discontent’ with neoliberal austerity, which was ‘hijacked by far-right populist parties and turned into instruments of their regressive and divisive political agendas’ (Davoudi and Steele, 2020: 115). The far-right’s hijacking of the narrative has been facilitated because successive political leaders failed to condemn the market’s intensification and its pernicious, harmful effects (Shenker, 2019: 40), which were apparent even before austerity’s onslaughts. As shown in the 2019 election, the rising level of discontent with austerity could no longer be ignored by electioneers seeking to win the public’s vote. At the time of writing and in the face of the COVID-19 crisis, public spending has reached a scale never seen during peacetime.
The inequitable effects of austerity have had a spatial dimension too, with some of the poorest cities and regions of England being hit hardest, including the North East region. Severe cuts to local governments’ public spending (Bailey et al, 2015; Hastings et al, 2015) has compounded the inequitable social effects of austerity because, in these areas, disadvantage is concentrated and there is a heavy reliance on the public sector for jobs and services (Peck, 2012). The scale and severity of budget cuts, especially in the North East, has reduced local governments’ ability to deliver services and to manage the recurring crises of capitalism. Proclamations from Boris Johnson’s Conservative government to ‘level up’ the regional economic, employment and budget disparities remain exactly that, while actual actions for levelling up have become more imperative than ever as the COVID-19 crisis is widely predicted to exacerbate existing spatial and socio-economic inequalities (Partington, 2020). So far, central government activities regarding its response to the pandemic are foreboding. Critical responses – such as testing and tracing – have been centralised and privatised, against expert advice, while the role of the public sector and local public health networks has been overlooked. Furthermore, Public Health England has been effectively dismantled and the expertise and resources within local authorities and community organisations have hardly been utilised (Chakrabortty, 2020). However, amid the darkness of austerity Britain and the global pandemic, there have also been glimmers of hope in the form of a rising level of activities by civil societies.
Proactive civil societies as the ‘best of times’
The idea of civil society failed because it became too popular. (Wolfe, 1997: 9)
This provocation refers to the faith in many concepts that travel far and fast and pick up different meanings at every stop along the way. ‘Civil society’ is not an exception; its history goes back to ancient Greece and its development as a concept began with the Enlightenment thinkers (notably, Alexis de Tocqueville) and continued through the works of many scholars, notably, Gramsci, who ‘may be single-handedly responsible for the revival of the term civil society in the post-World War Two period’ (Foley and Hodgkinson, 2002: xix). Today, its widespread popularity is due to the rising presence of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on the global stage since the 1980s. The long history of civil society is coupled with its various theorisations. According to Edwards (2014: 10), there are at least three distinct schools of thoughts about what civil society is, each of which has its own historical root, normative claims and socio-political implications.
The first one considers civil society as a part of society that is distinct from states and markets; it is a form of associational life. Its origin goes back to de Tocqueville’s view of the 19th-century US and the defence of individual freedom from the intrusion of the state. This view of civil society is particularly strong in the US and shares similar distrust of the state and desire for self-governance as that advocated by communitarians (Edwards, 2014: 7). It is, therefore, not surprising that one of its most influential contemporary advocates, Robert Putnam, has come from the US. The everyday references to, for example, the ‘third’ or ‘non-profit’ sector, which includes associations (notably, NGOs) whose membership and activities are voluntary, are often a reflection of this theory of civil society.
The second view considers civil society as ‘good society’ – as a kind of society characterised by positive norms and values, as well as success in meeting particular social goals. The third school of thought defines civil society as the ‘public sphere’. This view was first developed by scholars such as John Dewey and Hannah Arendt in their theorisations of the ‘public sphere’ as a central component of political life and democracy (Edwards, 2014: 8). It then became influential through Jürgen Habermas’s theory of ‘communicative action’ and ‘discursive democracy’. For him and other critical theorists, civil society is that which ‘is steered by its members through shared meanings that are constructed democratically in the public sphere’ (Chambers, 2002: 94). Despite the diversity of views, it is the theory of civil society as a form of associational life that has become dominant in policy discourse and popular imaginaries. As Edwards (2014: 10) puts it, ‘it is Alexis Tocqueville’s ghost that wanders through the corridors of the World Bank, not that of Habermas or Hegel’.
The understanding of civil society as associational life (that is, distinct from states and markets) resonates with the ‘third way’ politics of the New Labour government in the 1990s, which claimed to be the middle ground between the state-oriented (welfarist) and the market-oriented (neoliberalist) solution to collective problems. While, in reality, the so-called ‘third sector’ has been made financially dependent on the state and the private sector, and the boundaries between them have become blurred, it is this third sector view that is often visualised in myriad so-called ‘triple helix’ diagrams.
It is interesting to note that civil society as part of society is often conflated with civil society as a kind of society, assuming that ‘a healthy associational life contributes to, or even produces, the “good society” in ways that are predictable – while the public sphere is usually ignored’ (Edwards, 2014: 10). Such a perspective overlooks the various forms of what Chambers and Kopstein (2001) call ‘bad civil society’: although they resonate with many of the principles of what a civil society is (coherence, trust and so on), they are exclusionary of and sometimes hostile to outsiders and ‘Others’. Examples include the voluntary organisations that nurture hatred and fear.
There is another frequent conflation between civil society as an end and civil society as a means. According to Edwards (2014: 11), this is due to a number of political changes, epitomised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when civil society ‘became both … a new type of society characterised by liberal democratic norms and a vehicle for achieving it’. An example of such a conflation can be found in the range of civil society roles that have been identified by the World Economic Forum (2013: 9), which suggests that civil societies act as: watchdog (holding institutions to account); advocate/campaigner (raising awareness and lobbying governments for change); service provider (related to education, health, food and security, and contributing to
