Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesMy point, then, is that, in thinking about the role that cultural policies can play inthe development of cultural diversity, it is necessary to have the long term in view,for it is only over the long term that the powerfully divisive ways in which the relationsbetween different peoples and cultures have been organised in the historiesof nationalism and colonialism can be overcome. This has been partly a matter ofthe ways in which the relations between different peoples and cultures has beenrepresented in western societies. It has equally, though, and just as persistently,been a matter of the ways in which such differences in representation have beentranslated into, and helped to justify, significant inequalities of civic status andtreatment.It seems likely that, in this respect, some roads here will prove longer than others.While, as we have noted, there are similarities between what we have characterisedas sub- or multinational, autochthonous, diasporic, and indigenous claimsto difference, the situation of immigrants – and especially, in Europe, of non-European Union immigrants, strangers from afar – is the most precarious in all ofthe countries surveyed. It seems unlikely, moreover, that significant advances willbe made in strengthening the relations between cultural democracy and culturaldiversity here without putting questions of citizenship clearly and firmly at theircentre.The perspective of cultural democracyIt is questions of these kinds concerning the relations between cultural diversityand citizenship that properly belong at the centre of current debates about culturaldemocracy where, as we have noted, they meet similar claims to difference arisingfrom the histories of related oppressions in the fields of gender, sexual preference,and disability. These too, of course, have their specific properties which need to befully attended to in the fine grain of cultural policies related to their specific needs.But there is also much to be gained from looking at their intersections, for there islittle doubt that the oppressions of women, gays, lesbians, disabled people, andnon-white ethnicities have, in varied complex ways, underwritten and supportedeach other, especially as bases for the unequal distribution of civic rights and entitlements.Indeed, it is only from the perspective of these intersections that the vocabulary ofcitizenship can be reshaped in ways that reflect the shift – mostly still a demandrather than an accomplished reality – from polities based on the normative principleof homogeneity to ones based on the principle of heterogeneity. The pursuit offull and equal political citizenship rights is, of course, a central aspect of such concerns.There is, however, also a need for a clear understanding of the principles ofcultural citizenship that also need to be secured. Four principles are of paramountimportance in developing such a revised vocabulary of citizenship.i. the first consists in the entitlement to equal opportunity to participate in the fullrange of activities that constitute the field of culture in the society in question;64