wanders through the corridors of the World Bank, not that of Habermas or Hegel. Indeed, the first two schools of thought are regularly conflated – it being assumed that a healthy associational life contributes to, or even produces, the “good society” in ways that are orderly and predictable. This messy melange of means and ends will be challenged extensively in the pages that follow, but before embarking on this investigation it is important to understand why such lazy thinking is so common. Why has this particular interpretation of civil society become so popular since the Cold War ended?
The rise and fall of civil society
There is no doubt that neo-Tocquevillian ideas about civil society have been a prime beneficiary of wider political and ideological changes that have redefined the powers and responsibilities of states, markets, and voluntary associations since the early 1960s. At the broadest level, there are three ways in which societies can resolve collective problems – through rules or laws enforced by the coercive power of the state, through the unintended consequences of individual decisions in the marketplace, and through social mechanisms embedded in voluntary action, discussion, and agreement. The weight attached to each of these models has shifted significantly, with state-based solutions in the ascendancy from 1945 to the mid-1970s (the era of the welfare state in the North and centralized planning in the South), and market-based solutions in pole position from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s (the era of Reaganomics in the North and “structural adjustment” in the South). Disaffection with the results of both these models – the deadening effect of too much state intervention and the human consequences of an overreliance on the market – required a new approach that addressed the consequences of both state and market failure. This new approach, which gained strength throughout the 1990s and 2000s, went by many names (including the “third way” and “compassionate conservatism”), but its central tenet is that partnership between all three sectors of society working together – public, private, and civic – is the best way to overcome social and economic problems. Civil society as associational life became central to the workings of this project, and this project – as a new way of achieving social progress – became identified with building “societies that are civil.” Most recently, there has been a resurgence of neoliberal thinking which has tilted the balance back toward the role of markets in promoting social as well as economic goals without removing the need for civil society completely.
Second, the political changes that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s gave the idea of civil society a prominence it had not enjoyed since the Enlightenment but in a manner that also encouraged the conflation of ends with means. Civil society became both a rallying cry for dissidents – a new type of society characterized by liberal-democratic norms – and a vehicle for achieving it by building social movements strong enough to overthrow authoritarian states. The paradigm case for the conflation of these two perspectives was Solidarity in Poland, though here, as more recently in Latin America and the Middle East, civil society tended to be disregarded or neutered once the dissidents had been elected into office. Nevertheless, the rise of direct democracy that was such a feature of political change across large parts of the world during the 1990s and 2000s remains a trend of global importance, perhaps as important as the invention of representative democracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If the balance between direct and representative democracy continues to shift in favor of the former – driven by disaffection with conventional politics as well as the attractions of alternative means of participation – the political role of associations as vehicles for organizing such participation is bound to grow. As we shall see in later chapters, these changes bring both problems and opportunities.
Third, worldwide moves toward state retrenchment and privatization have promoted new levels of personal insecurity among the majority of the world’s population against a background of global market integration, increased mobility, and rapid social and technological change. Modernity, as Robert Bellah reminds us, is a “culture of separation,” and capitalism provides no collective identity to bring us together other than as consumers.10 Traditional social institutions and ways of dealing with such insecurities such as welfare states, labor unions, and nuclear families have been progressively dismantled during this process, leaving behind heightened levels of vulnerability. In these circumstances, a retreat to the familiar is to be expected, and this is exactly what voluntary groups can provide – a reassuring oasis of solidarity and mutual support among like-minded people who provide each other with emotional as well as material support, from soup kitchens to self-help to spiritual salvation. Indeed, an additional reason for the rapid rise in interest in civil society after the 1980s has been the collection of a mounting body of evidence that suggests that associational life plays a much more important social, economic, cultural, and political role than had previously been realized. Civil society has been noticed not just because of the rising public and political profile of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other groups but because a body of evidence now exists to justify this profile, backed by specialist expertise in universities and think tanks and supported with large amounts of money from research-funding bodies, philanthropic foundations, and governments.
At the level of national social and economic indicators, this evidence shows that the synergy between a strong state and a strong society is one of the keys to sustained, poverty-reducing growth and the successful reduction of different kinds of inequality because networks of intermediary associations act as counterweights to vested interests, promote accountability in states and markets, build new and more inclusive institutions, channel information to decision makers on what is happening at the “sharp end,” and negotiate the social contracts between government and citizens that all broad-based progress requires – “I’ll scratch your back by delivering growth, investment, and services; you scratch mine by delivering wage restraint or absorbing the costs of welfare.” Taiwan, one of the most successful of late industrializers, had more than eight million members in such intermediary groups by the early 1980s, including trade unions, student associations, and local councils.11 Or take the case of Denmark, which has developed some of the world’s highest indicators of human development and well-being through a long and active engagement between redistributive politics, an inclusive economy, and a rich associational life.12
At a more detailed level, it is useful to break down the developmental roles of civil society into three interrelated areas: economic, political, and social. The economic role of civil society centers on securing livelihoods and providing services where states and markets are weak, and on nurturing the social values, networks, and institutions that underpin successful market economies, including trust and cooperation. As Lester Salamon has shown, voluntary associations the world over have become key providers of human services (especially health and welfare), and now constitute a 2.2 trillion dollar industry in just 40 countries that were sampled.13 NGOs, religious organizations, and other civic groups have always been significant service providers; the difference now is that they are seen as the preferred channel for service provision in deliberate substitution for the state. In more radical formulations (such as the World Social Forum), civil society is seen as a vehicle for “humanizing capitalism” by promoting accountability among corporations, progressive social policies among governments, and new experiments in “social economics” that combine market efficiency with cooperative values.
In their social role, civil societies are seen as a reservoir of caring, cultural life and intellectual innovation, teaching people – at least according to the neo-Tocquevillians – the skills of citizenship, and nurturing a collection of positive social norms that foster stability, loosely collected under the rubric of “social capital.” In turn, social capital is seen as the crucial ingredient in promoting collective action for the common good or simply creating and maintaining the social ties that are essential if individuals are to function effectively in modern economies where the demands of exchange are increasingly complex. The normative effects of voluntary associations lie at the core of the neo-Tocquevillian argument, though this is as much a moral as a social issue for them. In some ways this is to be expected because many neo-Tocquevillians are conservatives, and conservatives tend to look back in time to recreate what they consider to be the best of times, defined according to a particular set of moral standards. On the other hand, those on the left tend to look