Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiescountries is untrammelled by national and regional jurisdictions. 1 But this, equally,does not mean to say that, in some circumstances and some contexts, the conceptdoes not – as a useful shorthand – identify tendencies that are new and worthnoting.From the perspective of our concerns here, two things stand out. First – in corroboration,extension and qualification of a point made already – the patterns ofmigration to many European countries and to Canada in the post-war period can,especially since the 1960s, accurately be described as increasingly global in characterin view of the higher proportion of immigrants coming from outside theregional blocs to which they belong. 2 At the same time, though, this is far moretrue of some countries than others where the consequences of this aspect of globalisationhave been negligible. In European Union countries, for example, the proportionof immigrants from non-European Union countries as a proportion ofimmigrants from European Union states was, according to 1995 data, 38.5% forthe United Kingdom, 5.4% for Belgium, 3.1% for Austria, and 0.8% forLuxembourg. 3 It should also be noted that Bulgaria is not a country of immigration,and that cultural diversity issues there accordingly centre on the two largestinternal minority communities – the Bulgarian Turks and the Roma/Gypsies.Second, a series of new developments in communications technologies – videocassetterecording, satellite television transmission, multichannelling, and thedevelopment of the Internet and World Wide Web – have significantly transformedthe media environment and enhanced the capacity of messages to travel acrossnational borders in ways whose long-term significance is difficult to assess. It isalready evident, however, that the ways in which these developments have beenconnected to debates about cultural diversity are varied and, often, contradictory.However, many see them as a force for diversity in breaking down the homogeneityof national audiences and allowing greater point-to-point as opposed to centreto-pointcommunication, thereby facilitating more varied patterns of internationalglobal flows which may prove crucial in sustaining those new social dynamics ofdiversity that run against the grain of the relations between people, culture, historyand territory which characterise dominant national cultures. 4The questions posed by these and other new social dynamics of diversity arereturned to in the section on cultural policies and cultural diversity. We now turn,however, to look at some of the more significant aspects of the different social,civic, administrative, economic and conceptual contexts informing the ways inwhich questions of cultural diversity are posed in different national settings. We doso, first, by reviewing the main findings of the national reports as they bear on considerationsof this kind.__________1. See, for a useful antidote to the worst excesses of globalisation rhetoric, Hirst and Thompson, 1996.2. See, for a discussion of the post-war patterns of international migration, Held et al., 1999: chapter 6.3. See Melotti, 1997: 73.4. See, for a good summary and review of this literature, Cunningham and Sinclair, 2000.32