Who Belongs in “Civil Society”?
An article in last Friday’s WSJ caused me to ask “which groups are legitimately included in “civil society?” The article focuses on the National Students for Justice in Palestine and the training that organization provided to student from some of its 300 chapters.
At Columbia University, in the weeks and months before police took down encampments at the New York City campus and removed demonstrators occupying an academic building, student organizers began consulting with groups such as the National Students for Justice in Palestine, veterans of campus protests and former Black Panthers.
They researched past protests over Columbia’s expansion into Harlem, went to a community meeting on gentrification and development and studied parallels with the fight over land between Palestinians and Israelis. They attended a “teach-in” put on by several former Black Panthers, who told them about the importance of handling internal disputes within their movement. “We took notes from our elders, engaged in dialogue with them and analyzed how the university responded to previous protests,” said Sueda Polat, a graduate student and organizer in the pro-Palestinian encampment.
Though there isn’t a centralized command overseeing the student movement opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza, there are connections between longstanding far-left groups and the protesters. The National Students for Justice in Palestine, or NSJP, has been around some two decades and has more than 300 chapters across the U.S., many of which have helped organize the college encampments and building occupations. NSJP has for months called on students to stand strong against colleges until they divest themselves of investments in entities doing business with Israel. Its social-media pages have become a scroll of encouragement to protesting students, with videos showing activity at encampments and around the world. As early as October, NSJP was promoting a “day of resistance” with demonstrations at colleges.
Some of the group’s campus chapters have been suspended by universities, including at Columbia. For the last decade, donations to NSJP have been received and administered by the Wespac Foundation, according to Howard Horowitz, Wespac’s board chairman. The donations are passed on to NSJP “for projects in the United States,” he said, declining to provide further details.
Wespac, a nonprofit based in Westchester County near New York City, is decades old, according to its website. It has supported humanitarian causes, as well as organizations that propagate antisemitism, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Wespac has posted support of pro-Palestinian protests on social media and posted videos in which protesters held signs that refer to President Biden as “Genocide Joe.”
The article provides other details — not a whole lot — about the different training events students attended leading up to the explosion of student protests around the country. It’s basic factual reporting but with just a hint of illegitimacy that might make people question which groups are rightfully included in civil society. The question arises most often, I imagine, with regard to advocacy organizations because those are the ones typically talking about the hottest hot button issues. When politicians and other stakeholders implicitly or explicitly condemn organizations — threatening criminal or tax sanctions, for example — they necessarily question whether those organizations deserve a place in civil society.
I throw that term, “civil society” around a lot without ever really understanding all that the term means. I know its cheap and easy, and editors disdain citations in formal scholarship, but Wikipedia has a fairly detailed and well-footnoted summary of what “civil society” means. Here is a short excerpt (I omitted the footnotes):
Civil society organizations provide citizens with knowledge crucial to political participation, such as the obligations and rights of citizens with regard to government processes, different types of political issues and policy agendas, ways in which citizens can collaborate to address societal issues, and approaches to creating meaningful change in communities. Dr. Carew E. Boulding and Dr. Jami Nelson-Núñez assert that civil society organizations are beneficial in that citizens are more inclined to participate politically when they can act collectively and develop associative solidarities with others around shared policy preferences. Other scholars, however, note that there are some drawbacks of civil society organizations as it pertains to political participation and policy processes.
Dr. Thomas Carothers explains that, because civil society organizations have such an influential role in political participation, the proliferation of these organizations has made it increasingly difficult for governments to meet both the widening range of policy preferences and rapidly changing social needs. The scholar David Rieff discusses another issue tied to civil society and political participation: single-issue activism. Since most civil society organizations focus on one sector or societal issue, this sometimes causes voters to shift their attention away from the multifaceted broad issues facing society, such as the challenges of globalization, and instead the focus of elections becomes centered on a few specific hot-button topics, such as abortion.
There is a considerable amount of data supporting the notion that civil society organizations significantly increase political participation. Dr. Robert Putnam conducted a study of civil society in Italy in the mid-1900s, and observed that those who were engaged with civil society organizations demonstrated greater “political sophistication, social trust, political participation, and ‘subjective civic competence’” than those not involved in these organizations. Similarly, Dr. Sheri Berman found that the NSDAP (Nazi Party) civil society organization leveraged strong civil society networks among the middle class together for the purpose of mobilizing for political participation in Germany. The powerful influence of these efforts is evidenced by the NSDAP becoming the most potent political force in the nation in the mid-1900s. These case studies provide evidence of the crucial role of social networks in facilitating political participation and civic engagement.
I suppose civil society is like speech sometimes. Speech — not guns or money — is an advocacy’s organization’s primary weapon. Money helps, though. To facilitate an effective civil society, we therefore can’t be selective with our definition, or about the organizations considered legitimate participants. There are, of course, some organizations whose advocacy is so far beyond the pale that they can and should be banished from civil society even if their primary weapon is speech. Banished either by taxation or criminal code. The North American Man/Boy Love Association is an easy example. But in the main, its harder to know which groups should be excluded from public participation and which should not. So just like speech, we ought to indulge a presumption that all advocacy groups are citizens of civil society until a group proves it is unworthy by illegality or universally unpopular advocacy, like hate speech. Some people think the National Students for Justice in Palestine has crossed that line. I am just not so sure.
darryll k. jones