Page 228 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

214 Globalization and Democracy

NGOs networked into social movements. In the absence of democracy
between states, global civil society represents attempts to democratize
“ from below. ” Although global civil society is certainly unevenly devel-
oped geographically, there are very few places in the world that are
untouched either by globalization or by movements that peacefully resist
and contest its dominant forms.
What is important to global social movement networks is substantive
democracy: they mobilize, draw in, and represent the marginalized and
disenfranchised to each other as well as to those not directly involved in
participation in movement communications and protest activities. They
do so by making issues and causes visible: matters for public concern.

Global social movements aim to influence the formation of ways of life
by means of persuasion, to draw in wider and wider numbers of people
to question how globalization affects themselves and others, and to think
differently about how global issues might be addressed and “ turbo -
capitalism ” contained. Although the effects of global social movements
are intended to be quantitative, in that they aim to persuade everyone
that “ another world is possible, ” it is above all by the quality of their
interventions that the democratic legitimacy of global social movements
is to be judged.
Besides an analytic description, then, “ civil society ” also carries a nor-
mative weight: democracy should involve vibrant civil societies. Although
“ civil society ” originated with the philosophers of the Enlightenment in
the seventeenth century, for whom it indicated the capacity of society to
organize itself without a state, its current popularity owes much more to
the way it was used in relation to totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe
and Latin America in the 1970s and ‘ 80s (Kaldor, 2003 ; Calhoun, 2007 :
81). What was emphasized in these cases was withdrawal from states, to
engage in creating civilized ways of life in the face of their unrelenting
repression and lies. Putting pressure on states to bring down repressive
regimes, in part by building international solidarity, was a secondary
consideration, especially in Eastern Europe, where even meeting to discuss
ideas was dangerous as the state used spies and informants to penetrate
every aspect of life. However, the infl uence of civil society on democratiz-
ing states has been very important to the subsequent popularity of the
idea as a way of democratizing globalization. Following the success of the
“ Velvet Revolution ” in Eastern Europe, as state after state collapsed in
the face of peaceful, but extremely persistent, demonstrations, global civil
society came to be seen as valuable for its orientation towards ending the
domination of undemocratic international political institutions and neo -
imperial “ turbo - capitalism. ”