1 In this Issue Making Civil Society Relevant (Again) Philip Oxhorn ……..............................1 Challenges and Opportunities for Democracy Maxwell A. Cameron..….........…….....3 More Than Peace Negotiations or Full- Fledged War Hernando Gomez Buendía…....……..5 The Political Economy of the Salvadoran Elections Manuel Orozco…..…............…..….....7 Cuba and the Non-Aligned Movement Ana J. Faya…..…........…...........……..9 Editorial The Americas After Iraq….......…......10 News Briefs Brazil..........2 Ecuador.....3 Uruguay.....5 Caribbean..6 Mexico...................7 Cuba......................9 Chile....................10 Central America...11 Abstracts Argentina: Governance in Crisis.......11 The Impact of Migration....................12 Editorial Board Donald R. Mackay Executive Director Sharon O’Regan Deputy DIrector Paul Haslam Senior Editor Judy Meltzer Co - Editor Claudia Paguaga Co - Editor Eric Verreault Design and Layout March 2003, Volume 2, Number 3 ISSN 1703-7964 Making Civil Society Relevant (Again) Philip Oxhorn It seems that wherever one looks in the policy debates about hemispheric relations and the best ways to strengthen democracy in Latin America, the idea of “civil society” is inescapable. Whether it be in development projects, funded by the Inter-American Development Bank, discussions over how to revitalize the Organization of American States and democratize negotiations over the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or the guiding principals for development assistance in donor countries, increasing attention is being given to the idea that “civil society” must somehow be included. Yet what does this mean in practice? What is “civil society” and who does it represent? Perhaps more importantly, is civil society up to the task? And if it is not, what should be done? This ambiguity also reflects how social science research has defined the term. Rather than focusing on real people with real needs, the tendency is to focus on intangible norms of “trust,” “associability” and “civic spirit.” Civil society’s foundation is seen as resting on the notion that rational (but largely faceless) individuals who decide to live together to further private, individual interests create civil society. Membership in any group becomes a function of interest maximization. Groups and group identities lose any sense of intrinsic value. Civil society becomes synonymous with “social capital,” following the lead of Robert Putnam’s influential work on Italy (Putnam 1993), and from this perspective it does not matter if people join bowling clubs, church choirs or, to take a “real” example from Latin America’s recent past, a human rights group resisting tyranny. Yet there obviously is a big difference between a bowling club and a human rights group if you are a Latin American. And if you are poor, have darker skin or live in an indigenous rural community, you may not see yourself as a “rational individual” maximizing your personal interests, but rather as a member of a community trying to cope with a variety of pressing social needs to whom “civic spiritedness” has a very different connotation and the idea of trusting people outside your community, much less often corrupt state institutions, seems naïve at best, and dangerous at worst. Defined this way, “civil society” seems as alienating and remote as the authoritarian regimes that dominated the region for most of its history. Somewhat paradoxically, civil society was quite relevant during the reign of dictators throughout Latin America in the recent past. Civil society organizations not only helped people cope with the repression and the economic upheavals associated with these regimes (Oxhorn 1995), they allowed them to mobilize against them to help usher in the current period of democratic rule through what the seminal study of transitions characterized as the “popular upsurge” (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986).