On a symbolical level, the images of Seattle were conveying a well-known and familiar idea: that NGOs are a kind of corrective political force, a counter-weight against the overarching powers of state bureaucracies and political elites: Inside, them, the cold and anonymous negotiating machinery of the WTO and its member countries; outside: We, the people.

Yet, these pictures, as convincing and persuasive they may have been, were deceptive in several ways. In the daily reality of politics, the NGO vs. State - logic of NGOs has waned since quite a time. On the contrary: NGOs are - at least in the "mature" democracies of the Western societies - on their way to become the State's best friends. 

a) Reflexive Modernity

Anthony Giddens, the academic master-mind of the "Third Way" has in various writings tried to analyse the shape and dynamics of post-traditional society. Central to his thinking is the notion of "manufactured risks". Insecurity, he argues, does in the scientific age no longer originate in man's inability to master the threats imposed to him by an uncontrollable nature. Today, the major threats to our life and security come from "within" human society itself. The risk of mass destruction, the risk of the destruction of the very basic prerequisites of human existence (as natural resources, bio-diversity, ozone-layer etc.), the risks of social disintegration are brought about by technological and scientific developments. The age-old struggle of man to ban insecurity out of his existence via technological innovation and scientific progress has failed; the very instruments he used to wage this struggle - scientific and technological progress - have proven to be at the origin of always new risks. So, systemically, no "security" is left: Ulrich Beck, today's most influential German sociologist speaks in this respect of the "age of the side-effect": Any wished-for positive effect of scientific innovation is accompanied by a host of "side-effects" which are not positive and not wished for.

Man, under these circumstances, is forced to take another stand to his own doing: he has to reflect continuously the possible unwanted effects of his undertakings. Society as whole becomes "reflexive", and has to take a critical and analytical approach to itself¹.

b) Scientificization

A second consequences of the age of "manufactured risks" is the "scientificization" of political and social processes. If the central driving force of change and the primary source of collective insecurity is of scientific or technical origin, than any attempt to asses and master these effects has to root in scientific and technological knowledge itself. Hence, intellectual capacities and scientific knowledge become central elements in social and political controversy. Evidently, this tends to change in a significant way the "balance of power" within the political arena. If the assessement of risks implied by a given scientific or industrial procedure becomes a central political controversy, any citizens with corresponding scientific knowledge will be able to participate at the discussion - often at a far higher degree of competence than politicians and government officials, who almost necessarily are non-experts. Ecology tended to be the first thoroughly "scientifized" policy field in western societies. So it is not surprising, that in Western Europe the rise of non-governmental expertise and scientific knowledge has been closely linked to the development of the ecological movement in the 1970s and 80s.

c) The society of the smart people

This point is closely linked to the emergence of what James N. Roseau has called the "Society of the smart people". The world as a whole, but especially the OECD-countries have witnessed in the last fifty years a continuous expansion of second- and third level education. This "skill revolution" has, combined with rapidly expanding availability of information in the "information age", led to a rapid increase in competence inside society. Knowledge is no longer restricted to exclusive circles of professional experts or bodies; it is fairly equally distributed at different levels of society. As a consequence, "...elites are conceived to retain control over resources, communications and policy-making processes, but they are also viewed as increasingly constrained by publics who follow their activities, who are more skilled at knowing when to engage in collective action, and who are ever ready to demand appropriate performances in exchange for support."²

d) The Changing Character of the State

Last but not least, the character of the State itself has changed. The classical mechanisms of government by political institutions have been replaced by a far more complex system of governance, in which society itself plays a much more active role. Instead of formulating (in the processes of political decision-making inside the political class, the bureaucracy and parliament) and executing political decisions in a hierarchically organised top-down approach, the state today acts more of less as a "notary". He codifies, "officialises" and implements political results, which have primarily been developed and matured inside society itself. Politics turn out to be the result of bargaining-processes within policy-networks, in which not only politicians and the administration participate, but where representatives of the social and economic interests at stake are systematically represented. The state becomes a "negotiation-state"³.

This redefinition of the role of the state in the process of policy-making is the result of many developments:

Within this institutional framework of the "negotiation-state" NGOs have finally emerged as new actors, forcing their way into the political bargaining circles. This has been made possible by two processes:

NGOs have become established actors in the political negotiating process inside Western soceties but also in international politics. They are accepted as advocates of weak interests (as compared to the socio-economic and cultural interests represented by the established social forces like business, trade unions or the churches) and of 'public goods" which do not fit into the array of classical "public goods' which the state has to deliver: protection of property and the underlying economic and social order, Security, respect of the law and constitution.

So what we are witnessing now, is a kind of symbiotic relationship between the state and the NGOs. This friendly co-existence between NGOs and the state bureaucracy is of benefit for the state and, in a larger sense, for the political system as a whole. NGOs play a vital role in the integrative mechanism of democratic political systems as they:

Summarising this trend, we would rather see NGOs no more as the antagonists of the state. To come back to the images from Seattle: It is not "we" and "them". In reality, it is something which sounds more and more like "us".

Today, the most important threat to the "weak interests', represented by NGOs, as well as to the citizens rights do no longer come from "big government". These interests and values are increasingly put into question by the economic sphere, which tends to delegitimise and eliminate any sphere of society which is not organised according to the market-principle and not open to commercial exploitation. Globalisation has dramatically reduced the degree of public control over the economy. The established order of the "embedded liberalism" of Western societies, in which a democratic state created the legal and institutional frame within which the market forces were free to operate, has been weakend significantly.

More important, the technological dynamic within the economic sphere is nowadays more or less beyond any public or political control. These developments are, to come back to the terms of Anthony Giddens "manufactured risks" in their purest form. Actually they tend to reach a new quality by the manipulation of the very basic elements of nature and human life by the new "life-sciences'(genetic engineering, bio-technologies and reproduction-technologies).

These developments given, there is an increasing tendency within the NGO movement to try to protect the political sphere against the ongoing attempts of "hostile take-over" by the economy. The democratic state is the big last island of non-market, non-economic forms of social interaction beyond the immediate private sphere. It is - still - the purveyor of public goods which neoliberalism wants either to abolish or to commercialise. Last but not least, the democratic state is accessible to rational argumentation - the only "power resource" the NGOs do dispose of. The state, being weak and instrumental to the economy as it may be, still is a bulwark against the "totalitarism" of the market, where interests, which have no financial resources, are ignored, and goods, that have no price, are not produced. This is the new central challenge for the NGOs: to conserve social and political spheres which are not subdued to the market principle and which are - at least partially - open to the procedures democratic governance.

The events in Seattle have been a very clear indication for the emergence of new "transnational' arena for NGOs and social movements. The ongoing internationalisation of politics implies automatically, that also non-state-political actors - and NGOs want to be political actors - have to pass over the borders of national politics. This is particularly true in some of the fields where NGOs tend to be particularly engaged: Ecology, development questions, social policy. In Western Europe, with the growing integration of the European Union there tends to be literally no significant political question left which does not have an European aspect or dimension. So it is not surprising to see, that many NGOs and NGO-networks do have their own representation at Bruxelles, whose only purpose is to follow the development of the EU-policy making process.

A second aspect of the need for the growing transnational dimension lies in the increasing importance of international regimes and organisations. Very decisive decisions, concerning the economic and social fate of whole societies tend to be made inside international organisations like World Bank, IMF or WTO. NGOs have to react to that development by adding an international dimension to their activities. Generally, this is done by the integration into transnational "NGO-networks", which try to coordinate acitivities of like-minded organisation on an international scale and which have developed considerably in the last years.

A additional rationale for a transnational dimension for NGOs-activities lies in the globalisation of the economy. "Big business" - especially in form of the transnational corporations - has outgrown the limits of any given nation state. States may like to put limitations to that , but they tend to be more and more unable to do that. So any attempt to (re)regulate parts of the economic sphere - as the financial system - any attempt to regain a minimum of public control of technological developments has to have an international dimension.