The European Dream (39 page)

The civil society is the realm perched between the marketplace and government. It is composed of all the activities that make up the cultural life of individuals and their communities. The civil society includes religious institutions, the arts, education, health care, sports, public recreation and entertainment, social and environmental advocacy, neighborhood engagement, and other activities whose function is to create community bonds and social cohesion. The civil society is the meeting place for reproducing the culture in all of its various forms. It is where people engage in “deep play” to create social capital and establish codes of conduct and behavioral norms. The culture is where intrinsic values reign. The civil society is the forum for the expression of culture and is the primordial sector.

Despite the civil society’s importance in the life of society, this realm has been increasingly marginalized in the modern era by the forces of the market and nation-state governance. Economists and business leaders, in particular, have come to view the marketplace as the primary institution in human affairs. Both capitalist and socialist theorists argue that human behavior is, at its core, materialist and utilitarian and that the moral values and cultural norms of a society are derivative of its economic orientation—or, to quote Madonna, “We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.”

The materialist philosophy lies deep in the pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment past. As we discussed in chapter 4, Locke, Descartes, Smith, and other early modern philosophers mounted a roundabout assault on the faith-based worldview of the Church. While some among their ranks still professed their allegiance to a higher divine authority, they often favored reason over faith and put as much store in material progress and the vision of an earthly cornucopia as on eternal salvation. The modernists came to believe that the marketplace is the wellspring of the human spirit and that the culture is the beneficiary. They have put work before play and substituted utilitarian values for intrinsic values.

The materialists view the marketplace as the critical social institution and primary arbiter of human relations. The problem is that their analysis is at odds with the history of human development. There is not a single instance I know of in which people first came together to establish markets and create trade and then later took on a cultural identity. Nor are there any examples of people first coming together to create governments and only later creating culture. First, people create language to communicate with one another. They then construct a story about themselves. They ritualize their origins and envision their collective destiny. They create codes of conduct and establish bonds of trust—what we now call “social capital”—and develop social cohesion. In other words, they engage in “deep play” to establish their common identity. Only when their sense of solidarity and cohesion is well developed do they set up markets, negotiate trade, and establish governments to regulate activity. Even in the early modern era, when the emerging capitalists and bourgeois class erected an imaginary nationalism to unite formerly disparate peoples in a new political configuration, the nation-state, they had to dig deep into the past and borrow bits and pieces from various local cultural stories to craft a new unified myth of national origins.

The introduction of new technologies into a society is also conditioned, in large part, by the cultural consciousness. For example, in 1831, Europeans invented chloroform for use in surgery. Centuries earlier, the Chinese invented acupuncture and used it as an anesthetic. Why did the Europeans never discover acupuncture and the Chinese never discover chloroform? Because European and Chinese ideas about space, time, and reality were so utterly different.

The Chinese culture, because of its emphasis on context, holistic thinking, the complementarity of opposites, and harmony with nature, predisposed it to discoveries like acupuncture. The European mind, being more reductionist, analytical, and detached, was predisposed to discoveries like chloroform. That’s not to suggest that cultural consciousness rigidly predetermines specific evolutionary advances in technology, but only that it conditions the mind to view the world in a certain way and therefore leads to new discoveries that conform with a people’s mental perception of the scheme of things.

Of course, cultural consciousness is not static. New discoveries and inventions continually modify spatial and temporal consciousness and can lead to a shift in the cultural paradigm itself as well as to fundamental changes in economic and political arrangements. But, I would suggest that throughout history, people’s experience of reality begins with creating a story about themselves and the world and that story acts as a kind of cultural baseline DNA for all the evolutionary permutations that follow.

The point is that the culture is not and never has been an extension of either the market or the government. Rather, markets and governments are extensions of the culture. They are secondary, not primary, institutions. They exist by the grace of the cultures that create them. Jean Monnet sensed as much, admitting in the late 1960s that “if the European construction process had to be started again afresh, it would be better to start with culture.”
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After a long period of being colonized at the hands of the market and nation-state, the civil society—along with the deeper cultural forces that underlie it—is pushing to re-establish its central role in the scheme of public life. And like all liberation movements, the first prerequisites for reasserting its prominence is casting out much of the language that has come to define its very being. Advocates complain that the civil society is not “the third sector,” as many academicians claim, but rather the first sector. Similarly, categorizing civil society groups as “not-for-profit organizations” or “nongovernmental organizations” makes them appear as less significant or even just shadows of commercial or governmental institutions. A new generation of activists prefer to think of their institutions as civil society organizations (CSOs). They also define their activity as service rather than volunteering, to connote its importance in developing and reproducing the culture.

The reach of the civil society is impressive. A study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, covering twenty-two nations, estimates that the civil society sector is a $1.1 trillion sector employing more than nineteen million full-time paid workers. “Nonprofit” expenditures in these countries average 4.6 percent of the gross domestic product, and nonprofit employment makes up 5 percent of all nonagricultural work, 10 percent of all service work, and 27 percent of all public employment.
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Several European nations now boast an employment level in the “nonprofit” sector that exceeds that of the United States. In the Netherlands, 12.6 percent of total paid employment is in the nonprofit sector. In Ireland, 11.5 percent of all workers are in the nonprofit sector, and in Belgium, 10.5 percent of workers are in this sector. In the U.K., 6.2 percent of the workforce are in the not-for-profit sector, and in France and Germany, the figure is 4.9 percent. Italy currently has more than 220,000 nonprofit organizations, and its not-for-profit sector employs more than 630,000 full-time workers.
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The growth in employment in the nonprofit sector was stronger in Europe in the 1990s than in any other region of the world, expanding by an average of 24 percent in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K.
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The expansion in nonprofit employment in these countries alone accounted for 40 percent of total employment growth, or 3.8 million jobs.
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It is interesting to note that in the ten European countries where revenue data was available, fees for services and products accounted for one-third to one-half of the income in the nonprofit sector between 1990 and 1995. Globally, of the twenty-two countries for which data is available, 49 percent of nonprofit revenue comes from fees for services and products. In the U.S., 57 percent of all nonprofit revenue comes from fees for services and products.
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The share of funds coming from the philanthropic and public sectors, however, has declined in many countries, thus dispelling the long-harbored myth that the nonprofit sector is virtually dependent on government or private charity to sustain itself.

Community service is very different than labor in the marketplace. One’s contribution is meant to advance the social capital of the community. While economic consequences often flow from the activity, they are secondary to the social exchange. The goal is not the accumulation of wealth but, rather, social cohesion and well-being.

Unlike market capitalism, which is based on Adam Smith’s notion that the common good is advanced by each person pursuing his or her own individual self-interest, the civil society starts with the exact opposite premise—that by each person giving of him- or herself to others and optimizing the greater good of the larger community, one’s own well-being will be advanced.

In a globalized economy of impersonal market forces, the civil society has become an important social refuge. It is the place where people create a sense of intimacy and trust, shared purpose and collective identity. The civil society sector is the antidote to a world increasingly defined in strictly commercial terms.

Civil society organizations have exploded across the world in the past twenty years. In large part, they are a reaction to a new globalized economy where market forces are more remote and less accountable to local communities, and governments have become both too small to address issues that cross borders and affect the whole world—such as global warming, illegal immigration, computer viruses, and terrorist threats—and too big to accommodate needs of local neighborhoods and communities. Civil society organizations empower people to champion their own interests in a world where corporations and governments are less likely to do so. Civil society activists argue that over-reliance on a deregulated global marketplace has led to unbridled capitalist greed and exploitation while diminishing the traditional role of government as a redistributive agent and provider of essential social services. The authors of the Johns Hopkins study on the dramatic growth of civil society institutions conclude that the success of civil society organizations is attributable to their ability to fill the vacuum left by market and government failures.

CSOs are more flexible than governments and more deeply anchored in geography than corporations. The civil society’s clarion call is “think globally and act locally.” Civil society organizations often organize across national boundaries while representing the interests of local neighborhoods and communities. They are able to be transnational and global, as well as communal and local, making them the ideal social agents to address the plethora of issues that confront humanity in a more dense and interconnected world.

CSOs have pushed for greater representation in every country as well as at global institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization. The participation allowed, however, has rarely been more than perfunctory and advisory in nature. The EU has become the first government to formally acknowledge CSOs as full-fledged partners in public policy networks. The European Union has recognized the civil society as the “third component” of European Union governance, viewing it as serving “an intermediary function between the State, the market and citizens.”
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There is a growing understanding that the very success of the EU as a new kind of regulatory state depends, to a great extent, on the effectiveness of civil society organizations in representing the interests of real constituencies whose concerns span the local, regional, national, and even EU boundaries. The CSOs bring true “participatory democracy” to the governing process, making them critical players in the new political experiment. Officials understand that without their active and full participation, the EU is likely to fail. The Economic and Social Committee (ESC) of the EU observed that “one of the biggest challenges for European governance is ensuring effective participation of organized civil society.”
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Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, underscores the significance of the new political partnership. He envisions “EU institutions, national governments, regional and local authorities and civil society interacting in new ways: consulting one another on a whole range of issues; shaping, implementing and monitoring policy together.”
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This process is what President Prodi calls “network Europe.”
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Although formal representation of CSOs in public policy networks is still weak, the very fact that the EU acknowledges a three-sector partnership is of great historic significance. Recall that the nation-state has been, from the very beginning, a handmaiden of commercial interests. Its mission has been to protect property rights and create conditions favorable to the geographic extension of market forces. Two-sector politics—commerce and government—has been the ever present reality of the modern era.

Now that commercial forces have broken through their national container and taken their activity to a global playing field, they are far less dependent on nation-states to protect their property interests. Indeed, global companies can now play states off against one another—threatening to relocate their operations elsewhere if their interests are not accommodated—making states hostage and increasingly subservient to their commercial agendas. And, if states fail to come in line with global commercial interests, regulating bodies such as the IMF, World Bank, and WTO can impose sanctions and force compliance.

The decoupling of the commerce-state partnership has weakened the state and diminished its power. The EU’s courtship of the civil society is an attempt to re-assert political influence in an era of global commerce. By giving up some of their remaining sovereignty and pooling their interests with one another and civil society organizations, nation-states can play collectively on a broader geographic playing field and, by so doing, more effectively negotiate the terms of engagement with global corporate institutions whose power eclipses most individual nation-states and whose influence spans the globe.