ISGN > Publications > CORRUPTION AND GOVERNANCE
"The New Democratic Diplomacy: Civil Society as Partner with the United Nations and Governments"
by Alejandro Bendaņa
Presentation at the DPI-NGO Conference
"Global Solidarity: The Way to Peace and International Cooperation"
United Nations, New York, August 28-30, 2000
Gandhi once remarked upon being asked about Western Civilization, "what a wonderful idea". So too with the New Partnership? Maybe before answering we should recall the basics: people are not the partners of government, they are the masters of governments, and if governments run the United Nations then people--people's interests-- would also be the determining force in the United Nations.
They are not. We all know the figures and probably the faces of global despair, mounting social polarization and environmental self-destruction. Unless the majority of the world's inhabitants are hell bent on collective suicide, then clearly this is not a world order that responds to the "We the people" upheld in Charters and Constitutions. None of this inevitable or fortituos. Because on the other side of the same coin we also know the figures and faces that represent a concentration of wealth, power and consumption in proportions unprecedented in human history. We know what is wrong, and we can afford to differ as to why, but we cannot differ around the hope and need to pull together to save the world from the worst. Hopefully that would begin by recognizing and dealing with both sides of the coin. And stop pretending they are disconnected or can co-exist. Only in this way will the New Partnership become a more coordinated and effective force in shaping the political and economic order affecting the lives of people in all parts of the world.
Engendering Visions, Strategies and Alliances
In this proverbial yet real divide between moraless power and powerless morality, as Martin Luther King posed it, the New Partnership must look at itself as it looks at the world. The critical question is whether "friendly governments", the United Nations, and professional NGOs are, can be, or wish to be, effective vehicles capable of injecting some degree of morality into power so as to attain justice. Who sets the parameters of our strategies and who is on our side?
Let us first revisit our stated objectives. We all claim to be against this and for that, but are our strategies and cooperation truly "engendered"? By engendering we mean the formulation of strategies that systemically address power relationships. "Engendering" NGOs and the New Diplomacy means articulating strategies and processes that include and account for the experience of the impoverished and oppressed--the experience of poor and oppressed women in particular. This is not simply a manifestation of political correctness, but rather recognition that the experience of the oppressed has tremendous implications for the entire community--the opposition to oppression in every form.
Can NGOs be a hedge against the current tendencies of societies and markets to stratify wealth and power? Can we still visualize, as religious groups have around for example the biblical notion of Jubilee, a time characterized by justice and abundance for all that are suffering? A world where community is restored and right relationship is once again established among people and between people and
earth?1
We can then ask who is and can be on our side, how far and for how long? Even if we disagree as to whether the contradictions are systemic, we can coincide around partnerships for protection: coalitions to support and develop protective resistance to the manifestations of globalized dispossession and polarization. It is possible to act to limit some of the damage regardless of differing assumptions about the nature of the ultimate source of the problem. Of course this is easier said than done. Protective strategies may spill over into system maintenance strategies on one hand, or social transformation struggles on the other. While striving for every possible gain, opposition politics must be informed by a realization that the crisis-ridden global polity requires moral and political will, as opposed to better technical management. It is not enough to contain the damage, or to manage the violent conflict, or alleviate poverty.
The Role of Governments
Are Governments up to the task? If so which ones and how? In earlier decades we could speak of a North - South or East - West divide with governments neatly inscribed in one field or another. This is not so clear cut today inasmuch as the divide is more social than geographical or interstate. Or to put it bluntly, governments North or South seem to be more part of the problem than of the solution. Many of us in the South still hold that states are an indispensable mechanism in the quest for social justice, and that "global civil society" will not get very far without governments that respond to society more than to the pinnacle of the international political and economic power structure centered around the United States.
Power will concede only to the demand and force of counter power. The question then is -- are we powerful enough to make effective change on the ground. Can governments of the South, and friendly governments of the North, be brought on board, or are most too enmeshed in the existing power structure to contest it? Over and above statements of intention signed at the Social Summit, whereby governments restate the principle of responsibility for social policy, the reality is different on the ground. Northern governments do not usually match rhetoric with resources. Southern governments generally lack the will and power to ensure social development objectives are incorporated into national policy. While governments in the South will delegate social policy to the World Bank and the like, governments in the North simply go on delegating directly to the market.
Working with governments, North and South, does not mean turning a blind eye to local manifestations of discrimination leading to poverty and exclusion. Governing elites in the North are all to happy to support international campaigns for the very same reason that local elites in the South portray themselves as victims: to avoid their own responsibility for the suffering in their societies. This being said one must also warn against the increasingly fashionable and dangerous tendency to ascribe poverty and violence fundamentally to country level actors and weaknesses; along with the parallel tendencies to prescribe solutions whose bottom line is greater more room (liberalization) for outside financial forces actors-- what donors and corporations call a "sound environment for private sector
development".2
How convenient to marginalize the workings of transnational elites and unbridled market forces in the creation of problems in the past while maximizing their healing power in the present. If the path of globalization teaches us anything it is that international forms of democracy and representation are absolutely critical to the survival of national and local democracy. Democracy and development at the level of the state will be defective without international democracy. However without a national state, it is doubtful that democracy can exist at all. Which explains the difficulty many of us feel in the South for the NGO-New Diplomacy proclivity towards so-called positive conditionality and the external imposition of governance standards. The faulty outside-in process can inhibit the indispensable bottom-up dynamic.
Societies in our countries, and perhaps elsewhere, can best express and defend their interests within the framework of the national state. Web sites and e-mail societies will not bring about social transformation. Societies are not global, but markets and capital are. International capital and financial organizations are escaping all control, and often count with the assistance of the G-7 in that process. It is therefore incumbent on many of us in the South to defend self-determination and national sovereignty as part of the struggle to defend the elementary rights of the population.
This of course is not a position common to all NGOs, North and South, that invoke the absence of democracy in order to justify the resort to outside power. While the projection of outside power may be needed in extraordinary human rights and humanitarian contexts, the tendency to generalize the call to intervention is worrisome in a development and peace-building context. The historical fact that internal actors may, with or without humanitarian reason, support external conditionalities or intervention does not change the picture. The problem here of course is that such misguided advocacy tends to reinforce interventionist global mentalities and practices the creation of international superstructures over a country's own government. Intervention must be the extreme exception, not the governing norm.
Whose NGOs? Conditionalities from Outside or Below?
In the post-Cold War context, there is a need to rethink and reorient NGO approaches to human rights, peace and development. Situations of course will vary and immediate imperatives will guide alliance building strategies, as for example when dealing with a Suharto in Indonesia, a cruel war in Sri Lanka, murdering hooligans in Sierra Leone or extreme poverty in Mozambique. In the development and debt context however external conditionality carries a cost, namely, the reinforcement of the principle of intervention. If injustice is being carried out--for example the collection of illegitimate external debt from countries of the South-- then the termination of such collection should not be subject to condition. Conditions should come from below and within, that through democratic pressure, as opposed to from outside and above, yet another possible form of colonialism.
Of late the IMF and World Bank along with rich country donor agencies believe that governments must be forced to listen to civil society. However governments are quick to take a page from the IFIs own consultation procedures, by picking and choosing its own civil society to listen to, and even then within the carefully defined constraints of external parameters of macro-economic and macro-political thinking (governance). In this way NGOs wind up contributing to the centralization of power and decision making at the global level. Democracy however cannot be brought from the outside, and international advocacy that does not develop a strong internal counterpart, risks falling into the trap of contributing to the migration of decision-making to a US-dominated neoliberal "international", effectively stripping national states and local communities of new layers of power.
Limitations and Opportunities
Washington may have appeared isolated when the New Diplomacy basked in attention following the first signings of the Ottawa and the ICC instruments. These episodes merited celebration. Simply isolating the United States brings no small sense of accomplishment in this post Cold War era. But we cannot have it both ways, because if the New Diplomacy wants to take credit when things go well, it must also take a hard look at itself when most other things continue to be wrong. When most governments North and South, continue to be unwilling or unable to contest the fundamentals of global US-led turbo capitalism. If contestation cannot take place in governmental sphere, or at the United Nations, it will continue to take place on the streets.
In this fundamental context, the New Diplomacy may not be as much a break with the Old One as is purported. What is new is the image of Northern governments wishing to deal with, and even help create and fund, nongovernmental organizational modalities that are limited in scope and essentially non-contestatory of the standing power relationship. The same cookie-cutter policies and the same jargon are boringly repeated in governmental development and financial circles across the North. The same governments that proclaim the virtues of soft power and New Diplomacy, and are shedding crocodile tears over poverty and violence in the world, are also on the Executive Boards of the multilaterals, defending the very policies that help produce poverty and death. "The IMF", says Jeffrey Sachs, no foaming radical, "gets is way because to disagree publicly with the IMF is viewed in the international community as rejecting financial rectitude
itself".3
NGOs: Cooperation or Co-optation?
As Northern governments step up their direct and indirect engagement with NGOs--part and parcel of the privatization drive--then NGO linkages with communities are also affected, often leaving the increasingly service-oriented NGO with an ambivalent relationship regarding the local political sphere and the imperative of global social change. Loyalties are sometimes mixed and always suspect. In many countries the NGOs appear first as outside, expatriate entities beholden to global networks more than local ones.
Understandably, many NGOs will respond to local and global dynamics in a way that is distinct from local social actors and community based organizations, employing different strategies--often the product of different understandings. The relationship between NGOs, be they international or national, is less one of "solidarity" than "cooperation" on the basis of a temporary intersections of distinct agendas. Linkages will vary, and power considerations based on access to resources on the one hand, and the situational crisis on the other, increasingly weigh in the definition of the relationship. The danger here is that amidst rhetoric of civil society and development, NGOs may assume a representation based on preconceived notions of citizenship and social change. Social engineering and externally led nation building become an endemic temptation, buttressed by patterns of globalization that denigrate the notion and practice of sovereignty. Democracy and Civil society are seen as "buildable" from the outside--a fallacy of
course.4
In the battle to define the content and expression of "Civil society", the corporate power structure will also push to secure broader acceptance of its own version of international civility. Can NGOs become vehicles of corporate influence over communities and populations? If so, the New Democratic Diplomacy becomes an undemocratic mechanism whereby NGOs are called on to help spread the word that there are no alternatives, and we must play the game by corporate rules, because that is the only game in town. Such logic already pervades broad governmental and United Nations thinking, albeit supplemented by an uneven commitment to incorporating palliatives more systemically.
"Fix it or nix it" is an oversimplification, but not a large one. There are what the Economist calls "technical NGOs", "staffed overwhelmingly with lawyers " who have become "expert in the minutiae" of trade and financial policy. These entities as with the New Diplomacy itself are probably more interested in amending the "rules" of turbocapitalism rather than simply decommissioning it.
If there is a drive to extend TINA to the NGOs, can it be countered with a parallel one to extend people's influence over the NGOs and, in the best of all possible worlds, to the friendly governments and the United Nations? Can people's movements, social organizations, be effective vehicles of influence over NGOs, which will then spread respect for democratic rights up the chain of political life?
International Campaigns and Social Movements
There are causes that demand international mobilizations. So we take to mounting international campaigns just as we took to funding projects to alleviate specific problems. Democracy however is not about projects or about campaigns; it is about politics and social movements. If institutional self -preservation or donor-dependency cannot be overcome, if we must play the media and the spin game, then at the very least we are obligated to work in a fashion that does not undermine democracy and social movement building. Ideally campaigns and projects would grow out of movements in the South --as opposed to feel good, public opinion opportunities in selected Northern countries. Movements do not flow from campaigns, and in fact we have witnessed that particular campaigns and projects, along with relief and reconciliation activities, have in many circumstances ignored root causes. Even worse there is evidence of NGO distortion of community agendas and undermining of local capacities to develop the more autonomous, self-sustaining collective organizations that are a crucial component of democracy and peace.
The United Nations Role in the New Diplomacy
Another question all together is whether the New Diplomacy in general and the UN in particular are being asked to become problem-solvers by the problem makers, without of course asking the latter to change their ways. After years of being maligned, the UN was suddenly being asked to do too much with too little financial and political backing. Like NGOs, the UN can become a convenient instrument for governments who want to appear to be doing something, but not too much, so as to not upset the bosses in Washington, NATO or the markets in New York and London. Pushing particular causes inside the UN can also become a public opinion cover-up for the selectivity and paucity of external aid budgets. According to Oxfam International, donations from OECD countries fell by a third between 1991 and 1997, and the sum varied in 1999 from $207,29 for former Yugoslavia to $16.00 for Sierra Leone and $8.40 for the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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More UN agencies need to follow the lead of UNDP to include the human index in measuring development. The humanitarian agenda of the New Diplomacy cannot advance at the pace of the slowest. Nor can it fail to demand even more of the most advanced. NGOs ,for example, must challenge UNDP's concept of equity that still tolerates an asymmetrical world as long as the "welfare" of the poor is attended. That is not good enough. NGOs, rooted in the experience of the poor, would consider alternative philosophical and programmatic alternatives to welfare and utilitarianism. Justice as fairness, not as relief or simple poverty
alleviation.6 The market is unfair, but markets can be changed because markets, as Karl Polanyi insisted, cannot operate without political power. Elites and governments would have us subscribe to economic theories that pretend to transform the exercise of power into a law of nature
Too many of our friendly governments and the UN are unwilling to explicitly recognize the link between globalization and increased insecurity and social inequalities at the local, national and international levels. We continue to hear the song-and-dance about globalization offering both "opportunity" as well as a "risk". Well the opportunity has certainly been seized by capital, while the risk has been effectively socialized. "Poverty is not a crime; it is a "challenge". Encouraging news for the
"challenged"?7
A lot of mutual congratulation and mass media attention does not necessarily alter the political, because the political is a product of power. Let us make no mistake as to the growing--not shrinking--gap that divide governments of the world from their people. The question for the UN could be what side should it be on. How do they and we address the crucial yet often unspoken question of our times: how to deal effectively with the fact that one country, the United States, wields more power than any other country in history and does so in a self-absorbed, self-serving way, largely free of responsibility?
Social Movements and Global Campaigns
Campaigns face the intrinsic danger of moving along governmental time horizons, that is electoral and media politics, often confusing the appearance of change with change itself. Opinions may even shift, as they have on the debt question, but has reality changed? That is the question posed from the South.
There is much talk now about prevention. Do government decision-makers, subject to electoral calendars, seriously have the time and real capacity to address the roots of problems? If so, how many officials will come out and say that neoliberal globalization needs to be prevented. Indeed is there a capacity among governments to recognize that perhaps they, or their close allies, or their Finance Ministries, or their military establishments, are part of the conflict-producing problem that needs to be addressed?
Campaigns can influence policy, but organized social forces challenge and shape the politics that define policy. In fact some of our Jubilee coalitions and debt networks lend helping hands in the reproduction of the system itself by becoming part of the policy making process.
We need campaigns, but not shallow ones that appear as shooting stars across the horizon only to wither away. More campaigns mean smaller efforts with each group narrowing its platform, bent on analyzing the pieces to death, at the expense of the understanding of the whole.
Campaigns can and must serve as schools, and not stepping stones towards job with the UN and governmental bureaucracies. What we most require is leadership-training, building leadership teams, with women and youth up front, in each community in each country, and then with their counterparts in other countries. Campaigns are excellent for reaching out, and they could be excellent vehicles for constructing team leadership, if indeed they can integrate people with different skills, perspectives and emphasis (as opposed to "look alikes"). Absence of diversity will surely mean the absence of critical thinking. "Professionalism" may be the enemy of politics, as campaigns and NGOs increasingly provide services and consequently organize themselves more on recipes from business school than on the experiences from the community.
Campaigns must also reach out to each other and build relations that can broaden and enrich our debates on international issues. We need to take a page from governments that talk to each other more than they talk to people. For this we need a space and a framework for our discussions where we emphasize solidarity as much as advocacy networks based on common solidarity and not common funding partners. Some well-intentioned help will hinder and not help. Maybe the UN can provide such a space and maybe it can resist the challenge to sell its own agenda. We need no more formal bodies--but we do need something more than e-mails and websites. Places and times where we achieve the contact, collaboration and discussions--where we hammer out guidelines and principles, before going on to programs or platforms.
Defining our Own Indicators
Some believe that the UN/NGO/civil society partnership can help states and the international markets to overcome their worse instincts. This presupposes a number of assumptions:
We need effective change. This is not to be confused with rhetorical policy adjustment, but rather would be a fundamental shaking of the neoliberal governing global paradigm. Our indicators of this change are not declarations, treaties, campaigns, editorials, or parliamentary resolutions--not rock stars or rock concerts--our indicators are the village outside of Managua or of Maputo. We have to ask what does the International Criminal Court, the Jubilee Campaign, the Landmines Treaty and the like, what does it mean to those faces? Not how good we feel about ourselves, not how good our politicians can sound, not how liberal the New York Times or Financial Times editorial can be, not pop star sound-bites, but how has the daily life of people changed outside of Managua and Maputo? Are the editorials and the rock stars addressing the global humanitarian implications of reckless privatization, liberalization and deregulation? If they are not--if our campaigns do not make connections--then we may as well also entrust justice to the market and the private sector.
There is no one set of prescriptions, and trying to universalize tactics--even if it is called advocacy or street resistance--would be a serious mistake. This need not get in the way of broad strategic perspectives.
Finally the test of any network or campaign is going to take the form of genuine solidarity with the important struggles taking place. Nothing better for the global power mongers and the NATOs of the world than to have activists safely buried behind their computer analyzing pieces of the problem to death. We need, in short, to implement new thinking and new practices. There is no choice: corporate globalization means that the adversaries are getting more organized internationally with more and more power flowing to their international instruments, be it the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. Networking is not an end in itself, nor is it a simple organizational form, rather it must be
global support for those in the forefront in the struggle for survival and social
transformation.
Yes to partnership and solidarity--based on passion, which is to say of people that feel and touch each other. Governments and institutions are, by nature, incapable of feeling the passion for justice, which is a source of strength and power. Individuals as human beings, not as officials or NGO professionals, can bring back life to this world. Relational power, first and foremost, with those the dispossesed, will be the basis of the New Diplomacy. Or it will not be new at all.
Alejandro Bendaņa
Centro de Estudios Internacionales
Managua, Nicaragua
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