Sovereignty, Democracy, and Global Civil Society: State-Society Relations at UN World Conferences

CHAPTER 5. Sovereignty Bargains and Challenges at the Conferences on Population and Development, Social Development, and Human Settlements

C H A P T E R 5 Sovereignty Bargains and Challenges at the Conferences on Population and Development, Social Development, and Human Settlements Up to now, we have concentrated on the conferences on the environment , human rights, and women as case studies in the emergence and development of global civil society. In this chapter, we extend the study to three other contemporary UN conferences: the 1994 Conference on Population and Development, held at Cairo, 513 September 1994; the World Summit for Social Development, held at Copenhagen, 12-16 March 1995; and the UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), held at Istanbul, June 1996. Together , these were the six major conferences of the 1990s. We know that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have became routine participants at such conferences. They share many goals and offer diverse interpretations of important issues that often challenge states’ own interpretations and interests. While the active presence of NGOs supports the potential for a truly global and social civil society to emerge internationally, there are still significant obstacles to a fully shared democratic sphere of interaction at the international level. Many of these obstacles are created by states, who are likely to use the language of sovereignty to protect issues they see as particularly central to their interests or asserted identities. At the Earth Summit, the human rights conference, and the women’s conference, states tried to keep both economic self-determination issues and cultural or religious practices within their sovereign prerogative. However, states were willing to make certain bargains over sovereignty issues when they could gain by it. In 129 our comparison of the conferences on the environment, human rights, and women, the bargains we witnessed suggested that states were more willing to compromise domestic autonomy in order to receive external resources for environmental protection than they were to sacrifice autonomy over cultural values. A brief analysis of the conferences at Cairo, Copenhagen, and Istanbul is useful in providing a broader perspective on those findings. We examine the following specific propositions generated in chapters 2-4. First, the more states link conference topics to sovereignty issues, the less ready states are to permit the open contestation and mutual accountability at the UN conferences that one would expect of a democratic international system. Conversely, when sovereignty issues are less central, we would expect NGOs to have higher participatory access at the conferences, along with evidence of greater cooperation with states and shared responsibility for implementation and monitoring. Furthermore, where state control might be enhanced by acquiring external resources, we would expect to see sovereignty bargains being negotiated. When we extend this analysis to the conferences on population , social development, and human settlements, at first glance, the cases seem to encompass topics not traditionally seen as related to core sovereignty questions. In addition, the problems addressed at the conferences appear amenable to the infusion of external resources. In accordance with those observations, on the issues debated at Cairo, Istanbul, and Copenhagen, one might predict a mix of issues and relationships conducive to the emergence of a global civil society—as defined in chapters 1 and 2 and indicated by global attendance and representation, shared rules and procedures for participation by all actors, and shared frames and repertoires for action—and a high potential for sovereignty bargains. What we found, however, was an articulation of sovereignty claims on social and economic issues that was consistent with the shifts in sovereign claims that we saw at Rio, Vienna, and Beijing. Those conferences revealed the emergence of less traditional articulations of sovereign claims: claims relating to “national” or cultural values. Those sovereignty claims, by their nature, are less available for trade-offs than environmental issues, as discussed in chapter 4. Given the presence of those nontraditional sovereignty claims, we would expect a less favorable climate for either NGO participation or for sovereignty bargains. Our investigation shows that while the conferences examined in this chapter were quite open to NGOs as participants, the issue 130 Sovereignty, Democracy, and Global Civil Society dynamics did in fact limit the willingness of states to make bids for non-state legitimacy or other kinds of sovereignty bargains. Cultural values played a prominent role throughout the conference on population. The Habitat conference almost foundered at the very end over the familiar debates about national cultural positions on women and reproductive rights, despite little direct link of the topic to housing issues. In addition, at...