Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitieshistoriography exemplifies what Wolf (1982: 5) calls “history as a genealogy ofprogress”: it is teleological and draws on a highly selective set of cultural references– what some critics have termed the “from Plato to Nato” conception ofwestern civilisation. The result is a sanitised and extremely eurocentric constructionof the past, which ignores the darker side of European modernity, includingEurope’s legacy of slavery, imperialism and racism. 1 In the words of Pieterse(1991: 4), “official European culture, reproduced in declarations, textbooks, mediaprogrammes, continues to be the culture of imperial Europe.”Philip Schlesinger (1994) makes similar observations; European Union constructionsof European culture privilege an elitist, bourgeois intelligentsia vision ofculture. This claim is borne out by the main European Union cultural programmesbetween 1996 and 1999, such as Kaleidoscope (“programmes supporting artisticand cultural activities with a European dimension”), Ariane (translation ofEuropean literature), and Raphael (cultural heritage project, notably restoration ofthe Acropolis, Mount Athos, and Burgos Cathedral). Other specifically namedrecipients of European Union cultural support include the European CommunityChamber Orchestra, the European Youth Opera Foundation and the EuropeanOpera Centre. Clearly, “high culture” (opera, classical music and grand architecture)features prominently in European Union conceptions of cultural action.What is striking about the way European Union documents describe Europe’s culturalheritage is that they make virtually no mention of the contribution of writers,artists, scholars and cultural practitioners of non-European descent. An estimated17 million Muslims live within the European Union, but as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argues (1998: 38), “they do not yet see themselves as part of the[European] project in any meaningful sense.” This is hardly surprising, she adds,when Europe’s identity is being constructed around assumptions about sharedGraeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian roots, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.Edward Said’s critique of “Orientalism” seems particularly germane here.Eurocentric discourses that pit the triumphs of European civilisation and humanismagainst the deficiencies, real or imagined, of the non-west further contribute tothe invisibility or denigration of Europe’s black and Asian population (Back andNayak, 1993; Stam and Shohat, 1994). As critics argue, the flip side of eurocentrismtoday is “Islamophobia” 2 and a right-wing agenda that seeks to exploit fearsabout the threat to “fortress Europe” posed by criminals, Muslim fundamentalists,illegal immigrants and “bogus” asylum seekers.It is not only black, Asian, Muslim or Third World peoples who are excluded fromthe canon of “European” culture, but also those from the New World, which issomewhat surprising given the appetite European consumers seem to have forAmericana. While the Commission’s own think-tank on audiovisual policy concludedthat “if Europe has a common film culture, it is that of American films.”, 2__________1. Gerard Delanty (1995: 111) makes a further point: “It has conveniently been forgotten today thatfascism and anti-Semitism were two of the major expressions of the idea of Europe.”2. For a well documented analysis of this see Runnymede Trust, 1997.3. Vasconcelas, 1994: 60.116