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The Postnational Constellation: A Broad Conception of Democracy

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NGOs as Legitimate Partners of Corporations

Part of the book series: Issues in Business Ethics ((IBET,volume 36))

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Abstract

This chapter is dedicated to sketching out the postnational constellation which describes the circumstances of political action that happens beyond the nation state. By acknowledging the emergence of NGOs and multinational corporations as new political actors on a global scale, the postnational constellation provides the grounds for conceptualizing the interaction between these actors as a political interaction. NGOs assume a broad range of democratic roles and they do so in contexts with different degrees of institutionalization: in formal contexts, i.e. by collaborating with international organizations; in semi-institutionalized contexts, i.e. by participating in multi-stakeholder forums or councils; and in essentially unregulated contexts, i.e. in their spontaneous interaction with corporations. The latter type of interaction is identified as the point of reference for this book. Since this type of interaction happens without the involvement of any official political institution, i.e. exclusively in the extraconstitutional sphere, it poses particular challenges when conceptualizing it from a political-theoretical perspective.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A distinction between a normative strand and a more technical strand of literature on the role of civil society actors in a globalized world is also put forward by Collingwood and Logister who distinguish between normative work on global governance and its role for NGOs on the one hand and policy-oriented work on the other hand. The former sees the involvement of NGOs in global governance as opening the door to a whole range of alternative conceptions of the world order; the latter is less concerned with identifying NGOs as agents in global normative structures but rather analyzes specific problems that arise from increased NGO participation in global governance (Collingwood and Logister, 2005: 175ff.).

  2. 2.

    Yet, as will be stated in the section “Three Contexts for NGOs as Representatives of Public Claims” (Chapter 2), in the interaction between NGOs and international institutions there is at least some sort of notional chain of accountability which connects “voters via national parliaments and national governments to global governance organizations” (Scholte, 2004: 211).

  3. 3.

    The disappearance of politics is actively propagated by the neoliberal design of a “world market society”, which aims at reducing the role of politics to night watchman states. According to this design the only political task that needs to be tackled on a global level is the ensuring of global free trade (Habermas, 2004: 185).

  4. 4.

    This paragovernmental role is structurally enhanced if NGOs are financed mainly by governmental actors; yet their dependence on donors risks distorting their priorities (Kaldor, 2003b: 92).

  5. 5.

    On the facilitating role played by institutions of global governance in strengthening civil society, see Muetzelfeldt and Smith (2002: 55ff.) and Scholte (2004: 226f.).

  6. 6.

    I cannot enter the debate about a world state here, but see Kersting (2002), Leggewie (2003), Höffe (1999) or Held (1995) for different points of view.

  7. 7.

    The word surrogate in this context refers back to Kant who suggested a league, i.e. a global federation, as a surrogate for a world state. Kant calls such a league a negative surrogate (for a world republic) which averts war (Kant and Humphrey, 2003: 15).

  8. 8.

    Thompson links these two perspectives to two approaches: cosmopolitan governance and civil societarianism. Even though I also focus on the democratic force of civil society in this section, I do not want to use the term civil societarianism because, according to Thompson, civil societarianism neglects the force of governmental institutions (1999: 116). Kersting does not distinguish approaches, but in a similar vein identifies the extension of public international law and the global public sphere as surrogates for global democracy (2002: 123).

  9. 9.

    As Habermas writes: “The communication structures of the public sphere must be kept intact by an energetic civil society”. He thus also ascribes to civil society a central role as an actor in the public sphere (1996b: 369).

  10. 10.

    By adopting a critical role, the global public can mitigate the colonializing assaults of system imperatives on the life world in a democratic manner (Habermas, 1990b: 36).

  11. 11.

    The justifications for the democratic force of civil society vary, of course: classical liberals argue, for example, that the democratic potential of civil society derives from the fact that it provides a counterbalance to the state; communitarians, on the other hand, see the positive effect of civil society on democracy as arising from the fact that it provides a site where communities – in contrast to self-interested individuals or the state – “co-determine their own destinies” (Hendriks, 2006: 490).

  12. 12.

    However, NGOs vary in their stance on globalization. Not all NGOs necessarily reject globalization; some back reforms of international market structures and some favour “radical alternative models of economic and social organization” (Youngs, 2004: 162).

  13. 13.

    These effects of civil society receive special emphasis from neo-Tocquevillean theorists (Hendriks, 2006: 490).

  14. 14.

    See http://www.wto.org/english/forums_e/ngo_e/guide_e.htm and http://www.wto.org/english/forums_e/ngo_e/intro_e.htm.

  15. 15.

    In its classical form, the tripartite structure includes representation from governments, employers organizations and workers organizations, such as for example in the Tripartite Declaration of Principles concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy from the International Labour Organization (ILO).

  16. 16.

    As we will see in this book, this conceptualization of democracy is exemplarily put forward by Habermas (1996b: 304ff.).

  17. 17.

    According to the critics, close cooperative relations between the three types of organizations (international organizations, business, and civil society networks) might weaken the contributions of each actor. The fact that the actors involved are all essentially unrepresentative considerably restricts their contribution to the promotion of greater democracy in global governance (Ottaway, 2001: 266; see also Bendell, 2005: 371).

  18. 18.

    http://www.fsc.org/en/about/governance

  19. 19.

    http://www.ethicaltrade.org/Z/abteti/who/gov/cauc.shtml

  20. 20.

    For typologies of partnerships with different degrees of intensity see for example Austin (2000), Crane and Matten (2007: 187ff.) or The Forster Company and TwentyFifty Ltd (2005: 1).

  21. 21.

    See the Introduction for the different roles NGOs are assigned by different strands of stakeholder theory.

  22. 22.

    Murphy and Bendell for example define the “political dimension of environmental management” as “reflected in the emerging emphasis on stakeholder management” (Murphy and Bendell, 1999: 39). Against this tendency, Ulrich advocates an explicitly non-strategic perspective on the “critical public sphere” (which NGOs are claimed to ideal-typically represent in this book) not as one stakeholder among others but as “the (highest) systematic site of corporate legitimation” (Ulrich, 2008: 429).

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  1. University of St. Gallen, Institute for Business Ethics, Tannenstrasse 19, 9000, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Dorothea Baur

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Baur, D. (2012). The Postnational Constellation: A Broad Conception of Democracy. In: NGOs as Legitimate Partners of Corporations. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2254-5_2

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