Phi Beta Delta International Review

1997 Issue

VOLUNTEERISM, INTERNATIONALISM, AND THE GREEKS: FUKUYAMA'S SOCIAL CAPITAL THESIS

.

PAUL RICH

University of the Americas - Puebla, Mexico

GUILLERMO DE LOS REYES

Univeristy of the Americas - Puebla, Mexico

The myriad number of voluntary organizations in the world are getting scholarly attention with regards to what they contribute to political culture. Nongovernmental associations are increasingly recognized as fundamental to democratization: "In the world of ideas, civil society is hot. It is almost impossible to read an article on foreign or domestic politics without coming across some mention of the concept...At the heart of the concept of civil society lie 'intermediate institutions', private groups that thrive between the realm of the state and the family."

Contributing to this upsurge in interest in voluntary organizations, Francis Fukuyama has advanced a new or revived thesis about how what he calls intermediate institutions sustain democracy. The current interest in civil society on an international level can partly be credited to the conditions in Eastern Europe after communism crumbled: "Leaders like Vaclav Havel wanted to go beyond establishing new governments and create a culture that could sustain political and economic liberalism. They looked for help to those private groups beyond the reach of the state - citizens' associations, churches, human-rights chapters, jazz clubs - that had nourished dissident life. Around the same time, the victorious Western democracies found themselves confronting sagging economies, a fraying social fabric and the loss of national purpose. Here too, the experts and statesmen agreed, revitalizing civil society would overcome our malaise."

Fukuyama's work is indicative of the heightened appreciation of private associations but, it needs emphasizing, the contributions of associations have long been noted. Alexis de Tocqueville considered them vital to American society. In Foreign Affairs, Lester Salamon has criticized "the myth of the immaculate conception", i.e. the idea this is a new phenomenon: "While recent years have witnessed a dramatic upsurge in organized voluntary activity, such activity has deep historical roots in virtually every part of the world." He warns that "Careful efforts must thus be made to acknowledge the nonprofit sector's peculiar historical roots...", and concludes that, "The resulting surge of interest in nonprofit organizations has opened the gates to vast reservoirs of human talent and energy, even while it has created dangers of stalemate and dispute. While it is far from clear what must be done to keep these gates open, a crucial first step is a better understanding of the dramatic process underway and the immense new challenges it represents."

Giving notice to volunteerism's relationship to democracy is not a new phenomenon. The basic claim is that, "A striking upsurge is under way around the globe in organized voluntary activity and the creation of private, nonprofit or non-governmental organizations." The assertion is even made that this constitutes a second or parallel world. Fukuyama is one of the most successful of the new mega theorizers in international relations, attracting enormous attention when his book The End of History put forward the idea that the historical process had resulted in the triumph of the free market and democracy on a world scale. In his book Trust, he claims that those nations where social trust prevails will prosper far more than those where such trust is lacking. This social trust is largely manufactured by the voluntary societies that create civil society. In respects, Fukuyama is a modern-day de Tocqueville who like him appreciates the importance of non-government groups. De Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America:

In the United States, political associations are only one small part of the immense number of different types of associations found there. Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types - religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute...In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

The consequences of not having durable intermediate associations that stand between the family and state are - in Fukuyama's view - devastating. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where civil society was destroyed provide a prime example. It would be a tremendous service project for Phi Beta Delta to establish its next overseas chapter in one of the former Iron Curtain countries.

However, the lack of volunteerism is not confined to former Communist states: "Many Latin Catholic countries like France, Spain, Italy and a number of nations in Latin America exhibit a saddle-shaped distribution of organizations, with strong families, a strong state, and relatively little in between. These societies are utterly different from socialist ones in any number of important ways, particularly with regard to their greater respect for the family. But, like socialist societies, there has been in certain Latin Catholic countries a relative deficit of intermediate social groups in the area between the family and large, centralized organizations like the church or the state."

The notion of the virtue of voluntary service is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Writes Stephen Bailey, "...even with the twentieth-century's massive depreciation of Victorian rhetoric, millions of people have continued to find nourishment for the free self in fulfilling perceived obligations and in performing voluntary services. I remember my father donning his greatcoat on a blustery night of snow and wind preparing for a mile walk and saying, 'I do not want to go to the meeting of the prudential committee of the church, but I ought to go!' Upon returning, he would smile and say simply, 'Well, I have done my duty.' "

The United States is hardly alone in the plenitude of its volunteerism, although its nonprofit sector is especially vigorous in comparison with other countries. Still, an estimated 40,000 new private organizations were created in France in one year (1986). In the case of Britain, France and Holland, "As nonprofit organizations step up their activism and lobbying, the governments will increasingly have to contend with groups that, like their American counterparts, take responsibility for influencing public policy, hold governments at all levels more accountable, and mount advocacy campaigns."

Still other countries are not as well provided, and for the moment much of the growth of nongovernmentals is prompted by the missionary zeal of American organizations. Service clubs such as Lions, Rotary, Kiwanis, Civitan, Zonta and others are aggressively establishing themselves in almost every country of the world. For example, Soroptimist International, a women's professional club similar to Lions or Rotary, reported chartering new clubs during the summer of 1995 in Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, the Czech Republic, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Lithuania, Germany, Turkey, and Australia. The Soroptimists have more than 3000 clubs in 112 countries.

Greek letter societies have been, in contrast to such service clubs, largely confined to the United States since their initial Victorian proliferation in imitation of Phi Beta Kappa. They are not a new phenomenon, and their failure to expand overseas is strange exception to the spread of American voluntary organizations. There certainly are a number of worthy ones that one would think would both benefit from such an expansion and benefit those universities where they could be established. Why the Greek societies have not spread in the same fashion as some of the service clubs and fraternal orders, not to mention religious denominations, probably cannot be explained by any one reason. Possibly it is combination of their essentially esoteric nature, their failure to evangelize, and the difficulties in changing their rituals and constitutions to fit an international setting.

There are thousands of universities around the world which could be regarded as possible locations for a version of Greek life, social or academic. While establishment of these societies abroad would benefit scholarship - nothing being less controversial or more uncontestably meritorious than rewarding achievement in forestry or economics with a key or medal - the flurry of discussion about volunteerism indicated that the possible benefits of their growth go beyond that, being related to democratization.

It would be curious if members of Phi Beta Delta, a voluntary society involved with internationalism, did not inform themselves about the current discussion over the influence of voluntary organizations en masse on political life in various countries. This influence needs to be thoroughly examined - and that is doubly true in the Latin American and Mexican settings where democracy is just emerging from a long depression.

The contributions of voluntary groups to democracy are not always obvious. In Latin America there are obviously powerful associations such as Freemasonry and Opus Dei which are difficult to credit with the creation of the open society. Their activities do not appear to support the Fukuyama thesis about an intermediate zone of voluntary societies between family and state that promotes democracy. Instead:

...we see movement back and forth from one kind of social structure to another. Thus an association originally intended to disperse power and responsibility undergoes changes moving in the opposite direction, that is, in the direction of concentration of power. In the earliest essay in America on the structure of voluntary associations William Ellery Channing, the Boston Unitarian clergyman, pointed to this danger. The voluntary association, so far from serving as an instrument of freedom, may end in becoming a new instrument of tyranny and conformism...

Perhaps, then, democracy needs more organizations but those of a certain kind. Nongovernment organizations must be examined to see if they really have contributed to the development of democratic culture or rather are guilty of a rather beguine approach to the subject. In Mexico, "Repression or cooptation of all dissident movements took out of public life any sign of autonomy. The state managed to avoid the creation of an internal democratic life in existing associations and established a legal system in which the granting of social rights depended on state mediation." In Mexico today, which is undergoing democratization, there has been a recent rapid growth in the number of nongovernmental organizations: "From 1989 on the number of non governmental organizations (NGOs) skyrocketed. As a sociocultural response to the state's withdrawal from welfare responsibilities since 1982, professional groups, intellectuals and progressive church-inspired associations decided to organize working groups oriented to the development of public services, technical consultancy, health programmes, popular urban development, popular education, youth attention, environmental protection and so on and so forth. Past state monopolization of all these kind of societal initiatives waned, and given the availability of international funding, several NGOs flourished all over the country."

Focus on the components of the informal governmental process that a political culture approach to scholarship produces means that an organization like Phi Beta Delta can be viewed as performing a function other than its stated one of promoting international values, the other major function being the promotion of democratic values. It would be a mistake to view honorary organizations such as Phi Beta Delta in terms only of their program interests. They also should be viewed as organizations per se, teaching by their very existence the ideas of volunteerism and private initiative which are part of democracy.

The expansion of voluntary organizations in Latin America is reflected in the fact that a recent guide to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the region cites 42 directories containing information about more than 20,000 groups, a doubling since 1990. These societies and their influence on the democratization of Latin America are evidence for the arguments about over civil culture encouraged by Fukuyama:

...the book could mark a turning point in the way we look at ourselves, usefully erasing the phony wall that has grown up between economics (which is hard and scientific) and culture (which is soft and studied often by men with beards). Mr. Fukuyama is also presenting a profound challenge to those who talk about a borderless world and to those who try to graft neat social programs they find in, say, Germany, onto American culture. There are such things as national cultures and just because we can't precisely define them doesn't mean they are not important. In the 20th century we tried to reduce social policy to a science. Now we are discovering that many of the important things can't be captured by numbers, even in economics. Mr. Fukuyama is leading this revival.

In light of all of this now ongoing discussion, the contributions of intermediate social groups 'overseas' should be of interest to Phi Beta Delta. Have these groups really contributed to democracy? Will new entrants to the scene make a contribution? This is particularly interesting because so much hope about a more open society in Latin America has been based on free market reforms. If the creation of a rich and complex civil society is not a natural result of a free market economy, and if it develops that Fukuyama is right, and that a civil culture based on associationism is the ultimate necessity for a successful society, discussion about the free market viz democracy in Mexico will have to be enlarged.

The debate about volunteerism signals a seachange in international relations and political science theory. Fukuyama, after acknowledging the contributions of Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and other partisans of rational choice, denies that their approach can be the whole story: "As Adam Smith well understood, economic life is deeply embedded in social life, and it cannot be understood apart from the customs, morals, and habits of the society in which it occurs. It short, it cannot be divorced from culture." Fukuyama further warns, "Not being content to rest on their laurels, many neoclassical economists have come to believe that the economic method they have discovered provides them with the tools for constructing something approaching a universal science of man." He adds the obvious, that "The political science departments of many major universities are now filled with followers of so-called rational choice theory, which attempts to explain politics using an essentially economic methodology."

Civil society has not been the subject of many courses, but as noted there is a considerable history to the idea that voluntary groups are the building blocks of democracy. Fukuyama's 'discovery' of the role of voluntary groups has been anticipated for instance by the work of Margaret Jacob in studying the influence of eighteenth-century Masonic lodges. Jacob argues that, "Modern civil society was invented during the Enlightenment, in the new enclaves of sociability of which freemasonry was the most avowedly constitutional and aggressively civic. The nature of masonic sociability has not been understood because historians have seldom looked at actual masonic practices." She believes that, "In the final analysis freemasonry, for all of its exclusivity, secrecy, and gender bias, transmitted and textured the Enlightenment, translated all the cultural vocabularies of its members into a shared and common experience that was civil and hence political." But whatever the case in the Netherlands in the 1600s, the ubiquitous presence of Masonry in Latin America and in Mexico has not produced notably democratic cultures.

There is an irony to the idea that an organization is interesting not because of its interests but because it is an organization. An analysis of the history and activities of organizations such as the Greek honoraries may not be periphery but central to taking the pulse of a society. Each culture has the voluntary societies that, in a sense, it deserves. Or, at least, that demonstrate the uniqueness of an individual country's political culture and its variance from that of Canada or the United States.

Fukuyama is right that nongovernmental organizations are an important and understudied aspect of the political process. Although the importance of his work can be criticized by asserting that he is going over old ground, he has accomplished a service by reminding us that such theoretical approaches to international studies as dependence theory and rational choice have not proved adequate. The reopening of debate about the ingredients of international relations and political science studies can do no harm.

Phi Beta Delta in becoming a truly international organization contributes not only to the internationalist goals which are the very essence of its purpose, but perhaps less obviously to the growth of volunteerism - one of the most hopeful developments in the post Cold War world. There is little doubt that the building of social trust through the fostering of some voluntary organizations is a contributory to democracy:

In a society that is looking for alternatives to a way of life dominated by corporations and state, social movements suggest other choices. A network of organizations that encompass broad constituencies can change our understanding of what is possible and desirable. Little by little we can build a new political culture based on our own questions about the existing order. Meeting human needs neglected by the state and the market is the basis for social movements. By working together they promote positive change and stretch our understanding of democracy and justice. The values of the everyday world, including friendship, respect and concern for others, combined with shared hopes and aspirations, and healthy does of courage and patience, characterize what is best about the culture of social movements.

The worldwide prospects for the contributions of associations to democracy are mixed. Not every Mexican university is going to rush to establish Greek societies. Latin Americans cannot be described as Americans often are as "...hyperactive joiners, creating strong and durable voluntary organizations from Little Leagues and 4H Clubs to the National Rifle Association, the NAACP, and the League of Women Voters." While the art of association is a general American national characteristic and talent, and partly accounts for American success in building a democratic culture, that is not the Mexican or Latin American case. Joining is part of North American culture. An estimated seventy percent of the American population belong to at least one association and twenty-five percent belong to at least four. "I came to know hundreds of people who found meaning and satisfaction in performing community services," wrote Stephen Bailey about his years of residence in Middletown, Connecticut: "...volunteer firemen, members of library boards, organizers of community chests and United Fund drives, hospital aides, readers for the blind. These activities were frequently in addition to service on PTA committees or church boards and participation in service-club benefits for the crippled....no reform of the bureaucratic and political system can possibly obviate the need for the intimate expressions of caring that are associated with the voluntary performance of works of obligation and service." Still, the export of American academic societies will benefit international education. National societies will become international, which is itself good, and countries which have lacked volunteerism will acquire it.

Latin America has new organizations which gradually are taking the place of close communities and normative systems. In the post-NAFTA era this should be encouraged; the region needs additional and different associations that will foster the civic culture which Fukuyama is promoting. In de Tocqueville's words, "Among laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads."

Not just Latin America will benefit from an interest and emphasis on the development of volunteerism and associationism. The former Soviet bloc countries will, and so will countries where democratic values are well established but challenged by new forces not necessarily friendly to democracy such as technology. The time has come to take more seriously the role of nongovernmental organizations on government, international relations, and personal freedoms.

Paul Rich is Titular Professor of International Relations and History at the University of the Americas-Puebla, and Fellow, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University. He is one of the founders of Gamma Sigma Chapter of Phi Beta Delta at University of the Americas, the first chapter to be located outside of the United States. His books include several on the role of voluntary associations in history, notably a study of English education entitled Elixir of Empire.

Guillermo De Los Reyes is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and assistant professor at University of the Americas-Americas-Puebla, Mexico. He was the first student member and officer of the new Gamma Sigma Chapter of Phi Beta Delta at the university.