Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesconstitute “forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identificationsoutside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference”.As such, Clifford continues, they are “in constitutive tension with nationstate/assimilationistideologies” (ibid.). Paul Gilroy (2000: 84, 111) makes a similarpoint, arguing that the “understanding of culture as a mutable and travellingphenomena” that has been developed in association with diasporas provides analternative to “the powerful claims of soil, roots, and territory” in offering a basisfor placeless ways of imagining and organising identities.IndigenousThe situation of indigenous peoples – most obviously represented in this study bythe First Nations in Canada – is sharply different. For indigenous claims to separatecultures and identities, far from featuring histories of travel, stress, as Cliffordputs it (1996: 287), “continuity of habitation, aboriginality, and often a ‘natural’connection to the land”. Developed in the context of resistance to colonial historiesof occupation, contemporary indigenous cultures typically contest dominantcultures by mobilising deeper and longer histories of indigenous cultural continuitywhich undermine national mappings of people, culture, history and territory byhighlighting their relations to relatively recent histories of violence and conquest.It should be added that these bases for the development of distinctive cultural formationsand their claims to difference may conflict not just with dominant nationalcultures. They are often in tension with one another. Multinationalist claims todiversity, for example, often entail a devaluation of other bases for diversity to theextent that their success depends on the mobilisation of strong nationalist sentiments:the apprehension that Quebec separatism would result in reduced culturalrights for Canada’s First Nations and varied Asian diasporas living in Quebec is acase in point. Recognition of these “differing diversities”, and of the differentchallenges – and opportunities – they present, is crucial so far as the fine-grain ofcultural diversity policies is concerned. However, it is equally important to takeaccount of some common contextual factors – some of them specificallyEuropean, others more general international tendencies – affecting the circumstancesin which questions of cultural diversity are now posed.European and international contextsIn a useful survey, Tariq Modood has suggested that three factors distinguish thecontext in which questions of cultural identity are now posed in the “new Europe”.They are:The impact of several decades of both immigration and the use of so-called guestworkers from (depending on the state in question) the Caribbean, Africa, Turkey,the Middle East, and Asia. Fuelled mainly by the demand for labour in the growtheconomies of western Europe, the consequence of these new forms of internationalmobility has been to introduce new forms of heterogeneity into the30