INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION: AN INTRODUCTION

European Ministers Responsible for Cultural Affairs;

Strasbourg, Council of Europe, 17-18 February 2003

By Johan Galtung, dr hc mult, Professor of Peace Studies

Director, TRANSCEND: A Peace and Development Network

Madam Deputy Secretary General, Excellencies, Ministers, Deputy

Ministers, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Permit me to start by congratulating the Council of Europe on

this important initiative, adding my thanks for having been invited

to produce some scattered guidelights in the largely unexplored

terrain the Ministers are now invited to enter.

You have among your papers the booklet Rethinking Conflict:

The Cultural Approach, the Council of Europe Cultural Policy and

Action Department invited me to write, so I will not repeat what is

written there, trusting your literacy level. But I would like to

focus on a couple of points that seem to me crucial.

Everything is a process, so is the important task ahead of

you. Maybe we can distinguish four stages or phases along that

complex road; others may have different maps.

Stage 1: INTOLERANCE. At the extreme end is the holocaust of

many, including the shoa. But intolerance has other articulations.

One of them is the nation-state. The One-nation state. Of the

about 200 states in the world only 20 have practically speaking

only one nation. And even so immigrants are coming in at even high

speeds.

Of the remaining, say 180, 179 are asymmetric, dominated by

one dominant nation. The others used to be called "minorities"

even when, in fact, they were majoritarian, reflecting power rather

than arithmetics. Their choice was between integration into

dominant culture, shedding the traces of the past, or

marginalization, sometimes as exotica. Or worse. Much worse. The

exception is Switzerland: the only country with symmetry.

Stage 2: TOLERANCE. No doubt better than intolerance. But

there is something that leaves bad taste, something like "I am so

great (and merit some applause) that I tolerate that you exist".

Within this package human rights find a place, and that is good.

But asymmetry remains. The not dominant are supposed to acquire

the culture of the dominant; the dominant are permitted to remain

ignorant even of their close neighbors. As a matter of fact, even

in Switzerland, positively singled out above, the two religious and

the four linguistic cultures are not that knowledgeable of each

other. There is a sense of distance. There is a lack of

curiosity. But here is also a sense of safety lacking in Stage 1.

Stage 3: RESPECT AND DIALOGUE. Now we are moving forward.

Instead of the "You are different from me, you are dangerous" of

stage 1, and the "You are different from me, that is your problem,

live and let live", there is "You are different from me, how

fascinating! Let us sit down and talk it over, for instance, how do

you look at ---?" The Other exists in his/her own right as a part

of the wonderful richness of the human culture, the most celebrated

diversity. Each time a language, still worse a whole culture with

its idioms and myths and habits, dies, we all die, a little. In

this stage we see Other as a source of own enrichment, and vice

versa. Dialogue means asking questions, the opposite of the debate

so filled with exclamation signs.

Stage 4: MUTUAL LEARNING. At this stage something new

happens: Other is not only explored; we take him/her on, as a part

of Self. Her language becomes also ours, his cooking becomes also

ours. We not only know his/her history, we feel the trauma, the

glories, the suffering, the hopes. We live Other, Other lives in

us. Above all the relation is symmetric.

Look for a minute at Western colonialism. We assume that they

all talk our languages; we talk none of theirs, only some

specialists, among their exotica. What we got from Other was gold

and spices, some plants and animals. And many, many slaves.

Today we still take it for granted that they, also in their

new roles as immigrants = cheap labor know our idioms, linguistic,

religious, the myths about history and future, and we none of

theirs. We teach them "1789" and rightly assume that if this is a

meaningless figure that person will have difficulties understanding

not only France, but the West in general. But we take it for

granted that we can talk about Iraq, and endlessly so, being

totally ignorant of the meaning of 1258. Think it through. If

nothing comes to your mind silence may be a good guide till you

have not only checked but absorbed. Arab school children know

this, just as they know exactly what Osama bin Laden meant when in

his first discourse after September 11 2001 he talked about

humiliation and "more than 80 years". Sykes/Picot. Balfour.

Liberation from the tolerant Ottoman Empire to be included in

highly intolerant Western empires. There is something about

splints and beams in the Bible. And there is Luke 19:27.

And that brings us to fundamentalism. This very month both

Osama bin Laden (or a committee with that name; the West loses time

asking who rather than what and why) in a statement aired by Al

Jazeera, and George W Bush in a statement to the National

Convention of Religious Broadcasters, made their religious

credentials very clear, as clear as their sense of being chosen by

the Almighty and well equipped to draw the line between Good and

Evil. They were in no doubt that the war to be fought was in line

with their faiths. In short, the DMA syndrome in my booklet,

Dualism, Manicheism, Armageddon were all there. Interchangeable.

In short, there is a culture of fundamentalism, privileged by

the Almighty to justify the criminal violence of 9/11 2001, and

also of October 7. To rephrase Marx, "Moderates all over the

world, unite! you have only your terrorists to lose". But have

dialogue with both those without and those with the backing of a

state or two. Let me only add how fundamentalist many marxists

were: workers were chosen by History, capitalists were headed for

extinction, violent Revolution inevitable. DMA.

There is also a male and a female culture. The female culture

is characterized above all by sensitivity to human suffering; the

male culture by concern with abstract principles. The former draws

on compassion to justify action, the latter on deduction. And if

they are Kantians they add "universability" as a criterion. But

cultures do differ. There is much wisdom in George Bernhard Shaw's

dictum, "Do not do to others what you want them to do to you. Their

tastes may be different". How do we know? By asking them.

The Draft Declaration in front of us is a major step from

stage 2 to stage 3, celebrating diversity, like ecologists do.

Needless to say, these stages are intertwining, mixed, sliding. But

the next stage 4 is beckoning at a distance: the symbiosis. As a

metaphor: take the wonderful diversity of world cuisines. The

French and Chinese masters are not alone in this world. We are

more than tolerant, we celebrate this diversity. But we do not

mix. I look forward to the day when dishes are mixed in the same

meal like I can mix languages in the same sentence. And I have

seen processes: I have seen the British become more intercultural

at the dining table than at the negotiation table. I have even seen

the primitivism of Norwegian "cooking", better described as

boiling, immensely enriched. Ladies and gentlemen: that alone

gives us hope for the world!