Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesdo so. To the contrary, in all of the countries under investigation, cultural diversityobjectives are always stated in the context of, or alongside, other social objectiveswhich serve, immediately, to either qualify or give a particular inflection to thatcommitment to diversity. Moreover, although the formulations may vary, there areusually three common elements involved in such formulations: a commitment todiversity, a commitment to principles of social justice, and a commitment to – insome form – the continuing unity and integrity of the national culture. However,the ways in which these three elements are related to one another differ significantlywith important consequences for the organisation of the social contextswithin which cultural diversity policies are set.I have already touched on these matters in my discussion of the assimilationist implicationsof concepts of social integration. My earlier comments on the vocabulary ofsocial inclusion also bear on the point as, in Belgium, Luxembourg, and the UnitedKingdom, cultural diversity policies are tending to be seen as a sub-set of socialinclusion policies. These, too, give a particular inflection to cultural diversitydebates owing to the connections they establish between such debates and the waysin which social inclusion policies tend to fuse social justice principles with moreconservative conceptions of the relations between cultural and social integration.The vocabulary of social inclusion is, as Ruth Levitas puts it (1998: 22), “a curiousamalgam of a liberal, Anglo-Saxon concern with poverty and a more conservative,continental concern with moral integration and social order”. As such, she argues,it is able to function as a shifter between these two concerns: it can “almost unnoticed,mobilise a redistributive argument behind a cultural or integrationist one –or represent cultural or integrationist arguments as redistributive” (ibid.: 27). Amore inclusive society is one that is both more just and better integrated, and it issomehow able to be both by becoming more different at the same time – but onlyprovided that such differences take appropriately limited and “acceptable” formsso as not to threaten social integration.There is a risk here that cultural diversity, in being brought into the policy playingfield under the rubric of social inclusion, has tagged onto it the coda of social integrationthat is now often the nationalist sting-in-the-tail of current diversity formulationseven where assimilationist objectives have been explicitly abandoned.Similar concerns have been expressed in relation to the policy rubric of socialcohesion that now provides the main umbrella policy context for cultural diversitypolicies in Canada, although with how much justice remains to be seen as thisremains a developing policy vocabulary that is subject to varied interpretations. 1Special consideration also needs to be given to the unique circumstances of thepost-communist regimes of eastern Europe in this regard in view of the role thatthe resurgence of strong, ethnically-marked nationalisms plays in developing theircredentials for equality of treatment with other nations in an enlarged Europe. The__________1. Making Connections: Culture and Social Cohesion in the New Millennium, the Conference Readerfor the CIRCLE/CCRN Round Table held at Edmonton, Canada, in May 2000 provides a usefulcompendium of the differing uses of the term in both Canadian and European cultural policy discourse.50