World View : The ‘Missing Middle’ of Democracy : People, not ideologies, are the building blocks of the new politics, say visionary experts on ‘civil society.’

On the West Bank, Palestinian teachers, students and parents quietly run underground schools and college courses to replace those closed by military authorities.

In the overcrowded refugee camps of the Gaza Strip, young women operate nonprofit child-care facilities, while Islamist groups offer welfare and social services. In East Jerusalem, the al-Hakawati speakers group holds regular debates on legal, human rights and other topical issues.

Throughout the occupied territories, volunteers have created scores of local “health committees” that provide rudimentary care for those who can’t get to or afford conventional treatment. And professional unions offer a mechanism for everything from pooling resources to regulating services, while writers’ and scientists’ syndicates provide forums for exchanging ideas and innovations.

As Palestinians prepare for the long road to self-rule, this mosaic of grass-roots organizations may be even more important than Yasser Arafat in determining whether a stable, pluralist society is eventually created in the West Bank and Gaza.

But groups like these may also provide a key to broader stability in the post-Cold War world. For they are at the core of what political strategists call “civil society”--a term increasingly used worldwide to describe a new vision of social and political organization built around people rather than ideologies.

Civil society is the product of groups both formal and informal, ranging from local sports associations to international human rights organizations, from trade unions to women’s bridge clubs and from chambers of commerce to wildlife protection movements.

Together, they form the “missing middle” that can fill the vacuum between the state and its people, according to Naomi Chazan, a political scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

As in the Palestinian case, civil society offers a means of participating before the ballot. In struggling democracies from Poland to Peru, it offers a means of having impact beyond the ballot.

And in places as different as Brazil’s tropical Amazon and Siberia’s arctic hinterlands, the diverse and disparate groups provide various means to draw people into a system, give them a stake, protect their rights and project their demands--thus stabilizing societies, peacefully.

The fabric woven by civil society could eventually replace the majority in “majority rules.” In places where there is no longer a classic, single-minded majority, interactive groups may provide a stronger glue to hold fragmenting societies together, social scientists predict.

The growth of civil society reflects one of the most fundamental shifts in power since the onset of global change in 1989, according to Augustus Richard Norton, a Boston University political scientist and director of the Civil Society in the Middle East project.

“The state system--with its armies and diplomatic privileges and sovereignty--survives. But parallel to the state system now is a system of non-sovereign or non-state actors, sometimes local but sometimes crossing boundaries, because the communications revolution has enabled them to maneuver around state restrictions and laws and surveillance,” he said.

In the decades ahead, civil society is likely to be the strongest barometer of democratic change. As a rule, the more numerous, engaged and diverse a community’s civil organizations, the more likely pluralism will take root and survive. And the more civil groups people belong to, the greater a society’s stability.

“Sustaining democracy requires more than just reforming laws to open up the political system or creating a large middle class,” Norton added.

“It also requires opening up political space where contending opinions are given a voice. The real home of democracy is civil society, because without a vibrant and autonomous civil society, elections no matter how pristine, no matter how mechanically perfect, are unlikely to produce durable results.”

Group life is nothing new nor, really, is civil society. The concept is as old as the ancients who coined the term. And for centuries the world’s great thinkers, from Montesquieu and Marx to Adam Smith and Hegel, have debated the role of grass-roots and other non-governmental organizations in lofty treatises.

What distinguishes the situation today are the dimensions and diversity of new groups that are emerging. The 1993 U.N. Human Development Report describes “an explosion of participatory movements or non-governmental organizations. . . . People’s participation is becoming the central issue of our time.”

Trade unions have provided much of the impetus for the wave of democratization of the 1980s, particularly in Poland, Bulgaria, South Korea and several Latin American countries.

The citizens groups Civic Forum and Public Against Violence were critical to the success of Czechoslovakia’s 1989 “Velvet Revolution,” providing a means of empowering people and challenging the state. And the 1989 pro-democracy uprising at Beijing’s Tian An Men Square was the product of a civil society struggling to emerge in China.

In the United States, which probably has the world’s richest civil society, the right of free association in groups beyond government control may be taken for granted. But it is new in most parts of the world. And it is growing.

Kenya now has 23,000 women’s groups alone. India’s Tamil Nadu state has 25,000 registered grass-roots organizations. And the Philippines has at least 12,000 community associations or cooperatives, according to the U.N. report.

Internationally, groups not tied to states are becoming global players in the 1990s. The London-based human rights group Amnesty International is now “more powerful than 90% of the world’s states,” Norton contends. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, while Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and a host of other international organizations are more involved in global crises than most Western nations. They’re also often a jump ahead of the United Nations.

In a break with the past, most of these groups are not controlled, manipulated or financed by nations. And in varying degrees, they are changing global political life on at least three levels.

A STAKE IN THE SYSTEM

First, they are bringing people from the bottom of society into the system--and in turn changing the middle and top.

Egypt offers an extreme example. About 750,000 people live in mausoleums of Cairo’s largest cemetery, known as the City of the Dead, due to a chronic housing shortage. The only people lower on the social ladder are poor migrants from Egypt’s desert oases who squat on the cemetery’s fringe. They’re called Zabbaleen, or garbage people.

For years, the Zabbaleen lived nocturnally, picking up refuse as an illegal livelihood. By dawn, they’d disappeared into their squalid and also illegal shanties. Even City of the Dead residents looked down on them.

But in the late 1980s, the Zabbaleen began organizing. They’ve since obtained a license to operate legally--and during daylight. The government agreed to provide water and electricity to their area. And as a recognized group, they’ve changed their image: Rather than being an embarrassment, they’re now seen as people contributing to the city’s life and cleanliness.

“Associational life in the past--unions and professional groups--was always dominated by the middle class. The new development is that the lower classes are now mobilizing in their own interests too,” explained Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian sociologist and publisher of the monthly Civil Society newsletter, which circulates around the world.

“And they are slowly changing the way of life and the balance of power in Egypt.”

At the time of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s death a generation ago, Egypt was home to about 7,000 groups, many of them under heavy state control or influence. Today, Egypt boasts 21,000 diverse organizations, the majority free, Ibrahim said.

Emerging civil societies are also empowering minorities--and allowing them to integrate without forcing a surrender of their separate identity.

Over the last three years, the Amazonia Working Group has pulled together more than 140 of Brazil’s small and isolated communities, from Indian tribes to rubber tappers, in an umbrella advocacy movement. It now has eight regional offices, according to Marcel Viergever, a U.N. development specialist. Once powerless, the minorities are together gaining clout on political and environmental issues.

On the other side of the Equator, the 15,000 indigenous Chukchi of Siberia’s Arctic Chukotka Peninsula--powerless for centuries against Russian imperial and Soviet Communist rule--have started to take on both the state and the Russians, who now outnumber the Chukchi 8 to 1 in their ancient tribal area. They’re campaigning to restrict wildlife hunting and eliminate a local nuclear power station, urging that funds instead be used to research energy alternatives.

“We’re trying to make non-indigenous people understand that in coalition we can create a better environment for all, not just the Chukchi,” said Oleg Egorov, the Chukchi’s new lobbyist.

A plethora of groups has also been crucial to female empowerment in the 1990s.

In Yemen, for example, the formation of several new women’s organizations resulted in 50 female candidates in parliamentary elections last April. Against all odds--since they were either independents or small-party candidates in a male-dominated, staunchly Muslim country--two won, crossing a threshold.

“Through civil organization people are able to express at the grass-roots level their preferences and their aspirations. Once they have a stake, then they’re hooked. So civil society influences the pattern of political development and ensures its survival,” said Saraswathi Menon, an Indian sociologist in the U.N. Human Development Program.

GADFLY TO THE NATION

Second, people’s organizations are increasingly vehicles for changing the functioning of nations. In addition to holding governments accountable, they, rather than the nation, often take the lead in solving problems.

Among the most dynamic Palestinian groups in the occupied territories is Law in the Service of Man or Al-Haqq, a human rights group formed in the 1980s and widely praised by Amnesty International and others.

Al-Haqq, which uses Palestinian lawyers, business people and academics on a voluntary basis, documents and goes to court over abuses. Even before a Palestinian authority is elected, a group is already in place to monitor its practices--although staunchly Palestinian, Al-Haqq has kept sufficient political distance from all parties to be a fair arbiter of democratic and human rights standards, both Palestinian and American experts claim.

“Civil society is simultaneously arrayed against the state and engaged with the state in setting the boundaries of public power,” explained Peter Lewis, author of “Political Transition and the Dilemma of Civil Society in Africa.”

“Throughout the continent, independent political and social forces have emerged to challenge moribund authoritarian-patrimonial regimes of many varieties,” Lewis added. “Churches and organized labor, lawyers and students, market women, academics, physicians, journalists, business elites and a host of other interests may be identified among the growing realm of associational participation.”

Zambia’s young trade union movement was critical in ending almost three decades of one-party rule. Its role was acknowledged in 1991 presidential elections, won by trade union leader Frederick Chiluba.

Throughout the Middle East, the rise of political Islam is also based on its ability to provide a range of associations and social services, particularly in countries unable to meet citizens’ needs yet unwilling to allow change.

Since 1970, the number of groups in the 21-nation Arab world has soared from some 20,000 to 70,000, according to Ibrahim, the Egyptian sociologist. Vast numbers are Islamist.

In Jordan, Egypt and other Arab states, Islamists have organized schools and clinics, assembled networks for youth and women, offered training and jobs, generally fostering an atmosphere of participation through Islamist groups.

“As the state retreats from providing services and housing and so on, people are recognizing that they must organize to provide alternatives. In the process, they demand a share in decision-making at the community level,” Ibrahim said. “That’s the wave of the present and the future.”

According to the U.N. report, free participation in civil society and the economy is not a luxury but an imperative for the survival of nations. “If states are to survive, they will have to establish new relations with their people,” it warned.

RESOLVING CONFLICTS

Perhaps the biggest test of many emerging civil societies is their ability to deal with conflicts, combat crime, and counter divisive ethnic and nationalist passions, particularly in the Third World and former Communist states.

On the one hand, the proliferation of civil organizations offers new means to cope with those nagging problems.

Although efforts to disarm Somalia’s warlords dominate the headlines, for example, U.S. and U.N. diplomats have also been working quietly to pull together people with common interests--merchants, intellectuals, women and others--to form a series of associations that go beyond clan divisions.

“Building civil society provides leaders who have their own constituencies with common interests,” explained former U.N. envoy Mohammed Sahnoun. “People begin to listen to them rather than the warlords as they see an alternative leadership which is long-term and rational and in which they have a stake.”

Among Palestinians, ideological differences run deep among diverse political groups--from Marxist to Islamist and from moderate pro-peace to radical rejectionist. But because virtually every party supports or is linked to aspects of civil society--ranging from Islamist health care groups to leftist women’s self-help groups--the long-term prospects for stability triumphing over violence are considered by many to be high.

“People at all levels already have a practical stake in a system,” said Mohammed Hallaj, head of the Palestinian Research and Education Center in Washington.

Accordingly, for places such as the former Yugoslav republics, Afghanistan and the embattled Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, experts advocate encouragement of broad-based associations that reach beyond the primordial bonds fueling strife.

“The goal is to have people associate in several groups so no singular source of identity will lead to conflict with a rival. Multiple associations provide different channels for expression, action and support and move people away from parochial or tribal perceptions,” said Menon, the Indian sociologist.

On the other hand, the U.N. report conceded that civil society has limitations. “Building these institutions takes time--and constant renewal if they are not to become instruments for a small elite to manipulate the levers of power,” it said.

For instance, religious groups may provide social services and mobilize adherents to participate in the political system. Yet the result in some cases--either directly or indirectly--can be to exclude people of other religions.

“Self-interest, prejudice and hatred cohabit with altruism, fairness and compassion,” Norton said, “sometimes making unrestrained free play of civil society a chilling thought.”