Governance Series
Governance is the process of effective coordination whereby an organization or a system guides itself when resources, power, and information are widely distributed. Studying governance means probing the pattern of rights and obligations that underpins organizations and social systems; understanding how they coordinate their parallel activities and maintain their coherence; exploring the sources of dysfunction; and suggesting ways to redesign organizations whose governance is in need of repair.
The Series welcomes a range of contributions from conceptual and theoretical reflections, ethnographic and case studies, and proceedings of conferences and symposia, to works of a very practical nature that deal with problems or issues on the governance front. The Series publishes works both in French and in English.
The Governance Series is part of the publications division of the Centre on Governance and of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. This volume is the 17th volume published within this Series. The Centre on Governance and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs also publish a quarterly electronic journal www.optimumonline.ca
Editorial Committee
Caroline Andrew
Linda Cardinal
Monica Gattinger
Luc Juillet
Daniel Lane
Gilles Paquet (Director)
The published titles in the Series are listed at the end of this book.
Deep Cultural Diversity
University of Ottawa Press 2008
All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Paquet, Gilles, 1936
Deep cultural diversity : a governance challenge / Gilles Paquet.
(Governance series, ISSN 1487-3052)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7766-0673-6
1. MulticulturalismCanada. I. Title. II. Series: Governance series (Ottawa, Ont.)
FC105.M8P28 2008 305.800971 C2008-901559-2
Published by the University of Ottawa Press, 2008
542 King Edward Avenue
Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5
www.uopress.uottawa.ca
The University of Ottawa Press acknowledges with gratitude the support extended to its publishing list by Heritage Canada through its Book Publishing Industry Development Program, by the Canada Council for the Arts, by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through its Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and by the University of Ottawa.
DEEP CULTURAL DIVERSITY:
A GOVERNANCE CHALLENGE
GILLES PAQUET
Foreword
the Other is a mirror into which you peer, or in which you are observed, a mirror that unmasks and denudes, which we would prefer to avoidRyszard Kapuscinski
Deep cultural diversity is not a new phenomenon. From time immemorial significantly different groups have been forced to face one another, and to decide how they would handle their conflicts and differences. In prehistoric times, archaeologists tell us, small family-tribes numbering thirty to fifty suddenly came across other family-tribes rather different from them in looks, traits, and mores. This encounter with the Other was an important event. They had three choices: they could choose war, apartheid (building a wall around themselves) or dialogue (Kapuscinski 2005).
Chance meetings were at first the way in which deep diversity was revealed. In Canada, for instance, the discovery of the country by Europeans in the fifteenth century led to populations with deeply different cultures, Europeans and First Nations, being confronted with each other. Governing such relationships posed daunting challenges.
The matter was most often resolved in a rather simple and brutal way: the discoverers simply decided that the populations they had discovered were not of their own species. They were declared to be of an other sort, not quite human, savages, animals of some sort, and brutal terms of engagement were simply imposed on them. Since the Others were not like Us they could be dealt with as if they were of another, non-human species, like animals.
For quite some time this has been a standard strategy for governing the interaction of deeply diverse groups. Aboriginals, heretics, blacks, Jews, and others have been so categorized through the ages. This allowed the governance of deep cultural diversity to be resolved by a primitive governing principle: the partitioning of the world into two species, human and other. In this scheme the humans are narrowly defined as members of certain select cultures, while the others are assigned to the category of chattels, along with the rest of the living world, on the assumption that they are meant to be used instrumentally by humans. This particular form of governance of diversity has proved extremely destructive, yet it has continued to re-emerge as a canonical pattern into very recent times, as with blacks in some parts of the United States, the Jews throughout Nazi-controlled Europe or infidels in Afghanistan under the Taliban (Gray 2002).
However, over the past fifty years, as transportation costs have plummeted, migrations across national borders have generated an increase in deep cultural diversity in a large number of countries. Coping with diversity has meant that different societies have had to develop philosophies of cultural encounters, idiosyncratic ways to deal with the Other. This has given rise to a large number of experiments, inquiries, and studies, but to even more mythologies. Some have been satisfied to observe the new phenomenon, but most have constructed narratives in support of the desirability or otherwise of deep cultural diversity, based much more on ideology than on facts. This has led to a whole range of points of view, institutions to support them, and discourses to justify them. While the range of possibilities in defining such philosophies has been quite wide, there has been considerable polarization at the two ends of the spectrum: cultural diversity as a goal to be pursued, and cultural diversity as a plague to be avoided.
The Introduction provides some basic scaffolding for the taxonomy of approaches developed to deal with this challenge. It also underlines the important way in which the human rights ideology and its formal legalistic thrust have thrown a wrench into the world of intercultural relations, and significantly distorted their evolution. Then, using the example of Canada to illustrate the complexity of the underpinnings of such approaches, it reveals the full extent to which the Canadian way is built on many unverifiable assumptions and resounding proclamations. With the passage of time these have constructed a sort of unchallengeable canon defended by phalanxes of interested parties and academic groups that have displayed much ingenuity in mounting a protective belt for this particular politically correct and progressive diversity-enhancing strategy called multiculturalism. Finally, some reference is made to the precautionary principle having to be invoked in the event that it is discovered that particular approaches elected by specific countries appear to generate perplexing results and undesirable, unintended consequences. This is not the reaction in good currency in most countries.
