This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Civil Society

A modern state, in any part of the world, must now confront a global economy that surpasses all national laws and borders.

How can the inequalities brought about by globalization be corrected?

How are individuals to be prepared for the age of new and ever-increasing competition in all walks of life?

How can social welfare programs be restructured so that the most vulnerable citizens will not become victims of global Darwinism?

The Latin American state, in particular, must not proceed from protecting its inefficiency to protecting its injustice.

In a globalized world, local government plays a critical role in maintaining the social equilibrium within each nation, and this cannot be achieved unless public spending is kept at a level of at least 30 percent of the gross domestic product. This, in turn, requires promotion of internal savings and liberation from the vicious cycle that leads us to attract external capital with high interest rates, instead of encouraging productive capital with high savings rates. To achieve all this, there must be a complementary relationship, not a hostile confrontation, between the public and private sectors.

This is precisely where civil society — the third sector, the social sector — can play a critical role by building bridges between the public and private sectors, by putting an end to pointless antagonisms, by advocating the compatibility of collective interests, and by acting on its own in areas that the other two sectors cannot occupy, describe, or even, occasionally, imagine.

Sometimes, when bureaucracy is blind, civil society is better equipped to identify, with greater speed and accuracy, the needs for development: for example, the problems of the forgotten village, the invisible neighborhood, the working mother.

And at other times, when private enterprise sees only a lack of profit, the social sector can discover or invent the best way to employ local resources and set up initiatives that will allow the less fortunate to help themselves: day-care centers, cooperatives, credit systems, shared medical and pharmaceutical plans, personal and public health programs, educational support, and door-to-door illiteracy programs if that is what is needed.

Or reading groups, or incentives for encouraging local theater. Savings banks, neighborhood associations, family medicine programs. Small, flexible, original, and renewable, third-sector organizations can be pioneers for governmental or private sector initiatives.

And they fulfill a political function that may be less visible but certainly not less critical. They help establish the public agenda. They empower people.

This is particularly true in Latin America, where we continue to be two nations, the term used by Disraeli to describe mid-nineteenth-century England caught between industrial development and social backwardness. We are indeed two nations: Brazil rather wryly calls itself “Belindia”—part Belgium, part India. In Latin America, the Mercedes and the mule, the skyscraper and the slum, the supermarket and the garbage dump, the baroque and the barock ’n’ roll all coexist, and the television aerial is the new cross of the neighborhood parish.

I believe that the third sector’s principal challenge in Latin America is that of creating bridges between these two nations, advocating human development as the starting point for sustained economic development, with the understanding that global problems can only be resolved by tackling local problems: the village, the isolated community, internal migration, small farms, trades, neighborhood roads, rural schools, vocational training, and traditional craftsmanship.

Global health cannot exist without local health.

The success of the new democracies in Latin America will be determined by their ability to relate the notion of political liberty to that of social welfare.

The function of civil society is to “socialize” both the public and private sectors. And I will even venture a step further: civil society should colonize them, though always recognizing that civil society itself is constantly being colonized by the State and the corporate world.

This, then, is not about stagnant, hermetic compartments. To a certain degree, civil society is not unlike political parties that have one foot in society and the other in the institutional world.

For this reason, the oft-invoked notion of civil society as an entity uncontrolled by the public and private sectors is insufficient. Civil society criticizes public and private institutions but it can also enrich them, contaminate them, and offer alternative solutions for real prosperity.

The aim is to broaden the horizons of this mutating world, so that new structures can emerge, strengthened by new institutions that will be able to adapt to change with justice.

With respect to Latin America, I insist upon the need for raising our level of savings so that our production levels may grow; with this change, Latin America would be less dependent on speculative capital. And that, in turn, would attract productive capital.

This is an extremely broad topic, but its nuances are so minute that they often go unnoticed. Nevertheless, they are important enough to constitute a basis and a framework for what we understand to be the “third sector” or “civil society.”

To open up the channels between savings and productive investment, social welfare funds are necessary, as are savings banks, credit unions, and, in a general sense, access to credit in the interest of expanding the financial system and its scope. At the same time, systems of micro-credits must be encouraged and expanded. I will give one example that I think is sufficient to illustrate this point.

In various rural regions in Asia, a democracy of credit is being created. Since its inception twenty years ago, the Grameen (rural) Bank of Bangladesh has designated 2.5 billion dollars to 2 million clients at current interest rates. In one year alone the bank dispensed some 500 million dollars’ worth of credits to the poor, with an average individual loan of around 200 dollars, and a 98 percent rate of return. The poor — unlike certain banks in Mexico, Russia, the United States, or Indonesia — pay back their loans punctually. They do not require taxpayer-subsidized economic bailout plans. The majority of micro-credit recipients are women, and 90 percent of the money they receive is used for their children’s health and education; in other words, for the development of citizens.

In Mexico, Manuel Arango proposes private administration for public ends and Jorge Castañeda proposes cooperative programs with defined parameters and specific goals that would be able transversally to cut through class differences and unify efforts in the interest of resolving concrete, if small-scale, problems.

Public interest does not have just one champion. Increasingly, solidarity and the desire to participate enable the creation, across the board, of nongovernmental organizations whose work could very well be as important as the efforts of government and private enterprises.

I can offer two examples: they are far-flung on the map but complementary. In the Brazilian city of Curitiba, the mayor, the architect Jaime Lerner, spearheaded a joint effort between public administration, private enterprise, and civil society to fight pollution, create more green space, recycle garbage, rehabilitate the urban center, and decentralize urban growth. The result was an improved quality of life for this Latin American city, and it was achieved thanks to the cooperation of all three sectors.

The other, more dramatic example is that of the extraordinary achievements of Hungarian civil society, operating within — and in spite of — a totalitarian system in its most radical incarnation: as a social underground in a dictatorial regime. The great Hungarian novelist Gyorgy Konrad describes how, with all they had to endure, including the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Soviet tanks, a chain of infinitesimal acts of love, sensuality, creativity, and friendship allowed the country’s civil society to survive on a day-to-day basis, despite all the unhappiness they lived with.

An experimental school, a research project, a new orchestra, the chance to publish in the underground, a tiny restaurant, a mathematics association, an attractive boutique, independent publications, semiclandestine newspapers. . all of these in the Hungary beholden to the Warsaw Pact were minimal but transcendental manifestations of civil society. When? How? Where? Humbly, the great Hungarian novelist reminds us: “in retreat, in trenches,” and ever conscious of the dangers and the obstacles, willing to wait one or two generations to achieve the socialization of the system. .

If they could achieve this, filled with courage and hope, as active members of civil society in a totalitarian state, do we, living in democratic, free-market systems, face a far less onerous task or is it the other way around — has liberty dulled us, illusion duped us, and complacency weakened us?

The paradox of Latin America is that we have a strong culture and weak institutions. The Latin American challenge, then, is to channel its cultural constancy and strength toward its political and economic institutions, and this cannot be achieved without the sustained impetus of civil society. Social explosion is the alternative — the return to military regimes, the resurgence of that time-honored Latin American tradition of authoritarian, centralist governments, along with the old lust for corruption and the more recent proliferation of narcotics empires.

If we can overcome these ills, we will strengthen both society and culture. They are inseparable. Without them, we will suffer from a fragile economy and a constantly threatened political sphere. Democracy with development and justice. This is the clarion call of Latin America. We have had, on occasion, political democracy with neither development nor justice (the Colombia of the liberal-conservative rotation); development with neither democracy nor justice (the Mexican revolution until 1960); and justice with neither democracy nor development (the early stages of the Cuban revolution). There are many other examples, many other variables. Currently, we rely too heavily on external and not enough on internal factors to achieve the balance we need. And so it falls to the third sector — civil society — to activate the citizens’ initiatives that can create useful jobs for the workforce that has been expelled by the state and private sectors as the result of an exclusionary modernization process.

Give the people back their power. Create the conditions to achieve real prosperity, from below — it will be far more solid than the flimsy prosperity that provides indispensable fiscal discipline but does not eradicate poverty or unemployment, and gives priority to financial capital while undermining faith in human capital. In her seminal book ¿Qué Hacemos con los pobres? (What Do We Do with the Poor?), Julieta Campos very succinctly assesses the situation: Latin America must move away from exclusionary modernization toward an inclusive one. The logic of the market, in and of itself, “accentuates the asymmetries.” Can’t we create a new model of modernity based on local initiatives and the participation of communities — that is, civil society? “Without renouncing global economic efficiency. . without weakening the control on spending and the stability of both the exchange rate and prices,” we must “address the priorities of human development.”

The mobilization of civil society can provide answers to these questions. But civil society does not live on air. It needs the protective shelter of democracy and the nourishing life force of cultural legacy.