I recently attended a discussion and debate hosted by the Faiths and Civil Society Unit
attached to Goldsmiths’ College. The discussion was with Ted Cantle, author of
the so-called ‘Cantle Report’ on Community
Cohesion, written in response to the Bradford Race Riots of 2001. The
discussion also included Adam Dinham, and Marjorie Mayor, both Professors at
Goldsmiths, Jenny Kartupelis, Director of the East of England Faiths Council
and Pragna Patel, Director of Southall
Black Sisters.
The main feature was Ted Cantle’s introduction to his latest
concept ‘Interculturalism’ whereby rather than seeking for people of different
faiths and races to merely peacefully coexist, we should be seeking for them
integrate and understand one another. Cultivating interculturalism, it was
explained, was important for a number of reasons. This piece will focus on just
one of those reasons. Cantle explained that with the end of the
cold war, there was no clear ideological opposition to commercialisation or
globalisation, but that recently it had emerged that faith groups were perhaps
the last bastion of such opposition. Implicitly one of many uses of interculturalism
was to improve public understanding of the way that faith groups resist
commercialisation and globalisation.
What came next was fascinating. A number of the speakers
that followed Cantle suggested that the problem with creating overarching structural
ideas like interculturalism is that they are too top-down and so neglect the
various ways in which local people resist commercialisation and globalisation.
Such structural approaches ended up forming their own oppressions. So Cantle’s
approach was too knee-jerk – too strong-handed.
Conversely, what had struck me was how weak Cantle’s
response was. When we consider the unprecedented power of global organisations
with greater GDPs than many countries, it seems that perhaps only international
political bodies and agreements, let alone national bodies, are capable of
holding of the forces of commercialisation and globalisation. And yet without
an ideological agenda to match the scale of the problem, it is all too easy for
these bodies and agreements to collapse under pressure. Just consider the
impossibility of achieving global agreements on corporate taxation. National
governments tell us that they simply cannot pressure businesses to work in the
interests of the common good lest those businesses move elsewhere. We need a
new ideological agenda.
In the face of all this, Cantle’s talk of interculturalism
seems far too weak. Of course, what Cantle is really suggesting is a sort of
compromise. He recognises that a strong top-down ideology might oppress people
just as much as do the forces of commercialisation and globalisation and so
instead he offers a concept whereby international bodies and governments can
work with local groups to stave off these forces together.
Who needs the king
anyhow?
It seems to me that those acting aggressive even towards
Cantle’s compromise are suffering from what I am describing as the Canute
Effect, but which is in fact its opposite. For rather than seeing the wise
king’s demonstration that he could not roll back the tide as being a metaphor
for the powerlessness of even he, they have taken it to mean that the king must
be worthless and so only the people in their various fragmented bodies can roll
back the tide.
Ted Cantle’s
‘Interculturalism: The New Era of Cohesion and Diversity’ will be published by
Palgrave Macmillan on December 11th