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Editorial – the roots of global civil society and the interwar moment

This special issue contends that the concept of global civil society offers a powerful analytical tool for understanding the transnational associational life that flourished across the world in the interwar years. It points to the paradoxical nature of this period, which witnessed both the de-globalization of the world and a growing sense of global interconnectivity. But it also advocates an approach attentive to the circulation and translation of ideas and practices of civil society, and to the ways in which these were embodied in the public organizations and institutions – from newspapers to peace leagues and cultural clubs – that proliferated throughout the world from the late nineteenth century onward. Finally, it invites scholars to reflect upon the varied, contingent meanings of the global – and the limits to such globalist visions. If ‘globalization’ was the catchword of the 1990s, the concept of ‘global civil society’ only gained currency among political scientists and public policy practitioners in the early twenty-first century. However, exponents of ‘global civil society’, such as Mary Kaldor and John Keane, have been resolutely presentist in their approach. To these scholars, the capacity for mobilization in a ‘vast, interconnected and multi-layered non-governmental space’ is fundamentally novel. It is for them an unprecedented phenomenon, born of the wellspring of popular sentiment that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, or of the increasingly integrated global system that emerged in its wake. As Kaldor put it: ‘what is new about the concept of civil society since 1989 is globalisation’. This insistence upon the novelty of these phenomena is one shared by many scholars of civil society in the non-Western world. Focusing primarily on the growth and proliferation of non-governmental organizations since the 1980s, phenomena associated with the end of the Cold War, the fall of authoritarian regimes, and growing international patronage, scholars of Africa, Asia, and Latin America have made scarce reference to the historical foundations of civic culture in these societies.