Those who, like me, are busy studying the European Union from a social perspective are always in search for a European culture and, at the same time, we try to map the different European cultures to identify common traits, common histories and common habits in Europe.
Certainly the most difficult step is defining “culture” and even more difficult is to delineate the boundary between culture and identity: two concepts certainly overlapping but too often confused.
Here I don’t want to waste space on that, each reader can read this article in light of his/her own understanding of the meaning of culture. Here instead, I want to question the concept of multiculturalism.
Umberto Eco, Italian (European) writer and semiologist, once stated that neither English nor French, even less Esperanto or Latin are truly European languages. The European language is… translation. The way in which we, European people, communicate is by translating speeches and documents, and by learning each other’s languages.
I borrow Eco’s statement and I declare: multiculturalism is the European culture. As we cannot look for one language for the entire Europe, in the same way we cannot look for a common culture; we can simply learn to “translate” our cultures: to communicate and understand each other. Is that true?
As mentioned above, multiculturalism is for me the possibility of exchanges and intercommunication between the different cultures that form our modern European societies. Multiculturalism is the way in which particularisms, subcultures, minorities present for a long time in society, old and new communities of migrants communicate with each other.
All over Europe such an idea of multiculturalism would not necessarily entail big problems, until one translates the abstract concept of multiculturalism into real practice., For the different social components, which have contributed to modify the original national culture, communication means essentially the right to be recognised as equal and the right to freely express their values. Endless debates on the Islamic veil, slaughtering practices, and many more, have opened up a Pandora Box in which the freedom of expression of cultural specificities and their compatibilities with the constitutional given of most democratic systems seem to clash, collide, crash in the most messy way, like in a storm where no end of skein can be identified.
The picture gets even more complex if one recognises that the emergence of different cultures within the national cultures has been accompanied by the emergence of equally important and undeniable nationalist, regional and federalist claims, which often have become subcultures themselves.
No European country has been exempted by these phenomena. Moreover as far as multiculturalism is based on the principle of coexistence of diverse cultures, it must not be understood as directly linked to immigration because “different cultures” does not simply mean “groups of different national, ethnical and religious origins”.
Within the current debate, I see different “positive” and “negative” approaches.
A first widespread idea claims the right to a “Multicultural citizenship”, in other words the right of an ethic-cultural minority to self-govern. This is notably the case of Catalonia in Spain, while in the recent Kosovo affair “multicultural citizenship” has been abandoned in favour of the century-old rule “one nation one state”.
Others support a “juridical citizenship”, consisting of the right to the free expression of the inalienable traditions of a cultural minority: a dressing-code for example, or the exercise of certain traditional arts.
A third position envisages the need to ensure an appropriate representation of all cultural components of a society within European institutions (especially Parliaments) through special quota systems.
These are three “positive” approaches because they accept multiculturalism and question themselves on the practical reforms needed to govern modern multicultural societies.
The most difficult debates between these three positions concern the practical solutions to the integration of those European minorities carrying with them strong and separate identities from their European origins. The risk to create “parallel societies” is approaching more and more. I already see it in Great Britain and in the Netherlands. Essential is to avoid that new-immigration countries (i.e. Spain and Italy) will fall into this same deadly trap.
The “negative approaches”, those who oppose the essence of multiculturalism, present different shadows of the same idea. Their supporters believe that any integration effort will result in the crystallisation of ethnical communities and in the loss of any sense of belonging and solidarity. They believe that we must insist upon the fundamental common values to avoid modern ghettos, potential sources of conflict.
Maybe they are not too wrong – if they would hold that the fundamental common values cannot be others than those constitutive of the pluralism and of the historical tolerance of the west: primacy of reason, individual rights, and secular democracy based on the separation of religion and politics.
It is never a waste of time to remember the historical tolerance of Europe. All efforts should tend to put in practice the values at the base of such tolerance and to stimulate the communication between cultures that I advocated for at the beginning. I am afraid that the current exchanges and communication between the different cultural elements that compose the European landscape does not entail cultural understanding. I doubt that we, Europeans, are yet able to understand each other, to comprehend and therefore appreciate each other’s cultural traits. But this is another story.
