Cultures and Globalization

Conflicts and Tensions

Helmut K Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, Helmut K Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412934725, 9781412934718
• eBook ISBN: 9781446224953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"In the age of globalization we are no longer home alone. Migration brings other worlds into our own just as the global reach of the media transmits our world into the hearts and minds of others. Often incommensurate values are crammed together in the same public square. Increasingly we all today live in the kind of ?edge cultures? we used to see only on the frontiers of civilizations in places like Hong Kong or Istanbul. The resulting frictions and fusions are shaping the soul of the coming world order. I can think of no other project with the ambitious scope of defining this emergent reality than The Cultures and Globalization project. I can think of no more capable minds than Raj Isar and Helmut Anheier who can pull it off."
- Nathan Gardels, Editor-in-Chief, NPQ, Global Services, Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media

"This series represents an innovative approach to the central issues of globalization, that phenomenon of such undefined contours."
- Lupwishi Mbuyumba, Director of the Observatory of Cultural Policies in Africa

The world?s cultures and their forms of creation, presentation, and preservation are deeply affected by globalization in ways that are inadequately documented and understood. The Cultures and Globalization Series is designed to fill this void in our knowledge. Analyzing the relationship between globalization and cultures is the aim of the Series.

In each volume, leading experts as well as young scholars will track cultural trends connected to globalization throughout the world, covering issues ranging from the role of cultural difference in politics and governance to the evolution of the cultural economy and the changing patterns of creativity and artistic expression. Each volume will also include an innovative presentation of newly developed ?indicator suites? on cultures and globalization that will be presented in a user-friendly form with a high graphics content to facilitate accessibility and understanding

Like so many phenomena linked to globalization, conflicts over and within the cultural realms crystallize great anxieties and illusions, through misplaced assumptions, inadequate concepts, unwarranted simplifications and instrumental readings. The aim here is to marshal evidence from different disciplines and perspectives about the culture, conflict and globalization relationships in conceptually sensitive ways.

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PART 1 CONFLICTS AND TENSIONS

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INTRODUCTION

Yudhishthir Raj Isar and Helmut K. Anheier

Behind the concern for ‘culture’ that is increasingly evoked in contemporary public debate lurks the specter of conflict: the cultural dimensions of conflict on the one hand, and the conflictual dimensions of culture on the other. The duality inherent in this concern is, however, not always overtly stated. Yet, like so many other phenomena that characterize or are generated by globalization, conflict–culture relationships are inadequately analyzed and little understood. Hence they are easily politicized by ideologues of many different types and persuasions. This applies in particular to the question of cultural identities, both individual and collective, and their forms of expression, maintenance, representation, recognition, and renewal.

What exactly do we mean by ‘conflict’? At one level, we mean the tensions between individual and collective values on the one hand and economic and political interests on the other. These are an integral part of the human and social condition; they have always re-asserted themselves in times of accelerated change. Nor are they all inherently negative or harmful, on the contrary. Many observers make the point that the arts, for example, flourish during times of change and tension as tools of critique and dissent. Or take the ‘creative conflicts’ that sociologists from Simmel (1983) to Dahrendorf (1994) have written about, or the ‘creative destruction’ economists such as Schumpeter (1962) and others identified. Globalization has given a new ‘edge’ to such conflicts, however. Harnessing them through adequate institutions and ways of conflict regulation is now the challenge (see, e.g., Berger 1998).

Yet there are also violent conflicts, including conventional inter-state wars, ethnic strife and religious riots. Such conflicts are not only hideously wasteful of social energies and acutely harmful to all their protagonists. They also endanger future generations by creating a legacy of grievances and a ‘culture of memory’ that, as will become clear below, are likely to sow the seeds of future conflicts as well.

Addressing a broad range of conflicts, their cultural content and their relationships to globalization processes – within and among nations as well as across the world’s geo-cultural regions – is our focus for this maiden issue of the Series. We shall use the framework outlined in the Introductory chapter to this volume in order to break down these relationships and the shifting nexus between cultures and societies. In so doing, we shall have to examine two facets of culture-related conflict, in other words: i) the extent to which conflicts generated by globalization in other areas appropriate the cultural dimension and ii) the extent to which the cultural dimension itself may have its own inbuilt conflict dynamics and tensions that might be either amplified or suppressed by globalization processes.

Although conflictuality is constitutive of the human condition, today we live in a particularly conflict-prone global environment, as the contributors to this volume will demonstrate, even though scholars disagree about the assessment and interpretation of different types of conflicts, their intensity and impact. Culturally driven and culturally implicated conflicts have been and are unfolding throughout the world. A myriad of tensions constantly surface with respect to cultural claims and assertions of many different kinds. A new commonplace is to see culture as a ‘security issue’. Yet fact-based and theoretically informed debate about the causes and consequences of such conflicts and tensions in the context of globalization has not become easier, but more difficult. One of the reasons is the increasing tendency to reify and essentialize the concept of culture, to instrumentalize ‘culture’ as a thing, an agency, and to ascribe causality to it, when often culture is only a pawn and the tensions are in fact generated by contests over power and resources.¹

The duality of cultural conflict: path-dependency, worldviews and interests

What, then, can be done to ‘deconstruct’ this relationship? First, we suggest that even the most complex reality should not deter us from proposing explanatory models, if only to discard them after having explored their utility. Second, we think that such models, like the framework already proposed for breaking down the relationship between globalization and cultures, should be parsimonious, allow us to focus on essential features and issues, encourage further thinking, and be relevant to policy. This may be easier to advocate than to accomplish, however, and so here we can do little more than sketch what kind of model we have in mind.

Let us make a risky proposition as a starting point, although we are aware that it may well not be fully testable with the limited evidence available: in our opinion, many of today’s conflicts, though not all, and rarely in their entirety, are tied to globalization processes.

Why might this be the case? In making this proposition, we have in mind a broad range of conflicts, including overtly ethnic conflicts, conflicts over resources and power, inter-state and civil wars, which are the focus of many of the chapters in this book, but also industrial, work-related conflicts, peasant revolts and student demonstrations, etc. We see globalization not primarily as the single cause of such conflicts but as a process penetrating and changing the ‘causal chemistry’ and ‘fabric’ of existing conflicts as well as emerging and reemerging ones. Finally, in putting forward our proposition, we are invoking a broader historical perspective on globalization similar to that of many contemporary analysts when they point to the expansion of direct foreign investment and world trade since the end of the Cold War as the critical period but not the only one. Thus we see the current globalization spurt, as indeed previous ones in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the context of a long-term though uneven expansion of world rationalization and capitalism. While in operational terms, we fully share contemporary readings of globalization as greater connectedness of flows of finance, knowledge, goods and services, and people across time, nations, regions and intercontinental space, we treat it conceptually as part of an ongoing historical process with cultural roots reaching back many centuries.

In other words, rather than a process that may have started in the late twentieth century, we regard today’s globalization as the latest phase of historic developments whose major impetus was the rise of capitalism in Europe and North America, but which for centuries have spurred and interacted with specific dynamics in other parts of the world in terms of economic and political development (e.g., Japan) or underdevelopment (e.g., Sub-Saharan Africa). At some level, the spread of rationality and capitalism has engendered conflict dynamics, i.e., colonialism, imperial wars, and struggles for self-determination and independence. At another level, these conflict dynamics, while often economic and political on the surface, have also been deeply cultural.

By ‘cultural conflict’ we mean nothing as dramatic as some ‘clash of civilizations’ or ‘epochal fight’ of ethnicities or religions. What we have in mind is more subtle and long-term: the cultural dynamics of rationalism and capitalism have long brought diverse cultural worldviews into contact with each other.² In many cases, such contact implied domination, but frequently it also involved some form of ‘meshing’ or partial inter-penetration of worldviews over time, encouraging cultural learning, crossfertilization, imitation and innovation. Not surprisingly, the ways in which worldviews interact and relate to each other reflect power relations and changing elite interests over time. Some of these worldviews are religious, for example those of Catholicism or Sufism, while others are secular ideologies such as socialism, liberalism or Baathism, while yet others are eclectic mixtures, such as fascism or many forms of nationalism. Some are more coherent than others, and they vary in terms of openness and capacity for adaptation. Critically, these worldviews have been, and are, affected by globalization in varying ways, and vice versa, but they also have their own dynamics. The important point is that such worldviews have existed and evolved for many centuries, sometimes millennia, and typically antedate the more pronounced globalization periods of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, Christianity, Islam and socialism have been transnational creeds from their very beginning, and are certainly not the products of national societies or cultures.

Thus, when exploring the relationship between globalization and conflict we have to be mindful that some types of conflicts are deeply rooted in history, and that they are not the result of current events, even though the latter may well have contributed new impetuses and triggers. Instead, some conflicts are closely linked to worldviews held by different populations, groups and individuals, and how these worldviews line up with prevailing economic, political, and cultural realities. For example, the ‘culture wars’ in nineteenth-century Germany were a conflict between a politically and economically weakened Catholic Church and the rising secular power of Prussia. The culture wars of late twentieth-century America, however, take place between a cosmopolitan urban-industrial elite, and a religiously minded lower-middle class in danger of losing the socioeconomic status they worked so hard to attain.

Yet, if globalization involves more frequent movements of objects, meanings and people across transnational space, then it also implies, at the very least, a greater exposure of different collectivities to each other, and hence also greater contact among worldviews. Such contacts may challenge or reinforce long-held cultural assumptions and they may also increase the frequency of ‘meshing’ and depths of interpenetration, including acceptance and rejection as well as patterns of innovation and diffusion. Whatever the outcome, such contacts may also generate a greater conflict potential.

Yet what specifically could be such greater conflict potential in the historic and current relationship between globalization and culture? Let us step back and remind ourselves of Weber’s observations about the relationship between ideas and interests. In his comparative analysis of world religions (Weber 1988), he concluded that material and ideal interests, and not specific ideas, govern human behavior. Yet the worldviews, i.e., the sum of ideas and their assumptions, act as a ‘switch’ and determine the ‘tracks’ along which actions are then being pushed by the dynamics of interests, be they political or economic. Thus, interests are path-dependent on patterns suggested, if not largely determined, by worldviews (see Tenbruck 1999; Schluchter 2005).

The parallel argument could be made for conflicts: not specific ideas, but material and ideal interests, govern human actions leading or responding to conflict. The worldviews, again, provide both structure and context to these conflicts and help shape specific conflict dynamics. As a result of globalization processes, the relationship between worldviews and interests has become more complex; and increasingly, through greater interpenetration and more frequent ‘meshing’, conflicts are nested in each other, either in latent or manifest ways.

An example of such nested conflicts is provided by the current morass in Iraq, with several layers of latent inter-ethnic and inter-religious strife that were ‘ignited’ to become manifest conflicts after the US-led invasion produced a power vacuum in an inconclusive post-war scenario. In other words, not only are conflicts, like interests, path-dependent on worldviews, they are also path-dependent on each other, as the illusion that World War I was a ‘war to end all wars’ profoundly and tragically demonstrated. In sum, in an age of globalization, the duality inherent in the relationship between culture and conflict stems from the path-dependent interplay between worldviews and interests.

Taking a closer look

The preceding paragraphs implied a rather abstract notion of ‘conflict’. How to make our understandings more concrete? In the most general terms, conflict is a disagreement through which parties involved perceive a threat to their needs, interests and concerns. In other words, conflict is more than a disagreement; it is that plus a perceived threat. It is also a social configuration in that it establishes a relation among conflicting parties, even if that relationship is very uneven and contested in content and form. Several aspects are worth noting.

It is the perceived threat that matters, not the actual one; and parties act according to their perception of the situation, which points to the importance of worldviews, values and belief systems as ‘filters’ but also to the role of information and recall (memory) of prior experience in interpreting threats. In other words, as shown above conflicts are culturally and socially embedded.

Power plays a crucial role in any conflict situation; conflict involves a confrontation among conflicting parties, each with some capability (real or imagined, specific or diffuse) to produce some effect in addressing the disagreement about needs, interests and concerns. Power is closely linked to resource availability and legitimacy, as well as to the potential of inflicting violence and the deployment of military means. Conflict is a clash of power, a pushing and pulling, a giving and taking. In this balancing process of powers confronting each other, the capabilities of the involved parties vary and may shift. In other words, conflicts are dynamic and rarely static.

Conflicts are manifest tensions that arise from perceived disagreements, as opposed to latent conflicts where parties may be largely unaware of the level of threat and power capabilities. Once conflicts are manifest, however, the conditions for communicating, mobilizing and organizing them are critical for the process and outcome. As we will suggest below, the wider availability of information technology, combined with a steep decline in communication costs, facilitates the transformation of latent into manifest conflicts.

While modern societies are conflict-prone they tend to seek ways and means of managing, i.e., institutionalizing, conflicts (panels, hearings, political parties, social movements, judiciary, etc.) rather than seeking settlement through domination alone. Such institutionalized conflicts are seen as creative conflicts that reduce the tensions that could otherwise build up along major societal cleavage structures. Such tensions could threaten the social fabric of societies, while managed conflicts contribute to social stability and ‘tame...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword, by Ralf Dahrendorf
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• List of boxes, figures, illustrations and tables
• Introducing the Cultures and Globalization Series
• Conflicts and Tensions
• Indicator Suites
• The Context of Culture
• Social Aspects of Culture
• Social Aspects of Culture
• Cultural Sites, Events and Flows
• 5 Political Systems and Culture
• Source Material
• Index