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Global civil society is a self-sustaining entity that preserves through the interaction
and reciprocal effects of the motivated, goal-oriented, and rational individuals and their
collectivities and structure of normative and institutional arrangements that exerts causal
and constitutive effects on the agents of global civil society. Shared norms, principles,
codes, goals, interests, arrangements and practices compose the structure of global civil
society that regulates the behavior of civic agents and provides them with opportunities
and incentives for individual and collective activity in the public sphere. The civic agents
through their interactions create social reality of global civil society.
Ever since the publication of the seminal work of Robert Putnam (1995) on social
capital, the term civil society became largely associated with the support, promotion, or
struggle for democracy and democratization (Grugel 2002, 93) and the relationship
between civil society and democratic governance became a subject of lively debates
(Smith 1998). Whether a vibrant global civil society is the key to further democratization
of global politics is the question that is explored next.
Democratization of Global Politics: The Role for Global Civil Society and Its Agents
Civil society almost always propels transitional changes to greater democracy and
plays a prominent role on all stages of democratization. “[T]he emergence of strong,
dense, and vibrant civil societies that work consistently to democratize politics and to
hold the state accountable” is one of the most important factors for the endurance of
democratic regime and consolidation of social and political forces within democracy
(Grugel 2002, 1).
Democratization involves a series of socio-political changes that transform the state
from one condition of being non-democratic to a qualitatively different one of being
democratic.
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By extension, democratization on the global level refers to a series of
socio-political changes that alter global politics in a democratic direction.
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The question
is, then, what are the conceptual attributes of democracy on the global level and what
kinds of changes need to be taking place to infer that the world is moving in the direction
of greater democratization of global politics. Currently, there is no theory or conceptual
framework of democratization of global politics. For that reason, I employ classical
conceptions of democracy and democratization to analyze global democratic politics and
democratization and to identify the types of roles that civil society actors can play in this
process.
represent something like the jus civile of the civilized community, existing above the laws of individual
states (Lipschutz 1992, 407). In spite of the bitter contestation of many principles of world culture, “their
reification is enhanced by the very contestation that challenges them” (Boli and Thomas 1999, 18).
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The transitional process undergoes three consecutive stages: (1) the end of a non-democratic regime; (2)
the inauguration of a democratic regime; and (3) the consolidation of a democratic system (Huntington,
Samuel. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norma and London:
University of Oklahoma Press, 9).
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In the absence of world government we cannot define democratization on the global level in terms of
transformation of the global state. The term ‘global politics’ used in the definition encompasses all political
interactions that crosscut state borders and involve both state and non-state actors, which consciously
employ material, ideational, and symbolic resources to modify the behavior of other actors (Nye, Jr. and
Keohane 1972, 380).
Convention