Building New Pathways to Peace

4. Decency, Equality, and Peace: A Perspective on a Peaceful Multicultural Society

65 4 Decency, Equality, and Peace A Perspective on a Peaceful Multicultural Society takashi kibe I n his book On Toleration, Michael Walzer states that “peaceful coexistence among groups of people with different histories, cultures, and identities” is “a good thing.”1 This claim is all the more convincing when we look at increasingly intense, sometimes violent, sometimes bloody conflicts based on ethnocultural differences, such as the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, the riots in the banlieu areas of France, and the Muhammad cartoon scandal, which originated in Denmark but spread to many other countries. While recognizing the urgent importance of peaceful coexistence, however, we should also ask the practical question: What are the conditions for a peaceful social order in the context of cultural pluralism? This presents a serious problem for political theory, and Bhikhu Parekh, a leading British political theorist of multiculturalism, clearly recognizes the important and difficult nature of this issue. He says, “Peace is the first desideratum in every society, particularly the multicultural whose tendency to provoke acute conflicts is further compounded by its inability to rely on a shared body of values to moderate and regulate them.”2 Parekh’s statement points to the theoretical and practical difficulty of a peaceful kyosei in the face of multicultural challenges. This chapter explores the idea of decent peace as a moral and political value that addresses the issue of peace on the domestic and international levels. The basic idea is simple. Decency, in the sense of non-humiliation, 66 takashi kibe is a necessary condition for durable peace, and decency can moderate and resolve serious conflicts with ethnocultural differences. The idea of decency, so understood, is an egalitarian, political morality of peace. On the one hand, egalitarian morality should aim at realizing decency, which means treating people equally, in a non-humiliating manner. On the other hand, it means that a full-fledged peace should incorporate decency into its necessary conditions. Putting together all these points, decency turns out to be a mediating concept linking equality and peace. It appropriately responds to multicultural challenges. In its sensitivity to a variety of socioeconomic and cultural instances that humiliate minority groups, decency also offers a perspective on equality and peace in the multicultural context. To form a theory of decent peace, we will draw mainly from two thinkers: Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit and Johan Galtung. Margalit developed the concept of decency as a social, domestic value in the form of what he calls a “decent society”3 and later applied it to the international level, a concept he called “decent peace.”4 Discussing Margalit’s idea of decency and Galtung’s well-known concept of positive peace, it becomes clear that the concept of decency can be connected with the concept of peace. Furthermore, there is a complementary relationship between Margalit and Galtung: Galtung’s positive peace corrects the institutionally oriented bias inherent in Margalit’s concept of decency, and the latter helps modify the distributive bias of the former. Decency and Egalitarianism Let us begin with a simple question: What is decency? Decency normally denotes conformity with social norms concerning behavior and propriety, as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear. Margalit, however, defines a decent society in an unorthodox way, as “one whose institutions do not humiliate people.”5 Decency is thus defined as nonhumiliation . What, then, is humiliation? In Margalit’s view, humiliation denotes a state of affairs that damages one’s self-respect. Accordingly , decency is defined as a non-humiliating situation in which one’s self-respect is not injured. The next question, then, is this: Why is decency (so understood) relevant to egalitarian political morality? The answer turns on the importance of the self-respect that underlies the definition of decency. According to Rawls, self-respect has two Decency, Equality, and Peace 67 aspects: “a person’s sense of his own value,” that is, “his secure conviction that his concept of his good, his plan of life, is worth carrying out”; and “a confidence in one’s ability, so far as it is within one’s power, to fulfill one’s intentions.” Rawls suggests that self-respect is “perhaps the most important primary good,” so important that “without it nothing may seem worth doing, or if some things have value for us, we lack the will to strive for them.”6 In contrast with Rawls, Margalit relies on the idea of...