Speech by H.R.H. Prince Claus at the occasion of the symposium ...

Surely, the belief in the universality of certain human values and of the rights flowing from them is apositive feature of the postwar world - an assertion of human solidarity which has given rise tointernational development cooperation and to a sense of shared social and political responsibilitytranscending national boundaries. At the same time, we have to be aware of how shadowy is theboundary between that concern and paternalism, and we need to reflect on the degree to which ourown culture reflects our own circumstances, and, indeed, has changed as a result of our own historyand the evolution of the conditions of our society.The industrial countries are rich and powerful. We have also social achievements of which we shouldbe proud. However, even in our own histories we do not see a picture of universal progress. Withoutwishing to engage in social nostalgia or seeking to paint a false picture of a rosy past, we can all seethat the material and social achievements of our modern world have not been without costs in termsof alienation and the loss of desirable social characteristics of earlier times. Our own societies are notin all respects necessarily better than they were one or two centuries ago, when admittedlyeconomic conditions were worse, and political and social institutions less developed. Likewise, ourown current material superiority over the so-called Third World does not tell us that our societies arein other respects superior. The complicated conclusion has to be that there are values which weclaim to be universal and by which we do judge cultures. Indeed, not to do so would be to deny thehumanity of the members of the societies in question. But we must be cautious in so doing and notmake such judgements a vehicle for a sort of cultural imperialism through which we impose onothers our own peculiarities. We must also be ready to recognize the merit of quite different ways ofbehaviour.Inhabitants of an African village society, with the mutual obligations of the extended family with anactive communal life and without the extreme division of labour of industrial society may suffermaterial deprivation, but may also enjoy the merits of integration into a lively and worthwhilecommunity.Opportunities and dangers of modern technologyThe impact of the industrial countries on the Third-World societies is not, however, primarily amatter of conscious efforts to change or improve social institutions or implement cultural change.The most important cultural impact from the West comes about as the side-product of the economicand technical influences. Even within the West, technical change has been a potent source of socialand cultural transformation - we see that today in effects ranging from the impact of moderninformation technology to the spread of fast food. Modern technology is a liberating force, increasingleisure, increasing the options open to the modern consumer, and a disruptive force, rendering oldways obsolescent and imposing on the individual and the small community the requirements of themass society.Within the industrial societies, technical change can be seen as responding to our needs. Also, wehave some experience in handling technical change, even if we have not fully solved the problems ofsocial disruption resulting from rapid innovation. However, it must be evident that for developingsocieties, technical change poses even greater cultural and social problems. Transfer and acceptanceof technology is never culturally neutral. Technical change comes from abroad, much of it geared tothe contemporary needs of the industrialized countries.

The local capacity to control and modify imported technology is limited. Modern technology holdsout great hopes for Third-World development, but also real dangers. Let us consider some of therisks of technologically induced cultural change.One danger is that external technology can mould the tastes and consumption habits of the Third-World consumer in a way which have unfortunate consequences. We all know, for example, of thedangers associated with the discouragement of breast-feeding.The availability of a Western life style, necessarily limited to the few, given the levels of nationalincome, can become a source of elitism and of misallocation of a nation's resources. Westerntechnology can become a vehicle for the concentration of resources on the satisfaction of the needsof an urban minority who, in return, become alienated from the needs and the possibilities of therural majority of their own societies.There have also been instances where the external intrusion has resulted in social change which hasundermined a complex balance between a society, its culture and its ecology.Building on traditional cultureI do not wish to imply by these comments that technical change is bad and that brakes should be puton the transfer of technology. Far from it. Problems of poverty and hunger can only be solved by theapplication of technology. Moreover, cultural change is both necessary to generate development andits inevitable outcome. But we should be alert to the need to make technical change as relevant aspossible and of the need to limit the cultural and social costs involved.What I have said in the preceding comments might seem as if I am focusing attention exclusively onthe cultural impact of technology and the purveyor of technology in the modern world, the business.This is by no means the case. Educational institutions, planning practices and social welfaremeasures, which are evidently desirable in our own societies, can take on a quite different meaningwhen transferred to another environment. The emphasis of social scientists a few years ago on theimportance of what we call the 'informal sector' in developing countries suggested that there wasgreat value in that sector of activity which lay outside the system of minimum wages, taxation,planning regulations, etc. Which represented what was best and possible in our own welfare systembut which could not be extended to the mass of the population in a poor country.We should also understand that those countries which develop most effectively are likely to be thosewhich, like Japan, selected from Western technology what they needed, modified their culture andsociety but nevertheless built upon their traditional culture and values, to develop a modernJapanese way of doing things which we now find worthwhile to study. Developing countries need toborrow from our technology and, no doubt, many of their political and economic institutions to drawfrom the Western experience. But also they should draw on their own cultural strengths and adaptimported practices to their own social setting.National identity and languageIn this regard, I suspect that the creation of what might be described as a clearly identified nationalculture, with a strong sense of national identity may be as important a task as the pursuit of materialprogress in the early stages of nation building. Moreover, in the longer term the self-confidence andsolidarity resulting from a strong sense of national identity may be of great value in tackling thedifficult tasks of economic development. The building of national culture is both a legitimate goal ofdevelopment and may even be a prerequisite for material progress. Looking back, it may well be that

the first generation of national leaders in the Third World will be judged as much by theirachievements in creating a national identity as their impact on the gross national product.This leads me to a key aspect of national culture to which, perhaps, this meeting should give someattention: namely that of language. Surely there is great advantage gained from the existence of anational language shared by the elites and the masses. Otherwise, language itself can become asource of social division, increasing the gap not only between the educated and uneducated but alsobetween town and country.Where for example the elite's language is a foreign tongue, this not only makes the discourse of theelite inaccessible to the bulk of the population but may also make it more difficult for the elite torelate to local problems. The world of learning becomes a foreign world conducted in a foreignlanguage and quite remote from the world of the countryside and the ordinary folk.It is this point that leads me to suspect that one of president Nyerere's most considerableachievements has been the promotion of Swahili as a national language for Tanzania. In that case, ofcourse, conditions were favourable for such a development. That is not always the case.For of course, the language issue is not a simple one. In a number of countries, the colonial mothertongue provided the only national lingua franca, across regional or tribal boundaries. The attempt topromote a national language more readily accessible to some linguistic groups than others has itselfbecome a source of division in a number of countries.Moreover, to build a language into an instrument of modern technology, bureaucracy andscholarship is a major task. There is also a loss involved if the promotion of a national language leadsto a decline in the elite's command over foreign languages - a loss in terms of internationalintellectual access and also, possibly, regional communication. However, while in Africa access toFrench, English, Portuguese or Arabic allows for ready communication among the states whose elitesshare command over those languages, it also defines lines of cultural division within the continentreflecting the colonial past rather than present or future needs.It is important to recognize that a corollary to the development of a national language must be theproduction of a large flow of published material in the language. Here I would sound a note of alarm.One result of economic crises has been that in many countries the flow of written material in anylanguage has dried up, not to speak of the supply of materials in languages widely accessible to themass of the literate population. In Africa we have the sad spectacle of a widespread increase inliteracy being matched by a widespread decline in the availability of literature. No doubt much ofyour discussion will be on complex issues, but we should also turn our attention to the ratherpractical and straightforward need to ensure that the physical means of communication are availableto support cultural development and contact. There are no doubt many meanings to be placed onculture and development, as the discussions at the preparatory meeting for this conferenceindicated, but surely one minimal component of cultural development must be the availability ofbooks for the mass of potential readers and access to means of publication for local writers.Challenges of culture and developmentAt the conclusion of these few remarks, I would like to return to the question of how those of usfrom the so-called developed countries approach the problems of culture and development. Thereare a number of challenges presented to the Western intellectual, businessman or aid administrator

working with Third-World countries. There is a need for self-awareness as to whether our ownattitudes about what is right and proper are necessarily relevant in a developing economy andindeed society. We have to ask whether our products or technology, which we know are useful in ourown societies, also make a positive contribution in the developing country context, we also have tounderstand the setting in which our contacts, customers, workers, government officials are having tocome to terms with the process of cultural change.Often we expect the movement from behaviour relevant to rural peasant societies to urban life tohappen in one or two decades when in our own societies these changes took centuries. Some alsoexpect such change to result in the same outcome there as here.Many in the West have been sensitive to the virtues and values in foreign cultures. Indeed it issometimes the outsider who sees what is worth preserving in the local art or architecture beforethere is an indigenous awareness of what is being lost in that rush to change of which we are oftenthe agents. We should support efforts to record and preserve those aspects of traditional culturewhich will enrich the futures of the developing countries, as part of their national heritage, andenrich us as part of the heritage of mankind. Even if we adapt technology to need and minimize theunnecessary destruction of cultures, a fast pace of cultural change is certain, artistic perceptions willbe transformed, old skills will decline and patterns of living will be modified. Such change isinevitable. We cannot expect the people of developing countries to live in museums or preservecultures in a sort of human zoo. But we can make a sustained effort to ensure that as cultures changeand the daily round of existence and human beliefs adjust to the needs of modern living, theachievements of previous generations are not lost. Not only that but our vision of our own societyand art is enriched by an understanding of the past and of the diversity of contemporary humanexperience.This should not be the esoteric preserve of the specialist, but should be encouraged as a much widerresponsibility - and opportunity. Modern Communications have brought the peoples of the worldcloser together - television and tourism, for example, have meant that vast numbers of Europeanscan now be exposed to conditions in far countries which, just a few years ago, would have been atmost presented on the written page. This has created an enormous opportunity for understanding -and misunderstanding. It is interesting that in Europe, tourism had its origins as much in the pursuitof education as leisure. Too often tourism is now a matter of sunshine in the day and night-clubs inthe evenings with exposure to local 'culture' taking the form of the presentation of a debased versionof local arts, crafts and foods to meet the visitors' preconception of the quaint and the exotic.Tourism is going to be an increasing form of human contact. Quite rightly, voices have been raised incriticism where tourism has been the source of cultural debasement - a sort of pollution throughhuman contact. But surely it should be possible to influence such contacts so that they are not only asource of subversion of local morals and taste (as illustrated by the term 'airport art'), but couldbecome a source of increasing mutual understanding and respect between cultures.Ladies and gentlemen,I have taken this opportunity you have given me to raise a few questions related to your themewhich have occurred to me. I have no doubt that in the coming discussions there will be many morestimulating issues raised. I look forward to reading a full report on the meeting with the expectationthat the proceedings will be lively and illuminating, and will eventually lead to some practical results.

____________________This speech was published in Cultuur en Ontwikkeling, toepsraken en opstellen over cultuur enontwikkeling van Z.K.H. Prins Claus der Nederlanden© Directie Voorlichting Ontwikkelingssamenwerking van het Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, TheHague 1996.