Life In Civic Society
by Kate Fearon
Fortnight September 2000
'Civic society' and 'civil society' are assumed to be synonymous and indeed have become interchangeable terms in Northern Ireland. While civil society is consequent upon the existence of a democratic state (that portion of the organised population outside of the state), civic society is slightly different. It may be more useful to understand it as a specific sector of the traditional and historical civil society. Therefore it includes all the groups outside the state that encourage and involve active, organised citizens to employ only non-violent methodologies to advance their various causes, which have at their root a concern with either protection or promotion of democracy. (Some groups in the civil society sector, most notably in our context, the Orange Order, are not necessarily benign.)
Difficulties in defining are compounded in a divided society, where the state cannot anticipate any automatic loyalty from those who reside within its (contested) boundaries. Indeed, those who have had least regard for the state have been some of its most active residents, and those who have had most regard for it have rarely acted in autonomous or collective ways in a civic society sense.
Northern Ireland's civic society has emerged from its active and diverse civil society in the early seventies, which was characterised by grassroots community activism and volunteerism. These actions in turn grew in confidence to a more professionalised voluntary and community sector that worked more closely with and accepted more resources from government in the eighties. These networks and groups developed to such a level that they were well placed to support more overtly and coherently the fragile peace process in the nineties, leaving us with the more cohesive civic society that we recognise today. Indeed, recognised to the point that it will have its own institution in the Civic, not Civil, Forum.
In the beginning though, all politics was local and informed largely by the self-help ethic established in response to appalling social conditions and then to the conflict. Lunch groups for the elderly, playgroups for children, holiday exchange programmes. Nothing too radical. Nothing too political. Many commentators have viewed much of this as naive romanticism. It had no real impact on conflict resolution. Insofar as this goes, it is true. But to be fair, the people who were organising these activities should not be responsible for resolving constitutional conflict-and not all of them claimed to do so. In the seventies, perhaps stabilising communities was radical enough.
The potential of these disparate, and in terms of funding, often desperate groups to contribute to a more stable society was officially recognised at an early stage. The establishment of the NI Community Relations Commission begged the question of whether increasing resources to community relations could reduce sectarianism and conflict, but disbandment of the original CRC in 1975 'stymied the practical testing of this proposition', as Avila Kilmurray notes in her excellent essay for The Times That Were in It.
Groups were more likely to be found in areas of high economic deprivation and nationalist hue. Unionist groups still saw 'community development' as a rebellious activity, something that sought to subvert and undermine the state. Even though the state, in economic terms, oppressed many loyalists, they supported the state over their own conditions.
The 1974 UWC strike demonstrates this acutely. Clem McCartney has posited
that, regardless of one's view of the management and objectives of the strike,
it must be included in the canon of civic society activity. Indeed, this
argument is given weight by the fact that another civic society organisation,
the British TUC, attempted to organise a back to work march that was attended
by only a few hundred brave souls. But this is not necessarily a case of
civic society being at odds with itself. A distinction can be drawn between
a one-off mass movement of people in a civil society action, and a more
developed civic society organisation that has a greater sustained organisational
focus over time. That the strike was a powerful and successful exercise
there is no doubt. |
