Defining Civil Society

An insightful piece on the Pakistani civil society -shows how the military regime and the articulate civil society are consenting bedfellows.

From the daily DAWN published on August 18, 2006

Defining civil society

By S. Akbar Zaidi
THE term ‘civil society’ is a complicated term which means different things to different people and is used in different contexts. Even in the more settled western societies, it has a changing meaning: late-20th century events have made the category more fluid, with civil society actors and constituents, moving in and out of the realm of civil society over a period of time.
In the countries of the East and the South, the location of the term ‘civil society’ and its meaning becomes even more complex. While there are different notions and contexts about what civil society is and is not, there is at least some broad agreement about what it must necessarily be. Civil society is supposed to be outside, and perhaps preferably in opposition to, or in contradiction with, the state.
In order to define civil society, it is a requirement that the organisations and actors of civil society not be controlled by the institutions or actors of the state. This ‘autonomous’ requirement is a necessary condition to distinguish civil society from the state.
For some more radical thinkers, the stricter requirement is that civil society must stand against both state and market, and particularly against economic liberalism. For them the “state, market and civil society are rival channels for the exercise of power’. For other theorists, civil society must necessarily be a democratising force. Howsoever one defines civil society and its constituents, the Pakistani case offers interesting (and contradictory) insights about the nature and form, and location, of civil society. It also shows the large number of contradictions which constitute the political settlement that is Pakistan.
Despite the fact that General Musharraf in October 1999 overthrew an elected prime minister, albeit an incompetent one, the largest and most public support for him came from the socially and culturally liberal and westernised sections of Pakistan’s elite, who embraced Musharraf as one of their own, which he very much was. Activists in the NGO movement in Pakistan were also vociferous in their support for Musharraf, precisely because he was seen as a liberal and westernised man.
Some prominent members of the NGO movement who had struggled for a democratic order in Pakistan when it was under General Ziaul Haq, actually joined Musharraf’s cabinet. Employers associations, trade bodies, women’s groups, and other such groupings which are all part of some acceptable notion of civil society, also welcomed the coup because General Musharraf was seen as a modernising man. Some intellectuals and peace and anti-nuclear activists also celebrated the arrival of a liberal head of state.
Clearly, for the westernised sections of civil society in Pakistan, the military general who had overthrown a democratically elected prime minister, was Pakistan’s latest saviour. Musharraf’s earliest critics and opponents included, what for lack of a more appropriate term one can call, the Islamic civil society, which did not like his liberalism and westernisation. Classical and western literature on civil society suggests that by being “against the state” in some ways, and especially by being against the autocratic undemocratic state, civil society is necessarily on the side of some form of a democratic dispensation. Not so in Pakistan.
For civil society in Pakistan, whether of the westernising, modernising kind, or of the more fundamentalist Islamic kind, the question has not been one of democracy versus non-democratic norms, but of liberalism against perceived and variously interpreted Islamic symbols and values. Unlike the traditional notion of civil society, the pursuit of democratic ideals is not a necessary and defining condition. Not only is this a fundamental difference, but so too is the necessary distinction of autonomy from the state, so integral to the meaning of civil society.
If sections of civil society are expected to challenge the state, in Pakistan, there are many who are the state’s partners. For instance, development groups which have emerged as a result of government failure in Pakistan and have become contractors in the form of NGOs in their own right, are often coopted by institutions of the state to become the latter’s ‘advisers,’ winning lucrative contracts and getting the publicity they need to further their credentials.
Human rights activists and advocacy groups, too, become partners with other stakeholders, particularly government, and try to redress problems created by the very institutions of the state that they are now partnering. The essence of Pakistan’s politics — very broadly defined — is one of compromise not confrontation, and of cooptation. Civil society in Pakistan is very much part of that political tradition.
Linked to this relationship with politics, and perhaps determining it, is the relationship of civil society and of NGOs with money, particularly donor funding. If, for example, the most prominent and potentially radical civil society organisations in Pakistan receive funding from donors who have specific interests or agendas, the ‘politicalness’ of these organisations gets muted. With the British and American governments amongst the biggest donors of civil society in Pakistan, one does not see much protest against them for their role in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, these governments are imposing their liberal social agenda on the two countries, an agenda which the westernised sections of Pakistani civil society endorse.
Moreover, the requirement that civil society be autonomous of the state is also undone since many of these NGOs, are highly dependent on foreign donor state. It is the broader westernised, ‘liberal’, modern (but in the case of Pakistan, non-democratic) vision, which western governments share with the elite and the westernised sections of those who constitute civil society in Pakistan — not with the Islamic elements or sections of civil society.
The greatest opposition to the foreign presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to Israel has come from the political and non-political sections of the ‘Islamic’ civil society. Unlike their westernised Pakistani cousins, this is an anti-imperialist political grouping, which is also against the agenda of the World Bank, the IMF, and economic liberalism, something that westernised civil society supports very enthusiastically. For both, however, democracy is less important.
Most definitions of civil society do not stretch themselves to include film societies, debating clubs or puppet and theatre festivals. Yet, because these entities have a political and radical cultural presence in the context of an Islamicised (and violently so) society like Pakistan, they can be included in a non-western context as belonging to civil society.
Even such benign civil society organisations seek patronage from the chief of the army staff, who is also the president of Pakistan, to further their cause: General Musharraf was the chief guest at the inaugural and closing ceremony of a puppet festival and a film festival, respectively, some months ago. While these cultural preferences may be the redeeming feature of Pakistan’s military coup maker, one should not forget that Beethoven and Goethe were claimed as the cultural ancestors of a certain group of Germans not six decades ago.
One is not stating that Pakistan’s experience is in any way unique, but one will argue that perhaps civil society ought to be defined by the conditions in which it exists so that one can understand its functioning and politics better. While Pakistan’s civil society is an outcome of its particular history and the way its institutions and politics have evolved, it is, nevertheless, essential to apply some minimum acceptable norms of civil society behaviour, to be able to evaluate its role and performance.
In the context of Pakistan, one is likely to find that civil society (its western wing), aspires to only a few of the necessary requisites. For it, a westernised, socially and culturally liberal agenda, is far more important and preferable than the messy indigenous politics essential for democracy. In fact, one of the main consequences of this ideology has been the depoliticisation of public life in Pakistan. Under such circumstances, where the main representatives of the uncivil society are perceived to be westernised and socially and culturally liberal, where civil society actors work for the emancipation of women and for human rights, and military generals support the same agenda, both civil society and “uncivil society” make consenting bedfellows.