Civil Society & the State-- From Adam Smith to Karl Marx

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Relationship between Civil Society and the State

By sunita2409, 10th Mar 2011 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/qx1uilx8/
Posted in Wikinut>Guides>Culture>General

Civil society is the sphere apart from the state where citizens associate themselves with their particular interests and aims and put forward various proposals that are not determined and introduced by the political system of government

var _comscore = _comscore || []; _comscore.push({ c1: "8", c2: "6035951", c3: "135832" }); (function() { var s = document.createElement("script"), el = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.async = true; s.src = (document.location.protocol == "https:" ? "https://sb" : "http://b") + ".scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js"; el.parentNode.insertBefore(s, el); })(); Two antithetical trends in political theory have tended to obfuscate the relationship between state and civil society. One recurring trend has located the state at the central point of things. The state-oriented concept from the days of classical political thought has accorded extraordinary importance to state as a unique sort of institutional arrangement tat enables the realization of good life and development of potentialities of individuals in society. The second trend, in contrast, seeks to descend the state in the background and initiate the rule of uncontrolled market for the promotion of individual enterprise, unfettered competition and preeminence of private property. The neo-liberal scheme of ‘rolling back the state’ and allowing market supremacy has meant conferring privileges to the civil society the opposite of state-centric view.
State as the controller and restrictive guardian of society seeks to fix the scope of political practice. Civil society on the other hand obviates as the region occupied by the rights-possessing or holding and juridical defined individuals, rightly called citizens. Political participation, holding the state accountable for its action and open publicity of politics are the hallmarks of civil society. To quote Chandhoke, the essential component of politics is dialogues and contestations with the state. Hence, “civil society becomes the site for the production of a critical rational discourse which possesses the potential to interrogate the state.” In simple terms, “the site at which society enters into a relationship with the state can be defined as civil society.” Open communication and publicity, freedom of speech and expressions and the right to form associations, being the characteristics of civil society, it occupies a prideful place in democratic theory. The nature of the state, whether democratic or totalitarian, can be understood only by referring to the politics of civil society. In addition, civil society’s influencing property (as distinguished from control function) is dependent on its democratic character. Democratic theory has acknowledged the pre eminence of civil society as an essential prerequisite for the existence of democracy. Following Chandhoke’s admirable clarificatory explanation, it can now be presented as the gist of the nature of the state can be interpreted by referring to the politics of civil society. The two are united by a bond of give and take policy, “there can be no theory of the state without a theory of civil society, and correspondingly, there can be no theory of civil society without a theory of the state.”
State-Civil Society Relationship: An Evolutionary Perspective
The historical study of political philosophy is in reality the history of state-civil society relationship, as explained by noteworthy political thinkers. Before proceeding to discuss the contributions of seminal political theorists, a brief overview of the progress of thought is presented here for general understanding. The term ‘civil society’ can be traced to ancient Greek political thought and to the works Cicero and other Romans. But, in classical usage civil society was equated with state. In its modern form, civil society emerged in the Scottish and continental Enlightenment of the 18th century. Numerous political analysts like Thomas Paine, Hegel, visualized the civil society as a domain running parallel to but separate from the state. They idealized it as a realm where citizens associate according to their own interests and pursuits. The novel mode of thinking was perhaps the reflection of new economic realities characterized or marked by the rise of private property, market competition and the bourgeoisie. There was also a growing popular demand for liberty as manifested in the American and French Revolutions.
The idea of civil society suffered an eclipse in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of the attracting of considerable part of attention by the social and political consequences of the industrial revolution. The idea of civil society was resurrected by Antonio Gramsci after the end of Second World War who connoted civil society as a special nucleus of independent political activity, a sphere of struggle against tyranny. Communist states in erstwhile USSR and Eastern Europe over extended authority over nearly all fields of social life. The collapse of the communist countries led to the questioning of the spheres of state control. In fact the Czech, Hungarian and Polish activists propagated the slogan of civil society that they considered the state tended to encroach; hence, the desire was to encourage the flourishing of the institutions of civil society (e.g. Church) outside the legal institution of the state
The fall of the Soviet system and the Eastern Bloc liberated unprecedented movements and agitations for and towards democracy throughout the world. Civil society idealized in term of ‘associative initiatives of non-state organizations’ appeared as a cherishable social arena both in the post communist ruling situations and in the developed west where ‘capitalist atomization’ had steadily become undesirable. Public frustration and disappear with conventional party system catalyzed interest in civil society, and the new social campaigns (i.e. Feminism, ecological activism) offered opportunities for civil society initiatives independent of the state.

http://guides.wikinut.com/Relationship-between-Civil-Society-and-the-State/qx1uilx8/

Civil Society, Ethnicity and the State: a threefold relationship

George Schopflin

(University of London)

e-mail: g.schopflin@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

Paper delivered at the conference, Civil Society in Austria, Vienna, 20-21 June 1997

WARNING. You are free to download and read these materials at will. But they are the intellectual property of the authors. So please could you acknowledge any use you may make of them, by providing a full citation and mentioning the Centre for the Study of Nationalism, SSEES. Any queries should be sent to g.schopflin@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

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1. Traditionally civil society is conceptualised as a necessary condition of democracy. Indeed, some arguments come close to seeing civil society and citizenship as the sole defining condition of democracy. The proposition to be argued here is that the problem is, in fact, much more complex and that civil society is only one component of democracy, though a vital one.

2. In brief, the argument to be put forward here is that democracy is composed of three key, interdependent elements - civil society, the state and ethnicity. These three are in a continuous, interactive relationship. They have different functions and roles, create different, at times overlapping, at times contradictory attitudes and aspirations and through their continuous interaction, all three are reshaped and reformulated dynamically. Hence civil society is not a static entity, a state of affairs that has been reached and is then established for good, but is fluid, shifting, conflictual, responsive to changes in politics and vulnerable to hostile pressures.

3. It follows from the above that civil society should not be analysed outside its context of interdependence. Its mode of operation is certainly autonomous but is simultaneously influenced by the interactivity sketched above. Furthermore, the contours, contents and processes of civil society are equally affected by its own actions, aspirations, successes and failures, not to mention its traditions and rituals. The cognitive and operational range of civil society, then, is far from unlimited, but is bounded by the other actors on the stage and by the way in which it understands its own history.

4. This approach to disentangling the nature of civil society is restricted to the three main dimensions already noted - civil society, the state and ethnicity. However, it should be noted that increasingly in Europe in the 1990s, a fourth dimension is gaining in influence - the international. European citizenship, other international organisations and the activities of NGOs are impacting on how a civil society shapes its ideas and purposiveness. This international dimension will only be touched on fleetingly in this analysis, but its significance should not be underestimated. What is vital to recognise is that the relationships generated by these four dimensions are causal, reciprocal and conditioning; and that they impact at both the explicit, overt level and the unconscious, implicit one.

5. To start with, there should be a brief look at the much-discussed relationship of state and civil society. In some analyses, this relationship is depicted as a zero-sum game, so that the stronger the state, it is suggested, the weaker civil society is. Indeed, in some libertarian arguments, the state seeks actively to oppress civil society. This assessment is too restrictive and will not be adopted here. Rather, given the emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between state and civil society, it is the mutual impact of either that is deemed significant. In effect, it is hard to conceive of civil society functioning successfully actually without the state. The citizen, the agent and subject of politics, is simultaneously constrained by the state and protected by it. The state plays an important role in providing the integrative framework within which civil society operates and the latter cannot function properly without that. That framework, which must include a solemnised set of rules by which the political contest is played out, must be accepted as valid by all and must be administered in as neutral a fashion as is consistent with the shared culture of the society in question. This would clearly include the rule of law and the ability of the state to create a degree of coherence without which civil society would rapidly become uncivil and potentially decline into chaos or anomie. But equally, civil society must be free to challenge the state in order to preclude the bureaucratic rationality of state action from attaining the kind of paramountcy that would generate rigidity.

6. Historically, modern citizenship - the package of legal, political, social, cultural and economic rights and duties that regulate the relationship between rulers and ruled - is the outcome of the rationalising activity of the rising modern state, accelerating from the 17th century onwards.[1] This activity sought to extend and to intensify the power of the state over the population under its rule. This was a key moment. The rise of the modern, rationalising, interventionist state, with a much increased capacity to implement its will, meant that a whole variety of previously diverse practices within a given territory, but under the same ruler, were coming under pressure to be made more coherent, unified, more easily run by the ruler. Administrative, coercive and extractive, ie. taxation, procedures were homogenised in the name of greater efficiency. State capacity was considerably improved.

7. This transformation of the state brought about changes in the attitudes and responses of society, broadly in the direction of accepting the rationalisation but demanding greater control over the state's claimed monopoly of taxation and coercion. The new modes of exercising power required new modes of legitimation. Crucially, universal consent to be ruled became a factor of politics. This was a radical, even revolutionary shift, with far-reaching implications. Popular sovereignty was the necessary response to the intensification of state power.

8. It meant that the functioning of the ever growing regulation by the state needed ever higher inputs of consent if the regulation was to be efficient. Without consent, the mounting complexity of the state makes its operation weaker; instead of coherence there is confusion as society resists actively or passively. The state, if it is not be undermined by repeated challenges from countervailing forces, must pay heed to the aspirations of its subjects, which are only partly shaped by it. Without this consent, the state is obliged to impose and validate its own rationality in the exercise of power; this inevitably tends towards a one-sidedness, an absence of feedback, a reductionism and bureaucratic rigidity that are hostile to innovation, find technological change hard to cope with, prefer the pursuit of bureaucratic interests and are ultimately self-defeating in terms of the exercise of power. The more or less reluctant recognition that reciprocity of rights and powers[2] for all - as distinct from those who had this right as a privilege of birth - gave the state into its modern form. Legitimacy was now likewise a two-way process, rather than dynastic or religious, and the ruler had to accept that this legitimacy would have to be renewed regularly through transparent procedures. Consent had to extend to competing rationalities, aspirations and visions of the future. In states ruled by ideological monopoly, customarily a vision of harmony, the evolution of contest and alternatives are relatively easily marginalised. Such a state of affairs tends to favour the development of a bureaucratic mindset that is protected by overt rules of its own devising, a closed corporate culture and identity which are to be imposed on the ruled, and consequent cognitive closures that leave the state incapacitated when obliged to respond to the shock of the new.

9. Rule by consent, on the other hand, permits a continuous and dynamic interaction between rulers and ruled. The problem, then, was how to achieve consent under the new conditions.[3] And logically the problem of consent raises the problem of dissent - what is to be done if a section of the population withdraws its consent to be ruled over a period of time, if it repeatedly demonstrates that it wishes to be ruled differently but cannot change the system? Equally, the problem of consent raises the question of trust, for if there is no trust, then the rulers will be extremely reluctant to share power with the ruled, for fear that they will be swept away and liquidated.[4]

10. A good deal of the theoretical analysis emphasises the civic contract as the key instrument for regulating the new relationship between rulers and ruled. But the civic contract is not only a metaphor, but does not provide answers for the dilemmas sketched above. Hence the answers have to be sought elsewhere, at a deeper, less self-evident level. In this context, it is important to understand that certain social and political processes are implicit rather than explicit, that every community encodes their regulation in tacit as well as overt codes of behaviour, which then come to constitute a part of its cultural reproduction.[5]

11. The proposition here is that the deeper foundation for consent to be governed is generated by and vested in the bonds of solidarity that are encoded in ethnicity. Where a set of values and identity are broadly speaking shared between different social strata, where they regard one another as sharing certain commonalities, respond to the same symbols, where they take the view that, whatever may divide them, they do share certain key moral aims and obligations, the basis for a redistribution of power becomes a less hazardous enterprise. Under pre-modern conditions, the level of consent was lower, affected fewer people, so that ethnic identities were less of a factor in the relationship between state and society, but the growth of state power and capacity generated the need for a new basis of trust. Why this trust should have been argued in the language of nationhood is explained by the particular phenomenon of European political language. The right to participate in politics was accorded the members of the "natio", the body politic (corpus politicum); the demand corresponding to the expanded power of the modern state was that all the subjects of the ruler should be considered members of the "natio".[6] Initially, this was a civic concept, but the pressure for the radical redistribution of power required that nationhood be given an ethnic content. Where this ethnic content was absent, the redistribution of power could not take place or the state was divided. The failure of Royal Prussia as a state, German-speaking but subject to the Polish crown, illustrated this process vividly.

12. By the same token, the trust that is engendered in this way makes it possible for those affected by the ever-expanding activities of the modern state to accept it as being a necessary part of being ruled. It comes to be seen as the "normal and natural" political order and, therefore, the fundamental legitimacy of the state which - crucially - is not questioned. Once this tacit acceptability of the state is attained, the question of consent is removed from the agenda, because it is made automatic, indeed axiomatic. This process is, therefore, the most effective way of creating consent; in reality it preempts dissent. The attainment of this consent does not, however, mean that it will stay off the agenda for ever. In certain circumstances, a consensual state may come to be questioned by a minority which, for whatever reason, rediscovers its own, separate identity and withdraws its previously given consent. The outcome of such a division may be state failure, which - as will be argued - is far more common in Europe than is generally recognised.

13. It follows, therefore, that the modern state has an interest in promoting a degree of ethnic homogeneity, notably by using the state educational system.[7] The reciprocal relationship between the state and ethnicity is a real one. It is not contended in this assessment that the state is actually capable of creating an ethnic identity out of nothing, but where it establishes what might be termed a working relationship with an ethnic identity, the state can shape, enhance, promote and protect it. The difficulty arises when the state finds that it is unable to impose its ethnicised codes on a group which has acquired a separate ethnic consciousness sufficient to generate its own cultural reproduction. In such circumstances, which are common enough, either some kind of a compromise is reached and the rulers of the state are prepared to share the state with other groups or, if the competing ethnic group has the territorial cohesion, it can opt for secession. The dynamic of state action sustains and develops ethnic consciousness; usually the one dominant ethnic group imposes its ethnic vision on the state to create an etatic identity and this is then imposed in turn on all the ethnic groups in that territory. That, in essence, is the building of the modern nation-state.

14. The overall outcome of this somewhat obscure relationship between ethnicity and the state is, as implied, the acquisition of a degree of ethnic colouring by the state. When two actors are in continuous contact, each becomes marked by some of the features of the other. This gives rise to a momentous conclusion - the universalism of the state and of the citizenship that depends upon it is more apparent than real. Both will be lightly, or less lightly, ethnicised. French citizenship is permeated by French ways of doing things, French codes, French points of reference and a French perception of what is "normal and natural".[8] This proposition can be applied elsewhere, to other states, including some of the most deeply civic and democratic polities. Ethnicity does not, then, vanish in the civic states of Western Europe - it merely slips out of sight. Nor is ethnicity necessarily destructive of democracy, therefore. It can undermine democracy when either the state or civil society or both is too weak to contain it and thereby ethnic criteria are used for state and civic purposes.

15. What happens then to citizenship demands further attention. (a) Citizenship is defined in this analysis as the package of overt legal, political, institutional, economic and other analogous relationships that bind society and the individual to the state and which govern political relationships within society. For the most part, citizenship is explicit, open to questioning directly and subject to continuous political engagement. It is through the rules of citizenship - informal as well as formal - that civil society finds expression‎. In this realm, there are the procedures, the mechanisms, the provisions that make power transparent and predictable. This is vital, for without the stabilising element of citizenship, the exercise of power becomes arbitrary and generates insecurity; this insecurity then reacts on ethnicity and can give rise to a sense that one's ethnic identity is threatened. That in turn can trigger off a radical narrowing of perspectives, an ideologisation, a deep-seated intolerance born of the fear that one's ethnic identity is in danger. This phenomenon is found when the state is too weak to protect civil society or sees no interest in doing so. The combination of state and ethnicity when used against civil society is what usually underlies nationalist excesses, the shift towards ethnicisation of politics, when all or virtually all power is exercised by ethnic criteria.

(b) Hence, those aspects of citizenship that impinge upon the ethnic underpinning of the state are evidently difficult to deal with through civic codes. The language of the state is manifestly one of these, for language has at least two functions. It is the medium of communication through which the individual relates to the state, but language is also one of the pivotal instruments of ethnic reproduction, some of the processes by which an ethnic identity is articulated and sustained. The interaction between the civic and ethnic dimensions of language is one of the most frequent sources of conflict in the modern state.[9] Members ethno-linguistic minorities will claim access to the rights of citizenship in both dimensions and thereby challenge the ethnic codes of the majority. Often, majorities will try to delegitimate these demands by reference only to the civic or state dimension, that the language of a particular state is, say, Ruritanian and that all citizens, as citizens, must learn the language of the state; this disingenuously ignores the problem of minority cultural reproduction. The solution to this admittedly difficult problem is to include all the ethnic communities within the area of the state in the codes of citizenship and to accept that citizenship will be coloured by more than one ethnicity. In practice, this is extremely difficult to achieve, precisely because much of this activity takes place at the implicit, indirect level, rather than the overt one where the codes of citizenship rule.

16. Without citizenship, then, cultural reproduction is endangered, because of the unpredictability of power, even while without ethnicity consent to be ruled is hard to establish. And without the state, the framework for citizenship cannot operate. Hence the key proposition in this analysis is that citizenship, ethnicity and the state exist in mutual interdependence. The ideal situation is when a threefold equilibrium has come into being. This is a necessary condition of democracy. Thus in situations where only two of the three elements are present, the use of democratic instruments like elections, even if free and fair, will not produce democracy, but some hybrid like consensual semi-authoritarianism. Croatia in the first half of the 1990s exemplified this instance.[10] Where state, citizenship and ethnicity are all weak, as in Bielarus, the existence of independent statehood is strongly questioned by its inhabitants. Generally, where both civil society and the state are weak, ethnicity flourishes and democracy will not be easy to sustain, as is the case with post-communism generally.[11]

17. It should be understood, however, that as the threefold relationships (state-citizenship, state-ethnicity, citizenship-ethnicity) are dynamic, the equilibrium does not have to be perfect. A wide variety of different solutions is possible. In Europe today, there is a highly fluid state of affairs, a questioning of received wisdom. After 1945, political systems were significantly etatised through the establishment of the welfare state and this is now under challenge. This can give rise to different models of democracy, with different forms of equilibrium. France can be said to have a strong state, strong ethnicity and a civil society that is weaker than the state, with the result that French civic consciousness is markedly ethnicised. In Italy, there is an inefficient state, a well articulated civil society and a strong ethnicity, with the result that much social action is citizenship-driven but without the equilibrating function of the state. England (not Britain) has a high capacity state (and growing stronger), a weakening civil society and a strong but implicit ethnicity; the outcome has been the growing etatisation of identities.

18. Challenges to the state, however, bring dangers in their wake - the danger of state failure. There are various roads to state failure, but the collapse of a multi-ethnic state is the commonest in Europe (Austria-Hungary, Jugoslavia, Czechoslovakia). In a sense, it can be argued that the 1945-1989 period was unique in European history in that it was free of state failure, but otherwise virtually every European state has experienced it. The criteria of state failure used in this analysis are: complete disappearance (Montenegro); the loss or addition of territory ; major upheaval or discontinuity, like foreign occupation, the aftermath of war or civil war; and possibly decolonisation, the loss of empire. In each case, the state is to some extent incapacitated or loses consent and is unable to provide the security that its citizens expect of it.

The incorporation of new territories within the boundaries of the state is a complex and difficult operation for the modern state. It adds new citizens with different aspirations and ways of life (even when there is no ethnic difference), thereby disrupting established bureaucratic pattern and weakening state capacity. This can dilute the bonds of citizenship and intensify ethnic allegiances. In practice, though few people recognise it in this way, the addition of territory is much more of a burden than it appears at first sight. The belief that territorial expansion is a source of greater power is a misconception left over from early modern or pre-modern times, when the switching of territory from ruler to ruler was much easier and more common. Currently, the values, attitudes and identities that come into being by responding to a particular state are long lasting,[12] making the integration of new territory complex and painful. Indeed, the identity created by a previous state experience persists and integration is seldom fully achieved. Ethnicity is self-evidently insufficient for this purpose as the case of German reunification shows. Rumania and Poland both show traces of their previous state experience to this day; even Alsace has retained some of the features that it acquired as a part of the Reich before 1918.

19. In fact, by accepting that the state is much more contingent than it seems and, therefore, a part of the normal pattern of political change, it becomes possible to see a very large number of state failures in 20th century Europe and to deduce from this that in Europe, the problem of dissent or withdrawal of consent is regularly solved by secession, rather than accepting high levels of instability through the presence of unintegrated minorities. This idea may only occasionally be conceptualised in this way, but secession is legitimated overwhelmingly by reference to ethnicity, which strengthens the argument that ethnicity plays a vital role in state stabilisation and stability. In the United States, on the other hand, the idea of secession is anathema (this is what the Civil War was about), presumably because the integrity of the US is guaranteed by a civic contract - the Constitution - which can only work if territorial integrity is not open to question. To this may be added that in certain circumstances, generally before polarisation is far advanced, confederal solutions or cantonisation or other forms of deconcentrating power can produce success, if success is measured by holding a particular state together and provides space for civil society and ethnic reproduction (this, in essence, is the story of Belgium).[13]

20. Multi-ethnicity creates a whole set of problems that exacerbate the difficulties in generating consent. If ethnicity really does play the crucial role in underpinning consent as argued above, then in a multi-ethnic state, this consent ought logically to be impossible to attain. There are very real difficulties in this area of political management, but they are not insuperable.[14] In essence, the answers are to be found in various forms of power sharing and the application of the principle of self-limitation to ethnicity, admittedly neither popular nor straightforward given that cultural reproduction can be seen to be threatened. The fact is that virtually every European state is multi-ethnic in some respects, albeit there are more than enough differences among them to require that a variety of solutions be considered. They must all begin from citizenship, that in a democratic state all citizens have equal right to cultural reproduction and to share in the material and symbolic goods of the state if they are to be perceived as citizens and if they are to identify fully with the state in question. This identification is vital if multi-ethnic relations are not to be troubled by unmanageable suspicion and distrust.

21. The heart of the problematic is that the codes of solidarity and cohesiveness, the nature of reciprocal loyalties and bonds, implicit communication, the construction of what is regarded as "normal and natural" are all located in ethnic identity and, obviously, these will vary in their expression‎ from one ethnic group to another. Here one finds fertile ground for suspicion and distrust. Is it, in fact, possible for one ethnic group to trust another sufficiently to share power with it within one state? The answer is that it can be done if all parties are sensitive to the imperative of cultural reproduction and accept that the rights that they demand for themselves must be extended to others. This implies that the political and institutional systems, citizenship, must be set up in such a way as to cope with the extra burden of the continuous renegotiation of power across an ethnic boundary. The distribution and legitimation of power must take account of this imperative for majorities and minorities in order to provide for the security of both. And note, too, that cultural reproduction is sensitised by multi-ethnicity; the question of identity is raised on an everyday basis and one's understanding of "normal and natural" is challenged daily. Without formal and informal regulation there is a real danger that small issues can grow very rapidly into major ones as ethnic ranks are closed and perspectives are narrowed. Symbolic conflicts are readily perceived as an onslaught on one's cultural integrity and security. This last proposition is nicely illustrated by the differences between Hungarians in Hungary and Hungarians in Rumania. For the former, their Hungarian identity is taken for granted as "normal and natural"; for the latter, especially those outside the largely ethnic Hungarian Szekely counties, being Hungarian means having continuously to engage with the Rumanian quality of the state and with the Rumanian majority resulting in a much more accentuated awareness of being Hungarian.

22. Yet, having sketched the undoubted difficulties in this area, there are some very real success stories and it is a common mistake to place excessive emphasis on the pathologies. In summary form, where multi-ethnicity has been effectively regulated, the groups in question have agreed to differ on some aspects of what constitutes loyalty to the state and they do not take these differences as vital to their existence. All the groups must have an overt and accepted loyalty to the integrity of the state; secession cannot be an issue. The state lives with lower levels of integration and rationalisation than it might prefer, it lives with different - and therefore unequal - solutions to certain issues (eg. education). Nor is there an insistence that the different groups actually like one another, enjoy living together or feel that they must share ethnic bonds. The difference is there but is dealt with in a non-universalist fashion. (Switzerland, Finland and Spain are instances.)

23. To the foregoing should be added the contingent problems of the 1990s. There are three significant trends acting on the democratic systems of the West.

(a) The collapse of communism has meant the end of the discipline which constituted one of the parameters of power. Whereas before 1989, pressure from civil society for greater empowerment could be resisted by offstage reference to the communist threat, this is no longer accepted as legitimate. Hence the relationship between civil society and the state, which seemed to have been quiescent since the upheavals of 1968, is back on the agenda. At the same time, the end of communism has forced Western Europe to look more closely at what it means to be European, where Europe ends, who is European and who is not. The Jean Monnet paradigm for the construction of Europe has clearly run out of steam and new instruments are being debated. Equally, while there is near universal agreement that the states of Central and Eastern Europe are, indeed, a part of Europe, what this is to mean in practice is hotly contested. What are the obligations that Western Europe owes Central and Eastern Europe? Is Russia in Europe or not? And what should Europe do ensure stability and democracy? And finally, the collapse of communism has also brought with it the collapse of the communist state which claimed to be the supreme embodiment of rationality. This has inevitably tainted the widely held belief in the state in the West, by association. Etatism, whether associated with the left or the right has been increasingly doubted. These are all new questions which have arrived with quite some urgency on the agenda and demand a far-reaching reappraisal.

(b) The problem of the welfare state and the simultaneous pressure for the greater empowerment of society have raised a different set of issues. As the welfare state paradigm has lost its effectiveness, as state capacity has declined with overload, as dependency has grown, as the cost of welfare provision has risen and the labour force has stagnated, coupled with the causal link between the high cost of labour and high unemployment, correspondingly questioning has intensified. Crucially, there has been a certain loss of trust in the ability of the state to deliver with no widely accepted alternative, hence the prestige of the state has declined. This last proposition is all the more serious, because the modern state has in many respects become the tacit repository of ultimate rationality, so that the loss of faith in the state has much deeper implications than might appear at first sight.

(c) Globalisation affects the equation in several ways. The impact of global processes is to erode the tradition-driven belief systems by which groups and individuals structure their lives and this loss of the past, in turn, creates an insecurity about the present and the future. The state is losing control over information, money, consumption, leisure technological change and other forms of innovation. This has not made the state impotent, but it has changed many of its traditional tasks, especially in the provision of material and cultural security. As time-hallowed structures have been weakened, the state, as well as civil society have to find a new role and new relationship, even as the parameters of action are shifting with great speed.[15]

24. Finally, there is the new issue of European citizenship. In the last decade, the evolution of a network of transnational associations centred on the European Union have generated new power relationships, new forms and hierarchies of power, of social knowledge and information, of political capital. Importantly, these side-step the traditionally conceived nation-state and establish connections directly among non-state actors and with Brussels. This process of development is still at a relative early stage, but it is real enough for all that and will become more intensive as European integration proceeds. The significance of these processes is that existing hierarchies of power that have their location within the state are threatened in a way that cannot be easily delegitimated by those affected (eg. decisions of the European Court of Justice). The new instruments of empowerment that result then can be used to reform or reshape domestic structures. European citizenship provides new resources and creates new identities that can transform long-standing patterns (eg. the far-reaching reshaping of Irish identity as a European one). Civil society will certainly benefit from European citizenship by having a new centre of power to which to appeal when it comes to dealing with the state, but it is an open question as to whether the European Union can provide the stabilising functions that were traditionally the task of the state. Then, the whole question of consent reappears in a new guise - what is the nature of the consent to be ruled in the relationship between civil society and the European Union? What are the implications of the democratic deficit in this context? And how will eastward enlargement effect further changes? What is beyond doubt is that European citizenship is also recasting ethnic identities as ethnic actors engage directly with Brussels and can use European resources in the contest for power at home. Overall, in this area the outlook is of fluidity and innovation, which will gradually or sharply reconstitute the state, civil society and ethnicity in the Europe of the 1990s and beyond.

NOTES

1 McNeill, W.H. The Pursuit of Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

2 Szucs, Jeno Vazlat Europa harom torteneti regiojarol (Budapest: Magveto, 1983), partially translated as 'Three Historical Regions of Europe' in (editor) John Keane, Civil Society and the State (London: Verso, 1988), pp.291-332.

3 Orridge, A.W. 'Varieties of Nationalism' in (ed.) Leonard Tivey, The Nation-State: the formation of modern politics, (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981), pp.39-58.

4 Hall, John Coercion and Consent (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).

5 Douglas, Mary Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge, 1975).

6 Keane, John 'Nations, Nationalism and the European Citizen' Filosovski Vestnik/Acta Philosophica, (Ljubljana) Vol.14, No.2 (1993), pp.35-56

7 Gellner, Ernest Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)

8 Weber, Eugen Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914 (London: Chatto, 1977).

9 Schopflin, George 'Aspects of Language and Ethnicity in Central and Eastern Europe', Transition Vol.2, no.24 (29 November 1996), pp.6-10

10 Vesna Pusic 'Dictatorship with Democratic Legitimation: Democracy versus Nation' East European Politics and Societies, Vol.8 No.3 (Fall, 1994).

11 Holmes, Leslie Post-Communism: an Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1997).

12 Mann, Michael 'A Political Theory of Nationalism and its Excesses' in (editor) Sukumar Periwal, Notions of Nationalism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), pp.44-64.

13 van Istendael, Geert A belga labirintus avagy a formatlansag ba'ja (Budapest: Gondolat, 1994) a translation of Het Belgisch labyrint of De schoonheid der wanstaltigheid [The Belgian Labyrinth or the Charms of Formlessness].

14 McGarry, John and Brendan O'Leary, (eds.)The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation (London: Routledge, 1992).

15 Giddens, Anthony The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990)

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The State and Civil Society:Studies in Hegel's Political Philosophy ...

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The state and civil society were first distinguished by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right as two stages in the dialectical development from the family to the nation.

'The Big Society': civic participation and the state in modern Britain

by Matthew Hilton, James McKay, Nicholas Crowson and Jean-Francois Mouhot

• Executive summary
• Introduction
• The state of civic participation
• Civic participation and the state
• Key drivers of change
• Conclusions
• Further reading
• About the authors

Executive summary

• The new coalition government has pledged to move away from big government to 'the big society', in which civil society is to be revived and given a greater role in tackling social problems.
• However, civic participation is not in decline. Indeed, much of the evidence suggests it is currently vibrant.
• Membership of trade unions, political parties, churches and traditional women's groups has fallen, but membership of new social movements, non-governmental organisations and pressure groups concerned with various new areas of public concern have flourished.
• The nature of membership and participation has changed, but this ought not to be interpreted as decline: rather, there are rational reasons for supporting organisations that require little active involvement beyond financial support.
• The expansion of the welfare state has not weakened civic participation. In many instances the state has promoted and strengthened the voluntary sector, the welfare state has acted as a spur to further voluntary initiatives and, rather than being in competition, the state and the voluntary sector have complemented one another.
• There has been little fundamental change in the relationship between states, citizens and civil society throughout the last sixty years, and much consistency of thinking about such issues across the political spectrum.
• Key drivers of the changing nature of civic participation include the rise of affluence and access to higher education, the growing authority of expertise (and the attendant trend to transfer political subjects to 'neutral' expert bodies), and the related transformations in social and political trust.
• In an increasingly complex world, the public has opted to support civic groups through arms-length, 'cheque-book' activism. This has been a calculated decision to trust certain types of organisation to act on its behalf when dealing with other experts.

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Introduction

The new coalition government has pledged to move away from big government to 'the big society'. The big society proposals assume that government alone cannot solve complex social problems. Instead, by making the public services more accountable to citizens, by decentralising power and by expanding the opportunities for civic participation, it is hoped that an active citizenry will play a quantitatively and qualitatively greater role in tackling problems that affect communities. The package of policies is predicated on the notion that there has been a decline in civic participation and that this can be attributed partially to a dependency culture encouraged by 'big government'. This paper tackles some of the central questions raised by the coalition proposals and argues that, instead of decline, civic participation remains vibrant and has constantly evolved over the last few decades.

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The state of civic participation

Civic participation in Britain is not in decline. Participation can be measured in different ways: through organisational growth, overall income of the charitable and voluntary sectors, or (perhaps most importantly for participation) individual involvement. All of these measures suggest that civic participation is vibrant. For example, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) estimates that in 2007 there were 870,000 UK civil society organisations (CSOs). There are around 170,000 charities in the UK, a figure that has climbed steadily since the establishment of the modern registration system in the 1960s (see Fig.1). A 2009 survey found that volunteering was undertaken informally by 57% of adults in England, and formally by 43%, in the twelve months preceding interview.

Fig.1: Growth in number of charities in England and Wales, 1960-2008

Source: Unpublished data, David Kane, NCVO

Tales of golden ages and modern decline are common in analyses of civic participation. These decline narratives operate by celebrating a supposedly ideal period in the past (for example, Victorian philanthropy), and then describing all subsequent developments as regrettable deviations. These analyses often present compelling cases, within their own terms of reference. For example, literature on social capital equates 'desirable' participation with forms of association that were common in the mid-twentieth century, but have declined since. Within its own terms, this case is undeniably true. Membership of traditional women's groups has withered: e.g., the Mothers' Union had 538,000 members in the 1930s, but only 98,000 by 2009. The numbers of those attending church regularly has been in steady decline since the early twentieth century. And the membership of the main political parties halved between 1960 and 1980, and has halved again since.

Narratives of decline tend to assume that change from these norms is to be deplored. It sometimes follows that easy interpretations are sought to explain such decline: perhaps that the rise of the welfare state has taken over the roles of traditional voluntary bodies, promoting a culture of dependency that makes citizens less willing to participate in communal and self-help organisations. The reality of change is more subtle and it can just as easily be argued that civil society has undergone constant renewal and revitalisation. Not only has the number of CSOs steadily increased, but new forms of civic engagement and new areas of civic concern have emerged.

For the United States, it has famously been argued by Robert Putnam that participation in voluntary associations has fallen, resulting in a decline in social capital and ultimately democratic citizenship. When such an analysis has been applied to the UK, the evidence is less compelling. Drawing on a number of surveys conducted by political scientists since the early 1960s, we have concluded that there is no real problem with the levels of civic participation in Britain.

Of course, a lot depends on the data used. The problem with much of this literature on civic participation is that the evidence base is highly selective, leading to questionable conclusions. Unfortunately for historical analysis, there is no definitive data to refer to. What is clear, however, is that forms and patterns of participation have undergone significant change in the twentieth century, and continue to do so today.

Understanding change, therefore, is the key issue. If mass political parties, the churches and women's groups have seen declining levels of participation, new social movements, pressure groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have often seen quite spectacular growth. Environmental groups, for example, have dramatically expanded their membership since the early 1970s (see Fig.2). No doubt there is crossover and hence double counting, but the cumulative membership figure of all the main environmental NGOs at the turn of the millennium was six million.

Fig.2: Membership of environmental NGOs

To take another example, the voluntary income of international aid and development (IAD) charities has also flourished over a similar period (see Fig.3).

Fig.3: Voluntary income of IAD charities (CAF, various years)

Figures such as these have led many authors to be incredibly optimistic about the future of civil society. The protests associated with various aspects of globalisation, for example, have encouraged one leading commentator to write of a 'democratic phoenix'. Precisely which ashes this phoenix is supposed to have risen from is unclear: such evidence as there is suggests a more continual process of growth and change.

To replace the interpretation of the pessimist with that of the optimist would be simplistic and misleading. Problems, opportunities and tensions exist within civic life, just as they have always done. The most serious of these relates to the changing nature of membership. Attention has been drawn to how face-to-face member participation in voluntary associations has increasingly been displaced by a more distant, 'cheque-book' relationship between NGOs and their supporters. The significance of this development lies in the proposed relationship between face-to-face participation in associations, and greater levels of social - and, from there, political - trust.

There is much to this argument and it might indeed be the case that the quality of membership has declined. Yet, as we will see below, two rejoinders are apparent. Firstly, it is not at all obvious that social and political trust have been causally connected. It might well be that even in a participation-rich society, in which much interpersonal communication takes place and levels of social trust are high, levels of political trust and political engagement are still low due to, for instance, the behaviour of politicians and the decline of ideology. Secondly, there may be a well worked out rationality in electing to engage in 'cheque book politics'. As we will see, in an increasingly complex world, in which communication takes place in myriad ways and in which highly technical issues cannot be understood by even educated lay people, it might make sense to place one's trust in mass membership, low interaction, yet highly professional and technically competent organisations.

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Civic participation and the state

It is not the case that the rise of the state has weakened either the voluntary sector or civic participation. The institutions of the welfare state, for example, have served in many ways to strengthen civic participation, and the voluntary and welfare services have worked in close collaboration over the decades.

The case against the state, and the welfare state in particular, is that it has displaced voluntary initiative and bred a culture of dependence. This is a mistaken interpretation. Undoubtedly, it may apply very well to certain classic spheres of public welfare. The demise of the voluntary hospitals is a prominent case in point, as are aspects of the social services and social work. Yet the anti-state case fails to appreciate the sheer diversity of the welfare state (and of the state more generally), and it does not acknowledge how public welfare has often revitalised public spiritedness. Once we examine the state and the voluntary services on a sector by sector basis, a whole variety of relationships between government and civic participation begin to emerge.

Far from being displaced by the welfare state, voluntary initiative has often been prompted to go beyond statutory provision, exploring neglected issues, and pioneering solutions. A classic example here is the rediscovery of poverty in the 1960s. Here, the complacent assumption that the welfare state had 'abolished' poverty was challenged by a group of social policy researchers based at the London School of Economics, notably Richard Titmuss, Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend. They used the Ministry of Labour's own statistics to demonstrate the ongoing nature of deprivation, and in doing so, reframed the notion of poverty as a relative, rather than an absolute, condition. This in turn triggered a new wave of groups campaigning on British poverty and deprivation, such as the Child Poverty Action Group (1965), Shelter (1966), Crisis (1967), and Gingerbread (1970). The 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, which defined statutory homelessness, was seen as a response to the lobbying carried out from the late 1960s by such groups. Ultimately, the idea that the state has displaced voluntary initiative misunderstands the 'moving frontier' that exists between the two sectors. As a major report on the voluntary sector noted in the 1990s:

[W]hen tides of change sweep through society as a whole, the contours of voluntary action also shift. When the state advances, the voluntary sector adjusts its role accordingly. When the state retreats and the market advances, as has happened in most advanced Western democracies over the past decade, voluntary organisations adapt their mission.

Certain forms of voluntary activity represent classic forms of self help and had no intention of involving the state. The consumer movement (i.e. Which?), for instance, has since 1957 engaged in the comparative testing of branded commodities to assist its members in making better purchases. Consumers soon found out, though, that voluntary effort alone was insufficient to deal with certain market and public sector mechanisms that impacted negatively on the consumer. They therefore called on the state to protect consumer interests through regulations on competition, restrictive trade practices, safety issues, etc. By 1980, one journalist for The Times was able to claim that the Consumers' Association had 'filled more pages of the statute book than any other pressure group this century'. Likewise, environment and conservation groups have a long pedigree of challenging and encouraging the government to take action over specific issues. This can be seen from the work of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society and the Smoke Abatement League in the lobbying that led to the 1956 Clean Air Act that followed the devastating London smog of 1952, to the Big Ask coalition of environment and development groups that paved the way for the 2008 Climate Change Act.

It is often tempting to see great transformations in the relationship between state and civil society, particularly when these tie in with perceived political turning points like 1945 and 1979. In fact, there has been little fundamental change in the relationship between states, citizens and civil society, and much consistency of thinking across the political spectrum. Change has been a matter of emphasis, and the significance of voluntary initiative has never been seriously challenged. William Beveridge, the architect of the welfare state, certainly did not think that there ought to be no role for voluntary effort. He wrote that the 'vigour and abundance' of voluntary action inspired forms of civic engagement that were 'the distinguishing marks of a free society'. Likewise Conservative Quintin Hogg thought 'such forms are seldom politically inspired, and form the natural barrier of defence between the individual and the State ... societies and organisations which are at once the condition and the result, at once the glory and cause, of a free society'.

Even the Labour government of the late 1940s was sympathetic to the role of the voluntary sector. Once the welfare reforms were in place, the Labour Party looked to the voluntary sector. Indeed, Nye Bevan believed state support for voluntary bodies could remove the stigma of charity and the arbitrariness of the collection box. Former Labour Research director and writer of the 1945 election manifesto, Michael Young, wrote Small Man, Big World, exploring the possibilities of mutual aid. On the social democratic wing of the party, Tony Crosland wrote of the need to develop individual freedom and liberty. And, back in power in the 1960s, Labour issued a series of investigations into the role of the voluntary sector in health, probationary services, housing and services for the young.

From 1979, Conservative administrations gave significant support to the voluntary sector, both rhetorically, extolling the virtues of non-state social action, and in practical terms, through funding initiatives such as those run by the Manpower Services Commission. From 1979-80 to 1986-87, public sector direct grant support for the voluntary sector increased by over 90% in real terms.

Since 1997, there has been a renewed attempt to define and improve the working relationships between the state and voluntary sectors. The Labour administrations of 1997-2010 introduced the 'Compact' that set out the relationship between government and the voluntary sector. It marked a major re-eval‎uation of the socio-political significance of the voluntary sector, and was intended to give the sector a greater consultative role in the design and implementation of policy. There were also innovations in the machinery of central government, most notably the establishment of the Office of the Third Sector within the Cabinet Office.

Government and voluntary organisations recognise that each have their respective roles to play. Much of the energy of voluntary initiative is directed not so much at competing with the state but in complementing what it does. Problems emerge, though, when this complementarity is formalised. Contracting, in particular, can create situations in which the energy of the voluntary group is directed at securing funding rather than promoting the interests of their clients. Also, when government control these contracts, it can detract from the vitality of the civic organisation. The social entrepreneurial role is therefore lost and the welfare service, provided by either the state or by a civic group under contract, become indistinguishable.

In certain areas it has to be acknowledged that the voluntary sector can only achieve so much. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, international aid and development NGOs were praised for their alternative model of development which saw them better able to reach the grassroots poor than official aid programmes. This triggered an embrace of the charities by the state, by firstly the Labour governments of the 1970s and then the Conservatives in the 1980s. But the amount of aid that can be disbursed by NGOs is limited and is inevitably tiny in proportion to that disbursed through official bilateral and multilateral programmes. When the UK government cut its overseas aid budget in 1966, for example, it did so by a sum greater than the total spending of Oxfam since its formation in 1942. The NGO is not an alternative to the state. It is a complement, and one which in no ways detracts from the proper role of state intervention.

Two conclusions about civic participation and the state stand. Firstly, the evidence of the last 60 years would suggest that it is better not to see the welfare state and civil society as distinct and competing entities. Rather there has existed an extensive network of politicians, ministers, civil servants, but also professional independent experts, voluntary groups and, in some instances, the market. The precise mix varies from sector to sector. Second, it does not follow that the expansion of the public sector has reduced civic participation. Rather it is the case that government, civil society and the market have all expanded alongside one another.

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Key drivers of change

There are many interlinked factors that have impacted upon the voluntary sector and civic participation since 1945. Changes in civic participation in the last seventy years have been fundamentally driven by increasing levels of affluence. In the long Keynesian boom that followed the Second World War, economic expansion financed the mass provision of secondary and tertiary education. These trends of affluence and education have continued since, resulting in a citizenry that is wealthier and better educated than ever before. This has changed the nature of citizen interaction with leaders and institutions, replacing a politics directed by elites, with one which challenges elites. Less likely to defer to class-based, monolithic political parties, citizens have responded to the complexities of the modern world by constructing complex and personalised forms of engagement.

Since the Second World War, experts and professionals have played a quantitatively more significant role than in any other period. These experts were central not only to economic management and social policy, but also to areas of cultural taste, the urban and rural environments, consumer behaviour and the psychological well-being of communities. Their prominence has been central to accounts of de-politicisation (that is, the transfer of formerly political subjects to the realm of experts) that, in turn, are said to explain increased voter apathy and civic disengagement.

In fact, expertise lies behind the transformation in civic participation. Just as experts flocked to local government, to engineering, to the financial sector, to architecture, to law and to medicine, so too would they become the bulwarks of an expanding NGO sector: from lawyers like Tom Sargent and Peter Benenson who would form human rights organisations JUSTICE and Amnesty, to the engineers, scientists and development economists who would staff Oxfam and Christian Aid, and who would in turn pass through the doors of international institutions to spearhead the technocratic solutions to third world development. These 'expert citizens' displaced, to some degree, grassroots activists, and transformed the face of post-war British politics, in its broadest sense.

Although the data is unreliable, there is evidence to suggest that citizens have deliberately chosen to trust certain groups over others. Rather than seeing political trust as emerging from social trust (as the social capital literature assumes), individuals have shown a remarkable understanding of different kinds of political trust not dependent on their active membership of a traditional voluntary organisation. There is evidence that the public is choosing to trust the expertise of NGOs and voluntary organisations over that of civil servants and politicians. For example, a poll conducted in August 1993 found that 38% of the public trusted government scientists. The figure for industry scientists was around the same at 41%. Yet for scientists working for environmental organisations, it was 73%.

The rise of the expert citizen, driven by affluence and the expansion of educational opportunities, goes to the core of the changing nature of trust and civic participation. In an increasingly complex world, the public opts to support a civic group, through arms-length, 'cheque-book' activism, as it trusts the organisation to act on its behalf when dealing with other experts. Clearly, single issue politics is open to the charge that it reduces politics to shopping. Voters, or supporters of NGOs, have low costs of exit and can switch their affinities readily and often: this is 'cheap participation', as one study puts it. Yet active participation in voluntary groups might not help their enfranchisement either: there are complex technical issues at stake that go beyond the lay person. Supporters of NGOs have actually recognised that such experts are better placed to make one's case (albeit with 'our' experts rather than 'their' experts).

Civic participation has come to be based on a very different form of membership. It is less likely to involve weekly attendance at meetings and social gatherings and more likely to involve seemingly passive direct debit payments. Yet, this membership can be mobilised at key times - to write letters, to attend protests, to support a campaign initiated from the top. These strategic mobilisations of supporters have been repeated over and over again - in Jubilee 2000, Make Poverty History, the Countryside Alliance and Live 8.

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Conclusions

The ongoing vibrancy of civic participation makes it clear that it is problematic and erroneous to define the voluntary sector according to any one criteria. It is constantly evolving and adapting to new circumstances giving rise to new forms of activism and participation. It has grown alongside an expanding state and complemented the work of the welfare services. Attempts to control and direct its activities are likely to fail and possibly to backfire, especially if sectors call on the state for further intervention. However, its vibrancy can be embraced, and its comparative advantages exploited, but not in a manner that sees it as an alternative to state provision. Indeed, its cheque-book supporters might readily switch their allegiances if this is the role envisaged for civil society.

June 2010

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Further reading

• Commission on the Future of the Voluntary Sector, Meeting the Challenge of Change: Voluntary Action into the 21st Century (London, 1996).
• Crowson, N., Hilton M., and McKay, J. (eds), NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-State Actors in Society and Politics since 1945 (Basingstoke, 2009).
• Finlayson, G., 'A Moving Frontier: Voluntarism and the State in British Social Welfare', Twentieth-Century British History, 1 (1990), pp.183-206.
• Inglehart, R., The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, 1977).
• Putnam, R., Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000).

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About the authors

All four authors are at the University of Birmingham. Matthew Hilton is Professor of Social History. Nicholas Crowson is Reader in Contemporary British History. Jean-Francois Mouhot and James McKay are both post-doctoral researchers on the Leverhulme-Trust funded project, 'NGOs in Britain, 1945-1997'. For further details see http://www.ngo.bham.ac.uk/. M.J.Hilton@bham.ac.uk

This paper was originally prepared for a History & Policy seminar with the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit.

See also: Economic downturns and the voluntary sector: what can we learn from historical evidence? by John Mohan and Karl Wilding

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State-society relations and citizenship

• Introduction
• State-society relations: overview
• State legitimacy
• Interaction of formal and informal institutions
• Statelessness
• Civic trust and socio-political cohesion: overview
• Intra-society relations
• Civic trust and citizenship
• Socio-political cohesion and nationhood

 

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State-society relations: overview

State-society relations is defined by DFID as ‘interactions between state institutions and societal groups to negotiate how public authority is exercised and how it can be influenced by people. They are focused on issues such as defining the mutual rights and obligations of state and society, negotiating how public resources should be allocated and establishing different modes of representation and accountability’ (DFID, 2010, p. 15).

The focus is not on particular institutional forms but rather on the relations and relational functions of state and society institutions. Neither the state nor civil society is seen as acting in isolation. Rather, the state derives its legitimacy through its interaction with citizens and an organised and active civil society.

The Citizenship Development Research Centre views a citizen as ‘someone with rights, aspirations and responsibilities to others in the community and to the state. This implies a relationship among citizens, and between the state and all those living within its borders’ (Benequista, 2010, p. 4). Citizenship confers various benefits, including the right to enjoy a nationality; to vote, hold office and participate in political processes; to access education, health and other goods; to access the labour market beyond the informal sector; to own businesses, land and other forms of property; and to security of residence and freedom of movement.

The nature of the political settlement can greatly impact upon state-society relations. In many fragile and conflict-affected states, relations are based on patronage and lack of accountability. The prominence of informal institutions and relationships and unofficial processes result in divergences between formal systems and rules and actual practice.

Political elites, who benefit from patronage and income from natural resource rents and criminal activities, often have little incentive to engage with citizens and to build effective public authority. The concentration of power in a few elites also limits the participation of citizens from public life.

In some situations, citizens may be excluded from public life through state repression and violence. This results in a legacy of negative and weak state-society relations. Efforts to promote an inclusive political settlement can re-shape relations and contribute to political and social transformation.

Much of the focus in statebuilding has been on building the capacity of central state institutions. Attention must also be paid to supporting civil society and citizen engagement such that they can hold the state accountable and make it responsive to society. Where donor policy and funding has been directed at both state and civil society institutions, these interventions have often been compartmentalised based on a traditional state-civil society divide. Strategies and policies are needed that focus on the interaction between institutions and citizens at all stages of war-to-peace transition, from peace negotiations and implementation of agreements to post-conflict peacebuilding. The challenge is to build peace alliances that stretch horizontally and vertically between different levels of society.

Greater attention also needs to be paid to questions of power and to altering elite incentives. External actors will find it difficult, though, to directly influence internal political dynamics. It may thus be more effective to target international behaviour and initiatives that affect incentives, such as management of extractive industries, international tax evasion and corruption. Statebuilding approaches also need to go beyond modelling the relationship between state, elites and an undisaggregated 'society', and ask who is represented by each group, who participates in state-society negotiations, and whose demands are being expressed? For example, donor approaches to statebuilding typically have not engaged with existing knowledge about gender power relations and how statebuilding processes impact women and men differently.

Benequista, N., 2010, ‘Putting Citizens at the Centre: Linking States and Societies for Responsive Governance - A Policy-maker’s Guide to the Research of the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability’, Prepared for the DFID Conference on ‘The Politics of Poverty, Elites, Citizens and States’ 21-23 June, Sunningdale, UK
How does citizen engagement contribute to responsive governance? This paper summarises ten years of research from the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation, and Accountability, presenting the key findings of more than 150 case studies of citizen engagement. It argues that existing donor programmes fail to recognise the full potential of citizen engagement, resulting in lack of understanding of the complex relationship between citizens and the state that shapes governance outcomes. Citizens need greater political knowledge and awareness of rights and of agency as a first step to claiming rights and acting for themselves. Involvement in associations has been an effective way of strengthening notions of citizenship and citizen engagement, which can contribute to more responsive states.
Access full text: available online

Eyben, R. and Ladbury, S., 2006, 'Building Effective States: Taking a Citizen's Perspective', Development Research Centre, Citizenship, Participation and Accountability, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton
How can a citizen-centred approach to development build effective states by improving relations between state and society? This paper gives an overview of current debates and analyses citizens’ own views on these issues. It argues that a state’s legitimacy is strengthened by civic participation, which often grows up around local issues, and can be empowered through donor support.
Access full text: available online

Fischer, M. 2011, 'Civil Society in Conflict Transformation: Strengths and Limitations,' in Austin, B., Fischer, M. and Giessmann, H.J., eds. ‘Advancing Conflict Transformation: The Berghof Handbook II’, Barbara Budrich Publishers, Opladen/Framington Hills
What problems and dilemmas are faced in the development of civil society in war-torn societies? What types of activities do NGOs undertake and what are their strengths and limitations? This chapter focuses on the potential contribution that civil society actors can make to peacebuilding, drawing on lessons from Bosnia-Herzegovina. It argues that support for civil society should be further developed as a key element of development and peace politics, particularly in post-war contexts.
Access full text: available online

Cornwall, A., Robins, S. and Von Lieres, B., 2011, ‘States of Citizenship: Contexts and Cultures of Public Engagement and Citizen Action’, Working Paper 364, IDS, Brighton
What is the nature of the citizen-state relationship and how do different kinds of states make different kinds of citizenship possible? Drawing on case studies from the Citizenship Development Research Centre, this paper contends that mechanisms aimed at enhancing citizen engagement need to be contextualised in the states of citizenship in which they are applied. It calls for more attention to be focused on understanding trajectories of citizenship experience and practice in particular kinds of states. It suggests that whilst efforts have been made by donors to get to grips with history and context, less attention has been given to exploring the implications of the dissonance between the normative dimensions of global narratives of participation and accountability, and the lived experience of civic engagement and the empirical realities of ‘civil society’ in diverse kinds of states. By exploring instantiations of citizenship in different kinds of states, the paper reflects on what citizen engagement comes to imply in these contexts. In doing so, it draws attention to the diverse ways in which particular subject-positions and forms of identification are articulated in the pursuit of concrete social and political projects.
Access full text: available online

See also a 2-page IDS research summary of this paper.

Castillejo, C., 2011, 'Building a State that Works for Women: Integrating Gender into Post-Conflict State Building', FRIDE, Madrid
What role do women play in statebuilding? How do statebuilding processes affect women's participation? Support for statebuilding has become the dominant model for international engagement in post-conflict contexts, yet donor approaches lack substantial gender analysis and are missing opportunities to promote gender equality. This paper presents findings from a research project on the impact of post-conflict statebuilding on women's citizenship. It argues that gender inequalities are linked to the underlying political settlement, and that donors must therefore address gender as a fundamentally political issue.
Access full text: available online

Unsworth, S., 2010, An Upside Down View of Governance, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton
How can effective, accountable public authority be increased? This paper synthesises research findings from the Centre for the Future State. It explores how public authority is created through processes of bargaining between state and society actors, and the interaction of formal and informal institutions. Findings highlight the need for a fundamental reassessment of existing assumptions about governance and development. Informal institutions and personalised relationships are pervasive and powerful, but they can contribute to progressive as well as to regressive outcomes. Rather than focusing on rules-based reform, policymakers should consider using indirect strategies to influence local actors.
Access full text: available online

DFID, 2010,‘Building Peaceful States and Societies: A DFID Practice Paper’, Department for International Development, London
Access full text: available online

Initiative for Peacebuilding, 2008, ‘State-Society Analytical Framework’, Democratisation and Transitional Justice Cluster, Initiative for Peacebuilding
Access full text: available online

Magalhães Ferreira, P., 2009, ‘State-Society Relations in Angola: Peacebuilding, Democracy and Political Participation’, Democratisation and Transitional Justice Cluster, Initiative for Peacebuilding
Access full text: available online

Additional resources

See discussion and resources on weak state-society relations as a characteristic of fragility (in Chapter 2: Causes and Characteristics of Fragility, Fragile States guide).

See discussion and resources on strengthening citizen engagement in statebuilding processes (in Strategies for External Engagement, Chapter 5: Statebuilding in Fragile Contexts, Fragile States guide).

For discussion and resources on political settlements, see:

• Inclusive political settlements and peace processes in the ‘Statebuilding and Peacebuilding in Situations of Conflict and Fragility’ supplement
• Political Settlements (Fragile States guide, Chapter 5)  
• Peace Agreements (Conflict guide, Chapter 3)

http://www.gsdrc.org/go/topic-guides/state-society-relations-and-citizenship/state-society-relations-overview

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The State of Civil Society in Japan

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FJ SCHWARTZ 저술 - 111회 인용 - 관련 학술자료
From Meiji to Heisei: The State and Civil Society in Japan. 42. Sheldon Garon ... Molding Japanese Civil Society: State-Structured Incentives and the Patterning ...

THE STATE, CIVIL SOCIETY, AND REVOLUTIONS ... - Project MUSE

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C Nolan-Ferrell 저술 - 2004 - 3회 인용 - 관련 학술자료
THE STATE, CIVIL SOCIETY,. AND REVOLUTIONS: Building Political Legitimacy in. Twentieth-Century Latin America. Catherine Nolan-Ferrell. University of ...