Redefining civil society’s role

The idea of social development is as old as human civilisation itself, with a perennial objective to promote the welfare of the common people in a polity. Social development has contextual, spatial and temporal attributes both as a concept and as praxis and has intrinsically been linked to the politics of the age throughout history.

However, the genesis of our contemporary notions of social development goes back to the rise of capitalism and its corollary, the nation-state. The term ‘social’ refers to associational life and the collective being of individuals – the collective life of citizens in the sense of the modern nation-state.

The term ‘social’ then becomes redefined as ‘civil’ in the modern sense, which includes all citizens of the modern polity – the nation-state. Social development at times, therefore, becomes synonymous with development for the citizens, who are constitutionally, legally and politically part of a state and who are both the right-holders and duty-bearers within the political system they live in.

From the altruism of old monarchs to the institutional accountability of modern democracies, the evolution of theory and practice of social development essentially remained a key instrument for subjects and citizens respectively to attain power, voice and representation of popular will in the cultural, socioeconomic and political life.

Coming back to the modern notion of ‘civil’ with the popularity of the classical liberal economic theory and distinction of political and economic domains, social development started to shape up as an autonomous domain of citizens during the last two centuries in the West.

This third domain as intermediary between citizen, state and market was termed as ‘civil society’ to protect the interests of citizens against a Leviathan state and profit-oriented socially indifferent logic of market. Civil society, thus evolved, gave rise to the idea of an autonomous space for citizens as a harbinger to protect democratic values in the face of a Weberian bureaucratic state and profit-oriented market economy.

The key premise upon which the Western concept of civil society is founded is primarily driven by this triangle of state, citizen and market which found strong expression in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Putnam and Antonio Gramsci. For Tocqueville and Putnam, erosion of social capital, lack of civic engagement and low participation in political life jeopardised democratic virtues while for Gramsci civil society provided the space to contest the ideological hegemony of the state which if left to its own devices will protect the capital and, hence, the interest of the bourgeoisie.

Unlike Tocqueville and Putnam, for Gramsci civil society is not an autonomous domain of citizens but a political space which the ruling classes use to establish ideological hegemony. Without contesting this ideological hegemony, qualitative transformation of societies becomes impossible because the hegemonic power spreads false consciousness to dilute the spirit of social change.

Thus the evolution of discourse of civil society in modern history is full of inner strains and critical thinking and is essentially a Western phenomenon that runs parallel to the evolving socioeconomic and political institutions under capitalism.

Elsewhere in the non-Western world, in particular in post-colonial societies, the civil society debate remained rudimentary in the sense that it could not emerge as a countervailing ideology to political and economic oppression. There have been attempts to articulate the post-colonial critical theory led by the Subaltern Group but it could not percolate to popular idiom.

According to James Ferguson, civil society has become like education, development or environment – no sane person can oppose it to look like a “reasonable individual”. This “often ahistorical and uncritical use of the concept of civil society serves to help legitimate the hegemonic and at times anti-democratic transitional politics”. Ferguson wrote this in the context of African politics but this has striking resemblance to what is happening in Pakistan in the name of civil-society activism.

Civil society cannot be reduced to NGOs only, but in reality these non-governmental donor-funded entities dominate the scene with their resources and ability to manipulate the discourse through conventional and social media. This tendency is reinvigorated by outside policymakers for whom the civil society of postcolonial societies is a set of NGOs, most of which are funded by bilateral and multilateral development donors or by international NGOs.

Some of these NGOs have grown large enough to become a quasi state – they effectively take over some of the state functions in health or education, for instance. Ferguson argues that “the reason the civil society concept is unhelpful in such cases is because these NGOs neither challenge the state nor the corporate interests but they instead become ‘horizontal contemporaries’ of wider institutions of transactional governmentality”.

In Pakistan, civil society activism has favoured military dictators like General Musharraf in recent history simply for his Westernised lifestyle. The Westernised, liberal and foreign-educated civil society lot of Pakistan is far removed from the political imagination of the common citizens of this country. And that is exactly why we are left with conservative, fundamentalist and backward elements (whatever term one may like to describe them) providing an alternative politics by resisting state and market forces.

The so-called ‘uncivil society’ shows civility while the proponents of civil society become isolated as irrelevant and as allies of Western imperialism –as conservatives put it. Comaroff rightly argues that “there is a Eurocentric tendency to limit civil society to a narrowly defined institutional arena”, which runs counter to Hegel’s original insistence that the civil sphere of relatedness has its origins in the historical particularities of the capitalist mode of production and exchange.

Even promoting local civil society through community-based participatory development has a strong Western lens that needs to be rethought, in particular when Pakistan has seen decades of this developmental paradigm with no visible impact on poverty and rural development. There are sporadic events of community-based institutions displaying the spirit of local transformation but this has been led by the self-selected activists rather than a broad-based consensus and aspiration of local people for change.

However, this should not imply that community-based participatory development is not a desirable development objective. It is only to suggest that this approach needs a critical rethinking. Societies do not operate in vacuums as there have always been social arrangements for socioeconomic and cultural transaction – no matter how primitive, kinship based or tribal they are.

Under the rubric of community participation, development practitioners tend to play down the role of power relations, patronage and heterogeneous nature of community itself in terms of power, social status and political millage etc. Village-based organisations created through development organisations are grafted in a complex local reality with little attention to existing evolutionary processes of indigenous institutions and their interconnectedness with local economy, culture and sociopolitical life as a whole.

Rather than imposing exogenous paradigms of participatory development to generate participatory numbers with a project implementation approach, it is vital to build on indigenous institutions that are organically linked to the popular imagination.

To unleash the transformative potential of the wretched classes in Pakistan, we need a more vibrant, counter-hegemonic and politically conscious civil society that has the ability, will and interest to say truth to power, and promote and protect democratic values.

In order for this type of civil society to flourish it is vital to contest both the eurocentric unbridled and un-thoughtful liberalism as well as the brutal barbaric alternative discourses of religious fundamentalism. We ignore this important sociopolitical space of civil society only at a great peril.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com