Governance and civil society in a global age edited by YAMAMOTO TADASHI. (Tokyo and New York: Japan Center for International Exchange, 2001, pp. 288)

✍ Scribed by Miles Litvinoff

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 31 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.1007

✦ Synopsis

This stimulating collection of country case-studies emerges from the International Comparative Study on Governance and Civil Society under the aegis of the Japan Centre for International Exchange. The interface between governance, civil society and globalization is increasingly the focus of political, economic, social, human rights, and environmental struggles. And the goal explicitly embraced by some, if not all, the contributors to this book is collective self-empowerment and justice for humankind.

Comprising studies of South Korea, Thailand, China and India in Asia, Israel in the Middle East, and Hungary, France and Germany in Europe, the collection helps us understand what civil society has in common the world over, as well as highlighting very significant regional and country differences. The admirable essay on India by Niraja Gopal Jayal covers issues that people working for human-centred development in the global North as well as in the South find critical: different understandings of 'civil society' and how far there can be a universal (Western?) model; the retreat, willing or otherwise, of the state and the 'crisis of governability'; civil society opposition to, versus collaboration with, the state and the corporate sector; how and when governments marginalize or actively repress civil society actors; the degree to which social movements may sacrifice their transformative vision and potential when they become institutionalized as NGOs or as surrogate government welfare agencies.

Other chapters raise more regionally and culturally specific concerns. For China, Wang Yizhou poses the question whether those uniform and quasi-official mass associations that the state permits to function qualify as civil society at all. Similarly, in the case of Israel, the two prime examples of civil society organization cited-the settler movement Gush Emunim and the ultra-religious Shashave, as author Shimshon Zelniker admits, '[blurred] the boundaries between state and society' (p. 174) and pushed the state towards more extreme forms of politics. Both appear to fail the test suggested by Jayal that 'only those organizations which affirm openness of entry and exit, and stand by universalist criteria of citizenship, can be considered part of civil society' (p. 125).

Reminding the reader how recently the term 'civil society' re-emerged, Marschall Miklo ´s and Kuti E ´va writing on Hungary recall the 'small circles of freedom' by which the intellectual dissidents of Eastern Europe sought to avoid the fate of 'those who start by storming the Bastille [and] end up building new Bastilles' (Michnik, quoted p. 180). These writers' enthusiastic endorsement of civil society as 'hidden policy-makers' and 'problem-solvers' is balanced by concerns about the quality of public governance. But they conclude optimistically: 'Will the political elite be able to learn the skills and ethics of shared responsibility and governance? Based on the tremendous progress made during the 1990s, our prediction is a definite yes ' (p. 206).

Contributors also consider the corporate elite. As participants at the World Social Forum and in a host of other social movements might add, Miklo ´s and E ´va's question is equally applicable to, and urgent for, big business as it is re big politics. Indeed, if the state continues to retreat in the face of economic liberalization and globalization, harming the poor as a consequence, corporates must surely join governments as primary objects of attention and will perhaps eventually supersede them.

Good governance can usefully be understood as 'negotiation rather than imposition, and participation rather than hierarchy' (Jayal, quoted by Yamamoto Tadashi and Kim Gould Ashizawa in their Overview, p. 26). Issues of participation and accountability recur throughout the book. In several cases the imperative for change appears relatively straightforward. For China the long-term task is to democratize polity and society before social tensions become explosive. Similarly, in a comprehensive discussion of civil society in South Korea, Jung Ku-hyun and Kim Inchoon conclude