Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Executive summary and recommendationsIn its broader meaning, when interpreted in the light of the concerns of culturaldemocracy, the promotion of cultural diversity involves supporting the right to bedifferent of all those who, in one way or another, have been placed outside dominantsocial and cultural norms: disabled people, gays and lesbians, women, thepoor, and the elderly as well as immigrant or indigenous groups. The needs ofmore finely-grained policies, however, require that the issues involved in these differingdiversities be distinguished from one another.The forms of diversity focused on in this study are those ethnically-marked culturaldifferences associated with the international movement of peoples and,within national territories, the claims to difference associated with the protractedstruggles of in situ minorities to maintain their identity and specificity in the faceof the homogenising force of national cultures. These are distinguished from otherdiversities by the respects in which they challenge the basic grammar of nationalcultures in emerging from relations between peoples, histories, cultures and territorieswhich cannot be reconciled with nationalist projects. They also involveforms of difference that have been tangled up with the histories of racism andcolonialism which have played so crucial a part in the processes of nation formation.These forms of diversity can be further divided into four types:i. sub- or multinational, which dispute the homogenising tendencies of nationalcultures, but do so on the basis of essentially similar strategies by articulatinga competing set of associations between a territory, its people and their culture;ii. autochthonous, distinguishing the situation and circumstances of ethnicallymarkedminority communities that are the result of earlier movements of peoples(or of national boundaries) within Europe;iii. diasporic, referring to the cultures produced in association with the histories ofdisplaced peoples, involving the development of mobile international culturalnetworks operating across, and offering an alternative to, the territorial logic ofnational cultures;iv. indigenous, which, developed in the context of resistance to colonial historiesof occupation, typically contest dominant national cultures, by national mappingsof people, culture, history and territory mobilising deeper and longer historiesof indigenous cultural continuity.There are three major European contextual factors that need to be taken intoaccount in considering the relations between cultural policy and cultural diversity:17