Andreea Enache
Mrd. Intercultural Management – UNESCO Department, University of Bucharest
Mrd. Communication and Public Relations – Faculty of Communication and Public Relations “David Ogilvy”, National School of Administrative and Political Studies
EJOP Editor and Founder
I do not pretend to give here a totally impartial and unbiased account of the issue that I have proposed myself for analysis and evaluation. I could have, of course, put on the role of the “undecided” researcher, with no pre-conceived ideas haunting her conscious and unconscious minds, desperately willing to find out the “truth” by systematically and objectively studying a well defined portion of reality. Instead, I will from the very beginning admit to being a supporter of the idea that nation states (as they were primarily defined and established, and as they are still functioning today) are real obstacles for authentic cultural diversity (i. e. not merely the coexistence of multiple cultures in a limited space and time, but also the mutual respect and its first-hand advocate – mutual accommodation, or, if you want, mutual integration). I have chosen a more relaxed approach of the topic not only out of preference, but also out of necessity: such a topic usually gives us very little room for a classical scientific methodology. Therefore, I had to adjust my schemes of analysis to the very complex objects that I want to deal with in order to sustain the idea that nation states are an obstacle for co-existent cultural diversities. I will insist on this, for I find it crucial for the understanding of the stake of this discourse: nation states have been the most prominent producers of cultural diversity at a time when cultures had very strict, almost material borders, and when they were in the almost absolute possession of the state and nation that had engendered them. Instead, nowadays, cultures journey and travel all the time, they move, they change, they talk with each other, they compete and challenge each other, they continuously change shape and content and limits. Therefore, they escape their former possessor and gain a sometimes-disconcerting freedom of speech and of movement. Cultures are more and more independent in relation with nations and states, and this is why they can no longer co-exist happily.
The strongest argument for nation states being an obstacle to the recognition of cultural diversity is of historical nature, lying in the past. One needs nothing more but to look to their historical origins and their historical development in order to get a clear enough picture of the adversity relation between nation states and cultural diversity. The creation of a nation state is not only a unifying action; it is equally and sometimes more eventfully an act of segregation. Let alone the multiple details of nation state formation, it is without difficulty that we can recognize in their claim for absolute unity the somewhat desperate quest for power, control and stability. All alterity is unsettling, producing collective headaches and troubling “collective minds”. Unity, in return, is simple and, thus, much more likely to become subject to control and object to prediction. Nation states rely on cultural, ethnic and religious homogeneity in order to exist. Diversity can only be external for them, it can only inhabit the spaces beyond the nation’s high and broad (de)fence. “One nation, one state, one territory” is the death penalty for the possibility of existence of a respected and dignified Other. In the best of cases, diversity is tolerated or accepted. But, accepting diversity is nothing else but saying that WE agree to stand YOU on our territory under the condition that all of us are aware that there is a distance, never to be fully overcome, between WE and YOU.
The second argument lies in the future: one of the most acute dilemmas that we are about to face is how to preserve the nation state as a referential for social identities (very much still needed and wanted as public surveys go on proving it time after time), while it is clear that the only possible “nation state” of the future is the Global Market. However, I suggest not letting ourselves intimidated by the apparently dead end of the problem. There are some that already seem to have an answer: small, local communities based on trivial criteria (type of favorite movies, support for the cause of mentally disabled, preference for a certain football team and so on) should be in their view the new referential for social identity. National identities are dangerous, they have caused big wars and millions of deaths – this is what you will get as an answer when coming forth with the consideration that you feel, let us say, Romanian, or Danish, or Portuguese … it is not safe anymore (for people around you) to declare and fully assume your belonging to a ethnic group or to a nationality. This clearly shows that nation states are already perceived as being very likely producers of fundamentalism and extremes. And it is not without great difficulty that we will be able to solve this issue, for, even if political analysts, historians, academics, in general, accept that nation states no longer suit this postmodern era and are by no means able to face its problems, one cannot ignore that the majority are still very much in love with their homelands, and their mother tongue and their people. It is again as though history is at least one big step ahead of us …
The kind of fear I mentioned above is not without reason (i.e. cause), but it lacks a lot of Reason because it misplaces guilt for ethnic fundamentalism on the territory of the nation state while the actual relation is quite the reverse. The nation state is itself the product of an extremist movement towards the affiliation of those sharing the same blood (or soil), the same language and history, that had its counterpart in the exclusion of those dissimilar. The very founding concepts of nation states do not leave any room for cultural diversity; it is only social practice (always more flexible and adaptable than social and political theory) that has softened the effects of these seemingly indisputable predicaments. At the moment of their creation, the label of extremist would have certainly sounded like a poor joke. And maybe it would have been so, indeed. Nowadays, however, it really seems that we have to tell them goodbye unless we don’t want to get stuck in the trap of the unsolvable question mentioned above.
All nation states, like all political realities, have a natural tendency to preserve their state of being and to escape, for as long as possible, an equally natural death. It would be unrealistic of any of us to expect them to die happily. But it is even more so to say that we can have the global village and integrate in the global market and still preserve our nation states as functional and efficient political structures. It is, of course, very hard and extremely unpopular to say that nation states and the global village cannot co-exist. It is, again, very hard to admit that the two political and social structures do not stand each other and that there is no midway between them. I would say that all the talking that is being done around the issue of globalization is a loss of time if we cling to debating whether globalization is good or bad, for it is none of them. Globalization is only powerfully going on and mercilessly sweeping off everything that contradicts its logic of being. With all the respect, I say that nation states are dead or, in the best of cases, rapidly dying.
And their dying was brought about precisely by their incapacity to sustain the ever-growing mobility and traffic of people, goods, services and, with them, of cultures. The Nation State had its criteria of possibility of existence fulfilled in the 19th and 20th century, but the 21st one found it totally unprepared to deal with the new political and social realities. The proponents and supporters of globalization have a saying that still gives me shivers: “Your home is where your work is”. People leave families, friends, communities, and countries in their search for a better (working)-place. And they also leave symbols, habits, customs, beliefs, ways of being and thinking and feeling; they leave cultures and they go with the mainstream.
A third argument belongs to an extended concept of present and is of descriptive nature. Nowadays Europe is one of the most adequate examples one could use in order to sustain the idea that nation states are detrimental for a both culturally diverse and culturally integrated Europe. In fact, nation states force us to choose between the two, and, more precisely, to choose the former option. I will, for the sake of brevity and clarity, refer only to the recent violence waves in France and surrounding countries. The events that started to shake France at the end of October, this year, are sad signals that Europe as a cultural project is in a very poor state. And this is so because Europe (and mainly its Western part) has never given up its colonial dreams and its imperialistic claims. It has only changed their form from geographical to cultural, but it still behaves in the manner of one suffering from a superiority complex, that is best explained by the “civilizing mission” theme that has never stopped to influence its “global” attitude since the 16th century, when Europeans re-invented the barbarians. The present situation in France has its roots in this European arrogance towards the Other, that it can tolerate but cannot accept, that it can accept but not respect, that it can respect but not love … The shift from the concept of assimilation towards the one of integration in the ’70 was a political maneuver that lacked dramatically the public support and the social consciousness needed for this to be an authentic change of social-political paradigm for the issue of immigration. Thus, France is now full of ghettoes and these ghettoes are full of anger. Europe officially takes great pleasure in recording an ever greater diversity of peoples, while its own peoples have a very hard time dealing with what they find to be an invading, and even toxic diversity, running perfectly uninvited into their existence. And, to top all this, economic (negative) growth makes the financially fragile Westerner look very unhappy towards the old and new waves of immigrants, that are the most probable scapegoats for the inescapable economic downsizing of the area. We have here a major gap between political and social views of things, a gap that calls for effective measures unless we want to become the witnesses of an ever escalating social conflict.
Diversity is embedded in the very texture of our world, be it natural or social, be it animal or human, animate or inanimate. It cannot be killed, it cannot be exterminated, but it can be “relocated”. Diversity has no need for us to safeguard it, but it needs people to understand it and to understand the new mechanisms that produce it. Once, these mechanisms were nation states, with their specific history, language, peoples and territories. Now, these realities have lost their power to produce cultural differences, which does not mean that the world will be unified or uniform in the future. They will be replaced by another type of symbolic machinery that will generate cultural variance. What exactly this machinery will be and how exactly it will function, it is probably still too soon to predict.