• The Impossibility of Cultural Domination

The Impossibility of Cultural Domination

This month coincides with the first anniversary of a culture related event, the significance of which is all but represented by a word which is the dividing line between culture and politics and affirms in strong terms that what is acceptable in world politics is unacceptable in culture.

·        After two bloody wars, the international community had felt the need for an international organization which seeks peace and renounces armed conflicts.

·        UNESCO was created out of the need to raise cultural anti-war awareness.

·        Respect for cultural pluralism enriches world culture and makes a greater contribution to world peace.

On 29 September 2004, the United States rejoined the organization concerned with world culture UNESCO (acronym of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). The United States had withdrawn from UNESCO on 31 December 1984, i.e. it remained out of it for almost twenty years. What was the withdrawal for? What was the return for? Is there greater significance than the requirements of politics, which in this case can't be reduced in any narrow political analysis away from the wide domain of culture?

 

Before we attempt to answer these questions it would be useful to remember how UNESCO was created and follow up its progress and identify its features as this may give us reasonable explanations for the withdrawal and return which may help us understand the general cultural significance of this story, far from any political polarization. Politics is changeable, but culture, which represents human civilization, is always in touch with the essence of man's life and activity.

From war to war

Looking into the idea of world peace requires that we start with the history of world wars. As UNESCO is one of the channels of the latest ideas of world peace, it is appropriate to return to the roots under these channels, the roots of yearning for peace which rose from the ashes of world wars.

The League of Nations was established in 1920 after World War I. It was designed to form an international organization for world peace to resolve international disputes through arbitration and to promote all forms of international cooperation. The League was suggested by US president Woodrow Wilson in his 'Fourteen Points' as part of the peace settlement for World War I. The 26-article League covenant was incorporated into the Versailles peace treaty, which the US did not ratify, and ironically, the US did not join the League because the US senate refused to approve it. The original member states of the League were 28 and the number eventually rose to 60. Some member states withdrew from the League and a major power the Soviet Union was expelled from it. However, the basic principles of the League were logically acceptable. The member states undertook to preserve the territorial integrity of all, and to submit international disputes to the League council. They also agreed that peacekeeping required reducing their national armed forces to such a minimum that ensured national security. The country which dealt a death blow to the League was Germany. Nazi Germany followed a policy of armament which ultimately led to the outbreak of World War II (1939 1945). Human losses in addition to other losses were tremendous. The US lost 292,000 people, Britain and Commonwealth countries 544,000, the Soviet Union 1,750,000, France 210,000, Germany 850,000, Italy 300,000, China 2,200,000 and Japan 1,500,000, i.e. nearly 15 million according to some statistics, to which are added the victims in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Baltic countries, Scandinavian countries, the victims of Nazi concentration camps and the quarter of a million victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. That makes the total loss of life in World War II reach as many as twenty million, each with a tragic story.

I meant to mention these figures to highlight the extent of global horror which that war caused. Despite political maneuverings, it was natural to give rise to a strong desire to establish a new international organization from the wreckage of the failed League of Nations. The United Nations was thus born to promote the spirit and values of world peace through mechanisms for the peaceful settlement of international disputes and international social and economic cooperation. Proposals for establishing the United Nations were discussed by representatives of the Soviet Union, Britain, China the US in the autumn of 1944 and the Charter was drawn up at the San Francisco Conference on 26 June 1945.

As the lessons of World War II were bitter and painful, the international community, whose participation in the UN increased, realized that political agreements alone did not keep world peace and felt the need to raise anti-war awareness, i.e. awareness of the logic of peaceful coexistence, which is by definition a cultural issue.

Thus UNESCO was created on 4th November 1946 as a special agency of the UN in terms of its mechanisms for making world peace. In other words, UNESCO addressed culture and intellectuals all over the world rather than politics and extremist politicians among whom were those who waged two world wars in one continent during a single century.

How was the approach, and how was the path?

Conditions and excuses

Dr Abdulsalam Almasaddi, the Arab intellectual, professor of linguistics at the Tunisian University, outlined the philosophy on which UNESCO was based in a single well-turned phrase. "The search for civilized harmony through cultural differences". This phrase acknowledges cultural diversity and equal respect for the cultures of all nations on our planet.

This broad concept in brief is: renunciation of domination the approach which UNESCO has taken since its inception. In this regard Dr Almasaddi says. "Successive directors-general of this international organization have attempted to put this philosophy into practice and considered it a sort of an unknown charter. When Ahmad Mokhtar Mbou became director-general on 14th November 1974 he followed his predecessors' policy. He was probably overzealous because he came from Africa, the continent which paid the highest tax of colonialism. He was from Senegal, a country with a rich heritage, charged by history with the task of reconciling differences: his people are predominantly Muslims, with French the official language." What Dr Almasaddi said was undoubtedly true, but it's not confined to Mokhtar Mbou, but extends to his successors. Let's consider US' reasons for the withdrawal and its conditions for return.

The US withdrew from UNSECO on grounds of its "over bureaucracy and financial mismanagement". The US was the contributor of almost a quarter of UNESCO's budget. This may be understandable with the logic behind it being the greater the payment, the bigger the influence; however, this is different as far as UNESCO is concerned; its resolutions are passed by majority voting, and this majority comes mainly from Third World countries in addition to some European countries with celebrated cultural and civilized weight. The reasons given by the US seemed to apply the logic of politics to culture, where influence is for the strongest. But there was another side of the story as indicated by the US condition for rejoining UNESCO, but that was not related to the latter's philosophy itself. Prior to its return to UNESCO, the US raised its objection to the report entitled "Our Creative Diversity".

Let's consider this report.

New international ethics

In last month's Editorial, which looked at the issue of reform from the perspective of culture, I referred to the report entitled "Our Creative Diversity" issued by the UN International Culture and Development Committee (1995), a translation of which entitled "Creative Human Diversity" has been published by the Supreme Council for Culture in Egypt. It was the vision conveyed in this important report that made me think up the idea that cultural reform can't be brought about unless we are aware that culture in its wider sense is not that of the elite alone, but is the sum total of a community's diverse cultures, heritage, present and future aspirations. Respect for cultural diversity is the essence of this important UNESCO report which was the outcome of painstaking research by a group of distinguished thinkers from around the world who investigated culture worldwide and outlined their vision in this report which serves as an international charter of culture and the starting point for various local cultures and sets out guidelines for respect for cultural diversity within the same community and among other communities. That might have been the basis for including a section in the report concerning the new international ethics. The section starts with an extract from a speech given by a participant at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro: "The world is our village, if a fire breaks out in one house, all ceilings in the village will be in danger. If anyone embarks on rebuilding, his effort will be totally symbolic. Solidarity must be the spirit of the age, and everyone must shoulder their public responsibility". In answer to the initial question: "Why are we in need of new international ethics?" he says: to create such conditions that help all humans worldwide live a decent life; huge human efforts and long-term changes in policies are necessary. That is a difficult task in the light of the many development-related problems the world is facing which need urgent solutions. But, as Arnold Toynbee put it: "Our age is the only generation since the dawn of history in which mankind has ever had the conviction that the advantages of civilization can be available to the entire human race."

According to the report, searching for new international ethics applies equally well to all those involved in world affairs, depending on the ability of people and governments to give up narrow personal interests and agree that the interests of mankind as a whole lie in accepting a set of common rights and duties. In the eyes of politics and narrow-minded politicians this vision looks utopian of course, but they look fair and logical in the eyes of culture and intellectuals. Hence the key role culture plays in the search for new international ethics, as envisaged by the report, as this approach is in itself a cultural activity which poses a number of questions: Who are we? What is our aim? What is the relationship between us and others and among all human beings? Those questions are essential ingredients of culture. Any attempt to formulate international ethics should take into consideration such things as people's moral experiments, past history and spiritual inclinations which all nations-small and large-enjoy. Accordingly, cultural treatment offers all humans equal opportunities to search for these new international ethics, a broad outline of which in given in the report as follows:

"Human rights" should be regarded as an inevitable criterion for international actions, i.e. common responsibility for protecting man's material and moral being, with all consequential requirements.

Democracy should be available to all, and minorities' rights should be protected within a framework of tolerance and cultural coexistence.

Equality of generations, i.e. the responsibility of the present generation for the future generations as expressed in sustainable development, and regarding all individuals and generations as members of one family chain.

The above were some ingredients of the new international ethics suggested by the UNESCO report which the US was not satisfied with upon considering rejoining the international organization. What is the deep meaning of this? What are its implications?

Upon informing UNESCO of its dissatisfaction with 'Our Creative Diversity' report, the US made its return conditional upon being a member of the executive office which acts as an administrative council, thus avoiding the surprises of voting. Some less populous member states were pressurized into withdrawing their nominations. Subsequently, the US resumed offering its 22% of UNESCO's budget, being $ 610m for the years 2004 and 2005.

Before attempting to grasp the meaning of the US' rejoining UNESCO along with its ideological objections, administration conditions, and financial contribution, which is definitely large, let's see what was UNESCO's performance like for twenty years without the US.

Despite the huge financial gap created by the US' withdrawal from UNESCO, that didn't stop its notable activities worldwide, particularly its successful projects to preserve heritage, historic landmarks, archaeological sites and cultural and environmental reserves in poorer countries in particular. Furthermore, UNESCO worked towards rewriting the history of science worldwide, thus recognizing the contributions of many scholars outside the West with ancient cultural backgrounds-Chinese, Indian, Arab and Persian who were alienated.

The most remarkable theoretical cultural contribution was its adherence to the concept of cultural exclusivity at conferences and forums, which made scores of countries, including major Arab countries and countries of the South known as "The Group of Seventy Seven", adopt this concept. The result of that successful effort was the production of the above-mentioned report

The US withdrew from UNESCO because it wanted to treat culture on the same footing as politics, i.e. translating its economic power into influence and domination, and its return implied its insistence on administrative influence. However, despite its objection to the philosophy of diversity, its return shows that there are wise people in the US who believe that international cultural effort can't be subject to the mechanisms of international political action. Culture is related to peoples' civilized, spiritual, psychological, and historical heritage, which can't be judged by the usual political criteria and balances of power or so we wish!

Sulaiman Al-Askary

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