This is an author produced version of a paper published in The Language of World Trade Politics : Unpacking the Terms of Trade. This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination.
Citation for the published paper:
Strange, Michael. (2018). Civil society. The Language of World Trade Politics : Unpacking the Terms of Trade, p. null
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2043/26827
Publisher: Routledge
This document has been downloaded from MUEP (https://muep.mah.se) / DIVA (https://mau.diva-portal.org).
NOTE: This is a draft text. The proof-read version appears as Strange, Michael (2018) ‘Civil Society’ in Dingwerth, Klaus and Clara Weinhardt (eds) The Language of World Trade Politics – Unpacking the Terms of Trade (London: Routledge), pp.97-114.
Civil Society
Michael Strange
Introduction
In December 1999, international news headlines announced the arrival of ‘civil society’ as a term at the heart of global trade governance (Brown, 1999). Protest marches consisting primarily of trade unionists and environmentalists were credited with the collapse of the World Trade Organisation’s Seattle Ministerial Conference and, subsequently, attempts to launch the so-called ‘Millennium Round’ of trade negotiations. Whilst that often-mythologised narrative overlooks other key explanatory factors, what remains evident is the way in which both critics and protagonists of the current shape of global trade governance came to see civil society as important to its legitimacy. The response of the WTO Secretariat to the events of Seattle, which included creating new avenues by which civil society could more formally engage with the organisation, gave ‘NGOs’ – non-governmental organisations – a growing role in the system. Similar stories of ‘NGO emergence’ – a new category of actorness (that is, who or what can be an actor in this field) – can be seen in, for example, how the European Commission manages civil society during current negotiations towards the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as well as global trade governance more generally (Scholte, 2011; on TTIP see De Ville and Siles-Brügge, 2015).
Many observers might therefore conclude that within the field of global trade governance it is well understood what is meant by the term ‘civil society’. Yet, that is far from the case. Indeed, as this chapter shows, not only is there significant ambiguity, but the term ‘civil society’ sits at the centre of an ongoing political struggle over both: a) to whom or what it applies; and, b) its respective role within the governance of global trade.
The chapter is structured as follows. Part One begins with a mind-map, tracing out the competing ideas at stake within how ‘civil society’ is used as a term in global trade governance. In particular, there is a need to consider how ‘civil society’ can be used to refer to both non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social movements. For example, institutional actors have been more willing to recognise civil society where defined as ‘NGOs’ and more informal forms of activism tend to be largely excluded. Struggles over the meaning of ‘civil society’ are part of a broader contestation over who or what should be recognised as an actor in global trade governance, as the chapter will argue.
Some might see the story of ‘civil society’ in global trade governance as just an account of how the WTO Secretariat, and other institutional actors, gives recognition
to certain individuals and groups. For example, what kinds of meetings can they attend, and will their views be acknowledged? Whilst asking who is recognised and how are important questions, there is another side of this puzzle that needs to be considered. That is, why is it that the actors described as ‘civil society’ are at all interested in global trade governance? Whether attending meetings, writing campaign pamphlets, or joining street protests, all these actions require often-substantial investment. That process is one of politicisation in which actors not previously interested in trade politics have, however, come to view this particular sphere of human interaction as relevant to their own political identities. That side of the puzzle forms the core of the chapter’s second part. First, however, the chapter looks at what is meant by the term ‘civil society’ in global trade governance.
Part One: Civil Society in Global Trade Governance a. Mind-mapping
What is ‘civil society’ in global trade governance? An activist campaigning against a particular trade agreement, when told he was part of ‘civil society’, objected on the grounds that, for him, it was important to be seen as ‘uncivil’.1 For that activist, the
term ‘civil’ denoted conformity and the threat of co-optation. For him, being a political activist required that he resist the civil norms of mainstream political-economic society. That response is far from uncommon amongst many activists critical of mainstream global trade governance. Today, the term ‘civil society’ is used to broadly identify a group of actors who share in common the status of being non-state actors, though as the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci understood back in the early Twentieth Century the distinction between the state and civil society is far from clear.
Civil society is often treated as a voice of political dissent, from varying ends of the political spectrum, that through being outside state institutions is better equipped to represent the plurality of interests and issues present in society. Yet, for Gramsci, civil society is key to ensuring the state’s survival where it provides the means to maintain consent. Gramsci’s reading of civil society was reflected in the above-mentioned activist’s rejection of the label. What both approaches share, however, is the understanding that civil society exists as a realm conceptually distinct to the political society of politicians and civil servants. The term ‘civil society’ does not in itself denote whether an actor is likely to contest or support the state. The political identity of any group or individual is therefore not given by the term ‘civil society’ alone.
In the context of this book, civil society becomes relevant wherever those actors it covers impact global trade governance. As distinct to the political society of that global trade governance, ‘civil society’ refers to actors outside both the nation-states and the legal-institutions coordinating their joint enterprise. Though certainly trying to influence that political society, companies and persons actively engaged in global trade are treated as distinct from ‘civil society’, falling into what can be thought
1 Personal observation made at a trade debate between activists and business
of as ‘economic society’. However, the lines between these different categories – political, economic, and civil – are not impermeable. Civil society is commonly viewed as consisting of not-for-profit groups, focused on campaigning for a particular cause. For this reason business actors are not civil society. However, this definition becomes harder to maintain if we consider three actors in particular: trade unions; business associations; and, lobbying firms.
Trade unions are often seen as part of civil society in their role as advocacy organisations, their priority being to protect the economic interests of their members. Many trade unions have also taken on a series of non-interest based issues within their campaigning portfolios, such as on the environment, gender, racism, and so on, such that they claim a role that goes beyond just trying to protect their members’ salaries.
Business associations are more clearly part of economic society, created to aggregate a series of common demands representing particular industrial sectors. However, business associations overlap with political society to the extent that many at the transnational level were originally created via assistance from international organisations. For example, the European Commission has taken an active role in helping to instigate several European-level business associations as a means to form a common European position on certain economic issues, e.g. trade-in-services. Where international organisations later turn to these business associations for information on how a particular industry views a trade negotiation they are treated as if part of civil society.
The extensive role of lobbying firms within global trade governance further complicates how we mind map the concept of ‘civil society’ where advocacy becomes a for-profit activity. Lobbying firms represent the professionalisation of advocacy, and have created much controversy over the fear that moneyed groups able to purchase the services of these firms may be able to exert undue pressure on the politicians and civil servants of political society. However, at the same time, the level of technical complexity involved in global trade – a policy field encompassing an almost limitless array of economic activities – necessitates the collection and dissemination of information from a broad range of economic interests if that field is to be optimally governed. This is why at least in the eyes of many politicians and civil servants involved in global trade governance, business associations operating at the transnational level are so important.
Lobbying firms fit into these relations through providing additional resources individual business associations or companies can purchase on an ad hoc basis to represent their interests. As advocates, lobbying firms appear as part of civil society. For many groups that campaign on issues tied to wider societal concerns like the environment and who rely extensively on public donations for their work, however, describing for-profit groups as civil society undermines what they see as its key role – to represent society to politicians and civil servants. According to this understanding, where advocacy is dependent upon which interests or issues are most able to afford the services of a lobbying firm it distorts that process of representation and undermines the legitimacy of any resulting policies. Whether lobbying firms are inside or outside civil society is therefore more of a normative, than an empirical, question.
Indeed, this last point opens up an even bigger question, which is: Is ‘civil society’ an empirical concept, or do we also need to understand it as a normative
concept? That is, to what extent does it go beyond stating what is, to argue for what should be? The above mind map has so far focused on defining ‘civil society’ in respect to what empirical phenomena it is most typically used to describe. Yet, and this is certainly true within global trade governance, as a label ‘civil society’ is closely associated with calls for deliberative democracy in policy decisions (Dryzek, 2006).
There are two aspects that are worth mentioning. First, it is what civil society brings to the input and output stages of decision-making. That is, in a nutshell, to provide a political community able to both provide a plurality of perspectives relevant to informing policy decisions, but also critically monitor the impact of those decisions. That civil society should have the right to play such a role is based on the second aspect, relating to the above-mentioned idea that civil society is somehow representative of societal concerns. Civil society cannot claim authority in the same way enjoyed by elected politicians. On questioning a then prominent UK government minister on trade policy, an activist was challenged on the grounds that they were, unlike the MP, unelected by the public.2 In response, the activist argued that his
democratic mandate rested on, at least for him, something stronger – a regular financial donation, as opposed to just a tick on a ballot paper. Whilst arguably this assumes too much as to how people view their charitable donation, as a normative project civil society is often presented as a supplement to support democratic deliberation – both through potentially giving voice to a broader range of stakeholders affected by policy decisions but who are normally excluded in majoritarian decision-making, and through including many issues that go beyond narrow interests.
Civil society is often seen to include groups that frame their demands (e.g. preventing fishing practices harmful to turtle populations) in terms of broader social goals (e.g. protecting the environment). An issue such as foreign ownership of national healthcare services, for example, might be framed in terms of the ‘market vs the people’. Campaigners draw upon a list of social issues by which to argue their demands, including, for example: labour rights; ending racism; gender equality; and, social justice. Presenting much narrower political demands in terms of these broader social goals not only marks out a special role for civil society as a type of ‘social conscience’, it also serves to help build bridges between campaign groups. Without such linkages it becomes impossible for a movement critical of a particular trade negotiation to attract interest from groups focused on wider social concerns (e.g. environment, gender).
Mentioning ‘movements’ leads to the final point to be discussed within this mind-mapping exercise – that is, the extent to which civil society is organised. When discussing civil society, a series of inter-related analytical terms come into play. These include, but are not limited to the following list: CSO; NGO; SMO; and, just plainly, SM. The first three acronyms within that alphabet spaghetti all end with the letter ‘O’, which in all these cases designates the word ‘organisation’. That is: ‘civil society organisation’, ‘non-governmental organisation’, and ‘social movement organisation’. In general usage, ‘CSO’ and ‘NGO’ are interchangeable. They may refer to a large multinational group such as Amnesty International, or a group staffed by one paid-individual – the owner-manager – aided by a string of regularly alternating interns. That owner-manager may well have a similar role within several other groups
too, meaning that no two CSOs/NGOs are alike. It should be said that the main distinction between the two terms is the relative emphasis on the phrase ‘non-governmental’, though as argued above this is also implied within the concept of ‘civil society’. The term ‘social movement organisation’ is much more distinct to CSO/NGO through its focus on social movements (abbreviated earlier on its own as ‘SM’).
Social movements are highly diffuse, formed through a series of largely informal relations between individuals and made visible in a variety of means (i.e. public meetings, street protests, petitions). They may be limited to one campaign, but to the extent that professional activist groups orchestrate campaigns, the movement may well encompass a long series of overlapping campaigns. This means that it is never possible to clearly mark out the origins and ends of social movements.
However, for the movement to be visible – to manage the logistics of printing political material, analysing complex trade deals, attending meetings with prominent officials – organisations become paramount (see Eagleton-Pierce, 2013). And, this often means particular individuals become paramount where they are the ones to first write a critical report on a trade deal that can then be cited by other groups and activists within the movement. This leads to certain analytical problems, since the term ‘social movement’ implies a much more horizontal political structure than one in which individuals – who are often employed by comparatively well-resourced groups – are central.
Yet, equally, speaking of ‘social movements’ as opposed to just organisations allows focus on the more diffuse and unprofessional relations at play within civil society. The term ‘social movement’ refers to the harder-to-define parts of civil society. As will be discussed next, this creates a problem for any attempt to categorise who should and should not be recognised as part of civil society, given that any given social movement will always exceed that part which is organised and tied to specific groups or individuals.
b. Meaning-makers
Given that ‘civil society’ is not just a descriptive term but carries with it a significant normative baggage, it should come as no surprise that in the often highly political field of global trade governance we see a history of battles between meaning-makers over who or what can be classed as ‘civil society’. This is evident in the example of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), where acknowledgement of civil society by the WTO Secretariat has been filtered through the ‘NGO’ category. There, a struggle has taken place over who or what is an ‘NGO’ eligible for this recognition. In discussing contestation over this particular actor-identity through which civil society has been made visible in global trade governance, in this section the chapter shows how competing definitions over these categories have distributional consequences with respect to who/what gets included or excluded. Where the normative value of civil society is based on its supposed claim to represent societal concerns to political society, any exclusion means limiting which societal concerns need be considered when undertaking global trade governance. This section first provides a brief history of civil society and global trade governance, before considering attempts by the WTO Secretariat to manage civil society under the ‘NGO’ label, and concluding with a
comparison to the role of civil society within another aspect of global trade governance – the ongoing TTIP negotiations.
i) A brief history of civil society in global trade governance
Going back to the failed attempts to create an International Trade Organisation (ITO) in the late 1940s, the history of contemporary global trade governance has seen very mixed approaches towards civil society. Where civil society has been recognised as somehow relevant, it has been under the ‘NGO’ label. Article 87 of the ITO’s Havana Charter included a provision enabling the organisation to establish working relations with NGOs, a note stating: ‘it is clearly desirable that the ITO should be able to take full advantage of the knowledge and expertise of the non-governmental organizations in (...) various fields’. When efforts to ratify the ITO within the US Senate were abandoned and the proposed body faded away, what remained were the set of rules it was meant to have hosted – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The GATT, of course, survived to become a significant regime that would be expanded and eventually find a home when the WTO was created in 1995. The ITO’s acknowledgement of NGOs was not included in the GATT, meaning that up until the WTO’s inception there were no formal channels by which civil society could be made visible in global trade governance. Whilst GATT documents sometimes made reference to ‘non-governmental parties’, this referred to the selection of panelists for the GATT’s dispute settlement mechanism. Traditionally, civil society was seen as only relevant at the national level, where political demands could be expressed but it was up to the national governments whether to include them within their negotiating position as Contracting Parties to the GATT.
ii) WTO Secretariat attempts to manage civil society
The Marrakesh Agreement establishing the WTO does acknowledge NGOs, though what this means in practice is highly ambiguous – Article 5 paragraph 2 stating: ‘The General Council may make appropriate arrangements for consultation and cooperation with non-governmental organizations concerned with matters related to those of the WTO’. This was significant as at the Ministerial meeting where the Marrakesh Agreement was formally signed, groups not affiliated with the Secretariat or one of the GATT Contracting Parties could only be present if able to show press credentials. What type of role NGOs were to be given at the WTO, and who might be able to call themselves an ‘NGO’, became clearer at the WTO’s first Ministerial Conference, hosted by Singapore at the end of 1996. The WTO Secretariat took a lead in shaping what was meant by the term ‘non-governmental organization’ with a set of guidelines on ‘arrangements on relations with NGOs’ that limited their role to ‘increase the awareness of the public in respect of WTO activities’. Significantly, the guidelines concluded that: ‘Closer consultation and cooperation with NGOs can…be met constructively through appropriate processes at the national level where lies primary responsibility for taking into account the different elements of public interest which are brought to bear on trade policy-making’. The WTO Secretariat tried to largely avoid treating civil society as an international actor, limiting it to the confines of national politics over which governments are the gatekeepers.
Where it came to drawing up the procedures for accrediting civil society for attendance at the first Ministerial Conference, hosted by Singapore in 1996, meetings
held amongst Member-state delegates in the General Council concluded that an eligible NGO needed to be a ‘non-profit’ group. This led to the Secretariat declining requests from law firms, as well as private companies, who were asked to re-apply via their industry association. Business associations were therefore allowed under the ‘NGO’ banner, constituting between 44% to 65% of those carrying the ‘NGO’ badge (Marceau and Pedersen 1999:46; O’Brien et al 2000:94). Another key criteria used by the Secretariat when selecting groups for attendance was their relevance to the work of the WTO. This was used, for example, to deny access to Education International (EI) – an international trade union body that arguably has an interest through the extent to which education is included under the General Agreement on Trade-in-Services (GATS) hosted by the WTO (see O’Brien et al, 2000:93).
Even where groups were granted access, this did not equate to observer status at any decision-making meetings, instead left to use the NGO facilities on the outskirts of the main event. Whether this enabled meetings with Member-state delegations or WTO Secretariat officials depended on what relations groups already possessed, rather than necessarily facilitating any new channels for advocacy. Given the venue of Singapore, the potential for contestatory action was already limited. Overall, the choice of venue for Ministerial Conferences has had a significant impact upon which groups can access meetings – and thus be visible as ‘civil society’ – due to both geographical proximity but, more importantly, the extent to which the local political regime allowed open political dissent (Piewitt, 2010; Steffek, 2012).
Hosting the second Ministerial Conference in Geneva, in 1998, saw a quite different political context, with visible public protests outside the gates of the meeting venue. There it was harder to narrow down civil society to the ‘NGO’ label, particularly as the Secretariat tried to frame it. The strategy adopted by the Secretariat at Geneva was, however, to try and claim recognition of the ‘challenges’ – i.e. social, environmental, cultural – people face in different societies, with the suggestion that the WTO-NGO relationship might be a solution (Wilkinson, 2005). No substantive information was given, however, as to how this relationship might be developed to resolve these challenges. Protests at the gate – seen in the media as sometimes violent – evidence a counter-move in defining civil society, so that it exceeded the narrow category authored by the WTO Secretariat. Protesters were largely treated as out of touch, and therefore irrelevant, compared to the more ‘civil’ individuals wearing ‘NGO’ badges within the Conference venue. That method of managing voices of dissent continued at the WTO’s next Ministerial Conference, hosted in Seattle in December 1999. Since 1996, civil society had become much more visible in contesting, in particular, the impact of economic globalisation on labour rights and environmental protections. The reasons for this politicisation are discussed in the chapter’s second half.
The Seattle Ministerial was a turning point for many, both for the WTO and its critics within civil society. It saw mass street protests, made all the more visible through the media’s focus on a poorly planned and sudden response from the police that led to several violent confrontations and acts of vandalism in a city normally known for its sedate character. The protests were blamed – or, in the eyes of some, celebrated – when the delegates failed to reach a compromise that would have launched a new round of trade negotiations (the Millennium Round) and the conference effectively collapsed. The protests made the WTO a household name as
front-page news, in stark contrast to the relative obscurity of the GATT. For civil society groups, the organisation leading up to Seattle and the myth that developed in its aftermath gave a sense that their collective endeavours might impact on the shape of global trade governance. Some suggested that despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world was still in a state of bi-polarity but now between a USA espousing neoliberal economics (i.e. deregulation, the shift of power over to multinational corporations, and a lack of sensitivity to social and environmental issues) countered by a so-called ‘Global Justice Movement’ - a ‘rainbow coalition’ of different groups with differing agendas but sharing a common critique of ‘social and environmental injustice’.
What part civil society played in the collapse of the Seattle Ministerial is debatable. Whilst the protests created additional logistical hurdles for delegates, overall the critical issue was a major disagreement between Member-states along a ‘developed-’ and ‘developing-country’ divide over to what extent the promises of the Uruguay Round had been evenly delivered with many developing-countries claiming foul. Civil society did have more influence at Seattle than in previous Ministerials, however, as it came as the then US Vice-President Al Gore was seeking nomination as the Democrat candidate. This enabled the unions to put pressure so that President Clinton made a vague but significant suggestion that the WTO consider labour standards within future trade agreements (O’Brien et al, 2000:140). This only helped further disagreement amongst the Member-states. The collapse of the Seattle ministerial was hugely significant for those activists involved, but also campaigners elsewhere, as it made visible an image of ‘civil society’ as an effective political movement that exceeded attempts to limit civil society to being a relatively passive provider of societal information for states and international organisations.
Since Seattle, the WTO Secretariat has taken an increasingly active role in formally recognising ‘NGOs’ and, in the process, determining which aspects of civil society are seen as relevant within global trade governance. For example, since 2000, the WTO annual reports have included a section on relations with ‘NGOs’ (Scholte, 2004:153-5; see also, Sutherland, 2005). The most obvious display of WTO-NGO relations comes with the annual public forum hosted at the WTO’s headquarters in Geneva, which began initially in 1994 as a ‘symposia’ in which delegates, parliamentarians, journalists, academics, and the staff of NGOs could meet and discuss relevant issues. To attend one must apply via the WTO Secretariat, and entering the WTO headquarters requires passing through a security check similar to that in airports. Once in, however, there is a surprising degree of freedom given that beyond the opening plenaries given by the Director-General and various Heads of State, many of the panels are organised and chaired by persons not associated with the WTO itself. The organisers of past panels have included groups otherwise often very critical of the WTO’s governance, such as Friends of the Earth International and the Third World Network. These groups have, however, become increasingly less active within the WTO’s Public Forum, suggesting they may not see these events as particularly helpful to their work. Indeed, this has been confirmed by at least some activists in interviews.
In addition to appearing as speakers or even panel organisers in the WTO Public Forum, civil society groups can author ‘NGO Position Papers’. The WTO Secretariat has an open invitation for external actors to provide these papers as an
information resource to the Member-states. The WTO Secretariat selects which papers are relevant prior to disseminating a list of these papers via a news bulletin sent to the WTO Member-state delegations (Marceau and Pedersen, 1999:20).
In some cases, civil society groups manage the WTO-NGO relationship. One example is the Geneva-based International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) (Hannah, 2014). ICTSD produces research and organises events often focused on helping to enhance the negotiating capacity of developing states belonging to the WTO, and the WTO Secretariat and delegates have often been present at its events. Where these events are organised in various capitals in Africa and Asia, the ICTSD takes an important role in adding to the WTO Secretariat’s task to build the technical-capacity of its developing country Member-states. Here civil society clearly serves as an important resource for the WTO.
Pascal Lamy’s long tenure as Director-General of the WTO, from 2005-2013, saw two important developments: first, a more systematic strategy to monitor the concerns of civil society organisations; and, second, increased participation within workshops for civil society in developing countries (Perez-Esteve, 2012). At the same time, though, during the slow and often stalling Doha Round negotiations the WTO’s role in global trade governance has become less certain as whilst both China and Russia have joined and so brought the vast majority of all trade within its remit, Member-states have increasingly turned to bilateral and regional regimes with the WTO seemingly down-prioritised. This has been mirrored in the activity of civil society groups, including those active at Seattle. Despite the more parochial character of these regimes, when critiquing these negotiations activists typically maintain a ‘global’ frame to their campaigns – presenting the deal as a threat not just to their national context, but in terms of dangers they see as global. Typically the chief danger for campaigners is what they term as ‘corporate power’ – that is, the growing role of private capital in global trade governance.
iii) Civil society and the TTIP negotiations
Many of those groups and individuals involved in civil society contesting WTO policies have been active in campaigns around other parts of global trade governance, including negotiations towards the US-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) (for TTIP, see De Ville and Siles-Brügge, 2015). Alliances built via earlier campaigns mean groups on both sides of the ‘pond’ regularly share information and strategy proposals. European groups have, however, been more active due to a number of factors. First, US groups have been focused on a range of other trade deals they see as more threatening, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Second, one reason they see the TTIP as less disturbing is that for trade unions the possibility of harmonisation between US and EU labour rights could be a significant gain. European groups have, however, extensively cited those US groups that have criticised TTIP. That critique has largely focused on the inclusion of an investor-state dispute (ISD) mechanism in which corporations would be able to sue the US or EU if new regulations were seen to damage their investments.
Two further points of critique seen from both US and European groups have been on consumer and environmental safety and the fear that TTIP threatens to undermine regulations in these two areas. This apparent unity is largely limited to the sharing of ideas and cross-citations, rather than sharing more material resources.
However, in the context of social movement activity ideas are themselves a valuable resource. There have also been several meetings framed as ‘transatlantic dialogues’ with representatives from different issue sectors attending as speakers. It is worth noting that whilst the ‘transatlanic’ frame is often stated, in campaign leaflets and public events there is an equally vocal assertion that TTIP is a ‘global’ threat, framing it in terms of harm to developing countries as well as the principle parties represented in negotiations. Much of the European activity has taken place via a coalition of groups formed originally as a means to build upon Seattle and contest the EU’s position at the WTO – aptly named as the ‘Seattle to Brussles’ (S2B) network. The exception to this has been in Germany where campaigners against TTIP managed to create a mass movement critical of the negotiations unparalleled elsewhere, and subsequently downplayed the ‘global’ frame in favour of focusing on TTIP as a ‘national’ threat to, for example, consumer safety.
The European Commission has a long history of working with, and even funding, many groups that make up European civil society. Having civil society at the European level has been seen as important to fostering European integration, providing it with the semblance of a nation-state. Civil society has had a mixed relationship with the European Commission’s Directorate General for Trade (DG Trade). DG Trade was active in helping to establish many of the business associations now lobbying it, as mentioned above. And, as said, the budgets of some of the groups most vocally criticising DG Trade for ignoring societal concerns include significant contributions from the Commission. Yet, DG Trade has largely excluded those vocal critics from the decision-making process. This is in contrast to the US where there is a tradition of non-state actors being invited as ‘experts’ within advisory groups to the United States Trade Representative (USTR), though there is criticism that business interests dominate the groups.
In creating a series of special advisory groups to which civil society was invited to attend, DG Trade tried to strictly manage who might be included (Strange, 2015). First, the meetings included representatives from business associations that had been lobbying for the TTIP. Second, those who attended were instructed that they could not report back to their organisations, maintaining strict confidentially. Lacking the enforcement powers of a nation-state, however, meant that this instruction was easily ignored. Third, despite promises to the contrary, attendees were for a long time not given access to the negotiating text meaning that their comments could only be made in the abstract. The special advisory groups both opened up new opportunities for civil society to be visible within EU trade policy but, also, provided DG Trade an opportunity to influence the definition of who counts as ‘civil society’ and the behaviour of actors accepted within that term.
The meaning of ‘civil society’ in global trade governance is inherently unfixed, due to the political significance of any definition. There remains an ongoing struggle to define which groups and individuals may be included in this category of actor, because the claim to include civil society in policy processes carries with it a significant normative value. However, why is it that civil society has become interested in global trade governance? Next, the chapter looks at how activists have become politicised to be ‘active’ in global trade such that civil society has become visible.
Part Two: Politicised to be ‘active’ in Global Trade Governance
Who or what is recognised as ‘civil society’ matters in global trade governance because it forms part of a broader struggle over what societal influences feed into its design and implementation. Yet, as the above section shows, institutional actors do not control this filtering process alone even if they are formally in charge of admittance to institutional venues. The discursive dynamics of global trade governance are not limited to formal actors designated by institutional actors, but include the various ways in which actors emerge as politicised within its context. This concerns ongoing discursive conflicts over both what constitutes ‘good’ global governance (i.e. legitimacy), as well as the changing parameters of how we define ‘trade’ (i.e. its shift from ‘goods’ to include a much wider array of social activities).
Civil society has become increasingly visible in global trade governance since at least the late-1980s when, during the Uruguay Round, French farmers protested against what they saw as threats to agricultural markets. Although less visible in the media, it should be noted that in the early 1990s a number of European development groups engaged in strategy meetings as well as lobbying of developing countries to contest what they saw as the threat any expansion of GATT posed to those economies (Wilkinson, 1996). In 1991, Mexico successfully used the GATT’s dispute settlement mechanisms to challenge US legislation banning the import of tuna harvested with nets lethal to dolphin populations. The GATT ruling politicised US environmental groups, which had up to that point operated as nation-focused organisations. Experiencing the GATT’s reversal of a hard-fought victory, many groups now shifted their agenda to include ‘trade’ within their campaign portfolios. This included some public campaigns, but most activity was spent in rapidly developing trade-specialist units equipped with personnel able to not only read trade agreements, but also publicly address politicians and civil servants in the media on these issues. This process needs to be understood as one of both politicisation in which new political demands and alliances were formed, as well as socialisation in which new codes of behaviour and language were adopted. At this point, much happened in North America.
In Canada, proposals to create a new trade agreement with the US – the Canadian-United States Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) – sparked public controversy during the mid-1980s, despite exciting little contestation in the US. The Pro-Canada Network was created, framing CUSFTA as a US takeover – a threat to Canadian cultural and political sovereignty – as well as harming its social and environmental policy. The campaign was unsuccessful in that CUSFTA was signed, but it did achieve a broad network that tapped into the union movement and the church. However, environmentalists and feminists felt largely excluded, used in name but rarely able to influence the campaign (see Huyer, 2004). Certainly civil society has its own filters, limiting which voices can influence joint campaign statements.
Politicisation through CUSFTA meant that Canadian groups were often at the forefront of advocacy critical of negotiations towards the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s. NAFTA witnessed trilateral networking between activists in all three of the countries involved, though campaigning was largely targeted at US legislators for strategic reasons since it was in Washington that the agreement would either succeed or fail. Trilateral networking allowed groups to enhance their capacity for advocacy, with US groups able to draw upon testimony
from Canadian and Mexican groups, who through being seen as important to the US debate were empowered within their domestic contexts. Where the Mexican government was unwilling to provide information, Mexican groups could turn to their counterparts in the comparatively more open political contexts of the US and Canada to obtain key documents (see Stillerman, 2003; and Hogenboom, 1996). Although the US had a relatively large environmental movement, in the case of NAFTA it was seriously undermined by an internal disagreement – with some leading groups supportive of NAFTA in the hope that any policy harmonisation it facilitated would force new environmental regulations onto Mexico (Dreiling and Wolf, 2001). Again, whilst the campaigners eventually failed to prevent NAFTA, the campaign attracted mass public attention, helped politicise many more types of groups around global trade governance, and left an infrastructure of relations through which further civil society activity might be possible.
The first ‘success’ story for civil society came when they took credit for the collapse of OECD negotiations for a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in the late 1990s. The head of the Malaysian ‘Third World Network’ (TWN) addressed an event in North America attended by veterans from the two campaigns mentioned above, presenting information that he had been given announcing these negotiations (Johnston and Laxer, 2003). The MAI was seen as a threat because it included the right for corporations to sue governments if new regulations were seen as harmful to their investments. Activists were helped when a Canadian group, with experience from both CUSFTA and NAFTA, was passed a draft of the negotiating text by a Member of the Canadian Parliament. The Canadian group first analysed the report, producing a critical commentary, before distributing both via its network already formed with other North American groups, as well as more globally through relations it was developing through preparations for the WTO’s then forthcoming Seattle meeting. Activists based in national contexts were able to use the texts in their own campaigns, targeted on those issues that made the MAI most politically sensitive within their country. This strategy was particularly successful in France where the release of the document and a critical analysis that framed the MAI as a threat to cultural sovereignty led to the government withdrawing and, therefore, the negotiations collapse (Egan 2001: 88-9; Johnston and Laxer 2003: 58-9). Whilst as with any such process it remains unclear as to whether civil society was chiefly responsible for the MAI’s collapse, certainly the series of relations the anti- campaign developed and the perception of ‘success’ greatly enhanced the politicisation of groups around global trade governance. Through politicisation, a growing array of civil society actors emerged within this policy field, as became clear at Seattle.
Seattle was a turning point for the WTO Secretariat but also for activists. Initially the then WTO Director-General, Mike Moore, tried to distance the WTO from any suggestion that it should do more to ensure economic globalisation could not harm labour rights or environmental protections, by stating: ‘It does not force countries to kill turtles or lower wages or employ children in factories. Put simply, the WTO is not a supranational government – and no one has any intention of making it one’ (WTO Secretariat, 1999). For many environmentalists and activists in the trade union movement, such speeches were patronising and failed to recognise their political demands critical of the WTO beyond a series of simplistic caricatures. Mike Moore’s reference to ‘turtles’ referred to criticism by environmental groups that the
WTO threatened US legislation intended to ban shrimp imports fished with nets harmful to turtle populations. Several shrimp importing WTO Member-states had filed a complaint against the US and the WTO’s dispute settlement panel ruled that the ban violated WTO rules. There has been much debate on the extent to which the ruling actually undermined environmental legislation, the case won primarily on the grounds that the ban did not apply to the US fishing fleet. However, the WTO ruling did threaten national environmental protections, and as such became a symbolic rallying point for environmentalists to critique the WTO as ‘undemocratic’ (cf. Dingwerth, this volume). At the same time, a number of cases of child labour abuses and falling labour standards saw trade unions stand side-by-side with environmentalists – nicknamed ‘turtles and teamsters’ – on the streets of Seattle.
National-level campaigns critical of the WTO were also empowered through having developed increasingly effective relations such that civil society contesting global trade governance had become transnational. Whilst most groups remained wedded to their domestic contexts, their newly developed transnational alliances meant they were able to share critical reports to be used in their own campaigns, as well as sometimes even coordinate strategies so as to target whichever were the most politically sensitive issues within their immediate contexts but as part of a broader campaign critical of the WTO. Seattle was important for two reasons. First, it made civil society visible as an actor – however disunited – apparently capable of affecting global politics despite lacking any of the conventional (i.e. military, economic) means by which power is understood. Second, civil society was shown to be transnational in scope, in respect to its abilities to organise and act, but also in terms of its political demands. This contradicted those above discussed attempts by the WTO Secretariat to treat civil society - and societal concerns, more generally – as something that could be just managed at the national level with Member-states guarding political access to the WTO itself.
Where these relations led to further networks, such as ‘Seattle to Brussels’, this has enabled a series of later campaigns on, for example, attempts to expand the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade-in-Services (GATS) (Strange, 2013a) as well as the more recent case of the US-EU TTIP. None of these campaigns would have been possible in isolation, being dependent as they are on both pre-existing alliances between groups and individuals, but also a common frame of meaning in which global trade governance is understood as politicised rather than something closed and technocratic.
Likewise, civil society groups should not be treated as a homogenous entity but rather a diverse series of conflicting interests. Even where groups share a common critique of, for example, the EU’s Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) initiative, there has been significant struggle between groups along North-South lines (e.g. Del Felice, 2012). Although by far the most visible civil society groups contesting global trade governance are based in the Global North, groups in the Global South have become increasingly active (Del Felice, 2014; see also Trommer, 2011).
Civil society has become increasingly relevant to global trade governance. It exists as both a field of interests relevant to the input stage of policy formation, but also as a normative concept by which to legitimate that form of governance as ‘democratic’ – that is, as responsive to societal concerns. The fact that institutional actors see civil society as important, even where the definition of ‘civil society’ is limited to the constrained ‘NGO’ identity, shows also the extent to which the scope of global trade governance has grown. To cover a growing array of social relations requires legitimacy as well as information. Business associations and lobbying firms can provide much-needed data but to achieve legitimacy it is necessary to be linked to actors visibly representing societal concerns. The dynamics of discourse at play here, though, mean that civil society is not a pre-existing actor ready and waiting for consultation when designing policies. Instead, civil society exists in global trade governance as an emergent actor, formed and re-formed through processes of politicisation in which often diverse political demands become linked through a shared critique of current trade governance. Existing as such, it also means we need to think of civil society and global trade governance not as two separate spheres – an actor interested in a particular policy field, and a series of legal-political institutions – but as inextricably linked through the social practices in which they are both constituted (Strange, 2013b; Hopewell, 2015; 2017). Civil society engaged in global trade governance is therefore symptomatic of the broader social construction of how trade is governed in the global context.
The example of civil society, as argued here, shows us that the terms we use to both study but also conduct global trade governance are not neutral or impassive. Rather, we see the term ‘civil society’ as intricably linked within a political struggle over the shape and form of this political domain. Its descriptive function cannot be isolated from its normative connotations because there is no apolitical consensus as to what the term describes. This relates to the work of those research can be strengthened when scholars acknowledge their ‘imaginative’ component of their task – that is, not research as fiction, but rather its role in cognitively constructing the world (Ní Mhurchú and Shindo, 2016).
As seen with TTIP, the struggle over who or what can act as civil society in global trade governance is far from over. Not only do we see active attempts by, in this case, DG Trade to limit access to this political identity; there is another type of exclusion when the WTO Secretariat has been criticised for allowing business associations to be classed as ‘NGOs’. For those activists to whom the term ‘civil society’ is most commonly applied, their political identity depends on being able to mark out practices and demands to which they are opposed. Contestation around the ‘NGO’ label points to not only a struggle for formal access to the WTO, but also how such debates play as sites for broader contestation over the shape of global trade governance. The question of who or what is ‘civil society’ speaks to a much bigger question about which society is represented within contemporary global trade governance, its legitimacy, as well as what alternatives exist to the present order. Through taking time to consider terms like ‘civil society’, we are better able to understand that politics, as well as rethink its future.
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