[Translated from Le Monde diplomatique]

COMPLICITY OF THE INTERNATIONALIZED ELITES
By Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth

** NGOs in the service of globalization? -- Why is it so easy to go from the job of being an official of a large non-governmental organization (NGO) to that of being the CEO of a multinational corporation? Common social and educational paths, and often a leading American university, make these connections much easier, creating a tendency toward an unnatural "partnership" between big companies and NGOs, in the name of a shared social responsibility. **

Le Monde diplomatique
June 2005
Pages 30-31

http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2005/06/

Sociology has much to say in discussions of globalization. [Note 1: Cf. "Sociologie de la mondialisation," ['Sociology of Globalization'] Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (Paris, March 2004).] For if learned analyses go on and on promoting or criticizing diagnoses, they remain very discreet with regard to the practices of the experts and counter-experts who are the crucial actors of globalization.

The study of global governance represents a prestigious and profitable market for producers of legal studies, economics, and political science. [Note 2: Thus the great international financial institutions, like the World Bank, now devote several hundred million dollars to promoting law and "good governance," which complements the repertoire of monetarist prescriptions (cf. Yves Dezalay and Bryan Garth, eds., Global Prescriptions: The Production, Exportation and Importation of a New Legal Orthodoxy [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002].) [NOTE: This collection includes the following essays: "Breaking Out : The Proliferation of Actors in the International System," by Anne-Marie Slaughter; "Transnational Advocacy Networks and the Social Construction of Legal Rules," by Kathryn Sikkink; "Modern Law as a Secularized and Global Model : Implications for the Sociology of Law," by Elizabeth Heger Boyle and John W. Meyer; "What Institutional Regimes for the Era of Internationalization?" by Robert Boyer; "Between Liberalism and Neoliberalism: Law's Dilemma in Latin America," by Jeremy Adelman and Miguel Angel Centeno; "Legal Education and the Reproduction of the Elite in Japan," by Setsuo Miyazawa with Hiroshi Otsuka; "Cultural Elements in the Practice of Law in Mexico: Informal Networks in a Formal System," by Larissa Adler Lomnitz and Rodrigo Salazar; "The Discovery of Law: Political Consequences in the Argentine Case," by Catalina Smulovitz; "Hybrid(ity) Rules : Creating Local Law in a Globalized World," by Heinz Klug; and "Legitimating the New Legal Orthodoxy," by Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth. --M.K.J.] Beyond their scientific or ideological differences, these producers have in common that they take seriously the stakes of globalization. Acting as though globalization were a reality -- to promote, combat, or control -- they mobilize social and institutional resources that contribute to causing it to exist, as a political stake but also as a workshop around which experts converge. When they bat the ball from forum to forum, the protagonists have a common interest in not diminishing this new arena of power. They succeed in this all the more easily in that the dynamic of conflict leads them to advance champions who mobilize rather similar combinations of intellectual knowledge and social capital. And all in the service of strategies that echo one another.

The market in international expertise is elitist and protected. In order to have access to it, cultural and linguistic competencies are required. Before being strengthened and legitimated by educational paths that are extremely expensive, predispositions to international matters are the prerogative of heirs of cosmopolitan family lines. Including among some critics of globalization, who join international networks that are often marked by North American influence. For these great multinational non-governmental organizations (NGOs), too, recruit their young professionals among the best graduates of the Ivy League campuses [Note 3: The Ivy League includes eight elite American universities. See Rick Fantasia, "Délits d'initiés sur le marché universitaire américain," ['Crimes of the Initiated in the American University Marketplace'] Le Monde diplomatique (November 2004).] Access to these élite schools, however -- whose cost can exceed $40,000 a year (30,000 euros) -- is reserved for the most part to the heirs to a liberal establishment that, noblesse oblige, has always cultivated a certain form of idealism and universalism.

Thanks to such recruitment, some militant organizations, some NGOs, dispose of a constantly renewed breeding ground of competencies. As motivated as they are well-known, they become critical partners of multinational corporations and States. These collaborations, poorly paid but rich in experience, do not at all exclude later careers in State institutions, the great consulting groups, or even multinational corporations. The professional activists will meet up there with their former fellow students, and may even get ahead of them. Militant apprenticeships of this type indeed allow one to acquire some of the key essentials in a time of "globalization": an address book, but also political know-how that combines media visibility and discreetness in lobbying as well as a very useful reputation in the event of a later recycling as "moral entrepreneur."

Thus Mr. Benjamin Heineman, graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, begins his professional career by devoting his first three years to a public interest law firm financed by the Ford Foundation. This leads him to important jobs in the Carter administration, before becoming (for seventeen years) director of legal affairs for General Electric, the globe's leading multinational. He is presently vice president there. This exemplary profile gives him great legitimacy in the professional and managerial world, where he takes positions for ethics and a greater "social responsibility."

DOUBLE GAME STRATEGIES

The characteristics of the new generation of globalization activists hold, a fortiori, for their elders. Cultural and linguistic ease, often cultivated from an early age in elitist educational establishments like bilingual schools (especially in developing countries), serve as a passport for later access to foreign university educations, whose cost, mostly assumed by families, reinforces the social selection effect.

This education abroad of the national elites of dependent countries constitutes a legacy of the colonial model, given a new impetus by the new imperialism. The United States has imposed its hegemony through educational investments that have reshaped the university paths of future government officials around economics and political science. The great private campuses of the Ivy League also serve as the preferred place for constituting the new elites, whether national or international. Making up for the increased competition in national higher education, the distant and costly educations have de facto permitted the various State bourgeoisies to privilege their heirs by reserving access to prestigious foreign degrees to them. This strategy, shared by many countries' elites, has contributed to "a unification of the global field of leadership education." [Note 4: Pierre Bourdieu, "Conclusions du colloque sur les instances de formation des cadres dirigeants," ['Conclusions of the colloquium on the educational particulars of executive leadership'] (Paris: Centre de sociologie européenne, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1993), p. 282.]

Through the denunciation of the old colonial ideologies in favor of new universals -- development, the market, the rule of law -- American hegemonic power has doubled its effectiveness. It has disqualified the networks of influence that ensured the endurance of the European colonial model, even as it has reoriented toward its own campuses the international educational circuits of the peripheral elites. With, as a useful corollary, the brain drain toward the most remunerative professional markets.

The two domains of national and international tightly overlap in the strategies of elite reproduction. In the marketplace of international expertise, the dominant operators are those who can mobilize credentials and diplomas authenticated by their State of origin. Conversely, an international capital of competencies and relations represents an advantage that is not negligible in national strategies of power. To be an énarque or polytechnicien [i.e., a graduate of the École Nationale d'Administration or the École Polytechnique] certainly does no harm to a later career in international institutions; to have a degree from Harvard does not at all forbid becoming a cabinet minister in Paris. A small group of privileged persons can simultaneously exploit its national notoriety to make itself heard on the international scene and invest in the international domain in order to reinforce its position in the field of national power. In this latter case, it is enough to explain that they would thus be better able to promote the interests of the country in global competition.

These double game strategies hold, a fortiori, for the great private philanthropic institutions -- like the Ford, Rockefeller, and Soros Foundations -- which are now found in the avant-garde of globalization, albeit a "humanized" globalization. Even as they finance the international expansion of the great NGOs that militate for human rights or the defense of the environment, they have contributed to the international prestige of the campuses that produce and diffuse the new liberal orthodoxy: more than half of the governors of central banks have diplomas in economics, most often from the great American universities; more than a third are former officials of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. Globalization thus valorizes a domain of international "governance" whose institutions and practices are inspired by the North American model.

Paradoxically, divisions within the empire strengthen it. The cunning of imperial reason [Note 5: Cf. Pierre Bourdieu et Loïc Wacquant, "Sur les ruses de la raison impérialiste," ['On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason'] Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (March 1998), and Le Monde diplomatique (May 2000).] [NOTE: The 'cunning of reason' is a notion developed by Hegel in his writings on the philosophy of history. --M.K.J.] consists in exporting its modes of criticism as well: even the opposition to the American model is inspired by analyses (multiculturalism, racial integration) and methods of struggle (invocation of "civil society," recourse to the media) that are current in the United States. In order to reply to those who justify their conservative policies by relying on the "establishment internationals" (IMF, World Bank, etc.), their adversaries draw upon the panoply of alternative models that are circulating in the networks of the NGOs. Thus at the center as at the periphery of the new world order, the internal struggles feed and are fed by dynamics of cultural importation. They are competitive as much as complementary in their hegemonic effects.

Thanks to their recruitment on elite campuses, with the financial support of philanthropic foundations and many stepping-stones to which they have access (in the university field but also in that of international institutions), the NGOs based in Washington can more easily devise strategies and models that correspond what is now at stake politically or scientifically. They are all the more careful to diffuse these analyses in that they hope in return to achieve a mobilization of international public opinion so as to increase their influence in Washington. For the militant organizations of dominated countries, the problem is different. The weakness of their own resources leads them to appeal to the international marketplace of philanthropy . . . which imposes upon them its slogans and models, if not its fashions.

CO-OPTATION OF ACTIVISTS

In his thesis on "The International Marketplace of Solidarity," Benjamin Buclet details all the ambiguity of the "partnership" between the international NGOs and the smaller structures that intervene at the local level. [Note 6: Cf. Benjamin Buclet, "Le Marché international de la solidarité: les organisations non gouvernementales en Amazonie brésilienne,” [’The International Marketplace of Solidarity: Non-Governmental Organizations in Brazilian Amazonia’] thesis defended at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, June 2004.] In order to finance their militant activism, the latter have to join in the logic of the project, negotiated by the international lenders of funds. The competition between projects ensures the influence of these financial managers, as much over the definition of the “target populations” as over the objectives and criteria of evaluation. In addition, the priorities of these managers are conveyed by the great NGOs, who are very present on the international scene -- which allows them, in fact, to fill the role of a holding company with respect to their networks of small local NGOs, which do not themselves dispose of social resources that open up direct access to international financing. This arrangement short-circuits the national governments and local players, but allows the “international civil society” (sic) to ensure the diffusion of its values and its priorities, to define what the needs of development or the “democratic expectations” are.

Even as they denounce the advocates of monetarism who have imposed their disciples -- and their discipline -- at the head of the national financial institutions of the developing countries, the agents of the “global marketplace of solidarity” extend to the local level the enterprise of political restructuring in the States of the periphery. When they make efforts to establish their credibility on the ground, the officials of these small NGOs do not in fact escape from the logic of clientelism. Spokespersons -- but also “godfathers” -- of extremely dependent populations, they are then led to compete with the figures who until then held a near-monopoly of local political power.

Sometimes, the gains achieved by activists on the international scene have been dearly purchased at the local level, for while they are encouraged to use the means prized by democratic countries and NGOs (peaceful assemblies, presentation of the most charismatic movement leaders), they clash with powers that, for their part, do not hesitate to respond violently. What corresponds best to the canons of Western protest, including media attention, is not necessarily what impresses the most regimes in which the power of the forces of repression and the separation of powers are not those of Stockholm or those of Washington. [Note 7: See Arundhati Roy, “Les Périls du tout-humanitaire,” [’The Dangers of the Completely Humanitarian’] Le Monde diplomatique (October 2004).]

Confronted with a struggle as doubtful as it is unequal, some activists can be tempted to flee to the great stages of globalization where, thanks to resources put at their disposition, they can have the impression that their engagements are not only less dangerous, but also more efficacious.

Thus, among the Chilean activists who had been pioneers of human rights under Pinochet’s dictatorship, several, and among them some of the best, emigrated in order to return to the forefront of the international scene. Some decided to do so because they were pursued or expelled, like law professor Jose Zalaquett, who joined Amnesty International in 1976, before becoming president of the organization three years later.

But for the most part their departure coincided with the decline of the Chilean NGOs after the victory of the democratic coalition. Either because the new governmental team called on them in order to benefit from their legitimacy: Mr. Roberto Garreton, an official on the legal defense committee of the victims of the dictatorship created within the Archbishopric, was, for example, named ambassador for human rights, before pursuing his U.N. career as special human rights rapporteur, notably in Zaire. More generally, when Chile stopped being front-page news in major media, the NGOs’ financing dried up, even if the least well-off sectors of the Chilean population continued to be victims of police violence. In order to continue their engagement, some militants than chose to emigrate, like Mr. Jose Vivenco, who went to Washington, where he has become one of the principal spokespersons of America Watch.

The internationalization of national struggles through which the embryonic global civil society is being built thus contributes to impose, as universal, strategies and a savoir-faire inspired by American political dynamics. Already, the victory of Ronald Reagan had already produced paradoxical effects, especially by favoring the universalization of the “rights of man.” [Note 8: Cf. “L’Impérialisme de la vertu,” [’The Imperialism of Virtue’] Le Monde diplomatique (May 2000).] In order to construct a sort of resistance to the right’s seizure of State institutions, the reformist, often democratic, faction of the Foreign Policy Establishment relied on the resources of private institutions that it had founded and whose control it retained. Desirous of encouraging the expansion of a “civil society” capable of playing the role of countervailing power, it invoked against the hawks Ronald Reagan surrounded himself with a universal morality of human rights.

“SUE THE BASTARDS”

The philanthropic institutions have had the effect of moderating civic mobilization. In the domain of the environment, for example, by dangling subsidies before them and by mobilizing scientific networks, the Ford Foundation has accelerated the reconversion of oppositional movements around the “responsible” themes. It has, for example, pressured the officials of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to abandon a strategy of confrontation that relied on courts of law to mobilize public opinion: “Sue the bastards,” according to the favorite formula of the inventor of this procedure.

Appealing to their civil responsibility as lenders of funds was involved, the financers of the Ford Foundation have introduced a filtering of applications by important bar officials. Simultaneously, the Foundation has encouraged negotiation between ecologists and industrialists. First by financing the work of a team of Électricité de France economists who have shown that the protection of the environment represents not only a cost, but a source of potential profits for businesses. Then by pressuring many small activist groups to regroup within unified structures around professional staffs, capable of negotiating on the basis of recognized scientific expertise. [Note 9: Cf. Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington: Island Press, 1993).] The great NGOs that now dominate the international environmental defense scene -- modernized under the name “sustainable development economics” -- are the instrument of this great counter-offensive inscribed in the great reformist tradition of American philanthropic capitalism, invented by the “robber barons.” [Note 10: Cf. Nicolas Guilhot, “Une Vocation philanthropique: George Soros, les sciences sociales et la régulation du marché mondial,” [’A Philanthropic Vocation: George Soros, the Social Sciences, and the Regulation of the Global Marketplace’] Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (March 2004).]

Pierre Bourdieu reminds us: “Reference to the universal is the weapon par excellence.” [Note 11: Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques [’Practical reasons’] (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 242).] Imperialism knows how to advance under the standard of the rights of man and good governance. Playing on their partnership with NGOs, multinationals now need do no more than present themselves as champions of “sustainable [capitalist] development.”

--
Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Home page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu