Claus Leggewie's article "Transnational movements and the question of democracy" reflects the emergence of a democratic system on a supra-national level. The development of Europe's political structures has reached a stage where it has become pressing to discuss the equilibrium and legitimacy of the system as a whole, and of its individual organs (such as the executive bodies of the European Union), as well as the status of other subjects of the "decision-making process", such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The development of transnational democracy is still a rather remote issue for Russia, where democracy remains problematic even on the national level. Nevertheless, Russia is a participant in the system of international relations, meaning some of the issues raised by Leggewie are relevant in the Russian context. The issue of the purpose and legitimacy of NGOs, for example, is an important one.

Non-governmental organizations emerge in the framework of representative democracy as a result of the fact that ordinary citizens are too remote from the immediate process of decision-making. Elected organs cease to pick up the signals emanating from society, with the exception of those that come from the majority or groups that possess great resources and influence. That is, NGOs that criticize the authorities and defend social interests are considered unimportant by "grand" politics.

NGOs play the same role on a supra-national level, and Leggewie notes the positive effect their activities produce. But he sees a danger in NGOs' growing remoteness from the source of their legitimacy, which he considers to be the groups whose interests the NGOs defend. Moreover, active participation in decision-making processes fundamentally requires greater legitimacy.

Striving to find a solution, Leggewie attempts to uncover mechanisms of additional legitimation for NGOs. He finds four such mechanisms:
1) the institutionalization of citizens' support for certain NGOs (through systems of voting or vouchering);
2) opinion polls (carried out in accordance with strict procedures);
3) the presentation and wide distribution of periodical reports by NGOs on their work; and,
4) the legitimation of NGOs through certain parliamentary procedures (accreditation and the like).

Concerning feedback and accountability, Leggewie is certainly right. However, he considers it no less important to give NGOs a more distinct status and to create "official" procedures of legitimation. It seems to me that the use of such procedures is at least doubtful.

At first glance, giving NGOs and their activities a clearer status will increase the efficiency of their work. However, while the defence of social interests is NGOs' main function, it is not the only purport of their existence. The institution of NGOs in the framework of modern representative democracy allows implementing direct civic democratic activity that is not restrained by complex legal and bureaucratic procedures. In particular, the function of NGOs is to act as channels for social communication that circumvent bureaucratic and legal barriers. NGOs make it possible to compensate for citizens' alienation from the administrative and decision-making process. NGOs are the modern embodiment of a principle formulated in ancient Athenian democracy, which says that justice is one of the main aims of civic activity ("those who are not injured try and punish the unjust as much as those that are", Plutarch, Solon , XVIII). The institutionalization of practices and mechanisms of the representation of NGOs will render that role vapid. Non-governmental organizations will concentrate their efforts on acquiring or preserving some official status, as political parties do now, and will cease to be a form of "direct action" in the framework of democracy.

The need, in a democratic society, for ways to directly express one's civic consciousness is directly related to another aspect of the problem, which Leggewie leaves out entirely. An NGO can also uphold certain values which are not directly linked to the interests of any specific group, simply because the members of that organization consider it fundamentally important to uphold those values. Christianity asserted the idea of the value, in itself, of every person. Since the beginning of the age of Reformation, individual religious or ethical feeling has come to be perceived as sufficient grounds for affirming a principle.

The dichotomy of the majority vs. individual persons, rather than just the majority vs. minorities, has been inherent to modern democracies, unlike those of antiquity, from the outset. The majoritarian principle of democracy is combined with an assertion of natural human rights. One of the fundamental rights is "the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" ( Universal Declaration of Human Rights , Article 19).

The significance and role of NGOs lies not just in representing the interests of minorities that are being ignored by a democratic authority elected by the majority, but also in realizing every person's right to defend their values. NGOs not only defend the interests of ethnic minorities; they also uphold the principle of the inadmissibility of discrimination. Thus the human rights activist Sergey Kovalev does not list specific groups, but declares that he defends the interests of rights in general.

Since the emergence of international law in its current form (ie including its humanitarian component – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other similar international documents), both NGOs and individual social activists have been able to legitimate their activities not only through representing group rights, but also through defending values. Do Human Rights Watch, the International League of Human Rights, or the Moscow Helsinki Group represent the interests of specific groups? No, they uphold the observance of human rights and values. Indirectly, of course, they represent the interests of those who adhere to the same values. However, such interests cannot fully be expressed through the definitions of material law. Human rights violations in Asia or Africa do not directly affect the immediate interests of Americans, nor does the discrimination against Meskethian Turks in the Krasnodar region affect the interests of inhabitants of Moscow.

Value systems have been international for many centuries. In the 1970s, the dissident philosopher Boris Shragin wrote that the dissidents, who appeared to be doomed to defeat because they were in a weight division incommensurable with that of the Soviet repressive apparatus, were in fact stronger by virtue of being part of an international movement. The Soviet dissidents quickly realized that the only resource that could have prevented them, as a movement, from being rounded up and crushed by the regime was an internationalization of their confrontation with the Soviet authorities. In many respects, they became the pioneers of the international NGO movement. Having realized that their legitimacy lay outside the boundaries of the Soviet system, they created the first independent voluntary associations of the post-Stalin period.

Of course, a procedurally confirmed representation of social interests is a powerful resource for NGOs, and it is their direct duty to develop in that direction. In the framework of stable democracies, this can yield considerable results, but even there legitimation and the improvement of the "quality" of representation should not become self-sufficient principles, since, as already noted, this would substitute a struggle for increasing legitimacy for the struggle for specific interests.

The introduction of formal criteria of legitimacy and the construction of a system of more or less legitimate NGOs on the level of the international community (not the EU, but the Council of Europe and the United Nations) would be especially disastrous for countries with less-developed democracies, including Russia. If the international community wishes to spread and affirm the principles enshrined in such fundamental documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the European Convention on Human Rights, then it has a duty to support minorities upholding democracy in non-democratic countries. This would include the recognition (ie legitimation) of NGOs that defend democratic values.

Doubt is often cast on that legitimation. An example of an attempt to undermine it is the campaign led by Russian conservative political commentators such as Maxim Sokolov to discredit so-called common human values. In fact, such authors use their criticism of transnational institutions for a veiled criticism of humanistic values (under Soviet rule there was a special formula for this: Soviet humanism). They are not interested in NGOs and their legitimacy, but rather in justifying the inhumane policies of the regime and in arguments against humanistic values as such, as well as the elevation of the nation (not necessarily in an ethnic sense) above the individual.

However, as long as Russia accepts the jurisdiction of international law, Russian NGOs have every reason to insist that reference to international documents ratified by the Russian Federation are sufficient grounds for lobbying social interests and advancing values both within the country and in the framework of the system of international bodies (eg the United Nations and the Council of Europe). It is important that in interacting with their external environment, NGO activists underline the basic democratic principles and human rights that are sufficient for a basic legitimation of their activities. However, they should not turn a blind eye to their own social responsibility. The appeal to lofty values may be a cover for all sorts of activities (including those directly conflicting with those values) or pseudo-activities. The use of any values for asserting egoistic rather than social interests discredits those values. In Russia, we have had ample opportunity to observe this in the actions of the authorities of the Yeltsin period.

To sum up the debate that has been going on for several years among civic organizations at round table discussions, seminars, and conferences, Russian NGOs are facing the following problems:
- their inability to inform a wide public about their activities;
- their inability to ground the system of priorities that guides their choice of activities in a language that would be intelligible to society as a whole;
- a lack of skills for mobilizing the population even in support of those interests that obviously concern relatively large social groups; and,
- a lack of skills for efffective interaction with the authorities.

The international character of the problems that Russian NGOs are facing should become an additional stimulus for renewal. They should formulate their missions more clearly as well as increase the transparency of, and justify in greater detail, the process by which they determine their priorities and detect and formulate the interests represented. In this way, for example, all objective difficulties notwithstanding, Russian human rights activists should clearly articulate and explain to the public why they concentrate on protecting minorities rather than the most socially vulnerable groups, and on protecting citizens from the arbitrary actions of authorities rather than defending the rights of victims in all cases of injustice.

Overcoming the lack of transparency in the actions of NGOs, which in many respects provides the grounds for doubts or speculation about their legitimacy as a subject of the contemporary socio-political process, is the only way to solve the problems of legitimacy while preserving the meaning of their existence in modern democracies.

The author would like to thank Tatyana Lokshina and Olga Shepeleva for their valuable remarks and additions.

Related articles:

Claus Leggewie
Transnational movements and the question of democracy (bg) (de) (en) (ru)
Social movements can provide an early warning system to mainstream politics. But once institutionalized, their lack of democratic mandate raises problems of legitimacy. This paradox must be negotiated if democracy is to respond to the global situation. [Russian version added] [2005-05-20]

Valery Tishkov
An anthropology of NGOs (en) (ru)
Organizations calling themselves "movements" are by no means always popular. Placing the legitimacy of the nation-state at the mercy of such ambiguous entitites would be ill-advised. [2005-06-01]

Boris Mezhuev
Transnationalization's dead ends (en) (ru)
Is transnationalism premised on the politically correct precepts of western European liberalism? And might transnational NGOs become a way of "laundering" corporate "cultural and political capital"? [2005-06-01]

Published 2005-06-01