Book Review
Civil society and nuclear non-proliferation: How do states respond? Claudia Kissling Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, 2008, 207pp., $99.95, ISBN 978-0754673002 Acta Politica (2009) 44, 346–348. doi:10.1057/ap.2009.3
This book develops a normative theoretical framework loosely based on Habermasian notions of deliberative democracy, and seeks to apply these to international decision making in the security field. Based on these theoretical considerations in the first two chapters, which are very brief and rather underdeveloped, the rest of the study consists of an empirical case study aimed at answering the questions whether (a) civil society can contribute to the evolution of regimes, even in the security field and (b) whether civil society can contribute to the democratic quality of decision making. Kissling conceptualizes civil society organizations as a ‘a proxy, or rather, as Nanz and Steffek phrased it, as a ‘‘transmission belt’’ between deliberative processes within international organizations and emerging transnational public spheres’ (p.10). She skates rather lightly over thorny questions about whether such spheres are indeed emerging, and why and how non-profit organizations (for her definition of civil society is strictly organizational) should be expected to act as proxies or transmitters. This conceptual oversight translates into weaknesses in the empirical study, where she does not systematically differentiate between democratic deficits caused by the structure of international decision making and democratic deficits (or strengths) within the collective of civil society organizations she considers. Kissling operationalizes her second and most central research question by determining whether (1) civil society organizations had access to decisionmaking forums (2) whether there was transparency, that is, whether they had full access to relevant information (3) whether states were responsive to civil society discourse and proposals and (4) whether there was inclusion, that is, whether every possible civil society perspective could be heard. Although she could have defended this particular choice of elements of ‘deliberative democracy’ a little more thoroughly, she is to be congratulated for her attempt to break down the largely theoretical concept of deliberative democracy into empirically testable elements. By doing this, she goes beyond existing empirical work that simply determines whether NGOs can influence international r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 0001-6810 Acta Politica www.palgrave-journals.com/ap/
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Book Review
decision making as well as beyond the deliberative democracy literature which is not only largely theoretical but also largely devoted to theorizing ideal conditions of domestic decision making. The operationalization of ‘responsiveness’, taking up nearly 100 pages, is almost a book within a book. Here, Kissling makes a real innovation. She looks at ‘policy adjustment’, along the lines of a classic qualitative study of influence through process-tracing, but this is not the only form ‘responsiveness’ can take. Because Kissling wants to know whether civil society involvement brings deliberative democracy to international decision making, she also looks at ‘justification’: have states taken pains to publicly justify their position, in these justifications have they referred to the ‘common good’ (as opposed to a nebulous state interest), and have they specifically referred to civil society arguments in doing so. Even if states would reject every single argument and proposal that civil society organizations make, their involvement would have improved the democratic quality of the negotiations if it were found that states did regularly take the trouble to justify their preferences in deliberative terms. The case study chosen for the book is the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and more specifically the 2005 Revision Conference of the treaty, taken together with the preparatory committees leading up to it. This case study is rather peculiar. Kissling’s second hypothesis betrays high normative aspirations: civil society organizations are not only hypothesized to have access to decision makers and information, states are expected to be responsive to them, and even to include all voices. Kissling could have chosen a case study in which the likelihood of a civil society contribution to democratic decision making was relatively great, such as negotiations on climate change, on the International Criminal Court or on landmines. If she felt that that would be loading the dice too much in favour of the democratic contribution, she could have chosen a case study in which expectations might be moderate, such as the negotiations on world trade. Even if she insisted – although why it is not clear – that her case study would have to be in the field of security, she could have chosen a more dynamic forum, such the OSCE or NATO. Instead, she has chosen the most barren, might-is-right predicated forum imaginable, the NPT, paralysed for decades by the division between nuclear and non-nuclear states. Moreover, she chooses to study it over a period when the United States was at its most aggressively unilateralist. Kissling could not have known when she began the study, which involved participatory observation at the forums in question, that the Review Conference would end in a complete failure to reach any agreement, but she might have known that, despite high civil society participation, the odds were stacked against a deliberative process. As a result, her findings that civil society access and transparency were limited, inclusion highly problematic and responsiveness almost non-existent are rather unsurprising. This is quite unfortunate and unsatisfactory, r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 0001-6810
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particularly in view of the pain-staking empirical research that was conducted. In a forum and at a time so loaded against deliberative decision making, and with states barely prepared, as Kissling details, to reach any procedural let alone substantive agreement, it would have been very peculiar to find that civil society did contribute to the democratic quality of decision making. In addition to the thorough but highly technical description of the 2002–2005 NPT negotiations from the perspective of civil society organizations, the most important contribution of this study is its promising research framework that deserves both theoretical elaboration and application to other, less over-determined case studies.
Marlies Glasius University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
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