Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Transversal study on the theme of cultural policy and cultural diversitydifficulties of balancing such strategies with the requirements of cultural diversityand cultural democracy that western Europe enjoins on its prospective new partnersare made clear from the strains and stresses that have accompanied the measuresintroduced in Bulgaria since 1989 in relation to the Bulgarian Turks. Thisobliges, once again, recognition of the national specificity of the circumstances inwhich questions of cultural diversity are inescapably posed. Tzvetan Todorovsummarised the issues at stake here nicely when, on returning to his nativeBulgaria after a long period of exile in France, he remarked that Paris was“undoubtedly a propitious place for a euphoric renunciation of nationalist values,Sofia less so” (cited in Morley, 2000: 241).Economic contextsThese now provide an increasingly influential setting and rationale for culturaldiversity policies which – especially in advanced economies where the knowledgeand information economies are displacing the predominance of traditional industrialsectors – are seen as having a significant role to play in developing the variedcultural skills and resources required by a vibrant cultural economy. From this perspective,diversity enriches the cultural capital of national or regional economies.It results – in the case of the connections of cultural diversity to cultural tourism,for example – in niche products for marketing in the global marketplace. Or, andmore commonly, diversity is seen as necessary for the processes of “product innovation”as new artistic and cultural forms are seen to depend on the syncretism andcross-cultural fertilisation that is possible only in culturally diverse societies.Given this perception that diversity constitutes a national cultural resource that needsto be nurtured and managed from the point of view of the economic benefits it mightbring through cultural exports or a thriving cultural industry sector, cultural policiesand industry policies often become closely intertwined. This is true of the prominencethat questions of intellectual property now enjoy in relation to those cultural industrieswhich rely on the authentication of specific forms of difference in order to organisethe markets they require – as is the case with Inuit art, for example. It is also evidentin the concern to develop forms of industry training that will provide routes forcultural workers to pass from the “margins” to the “mainstream” which will therebybe able both to enhance its product range and enlarge and diversify its market scope.Conceptual contextsThe contexts that are relevant here are those provided by the understandings of theconcept of culture which define the scope and directions of cultural diversity policies.It is now a commonplace for national cultural policies to eschew the restrictiveimplications of high or aesthetic conceptions of culture by embracing the socalledanthropological definition of culture as a way of life and then pluralisingthis to define, as the remit of cultural policies, a concern with the ways of life of allof the different groups in society: different social classes, different ethnic groups,different nationalities, and so on.51