Socscie1 midterm

• The global flow of people, especially refugees and illegal immigrants, poses a direct threat to the nation-state and its ability to control its borders. This statement is?

  True
• The looming crises associated with dwindling oil and water supplies threaten to lead to riots and perhaps insurrections that could lead to the downfall of extant governments. This statement is?

  True
• The inability of the non nation-state to control economic flows dominated by MNCs, as well as the current economic and financial crisis that is sweeping the world, also poses a profound threat to the nation-state. This statement is?

  False
• Environmental problems of all sorts, especially those related to global warming, are very likely to be destabilizing politically. This statement is?

  True
• Borderless diseases in Africa, pose a danger to political structures.
• War is the most obvious global flow threatening the nation-states involved, especially those on the losing side.
• Global inequalities threaten to pit poor nations against rich nations.
• Terrorism is clearly regarded as a threat by those nations against which it is waged.
• The nation-state has two basic components: nation and state.
• Nation “refers to a social group that is linked through common descent, culture, language or territorial contiguity”.
• Also important in this context is national identity, the “fluid and dynamic form of collective identity, founded upon the community’s subjective belief that the members of the community share a set of characteristics that make them different from the other groups”.
• The state emerged as a new institutional form in the wake of the demise of the feudal system.
• The state offered a more centralized form of control and evolved an organizational structure with “relatively autonomous office-holders outside other socioeconomic hierarchies, with its own rules and resources increasingly coming from taxes rather than from feudal, personal, or religious obligations”.
• Also coming to define the state was its claim to sovereignty.
• The nation-state can therefore be seen as an integration of the subgroups that define themselves as a nation with the organizational structure that constitutes the state.
• Civility and civil society have ancient roots and examples.
• John Keane traces what we know consider civil society to the appearance of the West on the global stage beginning around 1500.
• Until the nineteenth century, civil society was not distinguished from a state dominated by laws.
• The philosopher G. W. F. Hegel played a key role in redefining civil society as that which exists between the family and the state; a realm that is not only separated from them, but one where an individual can participate directly in various social institutions.
• The major figure in social theory associated with the idea of civil society is Alexis de Tocqueville.
• Tocqueville lauded the early American propensity to form a wide range of associations that were not political in nature and orientation.
• Civil associations allowed people to interact with one another and to develop, renew and enlarge feelings, ideas, emotions and understandings.
• The distinction between the market and civil society is a twentieth-century innovation usually associated with the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci.
• He is an italian Marxist thinker?

  Antonio Gramsci
• In his view, to challenge the hegemony of the state, the opposition had to gain positions in civil society in order to generate their own ideas to counter the hegemonic ideas emanating from the capitalist economic system.?

  Antonio Gramsci
• While the West often conquered the world through uncivilized, even violent means, it “gave birth as well to modern struggles for liberty of the press, written constitutions, religious toleration, new codes of ‘civil manners’, nonviolent power sharing and talk of democracy and human rights, whose combined ‘ethos’ gradually spawned the growth of civil society institutions”.
• A robust civil society was already in existence by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it was soon set back dramatically by two world wars.
• Mary Kaldor accords central importance to the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
• In Latin America and Eastern Europe in both regions, there was opposition to military dictatorship and efforts to find an autonomous and self-organizing base outside of the state in order to oppose the military. It was also during this period that civil society became increasingly possible.
• Of great importance in the 1990s “was the emergence of transnational networks of activists who came together on particular issues”.
• Following Kaldor, civil society is defined “the process through which individuals negotiate, argue, struggle against or agree with each other and with the centers of political and economic authority.”
• Thus, civil society involves both settings and actions that can take place within those settings. It also represents an ideal toward which many people and groups aspire – an active, vital and powerful civil society that can influence and act as a counterbalance to, potent forces in the realm of the polity and the economy.
• While historically civil society was a nation-state centered, that is, linked to groups and actions within states, in more recent years it has been associated with more global actions and therefore with a somewhat different set of organizations including “social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), transnational networks, religious organizations and community groups”.
• John Keane offers a definition of global civil society as “dynamic nongovernmental systems of interconnected socio-economic institutions that straddle the whole earth and that have complex effects that are felt in its four corners.
• Global civil society is neither a static object nor a fait accompli. It is an unfinished project that consists of sometimes thick, sometimes thinly stretched networks, pyramids and hub-and-spoke clusters of socio-economic institutions and actors who organize themselves across borders, with the deliberate aim of drawing the world together in new ways.
• These nongovernmental institutions and actors tend to pluralize power and to problematize violence; consequently, their peaceful or ‘civil’ effects are felt everywhere, here and there, far and wide, to and from local areas, through wide regions, to the planetary level itself.”
• The definition according to John Keane emphasizes five tightly linked characteristics of global civil society this are (1) it is nongovernmental, (2) a form of society composed of interlinked social processes, (3) oriented to civility, (4) pluralistic, and (5) global.
• Keane gives us a good feel for global civil society, as well as both its unfinished and varied character. This statement is?


  True
• However, one of the things that set Keane’s view on civil society apart is his argument that the economic market is deeply implicated in civil society.
• While many see civil society as distinct from both the nation-state and the market, Keane puts forth the “no market, no civil society’ rule.