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International Forum >> The Democracy Forum for East Asia>> "Civil Society, Political Parties, and the State:
Balancing Democratic Development in Asia"
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Introduction
Session I: Relations between the State and Civil Society Session II: Relations Between Political Parties and Civil Society Session III: Domestic and International Linkages of Civil Society Session IV: Directions for Reform Agenda Participants |
Session I: Relations between the State and Civil Society Chair: Larry Diamond, NED The first session focused on relations between state agencies and civil society actors in Asia and, in particular, on whether NGO demands in some countries are overwhelming the capacity of governments to respond. Moderator Larry Diamond noted that there was growing concern in some circles, particularly among international donors, that NGOs instinctively take a critical stance vis-à-vis the state and that NGOs often pursue their goals so aggressively that they risk alienating both government officials and citizens. Other critics argue that NGOs undervalue business groups, he said. "Is there validity to these criticisms?" Mr. Diamond asked participants. "What kind of balance should there be?" "When government institutions fail or do not work, citizens have a right to take direct action," replied Henedina Razon-Abad, a Filipina academic who is also active in the nongovernmental sector. She supported a critical role for NGOs to ensure that governments respond to the needs of the poor. In the Philippines, she said, elections are still based on patronage and coercion, not on policy differences. Despite all the talk about "democracy and good governance," at the end of the day politics is still about power, Ms. Razon-Abad said. She challenged her fellow NGO leaders to remain commited to social change, rooted in communities of the poor, and dedicated to "the habit of truth." Relations between the state and civil society were strongly confrontational in Korea before 1987, according to Shin Chul-Young, secretary general of Korea's Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice. Civil society leaders were harassed and imprisoned, and NGOs obviously received no support from the state. Following Korea's democratization in 1987, NGO-government relations entered a second, more productive period. Mr. Shin's own group was founded in 1989 to monitor government economic and social policies. And since the inaugurations of presidents Kim Young Sam in 1993 and Kim Dae Jung in 1998, the situation has improved more noticeably. The Korean government now supports NGOs financially, considers seriously their policy proposals, and on occasion even enacts these into law. Even though this governmental support, provided in accordance with a newly enacted law, is of great importance, some of the key NGOs, including the Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice and the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, have not accepted this support because their leaders fear it will limit their autonomy. Of course, the government has not met all the demands of NGOs, Mr. Shin said. And while NGO leaders are pleased to have secured funding, few want to be totally dependent on government financing. Many Korean NGOs are now pressing for reforms that would democratize political parties, for example, but it is difficult to imagine how groups dependent on government support can simultaneously advocate changes that would upset the existing order, he said. Mr. Shin also expressed concern about the current low levels of citizen participation in civil associations. "We want more grassroots involvement so our movement will grow," he concluded. Kek Galabru, who directs a human-rights advocacy organization in Cambodia, said, "We have a different problem-infiltration," in which the ruling party sets up its own parallel NGO sector, resulting in confusion among citizens (and often among outside donors) about the identities and affiliations of these organizations. Juree Vichit-Vadakan, a Thai participant, agreed with Ms. Razon-Abad about the prospects of NGO leaders being coopted. "Once you go into government, you are taking sides," she noted. Nonetheless, "We do not want total and permanent confrontation," Ms. Vichit-Vadakan added. "We believe cooperation is possible on some issues." James Klein, the Bangkok-based representative of the Asia Foundation, noted that a common assumption among political reformers in the late 1980s was that "the more NGOs, the better." We now know that each country has a different environment, Mr. Klein said. In Thailand, for example, the government supports many NGOs, including some that criticize the government itself. In Malaysia, by contrast, the government prohibits NGOs from being involved in politics. Mr. Klein thus recommended that conference participants keep the laws and practices of specific countries in mind as they consider general recommendations for improving relations between civil society and the state. "I think we need to get away from this concept of 'civil society and the state' altogether," Marvic Leonen of the Philippines replied. "I can define the constituency of my organization, but to me 'civil society' is just an academic concept." Many so-called Filipino NGOs are in fact part of local government councils or are closely related to the state in other ways. Other civil society NGOs are funded by business interests or the government. There is thus no clear dividing line between NGOs and the state, Mr. Leonen concluded. Euiyoung Kim returned to the issue of how critical NGOs need to be vis-à-vis governments. In Korea, he said, some NGOs have shifted from a position of direct opposition to a more nuanced position in which they advocate "state reform." Among the reasons for this shift, Mr. Kim said, are the fact that President Kim Dae Jung is seen as a genuine reformer whose minority government not only needs NGO allies but has helped NGOs through tax exemptions, postal discounts, and other policies. Many NGOs worked with the government to fight unemployment following the recent economic crisis, and this experience also appears to have made some groups less confrontational, Mr. Kim suggested. But Sook-Jong Lee, a Korean scholar who studies civil society in Korea and Japan, said that the main reason why Korean NGOs have assumed quasi-party functions is because political parties are not performing their traditional roles of articulating issues and aggregating voters. "The raison d'être of Korean NGOs is to check the government and to demand transparency," Ms. Lee insisted. Guillermo Luz, the director of a Filipino business association, said "I too have problems with the definition of 'civil society.'" He complained that in his country, a so-called People's Consultative Assembly with no real membership is treated as a major player by the news media, while politicians set up their own supposedly nonpartisan NGOs. "I would like to see more transparency on the part of NGOs," Mr. Luz said. Board members of his Makati Business Club must resign when they assume government offices, for example, and his former colleagues who are now government ministers work hard to fulfill their new responsibilities despite old allegiances in the private sector. Mr. Luz thus recommended that NGOs adopt similar practices. Suteera Thomson Vichitranonda, the director of a Thai women's group, acknowledged the difficulty of precisely answering the question, "Whom do NGOs represent?" Her organization, which recently changed its name to the "Women and the Constitution Network," concentrates on gender issues, including legal discrimination and the sex industry. But she acknowledged that other groups work on similar issues and thus their constituencies probably overlap. Fan Yun, a Taiwanese scholar and a board member of a women's NGO, said there is no single answer to the question of what is the most appropriate relationship between state and civil society. Social service organizations may need to cooperate with and to accept money from the state, she said, but for advocacy groups, "it is dangerous to get involved with the state." Advocacy groups must remain commited to their policy goals, but "the primary goal of the government is to get reelected," Ms. Fan noted. "We seem to take it for granted in this discussion that the state has a constituency," Lao Mong Hay, the director of a Cambodian NGO, noted. "But I recall the French king who said 'L'état, c'est moi!' In places like Burma and Cambodia, the state does not have a constituency." Neither the French colonialists nor the more recent communist regime permitted the development of a civil society independent of government, Mr. Lao said. Even today the Cambodian state cannot guarantee such basic conditions of democracy as free and fair elections. But when civil society objects, "the government accuses us of confrontation," Mr. Lao asserted. He thus agreed with Mr. Klein's recommendation that efforts to establish an appropriate relationship between civil society and the state consider not only government institutions and political culture but also the social and historical backgrounds of specific countries. The current government in Taiwan is much more friendly toward NGOs, Taymin Liu replied. Of course, the current ruling party, the DPP, was itself an NGO in the 1980s and it has remained faithful to its roots, she added. But with approximately 25,000 NGOs active in Taiwan today, the primary problem for NGOs is not government hostility but finding ways to differentiate themselves and to garner adequate financial support. One way many NGOs do this, she said, is by bidding for government contracts to perform social-service projects that include administrative overhead for the service provider. Cho Hee-Yeon, a Korean professor of sociology and an NGO leader, applauded the NGO renaissance in Korea in the past twenty years. But he was concerned by what he called the attempt by political parties "to absorb civil-society resources." Mr. Cho agreed that NGOs should play an active role in developing policy alternatives, but he did not want to see NGOs support political parties or assume the representational role that parties play. One of the signal events in the maturation of Korea's NGO sector was the election blacklist campaign of 2000, an NGO initiative that developed a long list of parliamentary candidates who were deemed corrupt or antireform. According to Shin Chul-Young of the Citizen's Coalition for Economic Justice, which did not join the campaign because they regarded it as illegal, the campaign was ultimately supported by as much as 80 percent of the Korean people and by many news media outlets. More importantly, the great majority of candidates on the blacklist were defeated in the election. The blacklist campaign thus marked the emergence of a strong and self-confident political NGO sector. But Korean NGOs have also shown that they can cooperate with the government, Mr. Shin added. He cited as one example Korea's Tripartite Commission, which was established to respond to the Asian economic crisis in 1998 and which consists formally of representatives of business, labor, and the state. In fact, Mr. Shin said, civil society representatives also participate in the commission's deliberations on such contentious issues as the forty-hour workweek. Peter Manikas, a U.S. participant with experience in political party development, noted that in the United States there are many groups that represent smaller economic interests, such as regional farm workers, or unpopular political causes, such as prison reform. Such groups may put pressure on political parties, Mr. Manikas said, but they almost never act like political parties. Reformers who encourage civil society groups in East Asia to behave more like political parties are perhaps not being entirely fair to NGOs and parties alike, Mr. Manikas suggested. Sandra Moniaga, director of an Indonesian NGO that works with indigenous peoples and on environmental issues, said that her country appeared to lag behind several other countries represented at the conference in terms of democratic development. This condition affected civil society as well, she said, as is reflected in a proliferation of terms used to describe various types of organizations, ranging from PONGOs (political party NGOs) to MINGOs (military NGOs) to CONGOs (company NGOs). Some NGOs have a clear constituency, Ms. Moniaga said, but others may consist of elite academics, for example, with no direct links to the grassroots. Marc Plattner said that it is crucial to look at the nature of the state in assessing the role of civil society. In a nondemocratic state, NGOs can claim to represent the interests of all the people. Once a democratic state is established, however, it presumably will have legitimate authority to tax and to make other laws. Interest groups may then arise within civil society that represent different and often competing sectors of society (business and labor, for example) or different sides of contentious issues (such as abortion, gun control, the death penalty). In such societies we should thus view civil society in a broad sense and not limit it to the NGO sector, Mr. Plattner suggested. Cheng-Hsiou Lin, a former NGO leader now serving in the Taipei city government, advised NGO representatives to "be smart-understand and use the government." By this he meant that NGO representatives need to learn how government works and how it may be influenced. But NGOs also need to remain critical: "If you want to bite the government, keep your teeth." And he encouraged them to decentralize their funding so as not to become too dependent on a single source. Ms. Razon-Abad agreed with Mr. Plattner that there is more to civil society than just interest groups. But she argued that there should be a preference for groups that normally do not get heard. She also said that NGOs that work on behalf of so-called marginalized constituencies "should start creating mechanisms of accountability." It is not enough to claim to represent the poor, for example; one must be able to show that money received on behalf of the poor was actually spent to improve their condition, she said. |
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