From multicultural to intercultural society
Gelegenheid:Frans Timmermans sprak voorafgaand aan de Europese Raad in Brussel op een seminar in het Europees Parlement georganiseerd door de PES. Het seminar had als titel 'The Minority Agenda' en werd gehouden ter afsluiting van de activiteiten in het kader van het Europees Jaar voor de Interculturele Dialoog. Op het seminar spraken naast staatssecretaris Timmermans ook OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Knut Vollebaek en de wereldberoemde Hongaarse schrijver en oud-dissident György Konrád.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
I must start by making a very personal remark. I remember in 1984, when I was a student studying in France, there was a huge cultural Dutch-Hungarian manifestation in Budapest. I decided to go there in my very old car, driving from Nancy via Vienna to the Hungarian border where it took me hours to get across and the car was almost stripped. The books I had with me were looked at and were almost confiscated when they saw the name of the author on the books. Although the books were in Dutch, so they did not know exactly what the title was, the name of the author was György Konrád.
I took those books with me to Budapest and my Hungarian friends asked me "Could you please leave these books here?” I said "But you cannot read them.” They answered "that does not matter, but to have a book by György Konrád on our shelf is something that we value and it is our way of protesting against the prison we live in.” Therefore, this is a very emotional moment for me to be sitting here next to György Konrád. He is not only a wonderful writer whose books I have always loved to read; his humanity is something that plays a great part in my own beliefs. He has also made this incredible contribution to the healing of Europe.
My oldest son, born in 1989, does not know the iron curtain. He has never experienced what I have experienced. He was not trained like myself to be a soldier to fight against the Soviet Union, a concept he does not know. Last summer he went to Lake Balaton for holidays and never one moment thought about the fact that this was once the other Europe.
Mister Konrád, we have to thank people like you for that.
The first point I want to make is about this East-West idea of Europe. Vaclav Havel once said that the greatest achievement he would see in his lifetime was for East and West Europe to become geographical denotations again and no longer to carry the value that the West is being enlighted and democratic, while the East is backwards and despotic. I think we now see that this has been achieved. The East and West are increasingly becoming simple geographical denotations of the same continent and the same space called Europe.
At the same time, I must say that one of the problems we face today is that in Western Europe, the good side of the iron curtain, people thought that the end of the European divide would only affect the other side of Europe. That they would change and become like us and that we would stay exactly the same. One of the problems we face in Western Europe today is that societies transformed, also on our side, because of the healing of Europe. People never took this into account. For that reason, this transformation is seen as threatening because it is not something we had envisaged or had prepared our people for. So I think that the first notion we have to bring across to the population is that the healing of Europe affects the whole of Europe, not just the formerly occupied part.
My second remark is that, especially from a social democratic perspective, we need to face the fact that nowadays the assumption of progression is no longer dominant in the people we represent. It is the assumption of regression that is predominant in the people we represent. Just imagine what that means from a psychological point of view if your assumption since the Second World War has always been ‘whatever my troubles are today, in the future my children and grandchildren will be better off if we work hard enough’ and that assumption has changed into ‘we have it all today, but we are going to lose it all tomorrow. We need to share it with others and they are going to take it away from us, so the best thing I can do for myself is to protect what I have’.
This is one of the breeding grounds for conservatism, populism and nationalism on the Left. People have a lot to lose. It affects working class people more than others. In a globalized world, and certainly in an integrated Europe, the others can go elsewhere if things do not work out where they are. They can go elsewhere; physically, psychologically and also in terms of their jobs. But the people we represent have very often nowhere else to go to. If their factory decides to move to China, they are left without a job. They cannot pick up their stuff and go elsewhere. So globalization and even European integration is then perceived as a direct threat to their position. This is something we have not been clear enough about as a social democratic movement and it is affecting not just economic positions but also cultural positions and the relations between ethnic and other groups.
In this context, there is a new phenomenon that has created a lot of dynamics in European politics. That is the politics of fear. It is the best driving force in politics today in Europe. Fear wins elections. For that reason even some of our comrades use fear in their electoral campaigns as an instrument to convince voters. Of course the politics of fear are very dangerous. First of all, on the basis of fear you can never deliver. So fear breads disappointment. Secondly, on the basis of fear you create, rekindle Europe's old ghosts. We have always been a continent struggling to find hope and fighting against fear. This is three millennia of our history. Whenever we find fear, the object of our fear is always the other. That is a constant factor in 3000 years of European history. Already in classical Greece that was clearly the case and this has never ever changed. We as social democrats need to understand this and must fight against the politics of fear even if perhaps in the short run this will cost voters.
Then I come to the issue of relations between populations. In many western European countries, because of this predominant idea of the nation state, meaning one territory with one homogeneous population and sometimes some exotic others, there is a complete misunderstanding of integration. Even in the Dutch debate, you see confusion. Language is so important. People use the words integration and assimilation as if these words would mean exactly the same, whereas assimilation excludes integration. Assimilation breads controversy. We have again thousand years of European history to prove this point. But in the nation state which is seen as homogeneous, this is not a point often understood.
Because The Netherlands is now an immigration country we have found words to express the fact that we are a diverse society. These words are often euphemisms to say 'us' and 'the foreigners'. We call them in Dutch allochtoon, an incredibly crazy word taken from sociology which has now got the value of ‘the other'. We call people 'the other' who belong to the third generation immigrants in the Netherlands, simply because they have darker skin and their first name is Mohammed. This is the situation in many western European societies and it is something we need to look at more carefully. In our progression of thinking we then start calling them Moroccan-Dutch, Turkish-Dutch. We call them what the Americans would call hyphenated-Americans, hyphenated-Dutch. But the interesting concept, also culturally, ideologically and philosophically is to find a word for how to call the non-hyphen-Dutch, the non-hyphen-Germans or the non-hyphen-Austrians. Should we call them aboriginal-Dutch or Dutch-Dutch? This is something to put into the public debate. Because it would help us understand that you can be Dutch culturally, ethnically and Dutch as a nationality and share this nationality with other people who can also be proud of that nationality without having to have that same culture. And there is a lot of confusion in this concept.
I want to tell you something briefly which I experienced in Russia when I was working there in the early nineties. At one stage right after Russian ‘independence’ - the removal of one state-hood by some people who wanted to replace that statehood, which is then called the end of the Soviet Union - also parts of Russia were thinking of more independence. Tatarstan for instance. And I decided with a Volkskrant journalist, Hella Rottenberg, to travel to Tatarstan to talk to the leaders there and to listen to them about what they were thinking about their independence. And we took the night train from Moscow to Kazan, in the heart of winter, a beautiful experience, out of Tolstoy one would almost say, and of course on these trains you always got a dizjoernaja, a person responsible for your wagon and she would cook some tea on the stove smelling of coal, very romantic.
One would always talk to fellow passengers on that train. We got talking to people who were interested in why these two people from the West were travelling to Kazan. We were telling them why and then they asked both of us "Where are you from?" "We are from the Netherlands, we are Dutch." And then he stared at her and asked "what is your nationality?" I did not understand why he did not ask me. She replied routinely, because obviously she had been asked this dozen times before, "Well, in the Netherlands we don't make this distinction between citizenship and nationality. In our passport we just have Dutch and I know that in a Soviet passport you have citizenship Soviet Union, nationality Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Jew. We don't have that." "Ah", he said, and he was not happy because he didn't sniff out what he was trying to sniff out. So later when she went to the bathroom he asked me "Is she a lawyer?" This is a Russian euphemism for asking "Is she a Jew?"
This man was simply acting upon these reflexes. So although we don't make the distinction in the West between nationality and citizenship, but we should think about this hyphenated-society we have become, it would be wrong to go into that direction because then the hyphenated-society becomes also a reason to set people aside.
I believe that today the best contribution we can make to the future of European society is to develop the concept of the multicultural society into a concept of the intercultural society.