Deep Cultural Diversity: A Governance Challenge

Chapter 2 Intercultural Relations: A Myrdal–Tocqueville–Girard Interpretative Scheme

Intercultural Relations: A Myrdal-Tocqueville-Girard Interpretative Scheme (co-authored with Paul Laurent) Distance lends, if not enchantment, anyway indifference, and thus integrity. —Clifford Geertz Amajor change in the intensity of cultural interpenetration has taken place over the past one hundred years or so. In remote times and on remote offshore islands, primitive cultures had limited involvement with one another. This does not mean that "civilized societies" were ever homogeneous cultural units. Polyethnicity and cultural diversity were salient features of most civilized societies,a fate imposed on them by conquest, trade, and so on. More recently, however, after an era when cultural homogeneity was idealized, if not realized, "a shuffling process" has been activated that has resulted in a degree of cultural diversity, "which is, by now, approaching extreme and near universal proportions" (Geertz 1986). This "shuffling process" has led social and cultural boundaries to coincide less and less closely, and the social space to become more culturally diversified. Ironically, this real increase in cultural diversity and heterogeneity comes at the very same moment that the Enlightenment yearning for a world polity, whose citizens share common aspirations and a common culture (Rorty 1986), appears to have become the dominant ideal. The dialectic between these two drifts—greater cultural heterogeneity and stronger yearning for a common culture—has been played out differently in different forums, such as (to take just a few examples) Belgium, Canada, the two parts of Ireland, Lebanon, South Africa or Switzerland. Yet intercultural differences have not been eliminated or eroded anywhere. Rather, they have crystallized ever ANALYZING DIVERSITY 25 2 more sharply through a process of cumulative causation, described at length by Gunnar Myrdal (Myrdal 1944). This has led to an uneasy coexistence between real differences and decreed egalitarian status. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that this sort of situation could only generate envy (de Tocqueville 1961). Such a surge of envy in turn could only give rise to intercultural violence, as Rene Girard explained rather well (Girard 1978). Consequently, only through the imposition of some shared conventions could envy be reduced and violence be controlled. This chapter discusses the growth of cultural diversity, and the power of the "shuffling process" of the past one hundred or so years to generate a heightened degree of cultural diversity and interaction, as well as some cultural balkanization. Then it shows why societies decreeing equality as a norm have become more prone to generate envy. It then builds on the work of Rene Girard to show how intercultural envy can only trigger violence, and looks into the different ways that have been developed to manage intercultural interactions and contain this violence. Cultural Diversity: The Myrdal Hypothesis Polyethnicity and cultural diversity have been the hallmark of most civilizations. And yet, because of the long hiatus during which the ideals of ethnic homogeneity within a particular geographical territory and of national sovereignty conformable to ethnic boundaries prevailed as values in Western Europe (McNeill 1986), the essential cultural diversity of most civilized societies has come to be occluded. The duration of this hiatus may be the subject of some controversy, but the heyday of what one might call the cultural nationalist principle spanned a period in Western Europe from the latter part of the eighteenth century to the early part of the twentieth century. The roots of this particular nationalistic vision may be found much earlier, with elements of the nation-state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Braudel 1979), and this notion is still in good currency in some regions of the world. Indeed, this vision of ethnic solidarity and national independence has permeated much of the consciousness of our contemporaries, even though it echoed only the perceptions of a time- bound and evanescent (Western) European ideal. For quite a long time now it has led even the educated classes to completely block out the historical record of 26 DEEP CULTURAL DIVERSITY cultural diversity. It is only of late that the polyethnic norm has been re-established and the norm of nationalistic homogeneity has come to be regarded as an ideology emanating from an historical episode. It is not difficult to understand why advanced civilizations have clung to this ideal. Polyethnicity and cultural diversity are important sources of friction. Many societies would gladly wish them away. One of the fundamental results of polyethnicity and cultural diversity is the development of multiplex relationships, with simultaneous ethnocultural linkages in more than one context...