Book review: The Myth about Global Civil Society: Domestic Politics to Ban Landmines, by Daniela Tepe

Abstract

Daniela Tepe The Myth about Global Civil Society: Domestic Politics to Ban Landmines, Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2012, 208 pp: 9780230279148, 55 [pounds sterling] (hbk) This book could have been an important contribution to Marxian research. It is not. Its unfulfilled promise is to draw on Marxian state theory in order to explain the manner in which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) shape foreign policy and international regime formation. In December 1997, the legally binding Ottawa Convention to ban anti-personnel landmines was signed. An extensive International Relations (IR) literature has demonstrated that national NGO campaigns loosely linked to each other via the International Campaign to Ban Landmines played a key role in bringing about this result by reframing landmines, transforming them from a national security to a human security issue. Yet little is known about how national contexts affected the role of NGOs as change-makers. Tepe links this gap to the preoccupation of much NGO research with global civil society. Hence, she sets out to explain the cross-national variation of the successful anti-landmine campaigns in the UK and Germany--variations in membership, strategies and goals. Her wager is that such an account cannot succeed unless it pays attention to the nationally specific nature of the capitalist state and society in the two countries. To this end, she employs 'a materialist state-theory framework' (p. 2). Tepe seeks to highlight the added value of her approach by contrasting it with existing NGO research, notably liberal-constructivist IR. Surprisingly, she does not discuss mainstream social movement theory with its focus on political opportunity structures, framing and resource mobilisation. Tepe acknowledges that liberal-constructivists have analysed how state-society relations shape the capacity of NGOs to influence public policy. Yet they fail to take into account 'the historically specific implementation of states' (p. 18). Tepe neither elaborates on what she means by this notion, nor does she zero in on other shortcomings of liberal-constructivism. One prominent model, which she discusses, draws attention to the degree of state centralisation and the nature of policy networks linking state and civil society, but fails to consider how the balance of class forces materialises as strategic selectivity in state institutions. Also, liberal-constructivism has little to say about how policy content shapes NGO effectivity--say, about how NGOs are affected by the nature of variable hegemonic projects which influence where boundaries are drawn and what gateways are opened between the state and civil society. More problematic still, Tepe's strategy in reviewing liberal-constructivist research is to build up straw-man arguments that she then attacks. This strategy dissimulates the fact that that she actually agrees with most of what liberal-constructivists say. 'While constructivist authors understand the importance of domestic actors in norm socialisation, I disagree with their argument that liberal states have fully internalised human rights standards' (p. 19). Virtually no liberal-constructivist doing social science makes such a claim, which flies so blatantly in the face of empirical reality. Also, Tepe wrongly asserts that liberal-constructivists 'neglect diverging values and opinions among members of the same network because the concept of shared norms and values forbids the very existence of such tendencies' (p. 20). The idea of norm contestation is central to liberal-constructivism. Sometimes Tepe's straw-man strategy conspicuously backfires. After criticising Andrew Moravcsik's liberal IR theory, she argues that in contrast to him, she 'understands state interests as functionally differentiated and the product of societal processes of preference building, where certain interests are represented more fully than others' (p. 24). This is a perfect summary of Moravcsik's theory! …