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Global Citizens Electric: Global Civil Society, the UN and the Internet |
A CIDA Partnership Branch Workshop on the Global Civil Society
presented at the INET'96 Conference in Montreal, Canada
June, 1996
by Peter Stockdale
© Peter Stockdale 1996
Introductions
Let me first ask workshop members to 1) introduce themselves, stating your names and positions and 2) say why they chose this workshop. I think it is important because probably far more consequential than what I have to say today is all of you meeting and starting discussions that I hope will last for years. That you have chosen this workshop suggests to me that you have common interests in a common future.
Who am I? My name is Peter Stockdale. I am President of the National Capital, that is Ottawa/Hull, Branch of the United Nations Association in Canada. We have an Internet address and web site and I have brought cards so that you can visit us electronically. I am also Co-President of Apertura, a fledgling consulting firm that specialises in community and international development. We have worked on international aboriginal networking, multiculturalism, more recently CIDA as a developmental tool, and this. I have worked as a Citizenship Policy Analyst in the federal department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship. I have written a federal study of success stories in internal communications, which included electronic communications. I am very active in my housing cooperative on environmental issues. Finally, I am a member of Equatoria, a unique organisation that collects books with a multicultural focus for distribution in Canada and abroad.
I received my PhD from McGill University here in Montreal, last year, the day after the Quebec Referendum. The thesis rooted the origins and progress of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in the internationalism of our Nobel Prize winning Prime Minister, Lester Pearson. How many here have heard of Pearson? He originated the idea of peacekeeping during the 1956 Suez crisis. How many here know IDRC? The Centre was founded in 1970 here in Canada as a federal quango with Regional Offices in developing countries. IDRC's mandate is principally to fund developing country researchers to undertake research to discover solutions to their own problems.
Thesis for Today
Let us begin in earnest. In 1970, Lester Pearson said,
"We have learned in our national societies, or I hope we have, that residential suburbs surrounded by ghettos and slums are intolerable and can only lead to bitterness and violence. We should learn that lesson for the world before it is too late. But we will never learn it if our vision is obscured and distorted by national egoism and prejudice; if we are exclusively preoccupied with our domestic problems and interest; if we beggar our neighbours by short-sighted policies designed to enrich ourselves; in short, if we cling to old and traditional concepts of national policy, national interests, national sovereignty long after technological progress has made them almost meaningless ..."
If, as we have learned by now, national sovereignty is no guarantee of security or even adequate protection for national rights in a world of international anarchy, then there must be developed some better method for protecting those rights and guaranteeing security and progress. For this, international co-operation, international organization, and collective action is essential.
If Canada and other countries are afloat in a global sea, then they can only hope preserve their right to their own values, to stay upright in such choppy waters, if they link together and support others with similar values. A state and economy cannot hope to secure its' security and well-being without forging such links. The question is, therefore, how in a orderless, electronic global village can this be achieved, and what will it cost. From my perspective and I suspect from yours, substantial parts of the discovery of common social values, their extraction for use by different societies, and their interweaving together, in short, the creation of a global civil society, can be done on the net. A key part of this nexus is the UN. Therefore, the reform of the UN is critical to the strengthening of global civil society.
What I would like to do today is:
1) provide for you an optic through which to view the issue of global civil society and describe my mental voyage in the discovery of this optic,
2) comment on how I see the information revolution affecting UN Reform.
3) indicate the kind of potentially relatively free goods of social values that Southerners might extract electronically for the bricks and mortar of global civil society, and
4) after my presentation, ask you to make your general comments, ask what other electronic opportunities you have identified yourselves, and pose several questions for discussion. I will NOT define global civil society.
IDRC and Social Values in the Global Village
Let me mention the name of a second Canadian, Marshall McLuhan, who gave us the notion of the global village. My comments today will be rooted in the ideas of Messrs McLuhan and Pearson as we discuss global civil society and its relation to the UN and the Internet. I believe we are talking about this subject today because a global movement is taking shape to make social values stick. This movement arises at a time when most processes of globalisation e.g. the market, are acting as universal solvents of social values. If you wish, you many see global civil society as an antidote to many of these forces. But I do not see it as necessarily oppositional. In either case, if we listen to the advice of Lester Pearson then, the only sure way to make those values stick is through international consensus and international institutions. The obvious way to do that today is through international conventions. But more and more, international consensus can be built on the net. And this is where you come in.
Let me describe part of my mental journey to this optic. Many of you may not know the role that IDRC played in getting Southern researchers into information systems and computer conferencing. I will review this briefly so you can see where my discourse is leading.
IDRC was created by act of Parliament in October 1970 with troops on the streets during a separatist kidnapping. The glue of OUR civil society seemed to be coming unstuck. The first Chairman of IDRC was Lester Pearson, and this was no accident. It was imbued with a spirit of international partnership, North- South, and East-West. Partnership was part of the bedrock of Pearson's thinking. Immediately after leaving the Prime Ministership he wrote the 1969 World Bank Report Partners in Development. Under the influence of Maurice Strong, one aspect of that partnership as realised in the IDRC emphasised the use of modern electronic communications and computers. To that end, John Woolston became the Director of Information Sciences. The software programmes ISIS, and MINISIS that have been used in many southern and international organisations were created with IDRC funding. Another aspect of IDRC's activities, was that it developed extensive international & southern networks of researchers, especially as a result of its fostering of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). By so doing, information systems were built up in the South. Part of the proof that IDRC is an international partnership is that its Board is international. A Swedish member of the Board of Governors, Carl Göran-Hedén, strongly promoted computer conferencing in the early 1980s. These activities funded by IDRC, and others which I hope you will tell me about, built electronic networks in the South.
UN Reform
I see the Internet not as a means to directly affect the reform of the UN, as such, but a means of circumventing it. Let me explain. The UN contains 186 states. It is financially bankrupt and often structurally static, but provides an intellectual, and in some cases a practical nexus through which global civil society can form. As the attempted reform of the Security Council has shown, reform of any accreted UN institution appears nearly impossible. There are, however, useful parts of existing parts of the UN apparatus. In general, though, we have seen, therefore, the piling up of new UN organisations in an attempt to escape the miasma of the existing ones. Perhaps this is a good thing, and may provide an implicit hint to us here wishing to reform the UN via the net. McLuhan noted, "No new idea ever starts from within a big operation. It must assail the organisation from outside, through some small but competing organisation."
The International Criminal Court is already a force for the defence of human rights world-wide, even though it does not yet exist. Why? In part because the Court is already well-webbed, The example of the International Criminal Court suggests that UN reform may not require the necessary agreement of the UN structure as such. The formation of cyber-reality is proceeding at such a pace that the UN apparatus may well find itself being overwhelmed by the cyber-global civil society. If you can represent yourself as any persona credibly on the Net; as a male, female, black, Asian, young or senior citizen, even automate a personality, then UN structures look much less forbidding. The crafting of consensus thus becomes possible if not very problematic, and certainly different from the manufacturing of consent that Noam Chomsky has written of. UN reform ratification procedures may well become institutional dinosaurs and just as dead. If we are as confident in the electric as McLuhan we would say as he did, "INFORMATION is the crucial commodity, ... solid products are merely incidental to information movement."
If we want to reform the UN and build global civil society via the Net, what means do we use. Is consensus building the key? If so, does this mean private discussion groups? Electronic voting? Listservs? This question is one I want to return to during the discussion after. UNDP's Sustainable Development Network may prove one such means. Coming out of UNCED, National SDNs within the UNDP SDN have been set up in a score of developing countries to promote sustainable development via electronic communication. In effect, states as yet unplugged now have at least one node E-mail and computer conferencing capable. Set up costs have generally been in the order of $100-125,000. That this initiative emerged from the Rio Summit means that the first steps taken in such countries are environment and equity focused. This is salutary from the point of view of building global civil society in the South. The problem is that, like in the North, one is presented with the question of how to make them pay for themselves. The experience of the SDN is that such a transition will take at least 3-5 years.
Often, if NGOs are involved, as in the SDN in Pakistan, they are rarely business-minded and indeed may see themselves as contrary to its aims. They are perceived so by business. Consequently, those most interested in forging global civil society may be the least prepared to make it self-sustaining. We have seen this very same problem in the United Nations Association in Canada. Whereas in the past much of our support came from the government, now that the Canadian state is pulling out of such activities, we find ourselves wallowing, trying to overcome our dependency on the state, without trying to compromise our values.
There are many problems with UN organisations. But in the context of constructing a global civil society relative to an electronic network, one key problem is that the Internet is not constructed in any meaningful way as a sovereign state to sovereign state interchange, in other words, in the same way as the UN is. Truly, the Net reflects the general shift away from the nation-state that rising estates like NGOs and the Media do. However, the Internet is even more based on the individual than the media and NGOs. In this respect, it represents a closer approximation to the UN Charter which begins with "We the peoples of the United Nations." Yet UN Organisations are state based, even the Sustainable Development Network. There is, therefore, no fundamentally legitimate way for the Net to relate to the central organs of the UN, although it might be recognised as an organisation, say at ECOSOC. Nevertheless, like the media and NGOs it does help push the UN in the direction of "We the peoples" and a more direct form of democratic expression than the current system. Naturally, however, there are tremendous inequalities beyond North and South. Yet, in some respects, the chasm between North and South is not so deep as in past technological revolutions.
I have seen Southern NGOs and universities far more "plugged in" with web pages and e-mail addresses than their Northern counterparts. Such an occurrence has been rare in previous technological leaps, which have more typically reproduced the current North-South divide in other forms. Packet radio and satellite transmission can overcome other infrastructure difficulties. However, countries with good information superhighways have a clear comparative advantage. Thus, even as the Net facilitates democratic expression the active members of the burgeoning global civil society on the Net are massively Northerners and only one quarter are franchised. And currently to be globally active largely requires a knowledge of English. Nevertheless, the gap may not be as absolute as it was. The South is not so South as it was, say in 1960. Further, the current threshold of participation in the communicative aspect of the information revolution is much less high than the past, unlike the era when computers and internet access required millions of dollars of investment at each site.
Global Social Values and the Commodification of Information
In the 1980s, large swaths of the First, Second and Third World melted into one world economy. Issues like the environment, and women in development caused people to think of development, not as a discrete series of inputs but part of larger, interconnected processes. Rethinking the state was no longer the province of the lunatic left or right. Re-awakening civil society and empowering stakeholders became a lingua franca inside and outside development circles. Further, McLuhan's electronic global village became a reality. As the Berlin Wall fell, the disciplinary divisions in the language and method of science crashed down. National walls were assailed, not just by the cannons of the market, but the pressing human needs of refugees fleeing civil disorder. We live in a world in which such barriers have less meaning than the past. Consequently, the pursuit of an objective cannot be made without attention to the broader context in which any organisation is located, including the UN. This Pearson understood. So did Marshall McLuhan, who said, "the tendency of the electric media is to create a kind of interdependence among all the institutions of society." The Internet helps create part of that larger context.
Economically speaking, the 1980s saw the globalisation of the market, capital, production, and to a lesser extent, labour. From a Marxist perspective, global capitalism expanded and deepened both rapidly and dramatically. However, a simple Marxist perspective omits the rapid expansion of civil society during this period. Professional associations and NGOs have grown enormously, in both number and stature, and information systems and the number of people attached to them have mushroomed geometrically. Therefore, we are presented not simply with capitalists vs. workers nor the information rich vs. the information poor but a constellation of different actors with different roles and abilities.
A result of these globalisation processes is the partial commodification of information. However, it is partial, and this provides considerable opportunities. I mentioned at the beginning of the talk about the availability of relatively free social goods for use by Southerners. To my mind, one way that UN reform and global civil society can be effected is through the exchange of social practices. We have been adapting each others' social and political values for our own use for centuries, by adopting the federal structures of the native Indian Iroquois confederacy, building on the democracy of ancient Athens, by incorporating the parliamentary practices of Westminster. The UN and the Internet are modern examples. I believe that the Internet will prove to be the most significant tool for the location, mining and exchange of social practices the world has known. Search engines give the user the capacity to scan vast databases and networks with ease. Everyone here knows about the rapidity with which a global dialogue on any given issue now forms on the Net. The Net also provides the promise of the meshing of global civil society by the exchange of social values. The North has many free social practices which Southerners can mine with impunity, thus legitimating and adding to their own social practices, thus helping weave a global raft of values that might survive rough global storms. Northern NGOs and states are a vast storehouse that is fairly accessible. Let me give you an idea of what I mean within the Canadian context which you can apply elsewhere.
Thus far, foreigners have adapted Canadian policies to their conditions on an ad hoc basis. For example, the Danes have adapted our tough anti-smoking legislation to their needs. I think legal codes are just part of an iceberg of Canadian values that could be extracted electronically by Southerners. Another example, the Canadian literacy movement is very strong, receiving the support of voluntary groups of all political stripes. As a social practice to build global civil society and as a development activity, literacy promotion is a natural. Last example, our Royal Commission on Non-Reproductive Technology established new ground rules for scientific experimentation and gene therapy to be consistent with the dignity of the person and the non-commercialisation of the body. And there are many others to choose from, if you are interested.
Conclusion
So in review, I have posited with the aid of Messrs. Pearson and McLuhan that global civil society is an antidote to many of the more pernicious effects of globalisation that we have been buffeted by of late. The UN is a key nexus through which to forge that global civil society, and the Net, like NGOs and the media, may provide a means to overcome the more ossified state-based aspects of the UN. The vital means of that overcoming and the strengthening of global civil society may be the cyber-reality of the Net, its potential for consensus-building and its vast storehouses of social values that can be found world-wide with relative ease. Southerners especially have the opportunity at this juncture in world history to mine by electronic means at relatively low cost those social values, and build rafts of social practices that will reform the UN, and create a working global and local civil society that will not overturn even in the heaviest global seas.
Let me end with a little magic metaphor. [GET PUTTY] This may look like scented play putty, please pass this around and back to me, but it is, in fact, the social values of a given society. The lemon one is for Morocco, the orange for Swaziland. Though people from the Saguenay in Quebec may resent it, the blueberry one is for Canada, and the mint one is for Pakistan. [TAKE OUT MARBLES] These may look like marbles, but they are in fact national states. I know they are states because a visiting professor to McGill told me so during a lecture. And he has a best-selling book on the Canadian political process. This may look like a UN flag but will become the choppy ocean of globalisation that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk. [MERGE PUTTY] Now if I link the social values of these given societies together, I get an interlocking system that weaves. [PUT IN MARBLES] If I embed the national states into their social values and then place them in these choppy seas we see that despite the waves they tend to stay together. Both the states and their social values largely remain together. [TAKE OUT MARBLES] But if I tear the states from this interlocked raft of social values, remove them one from the other, make them atoms, [FLIP] they founder in the very same ocean.
