The United Nations and the Idea of Dialogue among Civilisations

Kaveh L. Afrasiabi is scholar-in-residence at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Since its inception, the United Nations has been the embodiment of a global culture of peace. The United Nations is vested with primary responsibility for international peace and security, and is the sole instrument of collective security among the world’s nations. Despite a mixed record in peace maintenance, the United Nations remains central to the peaceful development of the international community, besides its role in a vast range of other concerns—development, refugees, human rights, health, the environment, and so forth.

 

In the contemporary debate on the United Nations, the world body is often faulted for being a reactive and divided institution, overloaded with responsibility, under-loaded with power and resources and in dire need of institutional self-reform. Such criticisms are compounded by various interpretations that reduce the United Nations to a political landscape for hegemonic power-plays. A case in point is Samuel Huntington’s narrative on the “clash of civilisations”, a blunt portrayal of global hierarchies ostensibly ordered by Western civilisation’s unprecedented concentration of wealth and power. Huntington’s narrative feeds the conclusion that the United Nations and its underlying idea of a “world community” are but a smokescreen lending “global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western powers”.¹

 

Huntington’s theory is reductive on two grounds. First, it overlooks the fact that the United Nations is a contested terrain wherein the countervailing power of so-called developing nations has succeeded to some extent in influencing the behaviour and policy preferences of the world body; and, second, that the United Nations and other similar transnational institutions such as the World Trade Organisation provide important reconciliative forums for strategic, diplomatic and economic dialogue and argumentation among nations.

 

Equally absent in Huntington’s narrative is any discussion of how the complex interdependence of nations, as well as the consensus-generating co-ordinating mechanism of the United Nations and its culture of peace, can act as qualitative brakes on the omnibus of clashing civilisations.² But perhaps a more fundamental defect of Huntington’s narrative is its inability to articulate a notion of the United Nations’ autonomy of influence and, relatedly, to decipher its importance as an “epistemic community”³ sui generis which enables the United Nations to chart its own mental map for creative adjustments to a rapidly changing, and paradoxical, international milieu. One such paradox pertains to the so-called informatic revolution and its concomitant “glocalisation”. It has been pointed out that “neologisms like ‘glocalization’ describe the information process by which the world appears to be simultaneously linking up and breaking apart”.⁴

A New UN Identity

Within the United Nations’ own (post–Cold War) administration of knowledge, the multiple dimensions of the UN system are explicitly predicated on the assumptions of nation-states. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the United Nations is the potential site of larger frames of reference such as the “sovereignty of humankind” and “world governance”. Indeed, both in scholarly works and recent initiatives from within the UN hierarchy, the net of the United Nations’ identity has been cast wider than before, principally as part of a complex web of relations at transnational and global levels affected by, among other things, the “NGO-isation” process—the growth of links between the United Nations and non-governmental organisations. Thus, taking cognisance of the United Nations’ evolution increasingly means viewing its identity via prisms other than traditional state-focused multilateralism. It means seeing the United Nations as the site par excellence for a cosmopolitan identity and politico-diplomatic globalisation, shouldering a primary responsibility for the creation of what has been described as “values for the global neighborhood”.⁵

 

The current UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, has taken a leading role in recent attempts at reconfiguring the United Nations’ identity. According to Annan, “State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined by the forces of globalization and international cooperation.” Calling for humane globalisation, Annan has drawn attention to a basic shift in the core institutional framework within which the United Nation operates:

 

Here, however, is the crux of our problem today: while the post-war multilateral system made it possible for the new globalization to emerge and flourish, globalization, in turn, has progressively rendered its design antiquated. Simply put, our post-war institutions were built for an international world, but we now live in a global world.⁶

 

Accordingly, a new UN imaginary has been created with the help of intervening notions such as “supranationality”, “humanitarian intervention”, “global civil society”, “global citizens”, “global compact” and “international public sphere”, denoting an ongoing process of conceptual and semantic self-overhaul at the United Nations. Turning the United Nations into a space for cultural production, the aim here is to create a new narrative of identity that fashions a homology between local and global identities and thus regulates the boundaries of the imagined global community following a rhetoric of affiliation and loyalty that has a transgressive character, transgressing local identities by the creation of a semiotic imbrication between world citizens and world community.

 

The key to this discursive work-in-progress is to delineate a satisfactory sense of “UN-ness” that can be simultaneously both complementary and transgressive of the United Nations’ traditional promulgation of “nation-ness”. This in turn requires a new concept of cultural identity, since culture has almost always become “allied with a nation or a state, providing the sole criterion for delineating civilization from what is barbaric”.⁷ Instead, what has entered the common parlance of UN discourse is the idea of global civilisation, expressing the aspiration to gather the world’s civilisations under one umbrella. Almost inevitably, this has raised the issue of whether or not it is possible to speak about a new cartography: a UN-focused civilisation. This is an intriguing question meriting attention in the scholarly works on (post)modernity, which hitherto have tended either to ignore or underestimate the United Nations’ contribution to the process of identity-formation, namely, a UN-induced “cosmopolis”. The latter reflects a new goal for the United Nations on behalf of its constituency, “we, the peoples”, that goal being to fashion for the United Nations a positive identity as part and parcel of its own “civilising mission”. Interestingly, such questions have emerged precisely at a time when the United Nations has formally committed itself to celebrating the world’s civilisations (in plural) by designating the year 2001 as the year of “dialogue among civilisations”.

Mapping Uncharted Territory

The idea of “dialogue among civilisations” is fully in tune with the United Nations’ raison d’etre, articulated in Article 1 of the UN Charter, to “develop friendly relations among nations” and to “achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion”. Dialogue among civilisations potentially serves UN global confidence-building measures and UN attempts to bolster international co-operation in tackling problems of socio-political intolerance—vividly manifested in recent horrific episodes of ethnic cleansing in Africa and central Europe. At a minimum, the UN-led dialogue among civilisations fosters the spirit of civil-mindedness based on an ethics of care for the other. It promotes the celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity and provides a constructive parameter for a new mode of socialisation on a planetary scale. In the words of Kofi Annan,

 

As I see it, this conversation must enable people of different faiths and cultures to appreciate both what makes them different and what they have in common. I hope it will help people all over the world understand that, even while cherishing our diversity, we need certain shared values if we are to work together for our common good—perhaps even our survival—as a species.⁸

 

Given such lofty expectations, in what is otherwise a routinely benign UN exercise of earmarking each year for a noble purpose, the challenge is to work out universally applicable standards of cross-cultural interaction in what Levi-Strauss once described as “the rainbow of human cultures”. While inflated assumptions abound concerning the dialogue among civilisations—for example, that it is an alternative “paradigm” in international relations—the fact is that its historical and theoretical profile is less than clear. The dialogue among civilisations is not a paradigm in the (Thomas) Kuhnian meaning of a conceptual resource applied to make sense of the world. It is at best a problematisation in the Foucauldian sense that serves (a) to debunk the clash of civilisations counter-theory, and (b) to create concepts that are pivotal for the maintenance of a just and peaceful world order. The mere reference to dialogue among civilisations implies a measure of communicativeness and mutual respect, and bears with it a deliberative, democratic and non-violent sociability. Its linkage to the United Nations, on the other hand, has elevated the discourse, privileging it over competing (e.g., regime-centred) discourses.

 

It is noteworthy that this idea and its clash of civilisations antithesis share the notion of tension or conflict between and among the world’s civilisations, the difference being the former’s emphasis on dialogue and reconciliation as opposed to the latter’s misgiving that increased dialogue and exposure only serve to heighten awareness of differences and clashing interests.⁹ Not only does the idea of dialogue among civilisations bear a strong family resemblance to its polar opposite, it also remains a long way from being a fully fledged perspective or paradigm. Proponents of civilisational dialogue often give the mistaken impression that it is at a level of theoretical elaboration equal or comparable to that of the clash of civilisations theory. Rather than feigning the importance of dialogue among civilisations, proponents of the idea should work on delineating its substantive meaning(s) and set an example of where such a dialogue may operate and, furthermore, make a tangible difference. The key to civilisational dialogue is not a restatement of similarities and differences. It is changing the global climate to encourage listening, inclusiveness, tolerance and reciprocity.

A Source of Hope

The term “civilisation” does not have a fixed, easily delineated meaning or provenance, thus making it difficult, if not impossible, for the United Nations or any of its affiliated organisations even to identify the number and types of the world’s civilisations. In the words of Giandomenico Picco, the UN envoy for the year of dialogue among civilisations, “if we identify eight or ten civilisations, tomorrow someone in the General Assembly will cry out that we omitted their civilization.”¹⁰ The idea of dialogue among civilisations is in and of itself vague and indeterminate. Once subjected to a systematic and methodological critique, it resembles less a well-rounded theory than a particular “speech act”, or declaratory agenda, emerging as a counter-move to the Huntingtonian discourse of fear and fashioning an optimistic discourse on perennial issues that have arisen in the contemporary context of human society, e.g., cultural globalisation.

 

Ironically, civilisational dialogue owes its viability—as a strictly “UN idea”—to its linguistic abstractness. It is basically a metaphor by which large groups can know in broad terms what is expected of them in the international arena, namely, rule-based behaviour and respect for multiculturalism. Thus, it spurs the imagination of global citizens towards cross-cultural learning, predisposing them to perceive harmony and cordial relations among nations and ethnic groups. The premise is that through dialogue we will cultivate deeper and more direct experience of cultural traditions other than our own, a belief which becomes a sine qua non for moral agency in intercultural discourse.

 

But if intolerance is to be reduced and the tide of ethnic violence stemmed, there must be a commitment by governments to make the elimination of intolerance a priority. Such a commitment is reflected in the November 1998 UN General Assembly resolution endorsing Iran’s proposal regarding the dialogue among civilisations. This resolution specifically emphasised “the importance of tolerance in international relations and the significant role of dialogue as a means to reach understanding, remove threats to peace and strengthen interaction and exchange among civilizations”.

 

Hence, the idea of civilisational dialogue, irrespective of its conceptual shortcomings, has a directive, uplifting and critical significance for a world beset by the forces of global barbarism such as racism and ethnic intolerance. It is above all an idealisation, foreshadowing a universal moral community and intended to make vivid to us the ideal of communication or what it means to assume the dialogical standpoint in the international arena. As such, dialogue among civilisations may be interpreted as “utopian realism”, i.e., as a certain reaction to theoretical distortions of hope handicapping what Rabindranath Tagore described as the “creative unity” of the human species. Arguably, a key advantage of dialogue among civilisations is that it allows a timely recovery of planetary hope, a sort of UN soteriology of hope that has brought a spirit of reconciliation to the United Nations, the spirit not to allow any one preconception of what is right or possible to dominate others, but rather to mediate among divergent views by seeking the integration of values.

 

Simultaneously, however, in some ways the United Nations is an inappropriate forum for civilisational dialogue because it compels the participants to adopt strategic positions corresponding to the interests of their nation-states. The widespread talk of “common heritage” and “dialogue” (e.g., North–South dialogue) often degenerates into acrimony at the world body. The United Nations is, after all, primarily, though not exclusively, the domain of political elites—leaders, government representatives, career professionals and the like. There is much evidence that even when the United Nations seeks to emphasise common ground, as at the 2000 Millennium Summit, the net result is often a “strategic dialogue” in which the United Nations is used as a forum to air grievances. Thus, the Millennium Summit was utilised by numerous African and Third World leaders to raise their key issues of development, trade access, debt relief, the role of multinationals, poverty, wealth and the digital divide. One leader, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, stated that “the poor of the world stand at the gates of the comfortable mansions and palaces occupied by each and every king and queen, president and prime minister privileged to attend this unique meeting”.¹¹

Cultural Self-Criticism

One consequence of the dialogue among civilisations is that it makes the politics of cultures explicit, running the risk of a tournament of values among self-styled civilisational “patriots”. Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that patriotism exhibits “a particular action-generating regard for particular persons, institutions or groups, a regard founded upon a particular historical relationship or association between the person exhibiting the regard and the relevant person, institution or group”.¹² Such patriots, therefore, will pay only lip service to “the otherness of the other” and to acknowledging the dark sides of their own respective cultures, such as those pertaining to gender and minorities.

 

It may be too much to expect a Third World already weary of Western “cultural infiltration” and “marginalising globalisation” to embrace a critical UN dialogue on its cultural vices, e.g., female genital mutilation in Africa, child labour in China, women’s subordination in the Islamic legal system(s), mistreatment of millions of “untouchables” in India, etc. The likelihood that civilisational dialogue at the United Nations can do justice to the much-needed dialogue on the perverse side of contemporary civilisations is practically nil, not least because of the UN Charter’s “domestic jurisdiction” clause which shields local cultures from effective UN scrutiny of their biases and failings. Moreover, even participants willing to listen to what others say often filter out arguments that conflict with their basic values or ideological orientations. Consequently, the purview of the UN initiative will be restricted, and is unlikely to transgress the time-honoured borders respected at the United Nations.

 

At the intellectual level, of course, illusory solidarities should not be allowed to conceal unsavoury practices. Rather, in accordance with the ideals of “deliberative democracy”, the UN-sponsored civilisational dialogue should openly and reflectively discuss a wide range of socio-cultural issues. While respectful of different views, it should also seek general principles that can be used to critique archaic or repressive cultural attitudes and practices. In this scenario, the participants enter into dialogue with an open mind, cognisant of the possibility that after rational discourse and argumentation they may need to rethink some of their values, beliefs and behaviour. Yet, such rethinking is more likely to occur in artistic or intellectual dialogues than within the diplomatic forum of the United Nations, shaped by the vested interests of states. Hence, the much-anticipated dialogue among civilisations is likely to be more important for the mood it has set in motion—for an anticipatory illumination of global cultural co-existence, interfaith dialogue, and so forth—than for anything else.

 

At present, a minimum consensus on the priorities of a genuine civilisational dialogue is noticeably lacking. Dialogue requires some initial common ground if the exchange is to be fruitful. At the very least, for instance, it requires agreement on civility, tolerance and the renouncing of violence in intercultural relations. Yet, the difficulty of a “dialogical” rather than “monological” dialogue on, say, the digital and/or wealth divide between the world’s haves and have-nots is all too clear, notwithstanding the growing divergence rather than convergence of North and South.

North–South Dialogue

Indeed, dialogue among civilisations may heighten the North–South clash by exposing inequities and engendering a rhetoric of discord and alienation. This points to what, in Habermasian jargon, is referred to as “distorted communication”. The subordinated, marginalised groups cannot rely on dialogue to secure equality and build community with the dominant groups intent on safeguarding their power and privileges. Yet, for civilisational dialogue to have an impact, its terrain must extend to political economy, taking into consideration the lessons of North–South dialogue. One lesson is that the lines of demarcation between the hemispheres have become less salient as a result of globalisation. Another is that the wealth divide is the most serious in the world today, infecting the climate of dialogue. The fact remains that in the post–Cold War new world order, only one type of conflict, the East–West rivalry, has been resolved. We are still grappling with the North–South division.

 

That division is clearly revealed in recent reports by the various UN development agencies, which indicate that the wealth of the world’s 225 richest people equals that of the poorest 47 per cent of the world’s population, that 250 million children are deprived of schooling, that one billion people lack access to safe water, and that 2.4 billion do not have adequate sanitation. This division is also empirically verified by other studies, such as the World Economic Outlook and the World Competitiveness Report, which suggest that there are ample grounds for sustaining North–South dialogue on issues of foreign aid, just trade, reform of the international financial infrastructure, Aids, etc. An economically neutral interpretation of dialogue among civilisations not only reifies the meaning of civilisations into their cultural ramparts, but, worse, it also reduces this dialogue to one of “stabilisation”. In Foucauldian terminology, dialogue becomes a “normalising discourse” aimed at generating what Inis Claude has referred to as “collective legitimisation”.¹³ Seen in this light, civilisational dialogue itself becomes a candidate for Derrida-style deconstruction, in that “since conventions, institutions and consensus are stabilizations … they are stabilizations of something essentially unstable and chaotic”.¹⁴

 

Yet, dialogue among civilisations can be properly spearheaded as a recuperative initiative, recuperating the North–South dialogue, by not only adding a new discursive dimension but also a substantially more refined notion of how to deepen this dialogue. As such, the importance of civilisational dialogue lies in its calibrated potency to enhance the South’s capacity for leverage at the United Nations and, simultaneously, to convey the message that the North–South transaction is not necessarily a zero-sum game but can be an all-win situation. Through dialogue among civilisations, the presently dormant North–South dialogue can attain a new level of seriousness and profundity that warrants engagement in it, however much it may be trivialised, particularly in the West, as “esoteric” or “merely cultural”.¹⁵

 

Unsurprisingly, much like other UN initiatives, particularly at the General Assembly, the proposal regarding dialogue among civilisations has been subjected to the usual contesting interpretations reflecting the divergent constellation of interests. This is in line with the insight provided by many contemporary scholars that public discourse is driven as much by principles of “communicative rationality” as by the material forces of economic and political power. For the Third World as a whole, the civilisational dialogue initiative, introduced by President Khatami of Iran in 1998, is important because it counters a popular fallacy, as propounded by Huntington and others, namely, that the United Nations is a mere pawn of the West where the rest of the world has little or no meaningful input. Historically, this initiative and the global attention it has generated reflect an important truth about the United Nations—that it is a site of contention and coalition-building by the countries of the South in their ongoing, critical dialogue with the West.

A Long-Term Initiative

Making civilisational dialogue operational implies a collective willingness by the world’s discrete “cultural forces” to promote dialogue as a common problem-solving approach to the global sources of war and conflict. Undoubtedly, this encompasses the current ongoing dialogue on the United Nations itself and its role as a cultural liaison among the world’s civilisations. Clearly, the architects of global dialogue need to give serious attention to the role of the United Nations as a vital linchpin of human progress in the new millennium.

 

It is too early, at the time of writing, to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of the UN initiative on civilisational dialogue. It remains to be seen whether the United Nations can fulfil the deluge of expectations that this initiative has generated worldwide. Will there be a huge gap between those expectations and the actual programmes and activities established by the United Nations? For the moment, this much is clear: the relative success of the initiative hinges in no small measure on the United Nations’ ability to extend it from (conference-based) “top-down” dialogue to the grassroots level by initiating an appropriate set of events and activities with mass and youth appeal. A separate criterion of success is whether the United Nations can promote its nascent “civilisational discourse” through the conduit of dialogue among civilisations. This agenda would mark a step forward from the focus on nation-states and their narcissism of parochial differences.

 

Dialogue among civilisations cannot be confined to the year 2001. The initiative requires a sustained effort on various levels—as “cultural dialogue”, “diplomatic dialogue”, “religious dialogue”, “intellectual and philosophical dialogue”, and so forth. With luck, these dialogues will reinforce each other by the sheer weight, enthusiasm and breakthroughs in each sphere. What is at stake regarding civilisational dialogue is not so much a chimerical final reconciliation, but the cultural and political ability to deal with a world full of tensions and interactions. By promoting debate and discussion on important social, cultural, political and economic issues, the UN initiative on dialogue among civilisations belongs to, and deepens, the new, forward-looking impetus of the world body, not simply as a “traffic-controller” of global diplomacy, but also as a norm-setting forum for the world’s mosaic of cultures, a forum which simultaneously undergirds an emerging global culture.

Endnotes

1. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs (summer 1993), pp. 23–4. See also Phyllis Bennis, Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1995).

 

2. See Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, “The Contestation of Civilizations and Interreligious Dialogue”, Iranian Journal of International Relations 11, no. 3 (fall 1999), pp. 338–62. See also Afrasiabi, “From ‘Clash of Civilizations’ to Civilizational Parallelism”, Telos, no. 15 (spring 1999), pp. 109–16.

 

3. On the concept of an “epistemic community”, see Peter M. Haas, “Epistemic Communities and the Dynamics of Internal Policy Co-ordination”, in Regime Theory and International Relations, ed. Volker Rittberger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

 

4. Ryan Henry and C. Edward Peartree, eds., The Information Revolution and International Security (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1998), p. xi.

 

5. See Keith Krause and W. Andy Knight, State, Society, and the UN System: Changing Perspectives on Multilateralism (New York: United Nations University Press, 1995).

 

6. Millennium Report of the Secretary-General: “We, the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century”, 27 March 2024 [www.un.org/millennium/sg/report/].

 

7. Vasiliki Limberis, “Religion as the Cipher for Identity”, Harvard Theological Review 93, no. 3 (October 2000), p. 376.

 

8. Kofi Annan, “Common Values for a Common Era: Hopes and Warnings for the Millennium”, Civilization (June/July 1999), p. 75.

 

9. Huntington has somewhat reversed himself by acknowledging the utility of dialogue to stem the tide of a “coming clash of civilizations”. See Samuel P. Huntington, “A Call for Dialogue: We Can Fight—or We Can Talk”, Civilization (June/July 1999), p. 76.

 

10. Giandomenico Picco, interview by author, New York, 4 September 2000.

 

11. Quoted in Peter Singer, “How Are Your Morals?”, in The World in 2001, ed. Dudley Fishburn (London: Economist Newspaper Ltd., 2000), p. 50.

 

12. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”, in A New Public Ethics, ed. Mary Daly (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1994), p. 308. In Emile, book I, Rousseau argues that patriotism is detached from a universal love of mankind.

 

13. Claude says collective legitimisation “depends ultimately on whether the UN member governments form opinions on a public issue that add up to something near unanimity”. Quoted in Peter R. Baehr and Leon Gordenker, The United Nations at the End of the 1990s (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 89.

 

14. Jacques Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism”, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 83–4.

 

15. This view was relayed to the author in May 2000 by a senior adviser to the US envoy to the United Nations.