LIBRI DI VALENTINA PAZÉ

Global Civil Society. Shadows and Light - This essay comes in two sections. First, the various definitions of « global civil society » found in the contemporary debate are examined, as well as some theories thereby inspired. In its most widespread meaning, the expression « global civil society » designates a heterogeneous set of movements and associations, transnationally organized, that are held to represent the dawning of a « global public sphere ». The second section of the essay discusses some empirical cases regarding the actors of global civil society: the coloured revolutions in eastern Europe, the no-global demonstrations in Seattle and Genoa, the social and humanitarian interventions of international NGOs. Extremely diversified results can be registered: spontaneous groups and organisations with clear-cut management styles, associations grounded on voluntary or professional work, protest movements and NGOs advising the WTO or the EU. Governance-focused theories look with increasing interest at these actors, since they seem able to reduce the legitimacy deficit that affect international institutions. The author expresses some critical considerations on this issue, stressing the risk that subaltern cooptation at the service of politics might prevail in the associations of civil society.

The essay goes throug Bobbio’s famous book twenty years later it was first published. The six «unfulfilled promises of democracy» (individual’s sovereignity, primacy of political representation over representation of interests. defeat of oligarchies and hidden power, mutiplying of self-government areas, education of citizens) are analyzed at the light of a crucial question: was it good or bad that democracy did not fulfill it promises? Rousseau, Bentham, John Stuart Mill’s ideals, which Bobbio takes as a point of reference to reflection on contemporary democracy’s disfunction, may still be shared by XXIst century democrats? The answer is not a simple one. Some promises could not possibly be kept and consequently they cannot be included in the normative model of democracy for our times. Other ones, such as those linked to the defeat of hidden power and money’s oligarchies, can not be divided from a conception of democracy like the one put forward by Bobbio, «minimal» but demanding at the same time.

The essay is made of two parts. The first criticizes the ethnical and nationalist interpretations of cultural community present in contemporary debate. To this end the Author introduces the notion of Çimagined communityÈ put forward by Benedict Anderson suggesting, with A. Appadurai, to delink it from the nation. In the globalization era, in fact, the whole world or at least large parts of it, can be thought of as an Çimagined communityÈ. The second part analyzes the paradoxidal survival and proliferation of Çlocal imagined communitiesÈ, next to global ones, a fact explained recurring to the three types of arguments based on the concepts of security, recognition, freedom.