Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesreversing these tendencies is an important aspect of the broader agendas of culturaldiversity, this need not involve a direct challenge to the unique configurationof the associations between people/culture/history/territory which give thehomogenising strategies of nationalist discourses their unique spatial and temporalcharacteristics.It is this that most distinguishes the forms of diversity focused on in this study:those ethnically-marked forms of cultural diversity associated with the internationalmovement of peoples and, within national territories, the claims to differenceassociated with the protracted struggles of in situ minorities to maintain theiridentity and specificity in the face of the homogenising force of national cultures.For both challenge the basic grammar of national cultures to the degree that theyinvolve relations between peoples, histories, cultures and territories which, in oneway or another, are at odds with – which contradict, cut across, or cannot be reconciledwith – those of nationalist projects. They also – in many cases, but not all– involve forms of difference that have been tangled up with the history of racismand its complex intersections with the history of colonialism which, in its turn, hasplayed so crucial a part in the processes of nation formation within Europe andthroughout the world.If we have singled out these forms of diversity for special attention, then, it isbecause the challenge they represent is one which requires a significant reconceptualisationof the very logic and raison d’être of cultural policies. It requires, inessence, that the conditions in which cultural policies are developed and applied,as well as the ends to which they are directed, be looked at anew in the context ofwhat are now increasingly recognised as the complex and varying ways in whichthe trajectories of peoples, cultures, and histories cut across, undermine, and providealternatives to the territorial logic of national cultures. And this, in turn,requires that the issues that are posed by differing diversities should be carefullydistinguished.Differing diversitiesIt is true of all of the states participating in the study that their cultural policies areconcerned with – to recall the brief for the study – “cultural diversity as it isexpressed both as a result of a historical process of patterns of migration into andacross different states, as well as cultural diversity that has subsisted within differentpolities over a longer period of time”. The balance between these two kinds ofdiversity is, however, quite different from one country to another as are the legal,political, governmental and civic environments which determine the conditions inwhich cultural policies concerned with diversity can be formulated and developed.These are the considerations to which we turn in the next section in reviewing thefindings of the national reports. It will be useful before doing so, however, to lookmore closely at these two kinds of diversity for they can themselves be further brokendown into four claims to difference based on orderings of the relations28