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Jan Aart SCHOLTE / Ян Арт ШОЛЬТЕ
I A Transculturalist Path to Democratic Global Cooperation |
Jan Aart SCHOLTE / Ян Арт ШОЛЬТЕ
Sweden, Gothenburg; United Kingdom, Warwick Faculty Chair in Peace and Development, University of Gothenburg and Professor of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
Швеция, Гетебург; Великобритания, Варвик. Декан факультета мира и развития университета Гетебурга (Швеция). Профессор политических и международных исследований университета Варвика, (Великобритания)
a transculturalist path to democratic global
cooperation
The problem of attaining global cooperation amidst cultural diversity is frequently and often urgently affirmed. However, the main existing prescriptions for handling cultural diversity in global politics — namely, liberal cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and interculturalism — each have major deficiencies. An alternative politics of cultural diversity — here termed transculturalism — takes a different approach by engaging the divergence of life-worlds not as a problem for global cooperation, but as a positive opportunity for forging creative collaboration. Core principles of the proposed transculturalist framework include intense reflexivity, explicit attention to culture/power links, recognition of cultural complexity, embrace of cultural diversity, cultivation of humility, deep listening, and reciprocal learning for positive change. Transculturalism offers significant promise for furthering constructive global cooperation, although the approach is by itself no panacea, and its implementation faces major challenges.
Key words: cosmopolitanism; global democracy; global governance; globalization; interculturalism; legitimacy; multiculturalism; transculturalism
Путем транскультурализма: к демократии глобального взаимодействия
Проблема достижения глобального взаимодействия и сотрудничества в ситуации культурного разнообразия обсуждается довольно часто. При этом, основные понятия, применяющиеся для исследования культурного многообразия в культурной политике — такие как либеральный космополитизм, мульти- и интеркультурализм, — имеют свои недостатки. Альтернативная политика культурного разнообразия, называемая здесь транскультурализмом, предполагает иной подход, вовлекающий различающиеся между собой жизненные миры, не в качестве проблемы глобального взаимодействия, но как позитивную возможность достижения креативной коллаборации. Базовые принципы предлагаемого транскультуралистского подхода включают повышенную рефлексивность, пристальное внимание к взаимоотношениям культуры и власти, признание сложности культуры, необходимости охвата всей полноты культурного разнообразия, воспитание смирения, внимательного вслушивания, а также взаимообучение позитивным изменениям. Транскультурализм обещает возможность содействия конструктивной глобальной кооперации, хотя сам по себе подход, безусловно, не является панацеей и его реализация требует преодоления множества вызовов.
Ключевые слова: космополитизм, глобальная демократия, глобальное управление, глобализация, интеркультурализм, легитимация, мультикультурализм, транскультурализм
Global cooperation is a vital need in contemporary society and politics. A host of pressing concerns today demand enlarged and strengthened global-scale responses. Examples of issues with a planetary scope include arms control, demographic trends, digital communications, ecological changes, employment, energy supplies, finance, food security, health, migration, taxation, trade, and more.
A vital condition for effective global cooperation is legitimate governance. People are more able and willing to collaborate in
respect of global problems when they endorse the framework in which that collaboration is pursued. Governance — i. e. arrangements for the regulation of one or the other issue-area — is nor-matively as well as practically more sustainable when the affected people accord the regime legitimacy. Governance that lacks legitimacy — which does not have the consent of the governed — generally fails to obtain the necessary commitment and resources for effective collective action. Indeed, regimes without legitimacy tend
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International Journal of Cultural Research
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Jan Aart SCHOLTE / Mh Apm mOMbTE
| A Transculturalist Path to Democratic Global Cooperation |
to survive only by trickery, coercion and violence towards their publics.
Shortfalls in legitimacy are a particular difficulty for contemporary global governance. On the whole publics have to date not ascribed legitimacy to global governance in anywhere like the degrees that people have generally accepted the authority of nation-states and local governments. As a result, global regimes have generally struggled to acquire the mandates and resources required to deliver effective global policy, and major detriments to decent human lives and a good society remain insufficiently addressed.
Arguably one of the greatest challenges for the construction of legitimacy in global governance is cultural diversity. Although a variously interpreted and deeply contested concept,1 'culture' can for present purposes be taken to cover processes of the social (re) formulation, expression, communication, reception and (renegotiation of meanings. Every instance of collective human existence has aspects of intersubjective meaning-making. Culture is how people come jointly to know and imagine their situation: how they define, describe, explain and evaluate their circumstances to one another.
As the social construction of life-worlds, life-ways and life-styles, culture involves a combination of mental processes and physical performances. It involves interrelations of semantics and behaviours, consciousness and displays. Intersubjective meaning-making transpires through speech, gesture, music, architecture, dress, ritual — indeed, through any social practice.
As such, culture has far-reaching implications for other core dimensions of social relations, including ecology, economics, psychology, politics, space and time. Culture — the social construction of meaning — affects the ways that people relate to the wider web of life (ecology); the ways that people manage resources (economy); the ways that people imagine their being, becoming and belonging (psychology); the ways that people govern their collectivities (politics); the ways that people map and enact space (geography); and the ways that people demarcate and experience time (history). Thus, although culture is not the primary and sole determinant of social life, its presences and influences are pervasive.
Culture shows substantial variation across global publics. The inhabitants of global domains know and enact their circumstances in diverse and sometimes incommensurable ways. Global politics is steeped in divergent coherences: different ways of making sense of the world, each with its own internal integrity. Cultural pluralism has long marked — and sometimes tested — social fabrics within countries and localities, but on a planetary scale divergences of life-worlds are still more numerous and deep. Even if contemporary globalisation has brought greater transplanetary standardisation in some practices, as the Stanford school of 'world society has documented,2 great cultural heterogeneity persists and shows little sign of receding.
Moreover, cultural diversity can be positively valued. The principle that people pursue different trajectories of knowing the world, according to their variable contexts and inclinations, could be regarded as a cornerstone of human dignity. In addition, cultural di-
1 W. H. Sewell, 'The Concept(s) of Culture', in V. Bonnell and L. Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 35-61.
2 G. Krücken and G. S. Drori (eds), World Society: The Writings of John W. Meyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
versity — by providing a broad range of knowledges and practices — arguably offers important resources for the advancement of other core values of a good society, such as democracy, distributive justice, ecological integrity, moral conduct, peace, solidarity and well-being. In this sense cultural homogenisation would greatly narrow human possibilities. Exposures to and engagements with cultural diversity also make human existence that much more interesting, dynamic and challenging.
Cultural variations in global spaces relate inter alia to diversities of age, class, (dis)ability, faith, gender, geography, indigeneity, institution, language, nationality, pastime, race, sexual orientation and vocation. In this sense cultural pluralism in global politics involves much more than national differences or a so-called 'clash of civilisations'. 3 The social construction of meaning involves complex intersections of multiple vectors. For instance, an elderly black poor Muslim woman advocating for the mentally ill in rural Uganda understands the world in ways that are on many points incommensurable with those of a young white secular male pharmaceutical patents lawyer in the City of London. Yet both are constituents in global regimes of health.
As the example just given illustrates, the multifarious cultural positions do not enter global spaces on a basis of equality. Encounters of cultural difference are steeped in hierarchical power relations. Some life-worlds have structurally privileged positions relative to others. Dominant rationalities exercise greater claims to truth and normality, while marginal meanings are little acknowledged or respected. To the extent that these cultural hierarchies and exclusions are arbitrary they contradict cognitive justice and (global) democracy, where all affected people would expect to have equivalent opportunities for participation and control. 4
Thus it is a first-order challenge for global cooperation to consider how global regulatory apparatuses can obtain legitimacy when: (a) the people who are subject to them hold (highly) varying understandings of relevant conditions and how those circumstances are (or should be) handled; and (b) some cultural positions are summarily and arbitrarily subordinated. How can different life-worlds be accommodated in manners that allow all parties in their different ways to regard the global governance arrangements as legitimate? To underline again: absent such legitimacy, the effectiveness and justice of global cooperation are compromised, and a host of vital problems such as climate change and food security are inadequately addressed.
Monoculturalism, Multiculturalism, Interculturalism and Their Problems
Until now most theorists and practitioners of global governance have largely denied or avoided issues of cultural diversity. Denial has been the response of liberal-universalist cosmopolitanism. Avoidance has been the response of communitarianism. Neither of these two main conventional approaches to questions of culture in world politics is sustainable in contemporary circumstances of pressing global concerns. A third more recently suggested alternative, that of interculturalism, does not go far enough in developing the pos-
3 S. P. Huntington, 'The Clash of Civilizations?' Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no.
3 (Summer 1993), pp. 22-49.
4 B. de Sousa Santos (ed.), Cognitive Justice in a Global World (Lanham:
Lexington, 2007).
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sibilities of cultural diversity for global cooperation. The following characterisations of the three models are admittedly condensed and simplified, but they suffice to identify core shortcomings of existing approaches to cultural diversity in global politics.
Liberal cosmopolitanism is a widely favoured approach to building global cooperation, particularly for mainstream understandings of world politics in Europe and North America. 5 This perspective has in effect denied cultural diversity, holding that western-modern knowledge of society and politics could and should be the reference point and life-way for all parties to global problems. For liberal cosmopolitans, western-modern constructions of democracy, development, rule of law, human rights and social justice have — or ought to have — universal currency as the basis for legitimate global governance. To the extent that others do not live up to these norms they are in liberal-cosmopolitan eyes 'backward' in historical development and must 'catch up' with western modernity.
However, liberal-cosmopolitan monoculturalism is unviable in today's world. Even if transplanetary cultural convergence on a western-modern framework were appealing (which is a matter for ethical debate), it is not in prospect. Many inhabitants of other life-worlds across the globe do not accept or desire Enlightenment knowledge and regard its promotion as a western-imperialistic imposition. Moreover, currently unfolding shifts in global political-economic power away from Euro-American primacy suggest that the material basis for assertions of liberal-universalist cosmopolitanism is weakening. Global legitimacy grounded on western modernity does not obtain sufficient purchase across the culturally diverse publics that need to cooperate on questions of disease control, energy supply, financial regulation, etc.
True, some recent liberal-cosmopolitan thinking in the vein of 'deliberative democracy' has sought to achieve greater acknowledgement of, and voice for, diverse identities and interests in global politics. 6 However, theorists in this vein have mostly avoided the issue of cultural diversity: namely, how to handle the variety of life-worlds that enter the deliberation. Nor have proponents of deliberative democracy — themselves situated at the core of social privilege within western modernity — critically interrogated the cultural framing of their own position. Nor have they developed their propositions by working through deep encounters with cultural difference in their own research and practice. To this extent concepts of deliberative democracy have so far retained a liberal universalism which assumes itself to be 'above culture'.
The main alternative to liberal-cosmopolitan monoculturalism, communitarianism, suggests that humanity can be divided into neatly circumscribed cultural groups who best lead separate lives in a spirit of mutual tolerance. 7 This 'multicultural' prescription suggests that encounters of different life-worlds should be limited and cautious, since deeper contacts across cultural lines readily
5 Cf. D. Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); G. W. Brown and D. Held (eds), The Cosmopolitanism Reader. Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
6 J. Bohman, Democracy across Borders: From Demos to Démoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); J. S. Dryzek, Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
7 Cf. C. Taylor, Multiculturalism and 'The Politics of Recognition' (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992); D. Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
breed contaminations, conflicts, fears and violence. In communitarian eyes 'global legitimacy' — a situation where all parties consent to the same apparatus of global governance — is an impossibility. Communitarian visions generally sit well with sovereignty discourses and statist governance, where global cooperation is pursued through narrow channels of formal intergovernmental diplomacy.
The problem with communitarian multiculturalism is that, even if this formula were attractive and desirable (which, again, is a matter for normative discussion), it is not feasible in today's much more global world. The quantity, range, frequency, speed, intensity and impact of global connections have reached levels that make communitarian cultural separatism unsustainable. Moreover, contemporary global policy challenges require far greater communication and negotiation across cultural diversities than can be achieved through old-style interstate diplomacy. Already participation in global governance processes now ranges far beyond traditional foreign policy elites to wider official circles, commercial actors, and a large swath of civil society and social movements.
A third approach to cultural diversity in global politics, that of interculturalism, improves upon monoculturalist liberal-cosmopolitanism and multiculturalist communitarianism in the sense of positively rising to the challenge of forging global cooperation out of a plurality of life-worlds. Interculturalism maintains that, with carefully pursued cross-cultural communication and negotiation, the destructive potentials of 'clashing civilisations' can be avoided. This approach offers a third way in cultural politics between assimilation and segregation. Indeed, interculturalism maintains that mutual recognition, respect, listening and learning across cultures can contribute to greater global cooperation among diverse groups. 8
While interculturalism provides a more hopeful vision than the predominant two approaches, this alternative too has its shortcomings. For one thing, interculturalism replicates multiculturalism's unsustainable assumption that culture maps onto neatly separable groups, when in practice cultures are intrinsically overlapping and intersecting. In addition, interculturalism tends to downplay the degree to which the negotiation of cultural differences is subject to power relations. Parties do not enter intercultural exchanges on an equal footing, and these hierarchies must be sensitively addressed if sustainable global cooperation is to result. In a similar vein, intercul-turalism can overoptimistically overlook that some cultural differences are unavoidably a source of deep conflict. There are occasions where good will is not enough to forge intercultural agreement.
Thus more ambitious alternatives in cultural politics are needed if urgent demands for enhanced global cooperation are to be met. The monoculturalism of liberal cosmopolitanism, the multicultural-ism of communitarianism, and the middle path of interculturalism are none of them fit for this purpose. A different approach would need fully to acknowledge and thoroughly to engage circumstances of cultural diversity and difference in global politics.
A Transculturalist Alternative
One possible alternative cultural politics for global legitimacy and deeper global cooperation could be pursued under the label of 'transculturalism'. This vocabulary signals a departure from mul-
8 T. Cantle, Interculturalism: The New Era of Cohesion and Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012); C. Taylor, 'Interculturalism or Multiculturalism?' Philosophy & Social Criticism, 38 (4-5) May 2012.
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ticulturalism, monoculturalism and interculturalism. The prefix 'trans' suggests a focus on movements across diversities. The invitation is then to develop guiding principles and concrete practices of transculturality which could contribute to wider and deeper global democratic legitimacy — and thereby promote global cooperation on terms that were more agreeable to all parties.
Ideas of 'trans-culture' are not completely new, of course. Already in 1940 the anthropologist Fernando Ort z coined the term 'transculturation' as a way to discuss mixes and mergers of life-worlds. 9 Talk of the transcultural has returned in the contemporary Latin American scholarship of Arturo Escobar, Walter Mignolo and others. 10 Since 1990 the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch has developed a conception of transculturality as an alternative to multicul-turality and interculturality. 11 Likewise, Jeff Lewis has invoked a language of 'transculturalism' to construct an alternative knowledge and politics of cultural studies,12 while Richard Slimbach has called on the concept to enrich experiences of international education. 13 Drawing on Native American life-ways, John Brown Childs has developed notions of 'cooperative heterogeneity' under the label of 'transcommunality'. 14 The principles elaborated below in the language of 'transculturalism' also resonate with various aspects of Jan Nederveen Pieterse's analysis of 'globalisation as hybridisation' and Chantal Mouffe's discussion of 'multipolarity'. 15
That said, the conception of transculturalism discussed below also offers a distinctive take on ethics and politics of cultural diversity. One or more of the seven core tenets echo parts of earlier formulations of transculturality, but this particular assemblage of principles is not replicated elsewhere. Moreover, unlike previous work, ideas of transculturality are here specifically related to the furtherance of legitimate and effective handling of global problems. It might also be noted that the perspective elaborated below was mostly articulated before reading other literature on transcultural-ism. The ideas have mainly emerged from the present author's own practices and experiences of working across multiple and intense diversities, especially in projects on 'Civil Society and Democracy in the Global Economy' (2001-5) and 'Building Global Democracy (2008-14). 16
9 F. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995 [1940]).
10 W. D. Mignolo and F. Schiwy, 'Transculturation and the Colonial Difference: Double Translation', in T. Maranhao and B. Streck (eds), Translation and Ethnography: The Anthropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), pp. 12-34.
11 W. Welsch, 'Tranculturality — The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today', in Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (eds), Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 194-213.
12 J. Lewis, 'From Culturalism to Transculturalism', Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 1,no. 1 (2002), pp. 14-32.
13 R. Slimbach, 'The Transcultural Journey', Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, vol. 11 (August 2005), pp. 205-30.
14 J. B. Child, Transcommunality: From the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).
15 J. N. Pieterse, 'Globalisation as Hybridisation', International Sociology, vol. 9, no. 2 (June 1994), pp. 161-84; C. Mouffe, 'Which World Order: Cosmopolitan or Multipolar?' Ethical Perspectives, vol. 15, no. 4 (2008), pp. 453-67.
16 J. A. Scholte, Democratizing the Global Economy: The Role of Civil Society (Coventry: Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation,
2004) — at www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/projects/englishreport.
pdf: J. A. Scholte, 'Reinventing Global Democracy", European Journal of
International Relations, 20 (1) (March 2014): 3-28; and website of the
The following paragraphs identify seven pillars of transculturalist ethics and politics: namely, insistence on reflexivity; acknowledgement of culture/power relations; recognition of complexity; celebration of diversity; cultivation of humility; promotion of deep listening; and reciprocal learning for positive change. Challenges of implementing this set of principles are discussed in a subsequent section.
The first of the proffered seven cornerstones of transculturalism, insistence on reflexivity, in many ways sets the tone for the other six. Reflexivity is a form of critical self-reflection which is constantly alert to, and questioning of, the particularity (i. e., not universality) of one's ideas and practices. 17 Reflexive thinkers continually make their assumptions explicit and constantly relate their knowledge and behaviour to their specific context: their time, their place, their language, their faith, their class, etc. With reflexivity any presumption that a person can hold a 'supra-cultural' truth is abandoned. Instead, reflexivity breeds an acute awareness — a hearing aid — that one's own grounds for legitimate global-scale governance may not be shared by (most) others. Negotiation of cultural differences towards global cooperation can be facilitated when, through reflexivity, parties are more keenly attuned to precise character of their differences. A searching self-consciousness of this kind, including a sensitive rel-ativisation of one's position, is generally lacking in assimilationist, multiculturalist and interculturalist approaches to cultural diversity.
The second anchor of a transculturalist alternative, acknowledgement of culture/power relations, means understanding that the social construction of meaning is always suffused with enabling and disabling potentials for the parties involved. Thus culture invariably involves power dynamics, whether overt or implicit. This attention to power is less pronounced (or absent altogether) in other approaches to cultural diversity. For transculturalist politics it is particularly important to identify, highlight and interrogate structural inequalities that can prevail among different life-worlds, especially in situations where a hegemonic construction (e. g. of 'development' or 'God') arbitrarily marginalises other rationalities that may have their own coherence and integrity. In a transculturalist mode, parties to global encounters make explicit, underline and question that their own and other life-ways can have built-in (dis)advantages. The interlocutors moreover appreciate that cultural subordinations can breed anger, suspicion and resistance on the part of the silenced. Furthermore, actors in dominant cultural positions who enter global conversations in a transculturalist spirit accept an obligation to unlearn and discard their arbitrary privileges. Sustainable global cooperation is advanced to the extent that the parties are open and honest about cultural power hierarchies in their relationships, refuse opportunities to abuse unfair advantages, and strive in principle to accord all cultural positions equal opportunities for respect and voice.
A third pillar of transculturalism, recognition of complexity, entails an appreciation that culture is not (as multiculturalist and inter-culturalist approaches would generally have it) manifested in neatly bounded and mutually exclusive populations, where homogeneity reigns inside each group and binary opposition prevails between them. In global politics as actually lived, culture involves not clear-
Building Global Democracy programme, www.buildingglobaldemocracy.
org.
17 P. Bourdieu and L. J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
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ly delimited, discrete and fixed spheres, but porosity, intersections, overlaps, permutations and movements. 18 To box political subjects into singular, artificially uniform and fixed cultural categories (e. g. 'Asian', 'Black', 'Indigenous', 'Islamic', 'Western', 'Woman', 'Youth') imposes divisions, exaggerates oppositions, and denies dynamism. In contrast, transculturalist recognition of complexity allows each person their own particular multidimensional moving life-world, where culture is an evolving interplay of multiple tendencies which cannot be reduced to separate constituent parts. Appreciation of cultural complexity invites deeper exploration of, and more careful communication with, counterparts in global politics. The resulting more nuanced and open understanding of both self and other selves can lay firmer ground for global cooperation.
A fourth mainstay of transculturalism, celebration of diversity, suggests that pluralism in life-worlds is not only recognised, but also in principle positively embraced and actively promoted. In contrast to monoculturalism, multiculturalism and interculturalism, transculturalism does not regard difference as a problem that can at best be 'tolerated'. Rather, cultural pluralism is enthusiastically welcomed as a creative resource. Encounters of diverse life-worlds are regarded as opportunities to develop new insights, to open wider potentials, to discover alternative answers. By providing multiple and dynamic responses to global problems, furtherance of cultural diversity might even be key to the survival of humankind and other life. In transculturalism global cooperation is not made contingent upon a consensus around meaning. In principle diverse understandings of, and practices towards, the same global issue can be pursued side by side in complementary fashion. From a transculturalist perspective it is not necessary — and on the contrary anti-democratic — to force all global constituents into a single cultural mould. Rather, in what Child calls 'coordinated autonomy', people can achieve mutual support vis- -vis global challenges while maintaining distinctive life-ways. 19
A fifth building block for transculturalism is humility in the face of difference. For all that cultural diversity might be celebrated in principle, situations arise where different constructions of meaning are incommensurable. Sometimes these radical divergences (e. g. around certain habits of diet and dress) remain fairly innocuous and can be readily accommodated. However, other incommensurable differences are unpalatable to the parties, triggering moral aversion and impulses to deny the other. On these occasions transculturalism prescribes humbleness. Thus, instead of immediately adopting a stance of confrontation and affirming one's own greater virtue — as liberal cosmopolitans and multiculturalists can be prone to do — parties to transcultural communication and negotiation acknowledge the imperfections of their own life-ways and their severely limited comprehension of contrasting life-worlds. Awe at one's ignorance of most human experience, and wonder at the sheer scope of human creativity, can check impetuous dismissals of contrary life-worlds and encourage maximal accommodations of difference. In particular, people in dominant social positions (e. g. professional classes and northern countries) can recognise that presumptions of their own cultural superiority result largely from their power advan-
18 C. Stewart, 'Syncretism and Its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture', Diacritics, vol. 29, no. 3 (Fall 1999), 40-62.
19 J. B. Child, 'What Is Transcommunality?' (2007). Available at: www. transcommunality.org/transcommunality.html.
tages. Humility in transcultural politics entails an abandonment of any and all 'civilising missions', whereby a self-designated 'advanced culture' paternalistically imposes itself upon, and seeks to absorb, supposed 'backward peoples'. Transculturalist humility does not require one to accept every difference and to like others whose views and practices seem offensive. However, by discouraging hasty deni-grations of difference, as well as its violent suppression, transculturalism can wherever possible nurture respectful co-existence. Global cooperation amidst cultural diversity is far more readily achieved among the humble than the self-righteous.
Humility facilitates a sixth core principle of transculturalism, namely the promotion of deep listening. In this approach, cultural difference is treated not as a black box (where the issue is ignored) or a Pandora's box (whose opening causes havoc), but as an impetus to a conversation. 20 Capacity to listen across diversities is a key skill that has been strikingly underdeveloped in modern global politics. Indeed, the ability to listen is arguably as important for global cooperation as expertise regarding legal instruments and policymaking processes. Veritable listening goes beyond polite nods (while one is mainly preparing one's own next words). Transcultural listening entails concentrated, careful and patient attention that strives maximally to hear, empathise with, receive from, and respond to counterparts. Paraphrasing Slimbach, one seeks to walk a while in another's mind, accepting the risks and uncertainties associated with not 'keeping to oneself'. 21 This deeper listening not only enlarges a listener's engagement with their interlocutor's experience, but also increases reflexive awareness of one's own life-world. Adapting from Paolo Freire, listening to oneself hearing the other can be an exercise in self-revelation. 22 This is not to suggest that any amount of listening can overcome certain cultural incommensurabilities. Still, a transcultural mode of listening equips parties better to develop actions on global issues that show honour and care for diversities and a mutual recognition that their respective lives are worth living. In this way transculturalist listening is an act of solidarity which, when practised on all sides, advances deep acquaintance and trust. Such a stance also leaves space for parties in global cooperation to pursue different responses with which each may be more comfortable.
Seventh and finally, transculturalism presumes that global cooperation is a process of ongoing reciprocal learning for positive change among diverse life-worlds. Transculturalism in this sense contrasts with monoculturalist liberal cosmopolitanism (which paints western modernity as an end of history beyond which further learning and change are not required) and multiculturalist commu-nitarianism (which insists on the preservation of tradition). In contrast, transculturalism treats exchanges across cultural diversities as learning opportunities that can in turn promote positive social transformations, for example, towards increased distributive justice or greater ecological integrity. The interplay of diversities — particularly when approached with transculturalist emphases on re-
20 Shiv Visvanathan, remark in the workshop 'Transcultural Constructions of Global Legitimacy', Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Duisburg, 13-15 November 2013.
21 Slimbach, p. 220.
22 P. Freire, Pedagogia da Tolerancia (Sao Paulo: Unesp, 2005); L. M. T. M. de Souza, 'Para uma redefimijao de Letramento Critico: conflito e produijao
de sigmficaijao', in R. F. Maciel and V. Assis (eds), Formagao de Professores de Linguas — Ampliando Perspectivas (Jundiai: Paco Editorial, 2011).
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flexivity, complexity, openness, humility and listening — generates continual self-conscious cultural reconstructions. A transcultural outlook not only recognises the inherent dynamism of culture, but positively welcomes and fosters the creative potentials offered by mutual transformations. Engaging cultural diversity is an opportunity to discover that new ways are possible. Learning from another is at the same time an invitation to change the self. In this way ethics and politics of transculturalism can generate new insights and practices for enhanced global cooperation. The exercise does not normally lead to cultural convergence, however, as different parties take different lessons from the exchange and apply them to different contexts to generate different changes.
With the seven tenets set out above, transculturalism offers a stark alternative to the monoculturalism of liberal-modern cosmopolitanism and the multiculturalism of communitarianism. Trans-culturalism also confronts issues of complexity, power, difference and learning for transformation more directly and productively than interculturalism. The suggestion is that this fourth approach to cultural politics could better produce the forms and degrees of global cooperation that are needed to deal effectively with ecological degradation, financial regulation, health promotion, intellectual property, migration and so on.
Towards Transculturalism in Practice
The preceding summary suggests that transculturalist principles could bring significant benefits for democratic global cooperation that are less available through other approaches to cultural diversity. More than cosmopolitanism, communitarianism and intercultur-alism, transculturalism can advance cultural vibrancy as a value in its own right. Diverse and dynamic culture is core to human flourishing in a good society: globally as well as nationally and locally. In addition, cultural vibrancy as fostered through transculturalism can advance other primary values in society. A situation where cultural diversity is recognised, celebrated and sensitively engaged towards mutual change is also a situation where democracy, distributive justice, liberty, peace and solidarity are more likely to thrive. In addition, humility, listening and learning across cultural differences could open new paths enhanced ecological integrity and material security for all. In short, the stakes for transculturalism are high and the gains potentially huge.
That said, transculturalism is not a panacea for democratic global cooperation. For example, a context such as Suriname, which shows many aspects of transculturalism in operation, is still a place that struggles with ecological damage, socioeconomic inequality, and fragile democracy. 23 Indeed, the personal and social changes that emerge from transculturalist exchanges need not automatically be for the better, or benefit everyone to the same degree. In some scenarios, transculturalism might be used as a hegemonic discourse that convinces subordinated groups to cooperate with dominant power. In this case transculturalism could legitimise injustice rather than resist and subvert it. Some critics might view United Nations initiatives such as the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and
23 P. B. Tjon Sie Fat, Chinese New Migrants in Suriname: The Inevitability of Ethnic Performing (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009).
the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in the light of such cooptation, for example. So, for all that transculturalism might hold promise in principle, its pursuit in practice requires continual critical scrutiny.
Moreover, power inequalities may give some influential circles in global politics little interest even to attempt to enact transculturalism. For instance, transculturalism could be used to challenge existing global elites, who might see their privileges better served by the assimilationist demands of liberal cosmopolitanism. Meanwhile certain social movements may gain much of their strength through multiculturalist insistence on conserving an unproblematised 'tradition' and would therefore resist transculturalist tenets of complexity, humility, listening and change. Given these powerful counterforces, transculturalism needs well-positioned adept and committed advocates to move forward to implementation.
Where could these effective promoters of transculturalism be found? Who can be the agents of this wholesale reorientation in the politics of cultural diversity for the contemporary more global world? Different theories of global governance and global democracy would locate the potential agency at different sites. For example, conventional multilateralists would argue that any change in global politics needs to come from intergovernmental processes,24 thereby suggesting that states (and in particular the stronger states) need to adopt transculturalism in order to advance this alternative. Newer multistakeholder approaches to global governance25 would suggest that nonstate actors (e. g. civil society, mass media, political parties) could also seek to insert transculturalist politics into global policy processes. Ideas of world federalism26 would propose that new cultural politics could be pursued through a global government and an accompanying global parliament, although such institutional designs may be impracticable for the foreseeable future. Theories of deliberative democracy27 would propose that citizens operating in public spaces such as Occupy and the World Social Forum could foster transculturalism in practice. Theories of resistance would look for transformational agency either in a vanguard social movement (e. g. of women or the working class) or in a 'multitude' of intersecting counter-hegemonic forces. 28 Alternatively, the agency for transculturalism could lie in some combination of these sites.
Yet whatever strategy of implementation might prove to be most practicable, the transculturalist alternative warrants further exploration. Other paradigms — i. e., of assimilationist cosmopolitanism, multiculturalist communitarianism and moderate intercultural-ism — do not put in prospect the degree of democratically legitimate global cooperation that is required to address urgent priorities of contemporary society. Transculturalism may involve leaps of ambition, but the major transformations of our day call for major reinventions of politics.
24 R. O. Keohane, 'Democracy-Enhancing Multilateralism', International Organization, vol. 63, no. 1 (2009), pp. 1-31.
25 T. Macdonald, Global Stakeholder Democracy: Power and Representation beyond Liberal States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
26 T. Tannsjo, Global Democracy: The Case for a World Government (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
27 J. S. Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).
28 M. Hardt and A. Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2004).
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