Globalisation and Pluralism

Victor Segesvary served for twenty-five years in various capacities in United Nations economic and social development programmes in Africa and Asia. Among his books are Inter-Civilization Relations and the Destiny of the West: Dialogue or Confrontation? (University Press of America, 2000), and Dialogue of Civilization: An Introduction to Civilizational Analysis (University Press of America, 2000).

In the course of history, there have always been transborder movements between kingdoms and empires—movements of ideas and people, of merchandise or artefacts reflecting specific human creativity and skills. We have only to think of the spread of the alphabet from the coastal town of Ugarit in Aramaic Syria to the whole Mediterranean basin; the adoption of the zero, invented by Indian thinkers, by other cultures, an adoption effected in Europe via Arabic scientists; the enormous movements of peoples across the Asian steppes since time immemorial; or the Silk Road linking China to Europe, along which sprung up such well-known commercial centres of antiquity as Palmyra in the Syrian desert.

 

These transborder movements do not resemble the phenomenon we today call globalisation. Despite transportation and communication links and increasing knowledge of other countries, the geographical regions related to each other by such movements remained isolated. China remained the Middle Kingdom between Heaven and Earth, the last being all other people not belonging to the population of the Celestial Empire (though subject in principle to the authority of the Emperor). And Venice, on the receiving end of the Silk Road, already represented a certain consciousness of European superiority, which, however, did not impede Venetian merchants from benefiting from good deals offered by transcontinental trade.

 

It was only after the Industrial Revolution and the great development of Western science and technology in the nineteenth century, parallel to the universal acceptance of the nation state as the dominant political institution in the West, that transborder, now called transnational, movements increased exponentially. The pace of transnational contacts, covering the farthest regions of the world, quickened especially with the truly astonishing technological developments in transport, electronic communication and information systems during the last four decades of the twentieth century. These technological developments created the dominant phenomenon of our contemporary life that we call globalisation.

 

Transborder or transnational movements of ideas and people were always, simultaneously, trans-civilisational movements. However, in view of the superficiality of contacts before the second half of the twentieth century, these movements rarely offered possibilities of what Benjamin Nelson has called civilisational encounters—occasions of cultural dialogue or confrontation.¹ It is undeniable that there were interactions between various cultures, leading to the diffusion of ideas and values from one civilisation to another, without developing into a dialogue. Because all civilisations are centred on a religious core, confrontations took place between representatives of different religions, especially those of a monotheistic nature, either among themselves or in their relation with believers of other, non-monotheistic religions.

 

In our age, civilisational encounters take place regularly because of the changed nature of contacts among people belonging to different civilisations. These contacts have been transformed by the hitherto unimaginable and unforeseen advance in various means, especially the media, of disseminating information worldwide. For this reason, some even envisage the formation of a world culture. This utopian vision results from a misunderstanding of the nature and essence of civilisations and of what globalisation means. The notion of a universal civilisation is advanced under the influence of certain ideologies in order to promote particular interests. Therefore, explaining the concept and practice of civilisational dialogue has to begin with a clarification of what we mean by civilisation, globalisation, pluralism and dialogue of civilisations.

Pluralism

The notion of civilisations has little currency in our day because international relations as well as the apparent coming into existence of worldwide financial markets have shrouded in a veil of forgetfulness the fact that the largest comprehensive entities, determining the framework of human existence, are civilisational worlds. Of course, it is understandable that the participants in international affairs, whose activities fill television news programmes and newspapers, tend to ignore the existence of civilisations: they do so because recognising the fundamental importance of civilisations in human life would deprive them, they think, of their role in world affairs. Does Islamic civilisation, the community of believers, the umma, not include several dozen states? Does the world of modern, Western civilisation not consist of states on three continents? Do the peoples of the Buddhist civilisational world not inhabit numerous Asian states?

 

Civilisations coexist on our planet and are humanity’s largest ensembles created around a religious, metaphysical and cultural core. Culture (in Cicero’s sense of cultura mentis) encompasses religion and worldview, scientific and artistic creation, patterns of reasoning and ethical principles of behaviour and action. Civilisation stands for a whole way of life, including technology, living conditions, social practices, political systems and institutions, economic organisation and methods of production, as well as all other material aspects of our earthly life centred on the cultural core. Civilisations are effectively above the international system regarded today as the highest level of human interaction. For this reason, it is fully justified to speak of civilisational worlds as having spatial and temporal dimensions.

 

In the perspective adopted here cultures are therefore at the core of every civilisation, and from these cultural foundations develop social practices in every domain of human activity. In turn, the core of every culture is a theistic or metaphysical religion, a link to the cosmic reality transcending the world of here and now. The only exception is the modern civilisation of the West that overtly denies any transcendental foundation (Max Weber’s “disenchantment”), though its Christian roots are undeniable even in the present late-modern period. For this reason, the key word characterising the present state of the West in relation to other civilisations is disjunction (a term borrowed from Anthony Giddens). This term has a double meaning: first, a disjunction of Western modernity from its own past, a distancing that occurred over the last four centuries; second, a consecutive disjunction from other great contemporary civilisations.

 

The multiplicity of civilisational worlds signifies that between different civilisations only a pluralistic approach can prevail. Though the cultural core of every civilisation is anchored in a transcendental faith or cosmic perspective, the problem of civilisational pluralism does not concern the domain of faith but consists in understanding other human beings in the course of civilisational encounters. Pluralism in this sense is often mistakenly comprehended as relativism, that is, relativism of traditions, values, principles, ethos, behaviour and worldviews. However, pluralism is not a form of relativism. It is acceptance of the fact that there are different human worlds with different visions of man and the universe, with different emphases on types of social ordering and interactions. In brief, to affirm civilisational pluralism is to be realistic, in contrast to those utopians who believe in a postulated “one-world”.

 

It is necessary to point out that civilisational pluralism is completely different from the much discussed multiculturalism. Civilisational pluralism concerns the relationship between great, coexisting civilisational ensembles on our planet, whereas multiculturalism stands for the simultaneous presence in one country or region of people belonging to different cultural worlds, though not always to different civilisations. Therefore, multiculturalism can have varying connotations in different contexts. For example, multiculturalism in the United States, a so-called settler country, involves the simple coexistence of the cultures of older or newer immigrants as assimilation into the predominant Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture gradually becomes less important. In European countries, assimilation or integration represents a much more difficult problem because of the defensive posture taken by strong autochthonous cultures, including religion, social practices and ways of life. Finally, it has to be said that multiculturalism is not a new phenomenon. During the Middle Ages, Confucianism, and later Buddhism, were introduced to Japan and slowly blended into the indigenous Shinto culture. This encounter was very successful. Japan became a land in which neo-Confucianism and various types of homegrown Buddhist tendencies flourished.

The Globalising Trend

Globalisation is, in my perspective, a cultural phenomenon. The term does not allude to Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the world becoming a “global village”, because it does not refer only to the worldwide extension of communication facilities. In Roland Robertson’s definition, globalisation corresponds to a “compression” of phenomena on the world scene, in turn compensated for by the irresistible spread of concepts, views, customs and lifestyles to the remotest corners of the world. In this sense, the “global circumstance” of modernity, according to Robertson, is a framework which makes possible the existence of plural human worlds.²

 

It is clear from the foregoing that globalisation does not simply mean the instantaneous transmission of information from one point of the world to another, or the rapid circulation of merchandise through world trade channels, or the ever-quicker transportation of persons and goods between continents. Rapidity of communications and of the dissemination of information does not change the character of operations, economic, technical or otherwise, because it does not modify their essence linked to a specific activity. A transfer of money remains a transfer of money whether effected in two seconds or in two days. The definition of export/import activities, the kind of merchandise traded, remains the same whether it takes two months to transport goods across the oceans or twenty-four hours by flying them in a Boeing 747.

 

The essential meaning of globalisation is captured by Roland Robertson’s definition in his landmark study: “the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism”.³ The globalising process, therefore, incorporates universalistic trends (such as the worldwide spread of Western consumerism) as well as particularistic self-affirmations and ways of life (such as the revival and global valorisation of national consciousness or other collective identities).

 

In contrast to globalisation, universalism grasps the world as a whole in the sense that it affirms putative universally held beliefs, values and social practices, as well as putative universally applicable institutional structures. In contrast to universalism, globalisation recognises the importance of context and, through this recognition, embraces its bipolar opposite: localism. Localism, by its inner logic, gives priority to particularism as much as context. Context, as an aspect of globality, eliminates abstract, formalistic approaches or preconceived principles for the sake of the contingency and particularity of things and events. The global trend absorbs certain aspects of localism and frequently reflects contextual realities, whereas particular situations incorporate global traits or instrumentalise, for their own purposes, such traits. In fundamentalist worldviews such as the Islamist or American Evangelical, globalisation is present in the form of discourse and in the use of particular arguments and technological solutions (such as television).

 

It is, then, possible to state that in our late modern age two contradictory movements exist simultaneously, each of which possesses its own dialectic: on the one hand, the ever-widening globalising trend characterised by space-time distanciation (Giddens); on the other, the growing importance of place, the focus of the local setting of multiple human interactions, which necessitates the co-presence of human beings, as being-together and the possibility of coming-together. Place designates not only a specific context, but is also linked to the experience of generations of human beings and to the recollection of past events in collective human memory. It is, therefore, the context in which space, experience and time fuse together to constitute particular cultural and civilisational worlds.

 

The interpenetration of the global and of the particular is the result of the combination of three factors:

 

1. Two generations of technological developments over the last hundred years. The first generation consisted of the use of railways, air transport and wireless transmissions; the second consists of what we call the information revolution—computerised networks, block trading of securities, satellite transmissions, etc. This unique and overwhelming role of technology does, of course, influence the interplay of universalistic and particular elements.

 

2. Technology is a servant of those who manipulate it in their own interest. By this I mean that technology is a vehicle of hegemonic power politics. In consequence, globalisation’s main bearer is, as Nietzsche would have said, the will to hegemonic power. Old-fashioned hegemonic politics applied pressures in a straightforward way to all those who happened to be in its orbit of influence. Hegemonic politics in the global age, precisely because technological progress has led to transparency in all public spaces, not only must take into account cultural, social, political and other differences, but has to exercise its influence on each of the entities concerned. Stuart Hall’s formula expresses this concisely: “The global is the self-presentation of the dominant particular” as the global stands for nothing else than the manner in which “the dominant particular localises and naturalises itself”.⁴ Hegemonic intent, under conditions of unforeseen, unintended and contingent features of the global environment, does not aim at the destruction and disappearance of different particularities, but endeavours, in the course of the global cultural process, to integrate multiple identities and particularities into the hegemonic identity and particularity.

 

3. For technology to assume the role it is expected to play in the globalisation process, and for technology-based hegemonic politics to be able to penetrate and shape in its own image the innumerable particularities of the world without eliminating them, a vehicle is needed to ensure that the message has the correct content and required coherence when disseminated by the media. This vehicle is the ideology of globalisation. To put it dialectically, ideology creates and sustains globalisation, and globalisation processes are themselves the source of the ideology of globality.

 

The globalisation process is, then, the engine of the self-affirmation and ideological hegemony of Western civilisation. It appears successful in disseminating Western civilisational values and ways of life—although frequently with devastating effect. Examples of such globalising phenomena are extended urbanisation; the imposition of the nation-state formula on countries emerging from colonial rule; the establishment of Western-type judicial processes; and the “consumerisation” of the masses due to the invasion of modern clothing, electrical appliances, etc., which is the most powerful instrument for modifying indigenous customs and ways of life.

 

The impression given by Western civilisation’s conquest of the world⁵ is, however, deceptive because globalisation is a phenomenon solely on the surface of the life of peoples belonging to other civilisations. This basic fact has not changed since the Second World War, and theories of economic and political duality in the non-Western world have not lost their validity. They express the lack of congruence between fundamental civilisational givens and imported concepts, values and modes of action. This lack of congruence between old and new is also evidenced by the self-defence of non-Western cultures against the onslaught of modernity. This self-defence can be seen in the mushrooming fundamentalisms reacting against a secular and rationalist foreign culture, and in the rebirth of ethnic solidarity, both of which aim to protect people’s collective identity.

 

The global era does not reveal itself today as the age of a “world revolution of Westernisation” because the definition of globalisation includes the inevitability of civilisational encounters. Therefore, the dialogue of civilisations can be envisaged as the other face of the globalising trend. This interface of different civilisations does not necessarily signify a confrontation; it can also be a fruitful dialogue. Peaceful coexistence between these great traditions and systems of beliefs and morals would be made possible by a mutual awareness of the other’s existence; by a profound sensitivity towards what peoples of other civilisations are thinking, feeling, believing and valuing; and above all, by an attempt to interpret and evaluate the beliefs and acts of others in their own terms, not ours. Such an effort would not inevitably induce us to have doubts concerning our own cultural tradition, but it does presuppose that all sides show readiness to learn from each other, and to integrate in their own contextual, local world elements from other civilisations whenever such elements appear necessary for the realisation of particular human projects.

Civilisational Analysis

The foregoing makes it clear that in order to participate in civilisational encounters one must know the other side’s particular human world. Such knowledge includes familiarity with the principal theses of the religion representing the other civilisation’s core element; the meaning of the world, i.e., the explanation of life and the cosmos that is built on the civilisation’s religious perspective; the ethical precepts elaborated during the cultural evolution of that specific civilisation; the civilisation’s prevailing symbolism, myths, rituals and important magical traits; the role of the temporal dimension as reflected in these traditions; the relationship and interaction between individual and community which mutually presuppose each other; and finally, the effects of modernisation (which today equals Westernisation) on society, political institutions, economic activity, and everyday life.

 

The concept of styles of reasoning, advanced by the Canadian philosopher of science, Ian Hacking,⁶ most clearly illustrates civilisational differences if we extend his arguments from the limited field of science to civilisational wholes. Differences between cultural worlds can be related to the fact that a style of reasoning determines the very nature of the cosmic vision, or the knowledge of the natural and human worlds, that it produces. An independent observer cannot evaluate such styles of reasoning because “the very sense of what can be established by that style depends upon the style itself”. Different styles may determine possible truths or varying understandings of the world, which can be objectively true in the framework of a given style of reasoning. That means that styles of reasoning open up new possibilities for reflection. As styles arise from historical and civilisational developments, their possibly being true is a consequence of the same developments. A style of reasoning, therefore, naturally bears the imprint of the religious/transcendental and cultural core of a civilisation. A style is not a way of thinking that confronts reality, but is part of reality itself.

 

Many examples can be given of differences between styles of reasoning. The complexity of various forms of Indian logical and philosophical thinking is well known; there is some similarity between certain Indian trends of thinking and those that dominate modernity. In contrast, the Buddhist worldview is not properly rational in the Western perspective because, believing in an existential path to reality, Buddhism lays more emphasis on man’s intuitions than on his reasoning capacities. Buddhist thinking is based on the doctrine of self-generating instantaneity. Reality is not a continuous process but is perceivable only in a momentary, discontinuous way. Things come into being and pass away in every instant; there is no causality in our sense. Time is, by definition, irreversible; there is no duration. The existence of things is revealed by their effects, and their before-and-after are incorporated in their instantaneous existence.

 

Chinese dialecticians produced, millennia ago, the most curious metaphysical speculations of ancient times. In Chinese civilisation itself two entirely different ways of thought coexisted for centuries: Confucianism and Taoism. To show the differences between Chinese and other, especially Western, thinking one can refer to the most striking example: the conception of the mind in Chinese culture. As Chad Hansen has demonstrated, concepts are determined by the nature and structure of a language, and he translates the ancient Chinese pictographic symbol for heart, to which no mental string of words and sentences corresponds, by the composite expression “heart–mind” in order to obtain the meaning intended by the Chinese.⁷ Hansen’s bridging of linguistic and cultural barriers by showing the essential difference between divergent conceptions of the mental and the emotional represents an excellent example of how and why civilisational dialogue has to be based on a thorough knowledge of a different cultural world.

 

Another fundamental difference between civilisations, or more precisely, perhaps, between the modern Western and all other civilisations, leading to their disjuncture, concerns their vision of the place of the human world in the universe, the cosmos. It is striking to see that in Chinese paintings, wonderfully reflecting the natural beauty of some of the country’s regions, humans are always tiny figures, lost in the immensity of the universe. This encompassing vision of man and the cosmos (which is also to be found in the Japanese worldview) indicates the essential difference of the Chinese outlook from that of modernity, which belittles the natural world in comparison to the human species.

 

A much more complex vision of the relation of this world to the beyond is the Islamic worldview. Of all monotheistic religions, Islam alone posits that there is a continuum between this world and the next, that there is no difference between man’s life and actions here and now, and his life afterwards in paradise or hell. The links cannot be broken. And the unity of the faith creates a unity among all those who believe in God, in accordance with the teachings of his Prophet, Muhammad. This unity is the umma. The religious ideal of Islam is organically related to the social order that is dependent on it, as observed by the poet–philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938). Consequently, nationalism, which challenges Islamic solidarity and the unity of religion and everyday life, is unacceptable. From this source originates the tension between universalistic and particularistic tendencies in the world of Islam, between the umma and the various Muslim nations, Arab or non-Arab. Any discussion of the political order or institutions has to be seen in the perspective of a contradiction between the community of believers and national communities based on ethnic or cultural differences.

 

Despite the overall importance of styles of reasoning and other basic differences separating cultures and civilisations, there are biological universals in all things human as well as a common core to the mental and emotional set-up of human beings. An example of this common core is the universal phenomenon of love between mother and child, between man and woman. But it also includes, for example, the recurrence of solutions to everyday problems in many human societies, and of forms of artistic expression in understanding our world and the universe. The latter indicate a similarity in artists’ visions, in their comprehension of the human predicament, and in their style and approach, wherever they may live on the surface of the earth. This common core, this “loose fit” (Hacking), makes it possible to share in different types of reasoning, and thus to understand the other’s point of view—that is, to have civilisational encounters.

The Modalities of Dialogue

Civilisational pluralism is different from all other forms of pluralism, especially those within particular civilisational worlds. Civilisational pluralism stands for the coexistence of several and different civilisations on the world scene—it really is a celebration of difference. This pluralistic world represents an ordered heterogeneity in human existence as against a uniform world culture.

 

Recurrent culture patterns or social practices as well as environmentally and historically conditioned relationships certainly constitute cross-cultural regularities, without implying a linkage between various civilisations through diffusion or through a repeated developmental sequence. Civilisational pluralism poses, therefore, the problem of how to ensure communication and achieve mutual understanding between people belonging to different civilisations, against a background of civilisational disjunction.

 

To initiate a civilisational dialogue, it is necessary to be familiar with aspects of the civilisation which is one’s partner in the dialogue. Thus, the dialogue must be thoroughly prepared through an analysis encompassing all the features of a civilisation—such as specific religious principles, cultural identities and practices—that are set in advance as the objects of the dialogue. From the point of view of dialogical content, a debate can be organised either, (i) with reference to every characteristic of a civilisation, in which case it is advisable to limit the dialogue to representatives of just two civilisations in order to preclude debates becoming so vast as to be ungraspable; or, (ii) on specific subjects, such as the role of the sacred in everyday life, social ordering and ethical questions, political institutions, or obstacles to civilisational co-operation in a given field. With option (ii), representatives of several or all civilisations can be participants in the dialogue. One must, however, be realistically aware that civilisational differences cannot be bridged nor corresponding mentalities changed in a short period of time. If it is to produce results, the process of civilisational dialogue will inevitably involve a series of encounters and a long time-span.

 

The organisational framework of civilisational dialogues is one of the most important conditions of their success. First of all, as the interface of civilisations represents the highest level of encounter between different human worlds, it is evident that such dialogues are doomed to failure if they are conceived as occurring in international institutional frameworks. As civilisations sometimes encompass dozens of states, and as our world is increasingly one of transnational movements due to the globalising trend, civilisational dialogues cannot conceivably be initiated successfully in a framework in which particular political interests dominate, often serving clearly hegemonic pretensions. In fact, the interstate system ignores civilisational differences precisely because acknowledging them would jeopardise the more limited interests of the member states and of those who govern them.

 

President Mohammad Khatami of Iran’s proposal in September 1998 of a dialogue among civilisations was a historical landmark in international relations. It was entirely understandable that he chose the United Nations General Assembly at which to unveil his proposal because, as of now, there is no higher world forum where the issue could have been raised. The muted response of the members of the interstate system to the proposal is the best indication of the reluctance with which sovereign nation states regard the prospect of an era of civilisational dialogue.

Participation

Besides openness to other convictions, worldviews and characteristic ways of life, an essential aspect of civilisational dialogue is that it must take place between representatives of a civilisation’s religion, philosophy, art and science, as well as between social leaders, entrepreneurs and workers, etc. That is to say, it must take place between thinkers, intellectuals and practical men, and not between politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats. In a word, participants must be independent people, free from serving political and particularistic interests, free from subjection to ideological pressures and mental shackles, free from submission, voluntary or involuntary, to the powers that be in their specific human world. They have to be representatives of their civil society. What I am aiming at with all these conditions is that representatives of various civilisations have to be independent in their opinions, autonomous in their relation to whatever political or economic power may try to intervene in the dialogue, and entirely sincere in their intention to reach common ground through discursive communication.

 

For this reason, it appears that the best solution is to invite participants individually but, where appropriate, through the institutions they belong to. Such institutions may be religious organisations, universities and other educational establishments, or cultural associations such as writers’ or artists’ federations and other social entities such as trade unions, women’s and youth organisations.

 

It should be emphasised, however, that the most important consideration regarding the selection of participants must be, first, their personal qualities, and second, that they represent all particular cultural tendencies of a civilisation—for example, China’s modernisers, Confucians and Taoists, or India’s modernisers, Brahmans and Jains, or the Muslim world’s modernisers, conservatives, reformers and fundamentalists.

 

The only hope of avoiding confrontation between civilisations in the twenty-first century is to initiate, as soon as possible, civilisational dialogues. Such encounters will determine not only peace in the world but also the destiny of our planet, because proliferating weapon technologies, ethnic feuds, nationalistic wars and intensifying environmental crisis pose threats that can be averted only by a common effort of all mankind.

Endnotes

1. See Benjamin Nelson, On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science, and Civilizations: Selected Writings, ed. T. E. Huff (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981).

 

2. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: SAGE Publications, 1992).

 

3. Ibid., p. 100 (italics in original).

 

4. Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity”, in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 27.

 

5. Theodore von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

 

6. Ian Hacking, “Styles of Scientific Reasoning”, in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 145–65.

 

7. Chad Hansen, “Language in the Heart–Mind”, in Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots, ed. Robert E. Allison (London: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 75‑124.