Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesthe need for more “user friendly” approaches to the procedures that relate to applicationsfor funding support; the need for the standards of value that are relevant tothe community concerned – rather than those of government agencies – to governcultural programming activities; and the need to find a way of balancing and reconcilingoperational autonomy for community-based cultural organisations withmore general requirements of public accountability. 1The changing social dynamics of diversityQuestions concerning the relations between cultural diversity and public sphereslargely focus on the more or less direct roles played by governments in relation tothose cultural and media institutions and activities which they fund, whetherwholly or in part, and regulate. It would, however, be a mistake to believe that theprospects for diversity depend solely, or even mainly, on what governments canoffer by way of direct support in these ways. Account needs also to be taken of thesocial dynamics of cultural diversity as these arise out of the measures that themembers of minority groups take to maintain an active involvement in their culture,and so keeping it alive and developing, and of the range of resources they areable to draw on for this purpose. At the same time, these dynamics of diversity “onthe ground” have also to be considered in their relations to changing policy horizons.These relations are often symbiotic ones, with changing dynamics of diversityprompting new cultural policy settings and being, in their turn, affected bychanging policy environments.The point can be briefly illustrated with reference to the three stages which –speaking very broadly – have characterised international shifts in policyapproaches to ethnically-marked forms of cultural difference over the post-warperiod from, first, support for “ethnic minority” cultures, to, second, multiculturalism,and, third, the approaches of cultural diversity. If the first of these wasguided by a perception that immigrant communities were in danger of losing theirdistinctive cultures without some forms of government support, that support wasdirected toward the maintenance of ethnic cultures as separate enclaves, disconnectedfrom the national culture and sustained by a social dynamic that was perceivedas an essentially defensive one arising out of an embattled relationship tothe host society on the part of “ethnic minorities”. Multiculturalism, by contrast,has usually been conceived as a response to criticisms of the designation of “ethnicminorities” in precisely those terms – as uniquely ethnicised groups committedto separatist cultural strategies – for their role in fostering the belief thatmajorities are somehow not ethnic, or separatist, too. As such, it responds to andseeks to foster a different social dynamic through which, in being more complexlypartitioned, the national culture is viewed as being made up from the independentdevelopmental trajectories of different cultures existing side by side and –__________1. There is a rich literature on these issues in Australia where the question of separate forms of accountabilityhas received considerable attention in relation to the administration of cultural associations runand managed by Aborigines. See, for an insightful discussion of the issues involved, Rowse, 2000.58