Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

IntroductionTransversal perspectivesOn leaving Belfast after the final day in the country visit to the United Kingdom –itself the last of the country visits in the second phase of the study – my eye wascaught by a heading on the letters page of the Belfast Telegraph: “Injection of culturaldiversity needed”. The case argued in the letter in question was that NorthernIreland would benefit from increased immigration to produce “a kaleidoscope ofworld cultures [that would] dilute the polarised views of the two cultures” whichdominated the political landscape. 1 This echoed the concerns that had been voicedat a meeting earlier that afternoon with representatives of the relatively smallIndian, Pakistani and Chinese communities in Northern Ireland. There was generalagreement that the complex intersections of the religious and political affiliationswhich define the two main cultural traditions in Northern Ireland – Loyalist andmainly Protestant on the one hand, Republican and mainly Catholic on the other –so overwhelmingly dominated the concerns of cultural policy that questions relatingto the cultural distinctiveness of Asian and other minority communities rarelyreceived the attention they merited. There was also general agreement among therepresentatives of the “two cultures” who were at the meeting that a broaderapproach to cultural diversity would be welcome both for its own sake as well asfor the possibility that it might help to lower the level of political intensity that stillgoverns debates concerning the relations between the two main cultural traditionsin Northern Ireland.My point in beginning with this anecdote is to underline one of the most significantaspects of the way this study has been conducted and certainly one of its mostcompelling lessons. This concerns the irreducible specificity of the terms in whichquestions of cultural diversity are posed in different national contexts in view ofthe ways in which they emerge out of specific national histories and trajectories.The specific texture of the historical ground from which current debates about culturaldiversity in Northern Ireland emerge, and the legacies that those debates mustwork through, are not replicated in any of the other countries participating in thestudy. But then the same can be said about each of these. The continuing historicalforce of the division between the French-speaking and Flemish communities inBelgium, and the complexity of the ways in which these and other cultural divisionsare accommodated within the relations between the federal, community, andregional levels of government; the unique place of the cantons in Switzerland andtheir role in maintaining the plurilingualism that constitutes one of the hallmarksof Swiss cultural diversity; the clear differentiation, in Austria, of approaches to__________1. Belfast Telegraph, 28 June 2000, p. 12.23