Challenging Asia‐Europe relations from below?: Civil society and the politics of inclusion and opposition

There has been a striking recent upsurge of oppositional political activity in East Asia, including labour and popular responses to the Asian economic crisis. This is mirrored in the policy recommendations and campaigns advanced by Asian and European NGOs that provide an alternative vision for sustainable economic and social development. The paper explores the significance of politics ‘from below’ for current efforts to institutionalize interregional cooperation through the Asia‐Europe Meeting (ASEM). It asks whether it is justifiable to identify this development as comprising emergent realities of ‘regional civil society’ and ‘transnational democracy’. The first part outlines the theoretical debate between neoliberal, liberal‐pluralist and critical‐structural approaches to civil society's attempts to respond to processes of ‘globalization’. The second part examines the role of both elite social movements and developmental NGOs as actors seeking to address the current ASEM agenda. It identifies key tensions in the responses of civil society actors: between elite inclusion, accommodation and outright opposition. This is followed, in the third part, by a critique of current NGO response to ASEM focusing on: (i) the practical dilemmas of their engagement with the emerging multilateralist agenda; (ii) the privileging of a liberal‐pluralist conception of civil society that dominates NGOs’ ‘rethinking’ of their strategic goals; and (iii) a misreading of the globalization discourse that serves to obscure the ways in which capitalism is actually being reconfigured in our era. The main conclusion is that movements of political opposition have acted to increase public participation in and criticism of interregional policy discussions. However, it argues that capitalist social relations remain a massive obstacle to the kinds of demands for social justice made by associations of civil society.