Bo Stråth - The Multicultural and the Social

Bo Stråth - The Multicultural and the Social

The serious backdrop of our symposium is the multicultural society crisis. The image of peaceful multicultural co-existence breaks down under new waves of refugees and migration and under catchwords like clash of civilisation and war on terror. The key question that the organiser of the symposium addresses is whether we are witnessing a decline of agora in our modern multicultural democratic societies. In Sarajevo it was much more acollapse than a decline of the agora and charshija culture, as we know today. The question is whether Europe in a more general sense is following that development. There are arguments for such an interpretation. The follow-up question in the invitation to this meeting is, if and how we can restore lost agora and culture of dialogue.

When we put and discuss these and similar questions we should be aware that we move on ideologically heavily loaded ground. Multicultural and cultural dialogue are no neutral and innocent concepts. The idea of multiculturalism broke through hand in hand with the new globalisation language in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. 

At the beginning of the 1990s, in parallel to the emergence of the idea that history had come to an end (Fukuyama 1992), a new Zauberwort was launched: globalisation. The argument contained in this concept was that the old Westphalian order, re-constituted in 1918 and again in 1945 as socially responsible nation states, had been overtaken by History. The globalisation concept did not provide much empirical underpinning or attempts to establish differences and similarities in relation to the free trade discourse that penetrated the world in the nineteenth century, hand in hand with the emergence of a global trade pattern, or to the unification of the world through the gold standard from the 1860s. The transcendence of boundaries was proclaimed as a new and epochal achievement in the progress of mankind. The globalisation discourse gave a teleological and axiological presupposition to the political language, teleological in the sense of having an ultimate goal, a telos, and axiological in the sense of representing an epochal break with the past. The denigration of borders was, rather than empirically demonstrated, a constitutive dimension of the emerging interpretative framework, where the political boundaries that had embedded the economies were eliminated, as much as the importance of the physical borders between the states was played down. Capital emancipated itself from political control in ways reminiscent of the 1920s. The connection went from theoretical postulation to empirical implementation rather than from empirically based problem definition to theoretical solution proposals. The liberation of capital movements all over the world at this time was described as something that could not be avoided, with market deployment as a natural force. 

The globalisation language about the Market as an unfolding natural force went hand in hand with images of cosmopolitan and multicultural integration of a world society without borders. Habermas talked about a post-national constellation and Fukuyama described a post-historical universalisation of liberalism. Hand in hand with the globalisation language there emerged a normative teleological project of transcending the division of the world into plural, territorially bounded entities by a variably construed form of world unity(Prozorow 2005). 

At the same time and in a paradoxical way there was an intensification of the identity discourse. New borders were re-established instead of those that were proclaimed to have been transgressed and belonging to the past. The idea of the nation was reinforced at the very moment when it was seen as a historical category. There was one interesting innovation in this paradoxical development. Whereas borders in the old Europe had mainly been defined as social borders they now were mainly seen in ethnic terms. The question of social solidarity and social responsibility disappeared and ethnic cleavages were reinforced. The ethnic cleavages, in turn, were reinforced through ideas of religious cleavages. 

The issue of territorial extent, which the globalisation language argued to be a historical category, came back in through the back-door, but did so in a biased way, biased because the social dimension, the question of social justice, had disappeared. Dominating images of the world as dialogue of civilisations and non-hierarchical webs of political, geopolitical and economic relations repressed crucial questions about interests, mutual or conflicting, power and social justice. Religions and civilisations do not throw themselves as suicide bombers into innocent crowds of people or initiate banlieue riots, but frustrated individuals do, reflecting social realities and feelings of impoverishment and powerlessness. The prose of the world is being romanced in the spirit of chatty humanism, and an empathic concept like dialogue is getting strong ideological overtones concealing social biases. 

There is a tendency to idealise and to blur unpleasant differences when we look for distance to our problematic present situation. How utopian is the global village promised in the globalisation language about both nearness and cosmos? Utopian means as we know literally the land nowhere. To what extent is the image of the global village or the agora based on escapism and illusion? How harmonious was the multicultural and peaceful coexistence in our agora societies in the past? What about internal and informal power structures and social inequalities and repression? How nostalgic is our retrospect view on a recent past that seems so distant?

It is important to openly discuss these questions in order to avoid self-delusion. There is a need for a realistic historic de- and reconstruction. Only on that basis can we derive inspiration for coming to terms with future. The inspiration must be based on learning from past experiences. Coming to terms with the future requires coming to terms with past. 

Having said this, I also want to emphasise that the multicultural agora and charshija image indeed does cover a reality, which went lost in the years of ethnic cleansing and ideas of blood purity. It is important to retrieve this historical reality, but we should do so in a more realistic way than what the local global village language does. My argument is that the instrument for a more realistic view is a focus on the social issue again. A focus on the social question in a historical reconstruction highlights both problems and possibilities. The question of social responsibility transgresses the dichotomy between images of a borderless world on the one side, and of ethnic and religious border building on the other. 

In "Wealth of Nations" Adam Smith discerned a global order based on transnational distribution of labour through transnational mobilisation of production factors. However, he – and his colleagues – never argued that the nations and their governments would disappear. On the contrary, the aim and the consequence of market deployment were to reinforce the peoples and their political institutions: the wealth of nations. The free trade was thought to be the economic cement of political democracy. 

The confidence in this harmonious fiction of a world both with and without borders eroded with the advance of industrial capitalism. Increasing observations of poverty, which was assumed to somehow have with the emerging system to do rather than something that could be reduced to the responsibility of the poor individuals themselves, and the ostensive wealth of a few provoked the idea that wealth was a matter of class rather than nation. The social issue was put on the agenda everywhere in Europe from the 1830s onwards when the insight grew that the emerging capitalist order produced damages that were beyond the responsibility of the individual as in the old view on poverty. Some kind of a systemic dysfunction was diagnosed. The emerging issue at stake was who was responsible. 

The debate accelerated in the framework of the long economic depression beginning in the early 1870s. The tension between economic integration and social disintegration became dramatic and the confidence in free trade was replaced by protectionist practices and politics. Unemployment was a concept invented in the 1880s to cope with a new mass phenomenon. The concept was a social construct (Topalov 1994). The social borders of the economies were emphasised. The social question became the worker or the unemployment question, i. e. the class question. “The Capital” by Karl Marx in 1867 and the “Manifesto” by him and Friedrich Engels in 1848 gave a new shape to the class concept. 

The social question was in conservative defence strategies mixed up with the national question. Protectionism and nationalism went hand in hand with a growing attention to the social protest. The liberal fiction of a state-bounded universalism and general economic wealth declined. National socialism was suggested as a conservative response to the emerging project of class struggle socialism. A social Darwinian language gave the meaning. Nations were seen in fight for survival against other nations and only the strongest survived. The economic wheels began to roll again through rearmament politics. The road to 1914 was paved. 

This was the long beginning of the Second European Thirty Years War. The Westphalian order that had been established after and in response to the First European Thirty Years War imploded in 1914. The armistice in 1918 resulted in political projects for never again. The League of Nations, the Paneuropean Movement and other similar projects for peace through wealth emerged. However, they all suffered from the weakness of vague idealism about universalism. The locus of political control and political power was not a very central question in the plans and in the emerging institutional setting. In the lack of institutionalised international politicalpower, economic transnational power emerged. In the 1920s the governments lost control over the economies to a global order of transnational price and production cartels. Instead of contours of a world government, envisaged in the idea of the League of Nations and of Paneurope, a global capital governance emerged when international cartels in key production areas divided the world markets through secret price and product agreements (Gillingham 1991). Against the backdrop of this development the governments lost control over the social question when the economic depression recurred in much more intense and tense forms than ever in the early 1930s. Under conditions of transnational economic governance and political impotence the world order collapsed under pressures of the social question. 

The confidence in global capitalism collapsed when ideals of universal market mechanisms were confronted with the practices and the effects of global capital operations. When world economic governance became mass unemployment the masses revolted. The social protest turned down the key tool of international transactions: the gold standard. The social protest enforced a definitive answer to the centenary contested issue of social responsibility. The answer was the state. Political control of the economy was re-established and the state was the locus of this control. The state became the generator of national integration through recognising the responsibility for the social question. 

The substance of the political answer to the social protest varied widely: fascism in Italy, national socialism in Germany, front populaire in France, New Deal in the USA, red-green worker-farmer coalitions in Scandinavia, and so on ((Wagner 1990; Zimmermann 1996 and 2000; Didry, Wagner and Zimmermann (eds) 1999; Stråth 2000a). In retrospect we see how different the solutions were. In the early 1930s when the next future was still unknown they were seen as much closer to each other. Roosevelt’s great interest in Mussolini’s experiment is well known (Schivelbusch 2005). The social protest was integrated in a new wave of nationalism that paved the way towards the second half of the Second European Thirty Years War. 

With the Enlightenment philosophy we ceased to consider history as vita magistra. We realise that we never learn from history. Still, or, better, exactly therefore, it is difficult not to see how in many respects reminiscent the situation today is with the 1930s. 

I am well aware that the historical outline I just made is a West European view covering industrialising societies in the Western part of the continent. I am also aware of the East European experiences of enforced industrialisation under Communist rule where the social certainly was in the focus, but was so in an overstretched and grotesque way. The image of the social was heavily abused. The historical criminal outrages in the name of, first national socialism, and then, what the outsiders came to call really existing socialism, cannot conceal that there was and is a social problem, however. 

It seems also obvious that the social problem today has left the European focus and become global. The globalisation narrative about market deployment needs a socially informed counter-narrative to express this situation. The mass migration we experience so strongly today is a truly global movement which has the potential to link the world together in new forms but also the potential to destroy it. The question, that perhaps more than anything else influences in what direction the potential will drive, is the social question, and the problem of responsibility for a global solidarity in social terms. 

It goes without saying that such a responsibility requires some kind of political capacity and I must not say that this capacity needs to be democratically controlled. We are far from a world government, and although such ideas have become somewhat more topical in the academic debate during the recent years they still in many respects seem like utopian dreams. However, less utopian and perhaps more realistic would be a European political capacity with a responsibility beyond Europe, perhaps a kind of global responsibility. When I talk about a political capacity with a global responsibility, I do expressly not do so in terms of some neo-colonial military capacity to intervene as an arbitrator but a social political capacity. For the moment Europe is far from the realisation or implementation of such a capacity as we all know. In particular if we talk about a democratically controlled political capacity, the European crisis and action paralysis is obvious. A border between democracy and populism, which once seemed so clear, is getting more and more blurred, at the same time as a tension between social protectionism and social dumping is taking on more distinct proportions, and so does the mutually reinforcing language of protectionism and nationalism. There is an obvious risk that the solutions for the future are looked for in the world of yesterday and that the social question once more is hided under the ethnically defined national question. 

It seems obvious that the ongoing European crisis has to do with dramatically growing social differences in Europe after the enlargement from EU 15 to EU 25 in 2004. Europe as it was equipped with a political capacity in the Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and the Economic Community in 1957 was never thought of in terms of a democracy. The architecture was a market under strict international, no, supranational control. The High Authority – as the Commission was called in those days – was a kind of European anti-thrust authority where Europe consisted of only six countries. The task was to prevent both the interwar rule of the international cartels, and the relapse of the national governments into populist politics. The memories of Hitler’s populism were still fresh, but an even bigger threat in the world of Monnet, Adenauer and de Gasperi was probably the fact that 20-25 per cent of the electorates in France and Italy at the end of the 1940s voted Communist. The European market integration would make Europe safe for democracy without being a democracy itself. British economic historian Alan Milward talked about the European rescue of the nation states (1994). 

Exactly how the talk about Europe as a democracy with an argued democratic deficit emerged is still very much an un-investigated question, but there probably is a connection to the decision by the European Council in 1973 to introduce a European identity, which later provoked the question of a European demos. Also the direct election to the European Parliament from 1979 fits into this location of the 1970s as a crucial time for the transformation. 

In any case it is reasonable to argue that the non-democratic organisation, with implicit growing democratic pretensions or ambitions, functioned fairly well as long as social differences were relatively small in Europe. The incorporation of some poor countries in the West (Ireland) and in the South (Spain, Portugal, Greece) was relatively easy. A European regional policy emerged as an instrument of a European solidarity and economic equalisation. 

The enlargement in 2004 dramatically increased the social differences and destabilised the situation in increasingly populist politics where social protectionism emerged in the richer Western part against what was argued to be social dumping from the new member states. Instead of Milward’s coordinated European rescue of the nation states a scenario of sauve qui peut is rapidly emerging. 

This is a dangerous situation which looks for simple solutions to complex problems. The Polish plumber in the referendum campaign in France in 2005 is a case in point. Competing cheap labour was packed together with what was experienced as threats from the Muslim ghettos of the French suburbs. The social problem was transformed into an ethnic and religious question. Instead of discussing the risk of a European social over-stretch the problem is addressed in religious and ethnic terms. 

Turkey is a case in point. Leading German social historians argue, that since Turkey is Islamic and never was Christian, it cannot belong to Europe. This comes close to essentialist cultural arguments of the same kind as was used in Germany in the 1930s, irrespective of the fact that Turkey constitutionally is a secularised state. The question of a Turkish membership in the EU is a legitimate question, but then it should be discussed in terms of EU’s capacity of social and political integration not in terms of cultural-religious essence. 

The agora was a local place but the global village of today is inscribed in a context of economic forces that do not know any borders. The collapse of Yugoslavia was not only a political break-down of a corrupt system, but also the outcome of economic forces undermining the political capacity. How much of the agora was there before the break-down? Agora is an urban concept, but at least for the rural districts Tone Bringa’s documentary “We Are All Neighbours” demonstrates the existence of an everyday life in ex-Yugoslavia that transgressed ethnic and religious differences in practices of co-habitation. The documentary also shows, however, how fast such practices can break down, and how tolerable differences can change to insurmountable cleavages and entrenchments. 

Multicultural became all over the world in the 1990s a concept to legitimise the failure of the states to guarantee overall social integration of various social and ethno-religious groups, exposed as they were to global economic forces. Multicultural became a concept of laissez-faire liberalism legitimising the transfer of social responsibility to local communities and at the end to the individual. This transfer at the end lead to the play-off of different cultures against each other. 

Agora was the centre of politics. If we consider the performance in our antique model in democratic terms, we should not forget that the democracy in crucial respects was far from what we mean by democracy. The slaves and the women were excluded, for instance. Nevertheless the agora was a centre of political deliberation and decision-making. The idea of a multicultural society is in many respects a capitulation of politics. By capitulation of politics I mean that the propagation of peaceful co-existence across ethnic and religious divides obscures our sensitivity to social inequalities. Agora and multicultural are not immediately compatible concepts. 

If we do not learn from history we should at least avoid being naive and in that respect there are historical experiences to draw upon. Democracy is clear as an ideal and easy as a parole, but difficult, complex and diffuse as practice. I have already addressed the proximity to populism. Another difficulty is the definition of the demos that constitutes the democracy. For Woodrow Wilson this was not a big problem when he claimed to have the prescription for making the world safe for democracy in Versailles in 1919. The possibility for everybody to proclaim oneself as a people and claim sovereignty was an explosive mix as we know today. We should not forget this bloody experience when we congratulate Montenegro to its new-won independence and when Montenegro becomes a pattern to follow in other parts of Europe such as Spain, for instance. 

The overall message of my paper can be epitomised: Democracy without a social capacity is fragile. Democracy with only an economic underpinning is fragile. Democracy must be more than dialogue. Dialogue is a necessary but not sufficient component of democracy. Democracy can only be long-term sustainable if it is based on some form of social responsibility and solidarity. The link between democracy and ethno-religious identifications is explosive.