No danger in cultural difference
Gelegenheid:Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been hired to provide some entertainment between two courses of the candlelit dinner, so I'll try and be entertaining. Since I can't sing, you know, I'll have to talk and provide some entertainment. You’ve pointed out already that I’m not a ‘friend’ of ECF – not yet! This reminded me of a famous letter written by George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill, inviting him to a play, and saying “Dear Prime Minister, I cordially invite you to the opening night of my new play. Do bring a friend – if you have one.” To which Churchill replied, ‘Dear Mr Shaw, thank you for inviting me. Unfortunately I will not be able to attend. But I’ll be glad to come to the second showing of your play, always assuming there is one’. So much for friends!
Before going into your world of culture, and in all modesty say a couple of things about that, I want to briefly say a couple of things about where our European society is today. Because I think there are some very worrying developments. There are also some hopeful developments and the essence of politics for the next two to five years is to convince our populations to choose hope rather than despair – this is quite a fundamental choice. The choice for despair means the flight into nationalism, chauvinism etc. So this is a very fundamental period in our European history.
I think we have not yet come to terms with the end of the European Divide. We have not come to terms with the fact that we now have a different Europe. We always see Eastern Europe as having become like Western Europe and we assume that Western Europe hasn’t changed – which is a false assumption. The whole of Europe has changed. That’s a first point which I think is crucial. Because it means that we’re all looking for a new position in that new Europe. Which in the Dutch context means that we are again tempted by our age-old mercantile, neutral, political temptation – this has been part of Dutch politics since the 17th century. You find it in different forms, from the benign mercantile attitude of Bolkestein to the more nationalist attitude of people like Wilders and Verdonk – it’s all part of the same fundamental elements in our society. It ’s nothing new, it’s age-old. That would be my first point.
And you see many countries looking for a new position in this new Europe and also reflecting on their identity. Things are more difficult than that because of other developments. Globalisation leads to a huge sense of insecurity in large parts of the population, although not in this part of the population and having said this before, I was immediately chastised by the Parool and Vrij Nederland who said ‘What is this man talking about? We’re all very international, very oriented towards the outside.’ Yes, we are, but large parts of our population, I’m afraid, are not.
And globalisation offers a lot of opportunities to many people. But I’m afraid that especially the middle classes have a feeling, especially in western European countries, that they have nowhere to go. They see the threats coming, but they don’t see the refuge that we can see because we can travel wherever we want to. We’ve sort of ‘bought’ our security and those of us who are well-to-do, like all of us here; see the collective as a service provider, not as something we share a common responsibility for. I’m afraid this is a very important point, and I will come back to the issue of culture in a moment.
There’s a German social democratic study that says that those who have given up on society (perhaps as many as 25% in some western European countries) don’t think that society has anything to offer, so they stay in their own world and they don’t encourage their children to try and reach a better situation. Becaus e they think ‘they don’t want us, we’re not part of this, so let’s stay here’. And then you have the middle classes who, instead of looking upward as they always did, are now looking at this bottom third of society and saying, ‘what we don’t want to happen, is us going down’. So you get this almost inverted, anti-solidarity because they don’t want to aspire to a higher position, they just want to avoid coming into a lower position.
Now why is this important when you talk about culture? The counterpart to this powerful sentiment is that you need to assert your identity. And asserting your identity is opposing it to another identity. And of course this is exacerbated by 9/11 and the real threat of fundamentalism – it’s not just something that people have thought up. It is there. It’s part of our society and part of the threat that we have to face. It helps to create in many people this idea of needing to assert one’s own identity and to distance oneself from different identities.
Now – and I am quite sure that there are some historians in this room -, this is not new in European history. We’ve seen this many times before. So there’s no need to fall into despair - we can tackle this! But we need to take certain measures. I shan’t dwell on socioeconomic measures. Let me just focus on culture.
When she was here, Elif Shafak, the Turkish writer, said that in her perception, this obsession with identity breeds the obsession with ‘the other’, with her or his identity. She says hawks breed hawks. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that when you look at present-day Europe. Secondly, the Basque philosopher Daniel Innerarity makes the point that because of this struggle with identity, we’ve lost the perception of what constitutes the private world and the public domain. In the Dutch context people think that because they believe something is so, it is so. If I believe the walls of this room are green, you can all say they’re red but I will argue that it’s not true because I believe that they’re green. And this is sort of the way in which public discourse is conducted in the Netherlands – claiming that your private domain should be the measure of the public domain. Saying that everybody should abide by the rules, but not me, of course, because I need that space to be happy. It all comes back to this fundamental point, to quote Innerarity again, that there is no consensus, on what the public domain is and what the rules are for regulating the public domain.
That was a digression but I want to make the point that culture becomes crucial in tackling these problems. Because we need culture to convince people that there is no danger in difference. We need culture to convince people - to quote Camus’ brilliant article in Combat, written 60 years ago - that what distinguishes humanity from animals is the capacity to look at the world through somebody else’s eyes. The capacity to be able to have a discussion, to allow oneself to be convinced by the arguments of the other. And there, art and culture play an essential role because art is nothing more and nothing less than reality consumed, digested and transformed. And therefore it is the best way, to invite others to look at the world through somebody else’s eyes. And if you help people to develop that capacity, you will help people to accept differences within society as part of life, not as something that should lead to an allergic reaction, and be pushed away.
In European history, from the very earliest times, diversity has been an essential part of our society. Assimilating newcomers has become part of our society. Unfortunately, we’ve arrived at the situation where change occurs too quickly for this mechanism to function fully, unless we intervene in the public domain as thinkers, philosophers, artists, politicians etc. Because the reaction which is now occurring in many societies, of treating what is new literally as foreign, is asphyxiating culture and society. Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winner, said culture is nothing more and nothing less than the rubbing together of differences. And this notion should be an intrinsic part of the role of culture in our society.
Why doesn’t this happen enough today, in Europe? Because of what I said earlier: lack of understanding of how we need to organise the public domain. You can only have this rubbing and coming together of differences if the rules of the game in the public domain are clear and are the same for everyone participating. And here, I believe, culture and politics should work together. I believe there should be more self-confidence in politics to stand for the rules of public space, to defend them and demand of everyone that they abide by those rules and don’t use cultural differences as an excuse not to abide by those rules. Only then can you be more relaxed and more open to cultural differences. It is an interaction. You cannot demand full space or full freedom for cultural differences unless there is a consensus on the respect for the rules governing the public domain. And this is the difficulty in western European society. This, again, is where writers, painters, film-makers and musicians should take more responsibility, and I’m glad to say that this is something they are increasingly doing, all across Europe.
I was fortunate enough to open a Marlene Dumas exhibition in South Africa a couple of months ago. And you would be astonished to see the public response to her paintings in that society. Because there you saw people looking through her eyes at their own society. I’m sure you’re all quite familiar with her work, she’s able to paint different cultures into one face. And she gets different people from different cultures to look at the same face and say ‘this is me’. And then you get a debate, in an intercultural society. Very interesting phenomenon and something we could really do with in European society.
Having said all that – and of course, you’d expected me to go into all the measures the government needs to take and all the recommendations we need to make. That work has been done in an excellent way by Gijs de Vries in his contribution to the book on European cultural policy. I think his reco mmendations might be the basis for a debate you might want to have. I think they are what the Commission, the governments and society at large need. Because I do think there should be more interplay between the cultural field and politics. People are often surprised that I like culture! You know, we do stigmatise politicians, I’m afraid. It’s not part of my job requirement to be a barbarian! And I’m certainly not the only one. In politics and in culture, we sometimes lack the capacity to link the two. This is something I bear some responsibility for, but I honestly believe you do, too. So I want to call upon you to take that responsibility. Because – and let me finish on this – if you really want to succeed in creating an atmosphere of hope and trust, in those parts of society who feel they cannot buy their way out of globalisation and potential terrorism and fundamentalism - those are large parts of European society - if they have the feeling that we are leaving them where they are because we say that what they’re saying is not acceptable, because we say that their fears are not decent, that they are wrong to believe that there are threats, we do so because we are safe, we’ll always be all right – we can always go elsewhere and find a job. But they can’t. If we don’t establish a link between them and us, and make it felt by the whole of society, we will succumb to this eternal feeling of fear which will break down our society. I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but I’m very concerned about this. We can change that around, all of us, by taking a measure of responsibility.
Thank you very much.