Abstract
The goal of this chapter is to find a conception of the public sphere which ascribes NGOs an important role as political actors, particularly in the postnational constellation and particularly vis-à-vis corporations. The term is again assessed from a liberal and a deliberative perspective. The liberal model defines the public sphere as the political sphere in which only questions of constitutional essentials and basic justice are discussed and decided. This relatively narrow conception excludes NGOs which promote claims that are not (yet) considered as matters of basic justice from assuming a meaningful role in the public sphere. In the postnational constellation the narrow liberal focus poses additional problems given the absence of a global constitution. The deliberative model, by contrast, conceives of the public sphere as a network of communications where rational will-formation is achieved. The public sphere is thus an emancipatory space where citizens are empowered and can create pressures for legitimization towards both, the state and the economy (i.e., corporations). Deliberative democracy can equally conceive of a public sphere on a transnational level because it defines political action not by the locus or the actors involved but by the discursive character of their interaction. As such it provides a valuable perspective for the interaction between NGOs and corporations in the postnational constellation.
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Notes
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Such a public sphere, untainted by power, can change the judgement of values and reasons that is dominated by different institutions like political parties, the mass media and interest groups, and filter such values and reasons critically (Habermas, 1990b: 32).
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Similarly, Dryzek defines the public sphere as “the most important location for deliberation” (2001: 652).
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As mentioned above, the nonpublic character of civil society contrasts with public political culture. Rawls further differentiates between the public-private and the public-nonpublic distinction (Rawls, 1993: 220); he avoids the former “because of the individualistic non-associational connotations of the word ‘private’” (Charney, 1998: 98). For Rawls “there is no such thing as private reason” (1993: 220).
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Rawls would reject this interpretation. For him civil society belongs to the nonpublic sphere, not to the private sphere. However, the tripartite distinction between public (political), nonpublic (political) and private is hard to defend: how would we envision nonpublic politics? Nonpublic politics is irreconcilable with the notion of democratic politics. On Rawls’ problematic distinction between public and nonpublic uses of reason, see also McCarthy (1994: 50).
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Other schools of thought offer a more differentiated view. In republicanism for example, the state and the market are not the only sources of social integration; instead, solidarity and the orientation to the common good offer a third source. This third source of social integration is meant to have an autonomous basis in civil society, independent of the state and the market (Habermas, 1996a: 21f.). There is thus a public sphere beyond the state-market dichotomy and making something public does not mean locating it in the legal sphere and its institutions.
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See section “Three Contexts for NGOs as Representatives of Public Claims” (Chapter 2) of this book for different contexts of institutionalization in which NGOs operate.
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Yet Rawls allows public reason to encompass new variations of conceptions of justice. He acknowledges that otherwise “the claims of groups or interests arising from social change might be repressed and fail to gain their appropriate political voice” (Rawls, 1997: 775).
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More about this will be discussed together with the implications of the substantively constrained conception of public reason in the section “Implications of Restricting the Content of Public Reason” (Chapter 7).
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Negative liberty can roughly be defined as the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. The distinction between positive and negative liberty goes back to Isaiah Berlin (1979).
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Thus, the liberal model exhibits exclusionary tendencies. More about this will be said in Chapter 7.
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On the insensitivity of the liberal approach to the importance of non-governmental discursive sources on a global scale, see Dryzek (2000: 115ff.).
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On the roles of NGOs in international organizations see also Scholte (2004: 213ff.).
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A strong notion of publics is also attractive for radical democrats; for them, weak publics are just “irrelevant epiphenomena or instruments of co-optation” (Fung, 2003b: 365). In contrast to radical democrats, this work starts from the assumption that the interaction between NGOs and corporations can be political, and democratic, without pertaining to a strong global public. My aim is not to promote a strong global public but rather to explore the democratic legitimacy of a weak global public (to which NGOs belong).
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In his “principle of publicity”, posited in the second appendix to his work “Perpetual Peace”, Kant claims that “[all] actions relating to the right of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity” (Kant and Humphrey, 2003: 37). As we will later see, this implies that legitimacy is conferred through the public use of reason.
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On the reasons why Habermas’ conception of civil society in deliberative democracy does not realize this emancipatory potential, see section “Two-Track Model of Deliberative Democracy” (Chapter 8).
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Again, as with civil society, the public sphere is not considered to be a residual category which simply absorbs claims that are not attractive for the state or the market. The public sphere and civil society are both constitutive of a democratic society.
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Examples for movements that formed in the course of such re-definition processes are the women’s movement, the peace movement, the ecology movement, and new ethnic identity movements. All these movements follow a similar logic. The liberal model leaves little room for thinking about the logic of social movements (Benhabib, 1992: 100).
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More about the problem of requiring internal democratic structures will be said in the section on the constraints on public reason (in the section “Implications of Restricting the Content of Public Reason” (Chapter 7)).
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It must be noted that this is only true if we conceive of deliberative democracy as a normative concept of leading public discourses, which implies a particular conception of legitimacy. If we perceive deliberation as a formal decision-making mechanism, the conditions that make deliberative democracy attractive in small-scale contexts seem to be absent in the international arena. This view of deliberative democracy as a collective decision-making mechanism hinges upon the possibility of face-to-face meetings which are of course inappropriate to most regional and national, and certainly to all global, decisions (Fung, 2003a: 52).
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According to Bohman, a transnational or cosmopolitan public sphere, as he calls it, is created when at least two culturally rooted public spheres start to overlap and intersect (Bohman, 1999: 195). Moreover, a transnational public sphere “requires the development of a complex set of critical abilities and practices, which, however egalitarian and wide in scope, have certain entry requirements best fulfilled by participation in a particular background public culture” (Bohman, 1999: 187). According to him, a global public sphere requires the development and expansion of transnational civil society (Bohman, 1999: 195). But as Dryzek rightly points out, there is little lost by treating transnational civil society and transnational public spheres as covering similar territories (Dryzek, 2000: 130). Moreover, in this work, the public sphere and civil society are rather seen as mutually enabling than as one being dependent on the other.
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Baur, D. (2012). The Public Sphere. 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_6
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