Kitabı oku: «Civl society», sayfa 7

Ambivalences

The heterogeneity of the concept of the civil society creates difficulties because the institutional can collide with the normative localisation, the organisation with the mental attitude. In the simplest case, the institutional localisation would mean the third sector, outside of the market and state. Normative localisation (or the “mental attitude” of the civil society, if you prefer) is more challenging, but a certain “ideological substance” is part of it.

As a concrete example, the institutional perspective focuses on organisations that aim to integrate refugees; there are also xenophobic associations that follow the opposite targets. There are protest marches by those in favour of, as well as those opposing, democracy. There are demonstrations for and against President Erdogan. The actual cases of the conflicts in Belarus are “a chance for the civil society”⁴ or “NGOs and the Civil Society in Belarus.”⁵ The EU has established a fund “with the intention of supporting the Belarussian civil society:”⁶ If one follows the institutional concept, it is only natural that mosque-based associations that preach fundamentalism and hatred, and construct parallel societies, must also be included under the concept of civil society. That conflicts with the positive association we connect with the term. We would prefer not to count Ku Klux Klan marches in the USA and groups with a similar mindset as manifestations of an “honourable” civil society. However, if we exclude the disagreeable phenomena of the late-modern world from this concept, it becomes nothing more than a profession of sympathy: Activities that one feels close to are part of it, while one would prefer to reject those that one regards with indignation.

This leads us to “mindset”. Obviously, only understanding the manifestations of the civil society institutionally does not go far enough; it is much more the case that their institutional categorisation must be linked to a normative, judgemental, ideological component. As one example: The civil society is not simply a phenomenon of the third sector (outside of the market and state) but is also necessarily connected with an attitude that gives the market and state the appropriate place, while simultaneously demonstrating a special regard for self-organised groups of the civil society outside of the market and state. Then, the civil or civic society is not only seen as a stopgap whose actors take care of refugees and guarantee caritative services because – scandalously – the state does not do this in an appropriate or sufficient way, as it actually should; much more, activities of this kind are held in high esteem. In this case, the normative components are included in the term.

Jürgen Kocka addresses all of the mentioned elements in his definition: “‘Civil society’ means […] a plan for human cohabitation, which originated in the Age of Enlightenment and has since been frequently changed and still continues to be changed. The concept is defined in different ways, in various constellations, against different opponents for the given situation, and by different spokespeople. Certainly, there was great variability in the level and kind of realisation of this plan, and there still is. […] As a rule, it can be said: A high degree of social self-organisation belongs to the ‘civil society’; e.g., in associations, societies, and movements, with the corresponding resources such as communication possibilities, education, and trust. The ‘civil society’ also includes legitimate diversity, controlled conflicts, and a specific approach to violence: restraining, containing, and minimising it. ‘Civil society’ incorporates a culture of civility encompassing respect for tolerance, independence, and performance, as well as a willingness for personal involvement and collectively transcending purely personal goals” (Kocka et al. 2001, p. 10). If we follow this definition, we can create a “packet” that limits the all too arbitrary use of the term “civil” or “civic society”. I will use six keywords to investigate this heterogeneous field.

1. The moderate state

The civil society is sympathetic to – but mistrustful of – the state. It stresses life outside of state regulation and supervision. This is aimed at the third sector: Civil society is an antithesis to the expansive, all-inclusive, omnipresent state, and also opposes a comprehensive market-form organisation. The society was once proportionally “larger” (compared with the market and state) (Polanyi 1977). Markets have expanded in modern times and the state has developed into a powerful regulatory instance. A remnant remains after the separation of the two forms of the market and the state – this is the “private” society that is so difficult to define: the independent, everyday life of the people. However, it does not only mean “private privacy”, the routine in one’s own kitchen, and not petit bourgeois cosiness: Civil society assumes the differentiation between the private and public spheres, and the view of “public privacy” is also part of the conceptual meaning. Watching a crime series on television or pruning the trees in one’s garden does not fall under the concept of “civil society”, but it does apply to showing an interest in public affairs, being elected to the parish council, or demonstrating for better environmental policies.

The late modern era is (with Western – and especially European – states in mind) a rich, even luxurious, society and the comforts enjoyed by those living in such a structure have not only contributed to the dynamics of industrial development, but also to the constructive performance of the modern state structure. The state’s apparatuses have accomplished impressive feats, especially when one observes the European achievements of the systems of the social market economic model; this also applies when a comparison is made with other prosperous countries such as the United States. Their proven efficiency has not only led to more and more services being planned for them, but also to an increasing overestimation of this efficiency. A mindset has become widespread: If there is a problem, there must be an administrative political solution. Under these conditions, problems of any type do not trigger the involvement of the citizens to actively roll up their sleeves, but to ask about the responsible authority and appropriate forms. The state is a problem-solving entity. The public can lean back. Although there is no intention to question the efficiency of the state, the belief in the civil society is linked with the notion that – first of all – individuals are considered to be responsible for finding a solution to their problems, especially when they are petty matters.

In the long run, the attitude of handing over all problems to the “service centre” of the state leads to individual incapacitation. Tocqueville already described that in a famous passage – and nothing has changed. There is no need to dramatise this as the dawning of a dictatorship; it has more to do with the evaluation of the voters’ diminishing feelings of obligation and self-efficacy. The feeling of being responsible, or accountable, for anything at all is slipping away. Faced with the lack of any kind of limiting criteria, state paternalism leads to the all-encompassing competence of the state (Hennis et al. 1977). There are some interpretations that include this as a programmatic claim because they want to have all problems eliminated through intervention by the state. However, over time, the insinuation of the state being responsible for – and capable of – everything leads to a disgruntled perspective. In view of the overestimation of politics, it is thought that villains or idiots must be responsible for preventing a positive outcome if the state has difficulties in solving problems.

“The civil society provides the elixir of life of freedom; its creative chaos of associations gives people a chance to live their lives without having to beg from the state or other powers. The concept that probably sums all of this up the best is […] the status of being a citizen (Dahrendorf 1992b, p. 559). This means being independent, taking responsibility, and participating. Some problems can be handed over to the civil society to solve without the necessity of state authorities becoming involved. This is because the general competence of the state cannot be had free of charge. That is why the tax burden is steadily increasing, and – seeing that too little money is flowing into the state’s coffers – the state’s debt burden is also on the rise. On the other hand, a high national debt decreases the resistance to crises. In no way is it only inefficiency that leads to half of the value added being siphoned off in some countries, but also its undefined, expanding field of competence. With the allocation of duties and activities to the third sector, the paradigm of the civil society would see a lesser necessity for entrusting an increasing part of the social income to the state. Handing over substantial resources to the state that then redistributes them is referred to as the allowance society.

The civil society reminds one that it is fundamentally the public of a liberal-democratic order that is able to organise its own life; that there are personal initiatives that do not have to give way to the lethargy they have stirred; that state systems are actually rather efficient; that it is, first and foremost, the self-trust of the individual that is appealed to, and not only trust in security systems that make the life of the individual snug, comfortable, riskless, and boring. However, the “bourgeois society” was once the bearer of the “civil society” and, faced with the dissolution of this experiential space, some have the radical impression that: “the civil society has come to an end.”⁷ There are still a few new variants, such as the species of the “enraged citizen” (Hessel 2011): Middle-class people who also want to take part in the hefty abuse of politicians once in their lives, or elder intellectuals who verbally concentrate their frustration over no longer being able to play a significant role. As simple resentment phenomena, they are all hardly helpful in promoting a democratic order.

The civil society is therefore a term that implies both dissociation and localisation. It relates to structures in the social “private” sphere that are employed against state bodies or market institutions. Civil society is the third sector: non-state and non-market. The civil society is not the state police, but crisis invention teams that are usually voluntary; the civil society is not the state hospital, but it is the Red Cross; the civil society includes charity foundations and interest-related workers’ associations, scholarship programmes for needy students, student leagues and sports clubs, civic initiatives, Freemasons, environmental groups, and women’s projects. A description given by the German Federal Office for Political Education (BPB) states, “Civil society is the world of private initiatives, associations, colleagues, friends, and neighbours. It is considered the ‘third sector’ alongside the economy and politics.”⁸ It can include a cellar theatre that is able to support itself financially, an adult education centre that transmits the knowledge that universities have turned their backs on, free meals for the needy that are not provided by the state, and a self-help group that offers a platform where people can report on their own experiences and offer consolation to each other.

However, demands are sometimes made (to the political entities) that give rise to doubts that the bodies that present themselves as civil-society institutions actually want to exist as distanced from the state as described above. For example, on its home page, the “Stiftung Bildung” (Foundation for Education) demands a “Ministry for the Civil Society”, a central committee in the Bundestag, the appropriate service centres in the communities, a legal right to leave of absence for social work, as well as pay for the period of involvement, core funding by the state for all civil-society organisations, and the provision of inner urban space for the civil society.⁹ It is quite clear that an ideology of this kind expects the state to provide everything. However, a nationalised civil society is not a civil society.

2. Areas of freedom

The concept of the civil society should address and guarantee those freedoms that undermine and eliminate the control and surveillance state (in good or bad faith). It is therefore necessary to take a closer look at new technologies, seeing that recent observations have revealed that a connection has developed between civil or civic societies and social platforms and other electronic facilities. The net provides the organisational support for a wide range of civil-society activities.

It is especially the case in a complex society like ours that the almost comprehensive responsibility of the state requires all-inclusive information, all-inclusive regulatory systems, and all-inclusive controls. The digital age provides the range of technical instruments necessary for the expansion of state controls. This does not happen under the perspective of control, but also of care; not under the perspective of information collecting to allow the state to intervene on all levels, but under that of helping its citizens; not under the perspective of suppression, but under that of eliminating danger. This also includes positive categories that provide help and legitimation to the expansion of state activities: increase in efficiency, provision of services, and accuracy. Even Vladimir Putin only wants to “fight terrorists”. And Xi Jinping merely wants to “educate” the Uighurs. Each camera serves to fight criminality and each electronic health card serves to provide a better diagnosis (and there is really nothing wrong with that).

It is necessary to know a lot about the people – also about the individual – in order to provide the most suitable “help”. It is necessary to use technical apparatuses to be able to feel as they do, to be of service. (Marketing experts have always known that. But “empathy” is full of preconditions and includes information in a pluralised world.) From this perspective, it is the technical-state control systems – much more than one’s fellow man – that represent true empathy; and it is necessary to trust the state if this is to be achieved. Of course, a perspective of this kind makes strong inroads into everyday behaviour going as far as the physicality of a person. One example: If it is possible for any teacher to use cameras, facial recognition, and emotional analysis to produce a daily balance that analyses the extent to which he or she was able to hold the attention of the greatest possible number of students, and it can be shown how many students lost concentration or were bored for how many minutes during the course of the morning, surveillance has already progressed to the extent that one can no longer banish it from one’s own thoughts (Mau 2017). This is because one is aware that one’s behaviour is being observed, recorded, and judged every minute of the day. “Private” behaviour is subjected to precise calculations and, in this way, ceases to be “private”. One is always “on stage”. One has to consider every blink of the eye one makes. That really does not sound very much like freedom. This permanent observation is not without consequence. There is no need to deal any further with the classical accusations that the omnipotence of a control state also concerns political behaviour, initiatives, and movements. Knowledge of this kind in the hands of political authorities might be considered principally harmless in Central European regions; however, it should be borne in mind that democracies can also “topple” into a condition that requires a certain amount of interpretive effort to be described as a “well-formed democracy” as the example of the United States shows. Knowledge about the population is much less harmless in Turkey or Belarus. In contrast, the civil society is devoted to a liberal mindset that insists on good reasons for the state becoming involved in private life. It is a notion that sees a wide section of society as a territory that is not under the control of politics and bureaucracy.

For the time being, the comprehensive information about the individual’s behaviour that exists in Western-democratic societies is mainly used as a resource for marketing purposes. There is no need to consider each recommendation that the individual comes to appreciate as a consumer as some form of tricky manipulation – intelligent marketing, which knows its audience (as groups or individuals), actually makes offers that correspond with the consumers’ preferences. It is possible to get this information in a harmless way: “People who bought X were also interested in Y”; however, this can also be based on individual profiling on the basis of previous activities, or can represent targeted actions that result from comprehensive individual tracking of internet activities. Everybody knows what Google and Amazon do and they are still used by most people because they are useful and convenient – they have reached the implicit decision that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. But some uneasiness still remains. In a comprehensive study, the Bertelsmann Foundation announced: “In order to master the digital change successfully, we need a strong, involved civil society.”¹⁰ That is probably accurate, but it is still formulated very generally. It is increasingly true that more information is being collected, but the comparatively harmless unease that marketing activities trigger can be used for completely different purposes at any time by totalitarian regimes. In the relevant situation, any kind of expression of opinion can be construed as insulting the president, ridiculing the state, being blasphemous, or showing that the person making these statements is preparing terrorist activities or belongs to a criminal organisation, and can be used for criminal offences. There are countries in this world in which any deviation from the official government opinion can be regarded as a criminally relevant statement. (These strategies are more elegant than Novichok.) In spite of what was naively believed at the start, the internet is not only an instrument for the civil society, suitable to be used for organising anti-authoritarian protests and basis-democratic assemblies, but also an instrument that can be used for the opposite purpose: for the control and suppression of the electorate and civil society. American employers can ask for applicants to provide access to their confidential internet profiles¹¹ – that is where one can really feel the absolute limit in the deprivatisation of the private.

The dynamic-destructive potential of electronic network possibilities has revealed itself over the course of the corona developments. It has been a source of long lists of conspiracy theories – some of them fraudulent, and others, dangerous – tips, offers, and interpretations (Hepfer 2015; Meyer 2018). This is the area where mask opponents and other asocial actors get together, and it also provides those bubbles in which the anti-immunisation lobby and others encourage each other in their craziness. The concepts of the civil society and civic society have long found their way into the language of all kinds of special interest groups. Even if it is only a matter of a few thousand bizarre characters with the desire of making the world aware of their observations of angels and aliens, or their feelings about Soros and Gates, it is commonly conceived that they are speaking as representatives of the civil society. It is not sure whether liberal democracy will survive the internet or whether it will be eroded and ultimately destroyed by it.