What is civil society

I spend some of my time considering the state of civil society in Belarus, as a measure of the political and social health of the country.  Is it flourishing?  Does it have “space” to grow?  Is the government responding to the concerns raised by civil society?

I’m struck by how elusive it is to define the term civil society. While diplomats and academics use the term quite a lot, we don’t always agree on what it covers. In diplomacy, clarity of meaning matters. It’s no good negotiating texts of agreements, if the parties to the agreement don’t understand the words or phrases being used.

But sometimes there are ideas or concepts that are complicated to explain, so we use a short hand term.  Civil society is probably one of those terms.

Samuel Johnson would think it referred to a group of people being polite to one another (“civil = courteous and polite”, and “society = being in the company of other people”).  But he lived before sociology, or the “study of human society”, had even been invented.

Over time, “society” has come to mean the aggregation, or sum, of people living together in a community.  “Civil” came from the French language, and before that Latin.  It means relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns.  In Roman times, civil was a way of distinguishing ordinary people from others, usually those in the Roman army (this sense of the word came to be covered by “civilian”).

The idea of division changed over time, and it seems, different languages developed different usages.  In English, in medieval times, civil came to differentiate between those who worked in the state, and those who worked in the Church.  (This is why I am a “civil servant” – I serve a civil or “temporal” power, as opposed to a religious or spiritual power.)

“Civil society” is a more recent idea.  Hegel seems to have been the first to use the term to differentiate between society and “the state”.  His ideas influenced many others including Marx, but no one definition of what is civil society clearly emerged.  There is a common theme that civil society isn’t the government or state structures.  But that’s where agreement seems to end.

The term is used regularly now, largely as a result of the challenges of the nation state from globalisation and the rapid exchange of information via the internet.  But defining still remains a problem.  Even the great minds of the World Bank have come up with a definition that is long and not especially illuminating.

In Russian «гражданское общество» («грамадзянская супольнасць» in Belarusian) usually means all non-state organisations that are pursuing interests of independent groups or individuals within a society.

I think the problem of definition stems from the inherent idea of what is civil society.  It will vary widely according to circumstance and the state or country within which it exists.  The nature and interests of civil society in Darfur, a sparsely populated, semi-desert region where the people survive on subsistence agriculture, is very different from the civil society in post-industrial, temperate densely populated Britain.  But the common theme is that the civil society is not of the state or its organs.

While defining what constitutes civil society varies from place to place, its health is important.  A state that nurtures and encourages the development of the civil society within its borders, will be more responsive to the needs, aspirations and expression of its citizens.

Civil society can, and frequently does, irritate politicians and policy makers.  But that’s its role – to represent the views and interests of groups within society on many issues that can’t simply be decided by a central government.

In Britain, civil society organisations and the media question constantly the decisions and policies of government.  Currently, organisations are lobbying the government over such issues as plans to construct a new high-speed rail link between London and North-West England, the introduction of a tax on financial transactions, and to reduce overall level of taxes.

Such is the development of civil society in Britain, that the government wants to harness the energy of civil society organisations, so they are more involved in the running of public services.  For what the state can’t provide, maybe civil society organisations can fill the gap.

That’s why I and my colleagues take a close look at the health of civil society in Belarus and in other countries around the world.