Listening. inclusiveness. tolerance. reciprocity - Perspective - Dialogue among Civilizations

UN Chronicle, June-August, 2001 by Kaveh L. Afrasiabi

As the philosopher Wittgenstein presciently reminded us in Tractatus, the ways in which we look at the world to alter the world. The United Nations 2001 theme of "Dialogue among Civilizations" is a lofty initiative that has already moved into the global mainstream thought as a viable alternative to the siren voices of "coming clash of civilizations", according to whom the whole edifice of belief in dialogue, e.g. between West and East, rests on the edge of abyss.

A cursory tour d'horizon of "Dialogue among Civilizations" depicts, first and foremost, a trope for cross-cultural reconciliation promoting particular values-the discovery of shared beliefs and concerns, regulation of disputes through communication, and the pursuit of normative consensus on global civility, such as with respect to minority rights. It invokes a new imaginary of world community, one that is inclusive rather than exclusive, which celebrates diversity instead of succumbing to the forces of global barbarism, above all, racism and ethnic cleansing. Thus, it spurs the imagination of the earth's inhabitants toward cross-cultural learning, providing them with a perceptual predis-position to perceive harmony and cordial relations among nations and ethnic groups, following the premise that through dialogue we can cultivate deeper and more direct experience of cultural traditions other than our own.

This is indeed a conditio sine qua non for a global "ethics of care for the other", spearheaded by towering thinkers from Tagore to Buber to Schweitzer, to mention a few salient ones. "Dialogue among Civilizations" follows the UN Charter's mandate "to develop friendly relations among nations" and is in tune with the UN leadership's recent efforts to turn the United Nations system into a more proactive "epistemic community" sui generis, enabling it to map out creative adjustments to a rapidly changing and increasingly complex international milieu. Thus, to properly gauge the significance and (potential) implications of the UN theme, we must take into consideration the Organization's evolving standards, casting a wider net of its identity than ever before.

While the United Nations was incepted as an intergovernmental global forum operating within the paradigm of "nation-state sovereignty", this never precluded it from simultaneously couching itself in a larger, albeit more latent, frame of reference, namely, the United Nations as the site in potentia for world governance and "sovereignty of humankind". Recently, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has drawn attention to the fact that "state sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined by the forces of globalization and international cooperation".

According to Mr. Annan, this has implicated the United Nations with a basic shift in the core institutional framework within which it 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."

Consequently, a new UN cartography has been brewing or packed up with the help of intervening notions, such as supranationality, global civil society, global citizens, global compact and global public sphere, denoting a semantic and cognitive overhaul aimed at re-representing the United Nations as the site par excellence for a cosmopolitan identity, i.e. a UN cosmopolis, shouldering a primary responsibility for the creation of what has been aptly described as "values for the global neighbourhood".

By all indications, this is a nascent "work-in-progress", resolved to delineate as much as possible the fundamental contours of a new UN identitarian narrative, fashioning a homology between local and global identities and simultaneously redrawing the boundaries of the imagined global community, following a rhetoric of (UN-focused) affiliation and loyalty that transgresses sub-global identities by the creation of a semiotic imbrication between world citizens and world community. In this narrative, the United Nations emerges as a space for (cultural) meaning production intimately linked to the idea of "global civilization"; the latter, in turn, has generated subtle allusions to a "UN civilization", to echo Giandomenico Picco, the Secretary-General's Personal Representative on "Dialogue among Civilizations", aspiring to collect the world's civilizations under one umbrella as part of its own incandescent "civilizing mission" on behalf of its constituency--"We, the peoples".

The trick, however, is how to click on the customers to become more globally civil-minded, their consciousness grafted onto the UN norms of alterity and supranational identity, without turning into cultural nationalists or, for the lack of better words, civilizational patriots.

In some ways, the UN "diplomatic forum" is ill-suited for a genuine civilizational dialogue because it compels the participants to adopt strategic positions corresponding to the interests of their nation-states, compared with, say, free-floating dialogue of artists and intellectuals. The key to such a successful dialogue is not a restatement of similarities and differences. It is changing the global climate to encourage listening, inclusiveness, tolerance and reciprocity as applicable standards in what Levi-Strauss once described as "the rainbow of human cultures". Rather than feigning the dialogue-enhancing role and importance of the Organization, UN planners must concentrate on delineating the substantive meaning(s) of "dialogue among civilizations" and set an example of where such a dialogue may be operationalized and, indeed, make a tangible difference.