able to match. Thus being more mindfull of intersphere relations is needed for example, returning to the role of NGOs, their position at the heart of both global governance and global civil society arguments has to be explained. For this it is necessary to go beyond process outcomes and rethink the processes themselves. One perspective is to argue that NGOs constitute the key integrating institutions between global governance and global civl society. Their role is analogous to political parties in intra state politics. Neither part of government nor national civil society, parties have operated as conduits between political elites and society. From the time when governments relied on parties for their election and therefore power, policies were proposed for society by parties to government, and also propagated to society by parties for government. NGOs have now found themselves in a similar ambiguous position, most noticeably in their links to UN activities, and links to states through the distribution and organisation of the development aid programmes from North to South through cities across the world. This is a basic source of both the additional primacy and the interzonality to be found in subnets not subject to the Westphalian process.


The liberty of states to wage war in the eighteenth century was, first, curtailed by irregular great power congresses in the nineteenth century, and then, was limited to defense by the permanent organizations of the twentieth century, first the League of Nations and then the United Nations. Thus a product of war and peace, the UN appears as the archetypal inter-state institution. But it was never just that. Although failing to embark down the path to world government that many of its supporters have advocated, it has moved beyond an interstate agenda. The most overt early example of this is the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights that directly challenges territorial sovereignty. But it si the practices of the UN across a wide spectrum of activities that has led to the UN having a supra state presence in the world political space of flows. It has been more likely referred to as global service. Like other global services, the UN family of institutions uses cities to supply the wide ranging public goods it provides. Whether in the fields of health, food, science, labour development, finance, communications, human rights or refugees, UN agencies operate through cities to make networks of practice.

Sources:
P.J.Taylor, Political Geography, 2005
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