A travelling ideal

In recent decades, the growth of cross-border publics has led to a rising awareness of the factual growth of global civil society. This awareness, like a shell covering a kernel, contains another insight: that the emerging civil society on a world scale is breathtakingly complex. That is perhaps an understatement, because in reality global civil society is so complex that it appears to our senses as an open-ended totality whose horizons are not fully knowable. Those who try to survey and summarise its contours have the feeling that they are blind geographers. The global circulation of books and magazines, Internet messages, and radio and television programmes combine to spread the sense that this civil society resembles a kaleidoscope of sometimes overlapping or harmonious, sometimes conflicting and colliding groups, movements and non-governmental institutions of many different, often changing colours. Perhaps it is better to speak of global civil society as a dynamic space of multiple differences, some of which are tensely related or even in open conflict. It resembles the inner structures and dynamics of global cities like New York, London, Berlin, Paris or Sydney: a complex and dynamic three-dimensional landscape of buildings of all shapes and sizes, sought-after and down-market areas, organisations of all descriptions, cheerfulness and cursing, public generosity and private thuggery, millions of people on the move, using many forms of transport, in many directions.