News and Civil Society

The Contested Space of Civil Society in UK Media

Jen Birks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317087632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

Civil Society has not been more relevant as a concept and a practice since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Global events from Tahir Square to Wall St have brought a new relevance and urgency to questions about the boundaries of legitimate dissent and public order policing, the meaning of tolerance in the context of conflicting rights claims, and how we can agree on the shared values of the 'good society'. This timely book examines the representation of civil society in news media, exploring the popular understanding of this contested space in relation to conflicting legitimating frames: as the neo-liberal Big Society, activist political participation, or postmodern apolitical tolerance. With close reference to prominent news stories, including the UK state visit of Pope Benedict XVI, anti-austerity protests and industrial action, police infiltration of the environmental movement, and the Occupy camp at St Paul's Cathedral in London, News and Civil Society scrutinises different facets of contemporary civil society, civility and civic virtue. A cross-disciplinary engagement with questions of national identity and pluralism, civil liberties and dissent, power and accountability, this book will appeal to those with interests in media, journalism, sociology, citizenship and political studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Civil society is a term that has enjoyed periodic renaissance, often at times of significant social change. John Keane published his key defining text (in two volumes) in 1988, on the cusp of the revolutions in Eastern Europe that precipitated the fall of Communism. Mary Kaldor wrote her examination of Global Civil Society as “an answer to war” (2003) in the aftermath of 9/11. Following the events of Tahir Square and the ‘Arab Spring’, the Indignados of the Spanish 15M movement, and the global Occupy movement, and also the anti-austerity riots in Greece and elsewhere, theorists such as Hardt and Negri (2011), Badiou (2012), and Castells (2012) have already put forward their analyses. But Keane (1998) asserted that his interest in the topic was motivated by a concern for how the concept could be useful in mature democracies, not only emerging ones.

And so to less dramatic beginnings. During campaigning for the 2010 UK general election, the Liberal Democrats included civil liberties in their manifesto, whilst the Conservative Party launched their Big Society idea. The two seemed to reflect different understandings of civil society – the first about the freedom to dissent and the power to hold politicians to account, and the second about the responsibility of communities for their own welfare. After the coalition was formed between the two parties, the Liberal Democrat leader tried to argue that there was no ideological difference:

What I’m discovering – I’m sure the Prime Minister will feel the same – is that we’ve been using different words for a long time and actually mean the same thing. ‘Liberalism’: ’Big Society’. ‘Empowerment’: ‘Responsibility’. It means the same thing. (Nick Clegg, speaking at Big Society launch, 18 May 2010¹)

Together the two aspects recalled Blair’s ‘rights and responsibilities’ discourse, inspired by the ‘new’ or ‘responsive’ communitarianism of Amitai Eztioni, which seeks to instil civic virtue through social expectation rather than democratic agreement. In any case, the public response to austerity measures that were in neither manifesto has not been to pitch in to the space vacated by the retreating state, by volunteering to keep the library open or running the local school, but to strike, march, protest and occupy.

Meanwhile, among the few concrete examples of autonomous organisations providing public services, the Catholic Church has faced legal challenges to its public exercise of religious values. Equality legislation that required adoption agencies to consider same-sex couples as prospective parents resulted in the closure of Catholic agencies that could not countenance going against the teaching of the church. The precise definition of tolerance – as the central value of civil society – has thus been contested over the ground of identity politics, and especially the competing rights claims of religious and LGBT groups. This prompts questions about how we distinguish between public and private, and how we understand the role of values in democracy in general and contested politics in particular, including the notion that political debate is in itself uncivil due to this often fierce contestation.

Academic theorising offers a range of definitions, normative models, and determinations of legitimacy, some of which filter through to some extent into public consciousness, especially through the news media. So, of interest here is how the models of civil society promoted by political leaders and other figures of authority are reproduced, debated, and challenged, with particular attention to the sources of dissent from civil society itself.

Research questions

This book is, centrally, an enquiry into the popular definition of civil society in news reporting, and in particular how legitimacy is determined. This includes the various boundaries of inclusion and exclusion (of associations and activities) between the realm of civil society and the business of the political system and the market, and the paths of influence between them. It also encompasses the distinctions drawn between public and private, and how civil society straddles the two realms; for instance to bring privately experienced problems to public attention, to argue for private interests as related to the public interest, to argue that the private is political.

The principal aim of exploring these definitions is to examine the associated criteria of legitimacy across various legitimating structures in legal, moral, political, social and cultural terms. The research will explore the extent to which news media reporting on civil society reflects the contested nature of the concept, and whether some normative understandings of civil society are excluded or delegitimised.

Structure of the book

The various dimensions of legitimacy in civil society in the different normative models will be set out in the next chapter, starting with definitions and boundaries, and then outlining the ways in which civil society is theorised under four headings that correspond with the four analytical chapters.

The first of these is ‘the good society’ – the values that are promoted or appealed to as defining a shared notion of the common good, and that underpin publicly-minded social and political participation. These values are understood to originate in various different sources, including traditional moral authority (such as the church), national attachments and sentiments, democratically-agreed statutes (such as human rights), and personal conscience. Although virtues and vices are clearly distinguished, and most would agree on virtues in the abstract (kindness, honesty, courage, fortitude), with a few exceptions (greed is good, equality is disincentivising), there is far less agreement on their interpretation and application. For instance, an appeal to fairness will rarely straightforwardly resolve a dispute, simply because the parties will have a different interpretation of what is fair.

We are not given to offering reasons for our values, which are often inherited or learned and held intuitively, but in as far as this is possible at all, it comes down to different conceptions of liberty, and in particular, an emphasis on negative or positive liberties as most defining the human condition. Chapter 4 therefore analyses the news-framing of various claims that locate civic virtue or moral sentiment in either religious instruction or individual pursuit of utility (both claiming freedom from state regulation of virtue) and in democratically agreed standards of justice (enforced via state regulation).

Secondly, these freedoms, rights and responsibilities are encoded into law, including that which circumscribes legitimate behaviour and action in civil society. Repertoires of dissent and protest are legally constrained and delegitimised in various ways, especially ‘disorder’ and ‘violence’, including property damage and behaviour that could be perceived as unruly or threatening. The activities of trade unions are also subject to industrial law, and civil action is increasingly used to end, prevent or deter action such as occupation. Public order policing, however, once framed as uncontroversially legitimate as the force of law and order against destabilising elements, is increasingly subject to scrutiny, not least in the wake of the death of Ian Tomlinson at the 2009 G20 protest in London. However, the most controversial ground in the policing of protest is the increasing use of surveillance to monitor peaceful protest. Chapter 5 explores the ways in which the boundaries between legitimate protest and legitimate public order policing are represented, including the use of civil disobedience as a moral justification for law-breaking.

Thirdly, in as far as civil society is understood to have a political role, the legitimacy of organisations, associations and movements is judged in terms of both their internal democracy and their external communication. The decision-making structures within civil society vary, with trade unions obliged to reproduce the mechanisms of representative democracy, and more peripheral movements challenging the legitimacy of that model and experimenting with radical forms of direct, participatory and deliberative democracy. Whilst communicative legitimacy is most commonly defined in terms of rational argumentation and deliberation, the ways in which that is understood in practical terms, in relation to advocacy, rhetoric, values, and interests, is more complex and contradictory. For those who see the deliberative public sphere as an unattainable ideal, the imperative is to find forms of communication that can cut through the ubiquitous commercial messages of the screen age, requiring more spectacular and performative strategies. Chapter 6 addresses the inconsistent and strategic invocation of these legitimating criteria, especially as regards the connection between the private and public spheres.

Finally, legitimacy is accorded by the broader society in the form of public opinion, and judged in relation to mainstream norms and expectations. Judgements are attributed to the public, not only on the legal and political legitimacy discussed in previous chapters, but also on participants’ acceptability as individuals in relation to an expected level of social conformity, including personal appearance, manners, and fulfilment of social duties. Individuals’ personal legitimacy is also judged on the basis of their political sincerity and emotional authenticity. Chapter 7, then, examines the construction of public opinion via polls, vox pop interviews with bystanders, letters to the editor, and in unsubstantiated claims about the public, analyses the legitimacy of emotion in personal and political terms, and interrogates the extent to which public space is understood as social rather than a political arena.

1 Available from: http://www.dpm.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/news/pm-and-deputy-pm%E2%80%99s-speeches-big-society-launch.

Chapter 2
Theorising Legitimacy in Civil Society and the Media

Civil society is a normative project; a shared aspiration; a set of liberties, principles, and practices; and a site variously of self-interested exchange, altruistic cooperation, rational deliberation, radical dissent and symbolic performance. It implies a range of conflicting values and criteria of legitimacy that are circulated, reinforced and contested in news media. This chapter will set out the four themes addressed in the book: the good society, dissent and civil rights, democratic participation, and civility and offence, and will explore the debates around the legal, moral, political, and social legitimacy of civil society according to different models of society. The following chapters will then examine the range of and comparative emphasis on these understandings in coverage of key news stories about civil society organisations, associations, and movements. First the lines of dispute around the definition of the concept will be outlined.

Defining civil society

The one point of agreement within the literature on civil society is that there is no agreement on a definition of civil society. All that could be universally agreed is perhaps the autonomous realm between private life and system(s) of power, which is rather limited in its descriptive power and throws up more questions than answers. If it is not private in terms of the domestic sphere, is it public? How is systemic power defined – as the state or the market, or both? What is the role of civil society, and what form does it take?

In descriptive terms, civil society is generally taken to mean social, voluntary, and political associations, although different models place emphasis on certain of those specific categories of association, and exclude others. To complicate matters further, the term is also used more broadly to refer to the moral/ethical aspirations of society (the ‘good’) and accepted mechanisms for reaching agreement (institutions and procedures, including the public sphere). These aspects are often distinguished as separate, but are also interrelated.

Civil society is related to citizenship, especially in terms of the cultivation of civility or civic virtues such as trust, open-mindedness and cooperation. However, citizenship refers to individuals’ relationship with the state, whilst civil society includes the agency of groups, associations and even, for some, corporations (Perez-Diaz 1995, Whitehouse 2005). Furthermore, citizenship includes individuals’ duties to the state in return for the rights conferred by membership of the nation-state (such as payment of taxes, abiding by the rule of law, and to some extent voting), whilst civil society doesn’t (necessarily) have such an instrumental relationship to the state, and needn’t involve political participation in this formal sense. In fact, civil society is such a highly contested term that there is no agreement on whether it is a political entity at all, whether it makes demands on the state or defends against them, what values it needs or produces, and in short how its legitimacy is defined.

Models of civil society

The various different ways of understanding civil society have been most clearly delineated by Mary Kaldor (2003), who outlined five models of civil society, all “both normative and descriptive” (2003: 11), though the ‘real world’ description may not live up to the normative ideal. Two are historical versions: societas civilis and Bürgerliche Gesellschaft, and three are contemporary: neo-liberal, activist, and postmodern.

Societas civilis is the earliest notion of civil society, and the source of the notion of civil society as a goal, with ‘civil’ used as a normative descriptor – a society that is civil. A civil society is one characterised by peaceful stability as distinct from violent unrest, regardless of how democratic that stability is; indeed, Elias (1969) connected the civilising process with clientalism, deference, and etiquette as instruments of prestige and power (see also Silver 1997: 51). In particular, this rests on the rule of law in governing relations between individuals, requiring the state to hold the public monopoly on legitimate violence. This definition is akin to the contemporary notion of the ‘good society’, though it is a more limited ideal than the range of values now asserted as ‘civilised’ (democracy, equality, tolerance, and so on), and this is now considered only one aspect of civil society.

Bürgerliche Gesellschaft, or bourgeois society, emerged with the rise of the modern nation as a mass society, democratic governance, and capitalist economic relations. This model was theoretically informed by the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, for whom individual freedom was exercised through the market, which operated as a limit on state power. Civil society was therefore defined as including the market, but distinct from the state, and concerned with the balance between the two. Marx also understood civil society in these terms and therefore rejected it as expressive of bourgeois individualism and the exercise of capitalist power, whilst Gramsci argued that civil society was not intrinsically connected to hegemonic power and could be the site of challenge to state domination as a form of counter-hegemony (Powell 2007). Jürgen Habermas’ (1989 [1963]) view of Bürgerliche Gesellschaft focused instead on individuals’ freedom in relation to the democratic process – as the freedom to form a political will and hold state authorities accountable – an arguably idealised view of the fruits of modernity (Curran 1993, Keane 1998) that he argued had since been lost through the refeudalisation of this bourgeois public sphere.

Of the contemporary versions, the neo-liberal model has the clearest inheritance from the bourgeois society, defining individual freedom in terms of voluntary relations in the free market. However, it is a more emphatically libertarian approach that focuses on negative liberty, the absence of constraint – it “might be described as ‘laissez-faire politics’, a kind of market in politics” (Kaldor 2003: 9) – although the coherence of ‘neo-liberalism’ as a term used to describe a political (as opposed to purely economic) perspective has been questioned (Thorsen and Lie 2010). In this model, civil society is descriptively limited to ‘third sector’ organisations – charitable and not-for-profit organisations – as a substitute for the state, in particular state welfare, but also public services. This is often characterised as a ‘neo-Tocquevillian’ approach (Powell 2007: vii), as for Tocqueville civil society included the pursuit of individuals’ “private economic interests” (‘civil association’), as well as the cooperative projects of groups (‘political association’), with both being oriented toward self-sufficiency (Bryant 1995: 143). For Tocqueville and his inheritors, virtue in society is generated by the very activity of association, especially by breeding trust and a cooperative disposition. However, critics argue that this is not borne out by the evidence, given that not all associations display these values, and it also ignores power disparities that may be exacerbated by blindly or indiscriminately trusting relationships (Edwards 2009). The neo-liberal model is, however, unconcerned with inequalities in power and resources, and their implications for the inclusiveness of quasi-market regulated pluralism.

The activist model, in contrast, focuses on what could be termed the ‘public autonomy’ of political access, engagement and participation – collective self-determination, over and above the ‘private autonomy’ of negative liberties (Baynes 2002: 20), building on Habermas’ interpretation of the Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in terms of an emerging public sphere. The central participants in this model of civil society are those that engage in political participation outside of the formal political system, such as advocacy and protest groups and social movements, and also, for some proponents of the model, interest and identity groups, but only those who are “civic-minded or public-spirited” (Kaldor 2003: 10). It involves demands for a redistribution of power to accommodate political self-organisation and pressure, as opposed to, in the neo-liberal model, a redistribution to markets and consumer. More particularly, political demands should ideally emerge through the deliberative ideal of disinterested rational debate (Habermas 1996), advancing “subordinated needs” (Kenny 2004: 70) through emancipatory networks of social engagement (Cohen and Arato 1992) that employ public reason (Rawls 2001). For Powell (2007), this includes securing and maintaining humanistic goals associated with welfare and human rights. However, this model struggles to account convincingly for a democratically legitimate consensus on the values and goals of society. In particular, it is difficult to see how this can be achieved through detached and rational debate (Baynes 2002).

The postmodern model of civil society is defined more clearly in terms of what it is not than what it is. In particular, it opposes the liberal universalism of the neo-liberal and activist versions, and the illusion of value consensus. Instead it conceives of civil society as a more antagonistic domain “of pluralism and contestation, a source of incivility as well as civility” (Kaldor 2003: 9). Kaldor argues that postmodernists accommodate nationalists and religious fundamentalists among the multiple identities that are “a precondition for civil society” (2003: 10), although postmodernism itself rejects the nation-state as a modernist project and religions as grand narratives, and, as she acknowledges, the only theorist identified as a proponent of this model, John Keane, rejects cultural relativism and mandates tolerance as a universal (1998). Powell argues that since civil society is a product of modernity, postmodernity poses challenges, especially to the nation and connectedly to the welfare state and the very idea of progress (Powell 2007: vii–1). In particular, he argues that it effectively...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theorising Legitimacy in Civil Society and the Media
• 3 Civil Society in the News: Case Studies
• 4 The Good Society: Virtues, Interests, and Justice
• 5 Uncivil Action: Legal and Moral Legitimacy
• 6 Representation and its Alternatives: Political Legitimacy
• 7 Civility in the Public Realm: Social and Personal Legitimacy
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index