Human diversity is a defining feature of countries across the globe. And increasingly it is also recognized as a force for social good, something to be nourished and celebrated rather than feared, or pushed to the margins. But, as Norwegian State Secretary Raymond Johansen noted in his opening remarks at the International IDEA Round Table on ‘Democracy and Diversity’ held in Oslo on 12 June, how are we to respond to the fact that the more diversity you have in your society, the lower prevailing levels of social trust are likely to be? How, in other words, should modern democracies go about managing what he dubbed a ‘society of turtles’ – resolute individualists prone to retreat into their shells at the first hint of outside interference?
From the left: Shashi Tharoor, former UN Under Secretary-General and Sona Khan, attorney at the Indian Supreme Court
While there are no easy answers what is urgently needed is real dialogue between all parties involved concerning the rules and principles underpinning the national contract. Like a chair missing a leg, he argued, a ‘we’ that excludes significant sections of the population is ultimately a weak ‘we’, prone to wobble, worse still collapse, at the first signs of impending social turbulence.
Developing a deeper understanding of the realities of human diversity is critically important for organizations working in the field of democracy assistance. And as IDEA Secretary General Vidar Helgesen noted in his opening Round Table remarks, while for centuries the nation state has been the primary framework for developing democracy, in practice this has been accompanied by profound ambiguities as to who, or what, actually constitutes the nation in question.
Who are we?
Responding to the ‘who are we?’ question confronting aspiring nation-builders, former UN Under Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor opened a broad-ranging panel on the theme ‘Whose Democracy? Diversity in a Globalized World’ by outlining the ways in which India, the world’s most populous democracy, has successfully housed the extraordinary diversity of its peoples under the umbrella of a multi-party constitutional democracy.
The singular thing about India, he suggested, is that you can only speak about it in the plural. And the related secret of the country’s successful experiment with multi-party democracy is that in one way or another, everyone is a national minority. The early 21st century has witnessed the twin rise of what Tharoor dubbed ‘Jihadism’ and ‘Mcworld’, both of which in their own ways risk undermining, even obliterating, human diversity. From this perspective a key challenge for this century will thus be to make the world ‘safe for diversity’.
For all its promise as a means of realizing human potential - a ‘gate-bursting liberator’ as the veteran journalist and author Neal Ascherson described it in his Round Table presentation – historically speaking democracy, at least as understood and delivered by nation states, has all too often tended to attempt to stifle human diversity, rather than to liberate or promote it. A rhetorical ‘yes’ to liberty, fraternity and equality in other words - but only on ‘our’ terms.
And while it would be nice to think that diversity does indeed enhance democracy, Ascherson noted that European experience - at least during the initial stages of the kind of large-scale immigration witnessed in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, for example – tends to suggest a contrary view.
Multiculturalism in question
In subsequent decades theories of ‘multiculturalism’ developed to explain how – and why – diversity benefited and enriched British society. More recently, however, multiculturalism has found itself under renewed attack, not least as a consequence of the ‘war on terror’ espoused by the USA and its allies since the 9/11 tragedy. In the UK and elsewhere in Europe, Ascherson noted, we are now witnessing a concerted attempt to revive – some would argue, invent - notions of national citizenship based on supposedly distinctive and shared ‘national values’.
Such efforts were roundly dismissed by Ascherson as amounting to little more than ‘old identity politics in disguise’, and as such possessing little if any connection to the democratic agenda. Issues of diversity can indeed be handled within a democratic framework, he contended, and the list of values subsequently proposed as underpinning this framework - liberty, fraternity and equality – certainly possesses the twin attributes of political familiarity and republican simplicity.
Assessing Canada’s historical experience of diversity, former Prime Minister Kim Campbell pointed to the importance of the rule of law as the basis for democracy, and as such providing the starting point for developing mechanisms for the democratic management of diversity – ‘agreeing about the rules governing how you disagree’ as she described it. In Canada as elsewhere, Campbell noted, social trust is often tribal – the ‘looking out for your own’ approach – and a key democratic challenge in this context thus becomes promoting trust in the ‘rules governing your society’.
Virtues of consistency
Diversity, as Moslem commentator and scholar Tariq Ramadan noted in his Round Table speech, is both a risk and a challenge for all of us. It is indeed much easier for us to stay closeted with the ‘people we know’ – whoever they are - and so diversity, he insisted, requires effort, education and understanding. Affirming his support for the republican values earlier proposed by Ascherson as the basis for democracy, Ramadan suggested that the real challenge today is not in affirming values, but in giving those values practical purchase on how society functions.
Tariq Ramadan, Moslem commentator and scholar
Equality in particular is noticeable largely by its absence from the contemporary political lexicon, and even more so from political practice. For example, taking equality seriously with respect to minorities, Ramadan noted, requires a willingness to share power with others, something that governments of all political hues are notoriously reluctant to countenance in practice.
But is there a basic tension - even a contradiction, as some would assert - between Islam and democratic principles? Not if we get our terms, sources – and most importantly, practices - straight, Ramadan argued. The values underpinning democracy – listed by him as equal citizenship, universal suffrage, popular accountability and the separation of powers – should be viewed as universal, not Western, in origin.
The differences surface when it comes to the model of democracy developed in different countries, which in Ramadan’s view is as it should be. So you can’t invade Iraq and impose a particular model of democracy, since by doing so you risk undermining popular support for those selfsame basic democratic principles.
By a similar token, Ramadan argued, Moslem and other minority population’s problem with contemporary Western societies is usually not with democratic values as such, but rather with the inconsistent, even partisan way in which those values are perceived to be implemented. Consistency in application, in other words, is central, both to the domestic legitimacy of democracy and to efforts to provide ‘democracy support’ abroad.
Approaches to secularism
Opening the second Oslo Round Table panel, titled ‘Democracy and Diversity: Experiences From Around the Globe’, Delhi-based scholar and analyst Rajeev Bhargava focused on the relationship between democracy and secularism. While there is probably wide agreement that to remain broadly democratic, the state must not be dominated by any particular ethnic or religious component of a society, beyond that approaches to secularism differ widely in both theory and actual practice.
Western secularist models, Bhargava noted, have been shaped by their particular historical context, most usually of addressing the needs of predominantly uni-religious societies. In multi-faith societies such as India, however, the issues involved are rather different, for example of ensuring that no single religious group dominates all others present within the country.
Secularism in India has a number of important distinguishing features. Alongside a ‘deep diversity’ of religious traditions that makes multi-religiosity a integral part of social life rather than an optional liberal extra, the principle of a strict separation of church and state, so central to Western secularist thinking, is understood in the Asian subcontinent as implying what Bhargava called ‘principled distance’ rather than exclusion or strict neutrality with respect to religions.
While the Western and Indian models of secularism are rooted in a common commitment to democracy, beyond that it is the differences in practical approach that appear most striking. And at a time when the limitations inherent in the Western liberal secularist approach are becoming increasingly apparent in, for example, Northern societies struggling to come to grips with the needs of increasingly multi-religious populations, the existence of alternative approaches to secularism that work – as the Indian model is widely perceived to have done – may provide a much-needed source of practical inspiration.
Women’s rights in focus
While broadly agreeing that the Indian approach to diversity delivers on key democratic principles, actual practice, as prominent attorney at the Indian Supreme Court Sona Khan noted in her presentation, suggests a somewhat less equitable reality. In particular, Khan focused on the way in which the individual rights of half the population – women – are as she put it ‘routinely sacrificed on the altar of group rights’ in the country.
Having successfully fought for the separation of civil and religious law in landmark court cases in India and elsewhere over the years, Khan is well placed to make such critical assertions. In addition to being a fundamental principle of democracy, she argued, equal protection before the law also reinforces diversity via its emphasis on the importance of recognizing individual human rights.
The shock of the new
Theo Veenkamp, Dutch scholar and former senior Justice Ministry official
Returning to European experiences of addressing social diversity, Dutch scholar and former senior Justice Ministry official Theo Veenkamp outlined the challenges currently confronting the country in the wake of the high-profile 2004 murder of film maker Theo van Gogh. Combined with the domestic emergence of Pim Fontuyn’s anti-immigrant List party and internationally, of Osama bin Laden and al-Quaeda, he suggested, van Gogh’s assassination by a Dutch Moslem extremist has served to shake the country into a realization that the ‘tolerance of necessity’ that has characterized Dutch society since its mid-17th century emancipation from Spanish imperial dominance is in severe crisis.
In this sense Dutch society finds itself at a critical historical juncture. Will the country move towards what Veenkamp termed a more ‘substantive, constructive tolerance combined with a more mature democratic society? Or will it retreat, turtle-like, into an approach characterized by ‘basic co-existence’ and overall democratic retreat? The answer for the Netherlands – as perhaps for other Northern European countries with shifting national identities and small, recently diversified populations – remains uncertain.
Concluding the panel presentations Enrique Ojeda, Director of the Seville-based Three Cultures of the Mediterranean Foundation assessed Spain’s recent experience with its new-found social diversity. Following centuries of relative ethnic and social homogeneity, over the last thirty years Spain has experienced a significant influx of migrants chiefly from the Maghreb and Turkey. Whereas in 1996 official statistics indicated an ethnic minority population of around 400 000, by 2005 the figure had risen to around 10 per cent of the total 45 million inhabitants of the country.
With opinion polls indicating that immigration is the second most important issue – after the economy – for ordinary Spaniards, it seems clear that what Ojeda termed ‘fear of the other’ is indeed a critical aspect of the challenges of diversity confronting the country.
Cassam Uteem, International IDEA Board member and former President of Mauritius
Concluding the Round Table discussions, IDEA Board member and former Mauritian President Cassam Uteem noted that the issue of diversity is as old as humanity itself. And with diversity as with democracy, there is no one size fits all solution to the question of how best to manage and promote it, he suggested. In both the global North and South, a key challenge for democracies today is developing institutional frameworks that will give the fullest expression to human diversity. The Round Table provided a useful window into some key issues involved in this process, and the challenge now for IDEA is to develop activities that will further inform and support policy-making designed to keep the ‘turtle tendency’ at bay.
Mark Salter is a Senior Programme Officer in International IDEA’s Democracy Analysis and Assessment Unit.
Full coverage of the Oslo ‘Democracy and Diversity’ Round Table is available at www.idea.int
