Between the hammer of globalization and the anvil of nationalism: Is Europe's complex diversity under threat?

Introduction

The European Union (EU) faces a double challenge from above and from below: neo-liberal globalization has weakened most representative institutions, while nationalism, patriotism, localism and xenophobia seem to gain new legitimacy, partly as a response to the very crisis of neo-liberal globalization. In this respect, the EU project seems to remain unaccomplished in two of its key areas: first, as a set of institutional mechanisms dedicated to defend its citizens from the intrusion of unaccountable external forces; and, second, as an innovative model of governance designed to overcome the long-term legacy of intra-European nationalist frictions at the root of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. This article argues that the two trends should be considered simultaneously and therefore conceptualizes EU institution building in opposition to the nation-state’s inherited cultural norms.

In order to grasp the persisting impact of these tragic past experiences, one needs to be critically aware of the power of the past in shaping present-day perceptions. The umbrella concept of ‘cultural homogenization’ can offer hints towards theorizing notions of European identity, while understanding both the post-war emphasis on cultural pluralism and contrary trends towards the rejection of multiculturalism. Scrutinizing those theories of nationalism that stress cultural networks and communication flows, the article relates ‘cultural homogenization’, as a policy of standardization aimed at reinforcing the link between state and culture, to the previous dominance of exclusivist state-building founded on principles incompatible with those of the EU. Modern history abounds with examples of discriminatory legislation directed against specific cultural practices and minority languages. In the eyes of many leaders, conformity and standardization meant not only functionality and efficiency, but also obedience to common laws. Insofar as the goal was to impose the culture of the dominant elite on the rest of the citizenry, it consisted partly of a top-down process where the state sought to nationalize ‘the masses’ and partly of the active collaboration of a cohort of enthusiast collaborators. These ‘willing executioners’ of state directives included most prominently primary and secondary schoolteachers and various types of bureaucrats and civil servants, as well as those eventually schooled through the more comprehensive and life-changing experience of barrack and front (Conversi, 2007, 2008). This article does not focus on the actual implementation of such binding mechanisms, that is, on how the ‘chain of command’ allowed cultural homogenization to spread amongst larger and larger sections of the population, but on the consequences of the breakdown of previous cultural pluralism and its impact on public perceptions of homogeneity at a time when culture was being equated with ethnicity.

Cultural homogenization needs to be distinguished from cultural homogeneity: Whereas the social process of homogenization is historically documentable, homogeneity per se is an ideological construct. The notion of human homogeneity presupposes the existence of a unified, organic community and does not describe an actual phenomenon. Although the concept of cultural homogenization remains under-theorized in the social and political sciences, a few analyses have explored its historical development throughout the modern age (Conversi, 2007, 2008, 2010a,b; Rae, 2002).

Before expanding our argument about the relationship between European identity and the legacy of cultural homogenization (and contrasting institutional arrangements), we need to place them within those approaches that have merged in the intersection between state-building and nationalism theories. The first section situates the article’s core argument within the ongoing discussion on European identity and institutions, emphasizing the relationship between communication flows, nationalist state-building and the maintenance of cultural diversity as opposed to cultural homogenization. It therefore explores how the legacy of the past impinges on perceptions of national and European identity, particularly linking cultural homogenisation with political instability.

Theorizing European nationalisms and the legacy of cultural homogenization

Two distinct views on European identity politics can be identified here. One view stipulates that the EU would need a shared identity in order to become a viable political unit and that such identity must be based on some shared symbolic and cultural elements (Smith, 1998, 2009). The opposing view sees identity as a major distraction from the more pressing problems of building shared viable and legitimate institutions (Stråth, 2002). What can be described as the culturalist argument sees identity as a necessary tool of political legitimacy, whereas a more instititutionalist argument sees institutions as shaping citizenship over and above particularistic identity concerns in a more direct and rational way, which in itself would bestow the needed legitimacy to the European project. A condensed version of the culturalist vision can be identified in Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach, which au fond argues that myth–symbol complexes of common descent are necessary for the maintenance of cohesive societies, although myths cannot be artificially invented (Smith, 2004, 2009). In particular, myths are necessary to the continuing existence of nations and thus play a central role in nationalist mobilizations. Since ethnosymbolists also argue that nations are the most important communities of modern times, they see the EU as lacking teeth, that is, those essential overarching attributes needed to avoid a legitimacy deficit. This bottom-up approach was largely framed in contrast to more established top-down visions of identities and institution building. Karl Deutsch and other ‘nation-building’ scholars once argued that an improvement of transactions and communication flows across the polity would inevitably favour regional integration by building new social networks and reinforcing pre-existing horizontal contacts (Deutsch, 1953). Deutsch’s communication theory thus focuses on human transactions, that is, on cultural and economic exchanges between humans within an established and politically bounded territory, usually the nation-state. ¹

A notorious problem with nation-building theory was its blind identification between state and nation, thus espousing and legitimising the ideology of ‘nation-statism’. Long ago, Walker Connor had warned against the risk of confusing the two terms, masterfully describing how ‘nation-states’ are mental constructs with scant resemblance to anthropological reality. In fact, the overwhelming majority of states in the world are multi-national, multi-ethnic and culturally plural, therefore not reflecting mainstream perceptions of internal homogeneity (Connor, 1969, 1972; Conversi, 2004). Not too differently from state nationalists, a generation of ‘nation-building’ scholars a-la Deutsch thought that shared identities could be fabricated from above by fostering inter-connectedness through the deliberate cultivation of common allegiances. But, in principle, this argument is exportable beyond the nation-state: communication theory and Deutsche himself did not exclude the possibility of a wider regional networks of communication and common interest like the EU, but was more often applied to state- and nation-building.

Since the 1980s, Anthony D. Smith (1998, 2004, 2009) and other social historians began to argue the opposite view, namely that nations are built layer upon layer over the centuries around pre-existing ethnic cores based on powerful, lasting myth–symbol complexes transmitted from one generation to the next. Nearly in parallel, Eugene Weber’s (1976) milestone work on ‘peasants into Frenchmen’ fustigated the common cliché that France, the quintessential prototype of ‘successful’ top-down nation-building, could vaunt an appreciable pedigree of shared national consciousness. Most Frenchmen stumbled upon their common Frenchness by chance or fate notably through the life-changing trauma of First World War, with its long trail of mass death, uprooting and disease. Through mass conscription, citizens experienced nationhood by being forcibly removed from their loved ones, homes and ancestral territories – a strategy which Benito Mussolini consciously pursued as he claimed that war remained his tool of choice to ‘incorporate the peasants’ and complete the ‘nationalization of the masses’ (Mosse, 1975). Thus, while Smith’s view of nationalism’s longue durée is at odd with Weber’s short time-span of nationhood, both agreed that top-down projects of nation-building are ultimately unfeasible, except under the extreme circumstances of war.

If even France, the nation-state par excellence, experienced a late identity formation, most other self-proclaimed nation-states did not fare better. Beyond France, the concept of ‘nation-building’ was predicated on the false assumption that nation-states were either internally homogeneous or could be made so with a bit of socio-cultural engineering. Walker Connor observed that, among the 132 sovereign states that existed in 1971, only 12 (9.1%) could be considered to represent ethnically homogeneous populations (possibly Iceland, Portugal, the two Koreas and a few microstates): most of the UN’s member countries did not fit the nation-state ideal type which therefore remained an unaccomplished, indeed impossible, project. ² Therefore, ‘nation’ and state have been historically and culturally misaligned and politically in tension. In this way, the dialectical interplay between nation and state routinely underwrites the persistence of differences and divisions within the ‘nation-state’. Yet, the drive to eliminate these differences has prevailed throughout the age of state centralization, so that ‘nation-statism’ became ‘the dominant political ideology of the twentieth century,… fascism being merely its most extreme variety’ (Mann, 2004: 2, 13–30). The term ‘nation-statism’ underlines the powerful merging of nationalist ideology with the central state. It can thus be distinguished from the more general and all-encompassing concept of nationalism, normally used to indicate a broader set of phenomena, including movements associated with stateless nations. Both Connor’s ‘reverse modernization theory’ and Smith’s ‘ethnosymbolism’ seemed to be vindicated by dramatic international events accompanying the collapse of the Soviet Union and other socialist states, where the efforts to homogenise and ‘massify’ internal populations had been at work and sustained over several decades. The ensuing eruption of ethnic conflict among stateless nations and the achievement of statehood by many aspirant nations confirmed that communication theory could not tell the whole story and was missing crucial clues. Even in the case of open policies of social and ‘cultural engineering’, as in the Soviet Union and Turkey, centralist elites soon clashed with the mobilization of ethnic minorities, as in the Baltic republics and in Turkey’s Kurdistan. ³ In the case of supra-national polities, cultural homogenization was a recipe for further fragmentation, as indicated by the historical experience of Central European empires attempting to impose a dominant culture.

As a paradigmatic supra-national institution, the EU would be unable to impose ‘old style’ standardizing norms in the field of, say, language and other cultural practices, if these did not resonate with its component parts and broader constituencies. Unitary symbols devoid of myth-carrying power have less mobilizing potential than national mythical complexes which usually resonate at the grassroots level with local and national identities (Smith, 2004, 2009). Artificially created supra-national symbols may have therefore a less unitary appeal than national ones: for instance, Soviet symbols were promptly dropped by non-Russian nationalities, and, somewhat reticently, by most Russians as well (Martin, 2001). In an overtly democratic context, the shared discourse which has been tailored around EU symbols like the European Union flag, Europe Day, or the Ode to Joy (the European Union anthem), aim to create a common pan-European multi-narrative, which ethno-symbolists do not recognize as sufficiently compelling or authoritative (Elgenius, 2011: 76–77, 88, 146, 161–165, 185, 192). This symbolic vacuum may provide both an opportunity for multiculturalism to flourish and, without the diffusion of an appropriate political culture, a potential threat to cultural diversity from the recrudescent forces of homogenizing nationalism.

So far, this section has served to introduce the issue of nations as ‘preordained’ constituting blocks of European identity and, therefore, to the difficulty of building fully representative institutions if majoritarian models persist that exclude minorities. Is this inevitable or there are margins of choice for introducing human agency in the form of specific policies enhancing cultural diversity? The next two sections first observe how the persisting legacy of the nation-state still restrains the full development of pluralist policies, and then discuss the existing EU-level institutional mechanisms countering these trends.

Dealing with the violent legacy of the nation-state

The EU’s collective memory is pervaded by notions of uncertainty, fear, aggression, boundary-building and cultural destruction: ‘The legacies of history can still be seen in a wide range of social attitudes, cultural practices, economic and demographic patterns, and institutional rules, and these lingering effects continue to obstruct efforts to build genuinely inclusive societies of equal citizens’ (Bashir and Kymlicka, 2008: 1). But the legacy of these past insecurities still needs to be fully dissected. Political instability and cultural homogenization followed parallel historical paths. The slow build-up of international chaos leading to First World War and Second World War entailed most often a process of internal diversity elimination, culminating with Europe’s self-destruction during and between the two wars.

The most heinous mass crimes of the century were committed either during First World War or in its aftermath, as the war spawned fascism, communism, environmental destruction, further cultural homogenization, genocide and innumerable related conflicts and wars, culminating with Second World War. Possibly, if First World War had not occurred, the principles of coexistence and pluralism could have survived intact, and even triumphed in some countries (Fishman, 2012). The year 1914 is therefore a watershed in human history. Indeed, the extreme war conditions allowed an unprecedented control by central state elites, establishing totalitarianism as a way of life well before the term ‘totalitarianism’ could even be theorized and politically implemented by fascism (Conversi, 2012b,c).

Movements of mass killing were nevertheless often preceded by decades-long attempts to streamline and control internal populations through aggressive policies of cultural assimilation (Conversi, 2008). Throughout this period, culture was considered to be an indissoluble attribute of ethnicity and nationhood. Therefore, cultural diversity was seen as a threat to state integrity.

This mindset gradually and substantially changed, thanks to the efforts towards greater European integration. Optimists describe the era of homogeneous nation-states as a just brief interlude and, in this way, contemporary EU is seen to reconnect with a previously existing history of inter-ethnic mixing and widespread cultural diversity. The next section assesses how European integration policies do partly reconnect with a pre-nationalist tradition of greater cultural diversity, which was, however, lost during the nationalizing trend culminating with First World War and Second World War.

From cultural autonomy to multicultural citizenship

Before the advent of the Western nationalizing nation-state, most political systems enshrined various forms of cultural, religious and ethnic pluralism, some including various levels of political autonomy. These patterns of coexistence slowly collapsed after the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), culminating with Napoleon’s campaigns across Europe, which forever changed the continent’s political landscape (1803–1815). In the following decades, nearly all multinational states were simultaneously subjected to political and cultural centralization and powerful centrifugal forces. Some voices warned that the multi-ethnic Central European Empires could only survive if they maintained institutions of community autonomy and avoided excessive state intervention in the realm of culture. As nationalist pressures spiralled out of control in the new century, Karl Renner (1870–1950), Otto Bauer (1881–1938) and other Austro-Marxists theorized the principle of ‘national cultural autonomy’ (NCA) within the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Bowring, 2005; Nimni, 2007). Varieties of cultural autonomy were also practised within the Ottoman Empire till the advent of Turkish nationalism (Barkey, 2005), which was largely a response to the carving up of the Ottoman lands by Western powers (Britain, Russia, Spain, France and, from 1911, Italy) and their regional nationalist allies. In most of continental Europe, First World War obliterated the principles of NCA as a widespread possibility, leaving nationalist solutions to ethnic diversity, such as repression and ethnic cleansing, in the ascendant. In the aftermath of the war, NCA was selectively applied only within a few eastern European countries, notably Estonia, and only offered to certain minorities (Núñez Seixas, 2001; Roach, 2005: 76–78; Smith, 2010).

After the Second World War and the Cold War, the NCA principle had to face the consecutive challenges of anti-colonialism, ethnic separatism and state reassertion. The practice of cultural autonomy contained many of the core ideas currently understood under the term ‘multiculturalism’ (Kymlicka, 2005; Schwarzmantel, 2005). It is for this reason that, at least since the 1990s, it has experienced a discrete revival (Roach, 2005; Smith, 2010). ⁴ Yet, multiculturalism is a broad concept developed within political philosophy to address the emergence of specific ethical needs concerning the recognition of cultural groups within contemporary liberal democracies. Although theorists of multiculturalism have focused ‘on the normative principles for managing ethnocultural diversity in a liberal democracy’ (Kymlicka, 2000: 183), the task of pluralist institution-building is largely left to another school of political theory, that of consociational democracy. The political principle of consociationalism as a form of power-sharing is possibly the most important inheritor of the NCA principle (McGarry and Moore, 2005). The literature on consociationalism, which entails a clear rejection of ethnic majoritarianism, is vast. Following the milestone work of Arend Lijphart (1985), there is an extensive body of literature extolling the virtue of ‘consociational democracy’ in clear opposition to majoritarian democracy (Crepaz et al., 2000). Long-term stability in deeply divided societies characterized by ethnic segmentation is seen as a consequence of non-majoritarian institution-building endowed with non-majoritarian mechanisms for conflict resolution. While Elazar (1985) argued that consociationalism, like federalism, is founded on ‘compound majoritarianism’ as an attempt to accommodate pluralism in a democratic setting, for Lijphart (1985), both consociationalism and federalism are non-majoritarian in nature. This debate has produced a wealth of data, controversies and widely respected policy recommendations (Coakley, 2013: 229–239). However, while consociational approaches are essential to a well-informed critique of majoritarian democracy, they focus much more on inductive operationalization than on broader principles and abstraction (Andeweg, 2000). Policy recommendations are central to this approach, sometimes highlighting the need for consociational engineering as the most promising way to achieve stable democracy. ⁵

From pillarization to consociation

Lijphart’s theory of consociationalism was partly inspired by the Dutch experience of ‘pillarization’: the origins of a ‘pillarized’ civil society date back to the democratization process of nineteenth-century Belgium and the Netherlands (Ertman, 2000). ⁶ These two countries are, together with Luxembourg, the three original members of the first customs union, Benelux, which after 1951 evolved and expanded into the current EU. It is therefore not surprising that some of these key institutional features have been inherited by, or carried on into, the EU. ⁷

Europe has tentatively been described as offering a ‘consociational’ framework, indeed as a new form of ‘inter-state consociation’ (Costa and Magnette, 2003). The very multilateral nature of the EU makes consociational democracy a more predictable option either in areas characterized by long-standing conflicts or in order to prevent the radicalization of simmering ones. For instance, Papadopoulos and Magnette (2010) argue that the EU’s consociational disposition makes compromises indispensable, reducing the margins for the rise of Euroscepticism and populism, while increasing its long-term governability and integrative capacity. ⁸ However, the current crisis of democracy poses a considerable challenge to this capacity, as this malleability may also provide a structure of opportunities suitable for the rise of Euroscepticism and populism. Significantly, some of the most Eurosceptic countries like England, Denmark and Sweden have a tradition in which only majority rule is democratically legitimate. Moreover, Europhobic governments, like that of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary, have unlimited preferences for majoritarian practices and politics, having neglected the country’s brief experiment with limited forms of cultural autonomy (Dobos, 2007). In these majoritarian countries, EU-level consociational deal-making, multilateralism and compromises tend therefore to encourage Euroscepticism and populism, rather than inhibiting them.

Although this article focuses mostly on consociationalism, there are other forms of group representation that play an important role in European politics. These include ‘symmetric’ and asymmetric forms of federalism, autonomism and territorial autonomy, cultural rights, or specific fiscal agreements, like the one existing between the separate Basque Provinces and Madrid (Conversi, 1997). All these forms of self-government or group representation contribute to adopt specific policies in the field of culture and cultural rights.

However, some scholars claim that none of these can be selected as the core identificational trait of EU governance: while the EU shows several hallmarks of federalism and consociationalism, a contrasting assessment recognizes that ‘the EU… escapes labels, such as nation, state, empire, region, federation, that form the conventional toolkit of political science… [while it] challenges the long-standing division in political science between politics within countries… and politics among countries’ (Hooghe and Marks, 2008: 108). ⁹ Such a ‘un-definition’ has both advantages and disadvantages: If the EU can ‘travel at great velocity’, it may also quickly unfold and unravel.

Given its weakness, how is the EU supposed to counteract fissiparous anti-European xenophobia? The issue remains the multi-level governance of ethnic and cultural diversity, while holding in check intolerance and exclusion, whose persistence is incompatible in the long term with the European project. The next section looks at how current institutional mechanisms can deal with the persisting legacy of cultural homogenization as expressed through the longing for homogeneous national spaces, in particular, noting the persisting challenge of right-wing nationalism and populism, despite joint European efforts to stem these with various measures.

Tackling mono-culturalism and diversity denial

Mono-culturalism, diversity denial and xenophobia can be prevented in various ways before they can cause serious damage: For instance, containment policies have been suggested within a deliberative model of democracy in order to pre-empt the expansion of radical right parties (Rummens and Abts, 2010). However, these can hardly halt the rise and consolidation of populist regimes prone to radicalize public opinion, as with the case of Silvio Berlusconi and Viktor Orbán. In fact, a less optimistic and bleaker picture could describe current democratic institutions as unable to stem the tide of populist trends that are deeply inimical to cultural pluralism. In majoritarian systems, former ultra-nationalist ‘Cinderellas’ have allied with dominant centre-right parties once changes in the political opportunities structure allowed the legitimation and ‘mainstreaming’ of far right parties. Following the diffusion of US-inspired neo-conservatism, this mutation towards ‘unscrupulous’ majoritarianism was partly ‘engineered by a centre-right willing to rely on former pariahs for legislative majorities’ (Bale, 2003). As a consequence, the political spectrum of majoritarian systems has shifted further to the right as the centre-right has adopted many of the populist and ultra-nationalist themes, legitimising them while increasing both their overall appeal and the number of seats thus captured by ‘an expanded right bloc’. These right-wing blocs often draw upon homogeneous visions of nationhood as a common bond. ¹⁰ As well synthesized by Bale, ‘once in office, the centre-right has demonstrated its commitment to getting tough on immigration, crime and welfare abuse, not least to distract from a somewhat surprising turn toward market liberalism’ (Bale, 2003). This assertion will be discussed more in detail later on, as the second part of the article expands on how corporate elites have eagerly chaperoned the overall shift to the right just when their neoliberal policies began to wreak havoc on political institutions. The de-regulatory character of neo-liberal globalization was not seriously challenged mostly because political elites could use the emotional platform of an expanded new right as a diversionary strategy to channel away potential criticism of the long-term implications of their economic choices.

In Europe, this new sombre intolerant imagery recall pre-First World War moods more than the ‘celebratory tone of identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s’, a shift that under the cover of the ‘war on terror’ degenerated into a ‘savage attack on multiculturalism’ (Siapera, 2010: 2). ¹¹

By early 2013, EU institutions had not yet succumbed to the backlash of these forces. Is it possible to identify which institutional arrangements are more likely to stem the drift towards intolerance and exclusion in those areas where culture and ethnicity merge? The next section focuses on one specific set of institutional mechanisms that should, in principle, favour multiple forms of pluralism.

Can subsidiarity lend a hand to cultural diversity?

How can the tension between pluralism and homogenization be overcome once the entrenchment of political positions challenges existing institutional arrangements? This section briefly explores whether the principle of subsidiarity might offer an answer, even though it leaves the majoritarian legacy of many member-states unscathed. If state- and sub-state nations remain the EU’s building blocks, their cultural autonomy tends to be preserved within the existing institutional framework. Subsidiarity requires that, if a conflict emerges amongst two hierarchically differentiated levels of multi-governance, matters ought to be sorted out at the lowest possible level. Brussels or the state capital should in these cases play a subsidiary role, dependent on the decisions taken by the more local authority, confirming the federal and consociational principle of the rights of the parts over the whole. Yet, given the differential capacity and strength of each level of governance, a consociational (rather than a federal) principle is de facto applied through subsidiarity. Can this function to foster and intuitionalise cultural pluralism?

In principle, subsidiarity can still be bent to serve homogenizing aspirations, particularly if there is a grassroots demand for these at the local elite level. In fact, this demand is supplied by the generalized, largely media-induced, fear of the other, which has engulfed the political discourse first at the grassroots, then at the political vertex, leading to an apparently ‘spontaneous’ reaction against multiculturalism (Vertovec and Wessendorf, 2010). As one of the guiding principles of European Union Law, subsidiarity proclaims that: ‘in areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Union shall act only if and in so far as the objectives of the intended action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level, but can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved at Union level' (Treaties, 2010: 6). The division of tasks according to subsidiarity seems rather independent from the EU’s relationships with, and management of, cultural diversity, which, when the subsidiarity principle is fully applied would allow the local level the possibility of implementing its own decisions also in terms of diversity management. In fact the Maastricht Treaty’s (1992) introduction of the subsidiarity principle into EU law served to reinforce the role of the Committee of the Regions (CoR), although the latter’s ‘power’ remain highly subordinated to that of other institutions, particularly in countries where majoritarianism prevails (Rose-Ackerman and Lindseth, 2011: 163). In other areas, subsidiarity translates itself into forms of ‘power sharing’ or consociationalism reaching both the EU and the state level.

However, it remains a weak principle in respect to more consolidate and powerful institutional frameworks. The rock-solid reality of existing nation-states with their constituencies easily mobilized through populism and nationalism remains the major stumbling block towards more efficient and representative European institution-building, making consensus particularly difficult to achieve during times of crisis. While a key impediment to further pluralist interaction comes from the past legacy of cultural homogenization at the state level, persisting institutional practices, particularly state-level majoritarianism, contribute to maintain perceptions of impending homogenization even through various subsidiary levels of government (Conversi, 2012a).

EU multi-level governance allows for diverging and often contrasting possibilities and solutions, yet many of its constituent states are still internally run on the basis of territorially grounded majoritarianism. For instance, the hegemonic discourse prevailing across the political spectrum in Denmark intends democracy as the expression of a homogeneous, organicist and solidaristic community, the Danish people (Haahr, 2003). Given Denmark’s historical legacy as a highly homogenous society, at least until the 1960s (Kærgård, 2010), an ethnic majoritarian vision still permeates political discourses implying exclusive unifying traits which serve as boundary markers and, in the end, have led to a backlash against multiculturalism (Hedetoft, 2010). Majoritarian conceptions of democracy as based on a single homogeneous people also clash with the accepted, but contrasting, wisdom that there is no homogeneous European people (Haahr, 2003).

In this section, we saw how the legacy of the homogenizing nation-state, particularly in majoritarian contexts, makes it difficult to implement cultural pluralism and multicultural practices. In the next section, we explore a broader but related set of problems deeply linked to representative politics and institution-building in the cultural field. Here, and throughout the second part of the article, I connect the continuing prominence of dominant ethnic nationalisms to the advent of neo-liberal policies and ideologies, arguing that their combination may undermine the smooth functioning of European politics at various levels through a return to populism and nationalism.

Neo-liberal globalization and the spectre of social cohesion

How far do neo-liberal globalization and nationalism strengthen or weaken each other? As neo-liberal policies have undermined the decision-making power of the nation state and its majorities, they have partially reinforced both sub-state nationalism and supra-state politics. On the one hand, the changed context has provided novel opportunities for minority nations to advance differentialist claims that are no longer based on the homogeneous concept of the nation-state. On the other hand, the erosion of representative political institutions as a consequence of globalization has contributed to a potential backlash against cultural difference and a desire to revert to past notions of homogeneity – and these are inevitably bound to affect indigenous minorities as well. One prominent victim of the onslaught has been multiculturalism, which has experienced a growing backlash through deepening stages of globalization, more particularly since the beginning of the ‘global war on terror’. In this way, the militarization of neo-liberal globalization has weakened pluralism by ‘carrying away many of the institutions and practices of multi-culturalism that had developed over the previous two to three decades’ (Castles, 2011: 23).

Some authors have noticed how a focus on social cohesion conceals the broader return to a desired homogeneity, which, although not expressed in such sharp terms as in the heydays of the nation state, offers new spaces of manoeuvre to essentialist visions of nationhood. The implications may include a serious backlash against diversity in general. Of course, social or community cohesion does not necessarily imply a rejection of multiculturalism per se, but it is increasingly accompanied by negative perceptions of cultural and ethnic diversity. Although not all policies of social cohesion need to entail difference denial, the very term ‘cohesion’ refers to a nationally based, implicitly homogenous (‘coherent’) notion of citizenship. This is reflected in the widespread idea that, as ‘ethnic diversity correlates negatively with generalized trust,… trust is developed more easily between actors resembling one another’ (as cited by Holtug, 2010: 441). This bias against cultural diversity has been dismissed by various works and in various areas, as in anthropology (Harrison, 2002, 2003) and in political science (Laitin, 2007). What matters instead is the existence of ‘trust-inducing’ values which are not culturally specific and may transcend visible and less visible cultural differences (Holtug, 2010). Research on the interfaces between human behaviour and socio-political issues has rather shown a reverse trend in that, contrary to common prejudice, cultural similarity can also lead to conflict. For instance, a conflictive relationship between culturally similar groups has been identified in the case of highly skilled German immigrants residing in German-speaking Switzerland (Helbling, 2011). In other words, trust cannot simply be built on the basis of either cultural similarity or ethnic commonality, but it is largely independent of both of them.

Moreover, such trust amongst cultural minorities can be more easily achieved if the political institutions are seen as supporting diversity, pluralism and coexistence. This is particularly the case within those multinational and culturally plural states in which the preservation of one or more regional/national cultures is felt to be essential to the core identity of the corresponding groups. An excessive emphasis on state-level identity politics and the injunctions of social cohesion may well result in a collapse of trust. In other words, we need to question ‘the assumption that shared culture, or affiliation to shared cultural symbols, is necessarily a source of social cohesion’ (Harrison, 2002: 211).

The legacy of the nation-state is doubly negative in this field: while the nation-state’s holistic majoritarian format is unlikely to appeal to minorities, neoliberal globalization has weakened its representativeness and legitimacy among majorities as well. Therefore, neither majority nor minorities can be expected to put their trust in the political institutions of a nation-state whose symbolic appeal has been eroded by globalization and whose past obsession with cultural homogeneity casts a long shadow amongst its cultural minorities. Rather than promoting trust, the very emphasis on social cohesion as an avenue to integration and full citizenship risks to be founded on holistic, past-looking ‘presumptions that may well be seen to induce conflicts’ (Lithman, 2010: 501), precisely because ‘social cohesion is often being redefined to equate with homogeneity and assimilation.’ (Vasta, 2010: 503).

Both within and outside the EU, the challenge to multiculturalism has become particularly strident in the field of language rights. The persistence of ethnic, political and cultural majoritarianism in many contemporary democracies shaped by the negative legacy of the nation-state has led to the adoption of ‘restrictive majoritarian language policies’, which fail to change ‘the language preferences of the state and civil society’ (May, 2003, 2012: 151). As language is simultaneously a tool of interaction and a core value of modern nationalism, the past drift towards the ‘minoritization’ of languages and cultures lingers on, reproducing ‘the static, closed and essentialist view of the nation state, as forever culturally and linguistically homogeneous, that is the product of nationalism’ (May, 2011: 168).

These are persisting patterns dating back at least to the French revolution and the consolidation of state-sponsored assimilationism, which, as Eugen Weber masterly described, culminated under the extreme uprooting conditions of First World War (Weber, 1976). The article finally explores the interaction between the legacy of majoritarian/exclusivist democracy and the impact of neo-liberal globalization. ¹² It focuses first on the tangible legacy of state-led cultural homogenization, both in terms of perceptions and ongoing cultural policies in majoritarian democracies; second, it concentrates on the present impact of neo-liberal marketization with its weakening effects on a host of institutions both above and below the nation-state level. The goal is to study and contrast the simultaneous impact of ‘nation-statism’ and neo-liberal globalization on cultural diversity.

The neoliberal erosion of democratic institutions and the fate of cultural minorities’

According to an increasingly accepted viewpoint, Europe’s post-2008 economic, financial and political woes largely derive from the destructive impact of neo-liberal de-regulation. In its most extreme forms of ‘market fundamentalism’, globalization has been linked since the 1980s to the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the US Treasury Department, the World Bank, and other institutions belonging to the so-called ‘Washington consensus’ (Stiglitz, 2002). An exploration and description of the socio-political forces that drive the project of neo-liberal globalization is beyond the intended scope and limits of this article – although I expand later on their implications for the reproduction of diverse cultural identities.

Since the mid-1980s, de-regulation, privatization and liberalization have been either passively accepted or imposed upon representative institutions and law-enforcement bodies. In the sphere of cultural diversity, the new rules deeply affected the media markets and entertainment industry: Through the latter’s subversion of small- and large-scale cultural economies and the neoliberal retrenchment of the state, the ‘nation’ container has been emptied of its core cultural content. That meant both that the central state lost some crucial prerogatives in the cultural sphere and that a window of opportunity opened up for sub-state nations to claim or build their own cultural policies. Although homogenizing efforts by the nation-state have persisted in several cases, they have lost ground to both sub-state actors and trans-national corporations (TNCs). At the same time, states have become largely unable or unwilling to defend the cultural spaces and markets of their constituencies from more powerful corporate forces. In practice, de-regulation meant re-regulation by international, mostly US-based, financial organizations and law-enforcing agencies. In the cultural sphere, the ‘Washington consensus’ increasingly manifested itself as a sort of ‘Hollywood consensus’, where the advance of the US entertainment industry became virtually ‘irresistible’ in most fields of culture, economy and mass consumption (De Grazia, 2005). Although communication scholars may suggest that ‘Americanisation’ depends on the nature of media regimes, there is broad agreement that cultural diversity has decreased in the area of mass consumption, while it has possibly increased within the boundaries of the nation-state, just as the latter has lost control over its territory’s ‘cultural content’ (Schlesinger, 1997).

As I argued elsewhere (Conversi, 2012a), the effects can be particularly disruptive in countries where majoritarian representative principles prevail. In theory, the existence of autonomous regional institutions could allow the development of locally regulated regional media, inspiring a wealth of cultural production in various fields, particularly in the field of minority language broadcasting (Cormack, 2000). In fact, regional-level subsidisation has allowed a limited flourishing of local cultural productions, as well as a more bilateral circulation of truly international (non-US) commodities and goods (Schlesinger, 1997). However, neither regional nor state governments have been able to regain control over various areas, from financial matters and the entertainment industry to the mass media and cultural politics. This absence of control was laid bare during the political and economic crisis that openly erupted in the EU in 2011. ¹³

Going back to Deutsche’s transactional approach, cultural aspects of his communication theory can be applied to the EU to question taken-for-granted notions of identity ‘beyond the nation-state’. Trans-European inter-cultural contacts have hardly developed to a level where they can have a significant impact on popular attitudes amongst broader sections of the population, including voting majorities, who can be more easily captivated by the US-led entertainment industry and by the appeal of xenophobic revanchism than by the EU’s sustained efforts at bridge-building (Conversi, 2010b, 2012a). In line with communication theory’s emphasis on building networks of cultural exchanges, the insufficiency of a shared European (indeed, cosmopolitan) space or meeting point of national and non- national cultures is a severe hindrance to the whole integration process. If the politics of cultural exchanges and intercultural encounters had been expanded in more substantial areas, particularly through the mass media, a much broader spectrum of the European public might have shared the same levels of attachment to Europe. However, this has hardly been possible due to the global de-regulation requirement of the media market, which has most often led to an absolute predominance of US entertainment industries and their cultural content (Conversi, 2009, 2010b).

In other words, media de-regulation impelled by neoliberal globalization has disempowered not only cultural minorities, but also cultural majorities (Tardif, 2008; Tardif and Farchy, 2006; Warnier, 1999). It has thus deeply eroded cultural diversity at multiple political levels, including amongst dominant cultures (Conversi, 2009, 2010b). Some authors are aware of the inner tensions between neo-liberal globalization as largely imposed upon European politics and the need to preserve Europe’s cultural heritage. For Kraus, ‘the language of the market does not necessarily enter the scene as the harmonious counterpart of the language of diversity. To some extent, processes of market integration in an unbounded economy have homogenizing consequences’ (Kraus, 2012: 15). ¹⁴ Given the anti-regulatory character of globalization, the European ‘emphasis on individual economic freedom largely offsets EU initiatives linked to maintaining regional cultural diversity’ (Biscoe, 2001: 57). Neo-liberal globalization empties the normative content of pluralist politics, so that that EU’s efforts in this direction are ‘mainly of symbolic importance’ and tensions result ‘from the EU's dual objectives of furthering integration whilst maintaining regional cultural diversity’ (Biscoe, 2001: 57). In the field of language, the existing tension between the rules of the ‘market’ and the need to protect cultural and linguistic minorities is often emerging. For instance, the European Court of Justice frequently struggles to find a balance between the principle of minimum state intervention and the linguistic policies at the state or sub-state level (Urrutia, 2012). As I have argued, cultural complexity and diversity at the beginning of the twenty-first century are not so much mediated or threatened by the nation-state, as they are deeply conditioned by globalization, particularly when the latter is imbued by neoliberal laissez-faire ideology deeply suspicious of any form of official cultural protection.

The EU has possibly shown more efficiency in tackling corporate abuse in various areas than most of its member states. For instance, while US laws have been used to overhaul the European ban on genetically modified food and the ban has withstood multiple pressures, by 2010 a few states had already surrendered to corporate demands in various sectors, like the cultivation of biotech corn. ¹⁵ On the other hand, while the concept and practices of a ‘social Europe’ have provided a relative bulwark against the most extreme forces of market fundamentalism (Albers et al., 2006), EU institutions seem to have performed better than most state actors to limit the damage inflicted by the seemingly uncontrollable spread of corporate power. Thus, while the ethic of ‘corporate responsibility’ is often flagged at the political level, corporate de-responsibilization has simultaneously attempted to twist EU and national legal systems, reaching well beyond the financial elites and the entertainment industry, for instance into mass food consumption and health habits. Whereas large industrial and financial organizations have often been able to corner the separate governments of most member states, EU inter-governmental institutions have shown more resilience and coordination capacity in protecting citizens’ and consumers’ rights from the corporate takeover of socio-political decision-making. However, as I have indicated, there is scant evidence that EU institutions have the competence to offer a sufficiently organized defence against at least some of the most homogenizing practices emanating from economic and cultural globalization. For instance, no comprehensive policy to delimit the consumption and spread of ‘junk food’ amongst the poor, the children and other vulnerable segments of the population has been adopted at the time of writing, despite continue warnings by health professionals. On the other hand, the EU can still provide, at least in principle, a model able to overcome the conflictive and homogenizing legacy inherited by the nation-state system, on which it is nevertheless still based. It is essential here to consider how the two homogenizing trends, nationalism and globalization, can operate in tandem so that their overall impact on cultural diversity is not lost. They can either reinforce each other (nation-states keep their homogenising focus) or neutralize each other (neoliberal globalization is largely incompatible with nation-statism’s most homogenising practices), while in general two forms of homogenizing pressure have more destructive impact than one. I have thus argued that the two dimensions should be considered jointly while studying the relationship between political institutions and cultural diversity.

Conclusions

This article has stressed the need to merge studies on the neoliberal weakening of state institutions with studies on the persisting effect of ‘nation-statism’ and its accompanying visions of national homogeneity. Although the two areas have produced two considerable bodies of literature, their mutual interaction in the context of cultural pluralism and ethno-national conflict still needs to be addressed in a comprehensive and mutually interactive way.

Recalling Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) Angelus Novus, written in the 1930s, two young scholars of comparative literature advance a challenging proposition:

In an age when Europe is increasingly perceived as an administrative and bureaucratic machine unable to inspire socio-political passion, it is perhaps time to bring back Walter Benjamin’s reflections on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus: what if it is only by directing our gaze to the ruins of the past that we might be able to think the New? What if, more precisely, we can imagine a truly alternative vision of Europe only by redeeming the utopian spark betrayed by key events in Europe’s recent past? (Vighi and Nuselovici, 2010: 1).

Classic econo-centric works rarely address cultural issues or homogenisation as central concerns. ¹⁶ For instance, Moravcsik’s (1998) description of European integration as a sequence of great inter-state bargains is firmly centred on the elites’ advancement of commercial interests and only offers cursory references to the EU’s cultural policies. Similarly, Milward’s analysis shows how, in the early years, the European economic policies contributed to the ‘reassertion’ of the nation-state as an organizational unit, but offers no particular attention to cultural policies as such (Milward, 2000). Both authors stress the economic functionality of European integration insofar as this contributed to advance each member state’s rational and national self-interests. In this view, European integration played a rather less idealistic and more functional role in protecting the interests of European nation-states. This does not contradict my argument and I do not totally disagree with this approach, but I start from a different set of assumptions about the centrality of cultural concerns and their institutional component.

As EU policy-making has followed on the heels of the failed homogenizing attempts of the past, multi-level cultural pluralism has become inscribed in the very foundation of the EU and its endorsement is an essential requisite for membership. In fact, the entire unification project would become unrealistic without a persistent and relentless emphasis on concepts like multilateralism, pluralism, multiculturalism and ‘unity in diversity’. But nation-states still form the EU’s building blocks and in many of them majoritarian forms of democracy prevail as the expression of a homogeneous and organic entity called the ‘people’. In other words, one of the major limits of the EU is its reliance on the previous system of nation-states. As I have argued, Europe’s double challenge stems from the past legacy of majoritarian mass politics, as well as from the current predicament of neo-liberal globalization (Conversi, 2012a). The former makes political institutions deeply unrepresentative, while the latter weakens them in such a way that their legitimacy is further eroded.

At least since the Treaty of Rome (1957), European identity has been partly shaped around the negation of pre-war homogenizing practices. European elites’ have thus consistently struggled to overcome the negative models of the past. The view that Europe can only exist because of its resistance to homogenization has been expressed with lucidity by the French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, who argued that Europe was born from the divisions of Christianity and empire, then from the division into nation-states, and ‘exists by having refused the hegemony of Charles V, Napoleon and Hitler. That Europe of small cultural spaces is the one we should save through peace and confederacy’. ¹⁷ In part, this ideal has been realized through the widespread adoption of implicit consociational arrangements, which have emerged as a consequence of the actual day-to-day practice of multi-level governance. But many of these advances in the promotion and practice of cultural pluralism have been nullified and trivialized in an age of neoliberal deregulation.

The article has identified a battle between two complex groups of forces over the fate of cultural diversity: state nationalism, often associated with right-wing politics, defends majoritarian norms, but frequently combines with neo-liberal globalisation towards further cultural homogenisation. By contrast, EU policies tend to combine with politically mobilized sub-state ethno-national communities to endorse cultural diversity in various areas, like minority languages, audiovisual production and so on. However, I argue that the interaction between these two forces should be analysed in view of the all-pervasiveness of a more general set of economic and political forces obeying the laws of neo-liberal globalization. The latter can flirt with both European integration and state, or sub-state, nationalism and therefore pose a new set of challenges to the maintenance of cultural diversity.

The EU was created in the aftermath of Second World War for various strategic and economic reasons, but also in response to past failures of internecine conflict and war. As the union shifted from economic cooperation to the creation of more robust political institutions in the 1990s, identity matters became much more prominent and, with them, the negative memory of the members’ states’ previous campaigns of cultural and ethnic homogenization. The EU’s official motto since May 2000, ‘united in diversity’ (Lat., In varietate concordia), aims to reflect the EU’s respect for ethnic, cultural and religious minorities and is unequivocally enshrined in its founding treaties. ¹⁸ Yet, the motto itself has been questioned for its lack of cultural depth and insufficient operational validity (Kraus, 2008). ¹⁹ For Kraus, the notion of ‘complex diversity’ offers a more appropriate framework of interpretation, indicating ‘a social and political context in which diversity has become a multidimensional and fluid phenomenon, … [whose] building blocks (or layers) of diversity must themselves be regarded as becoming increasingly heterogeneous too’ (Kraus, 2012: 13).

European institutions have thus been described in opposition to previously dominant state-building practices, whose legacy includes ethnically defined forms of majoritarian democracy in which the dominant nation is associated with a dominant culture – therefore merging culture, ethnicity and nation. In this way, I have linked the EU’s cultural philosophy to its implicit consociational functioning despite the continuing prevalence of majoritarian mechanisms in many of Europe’s member states. ²⁰

The answer to the question raised in the title has been, at least in part, affirmative. However, the greatest threat does not come necessarily from the erstwhile centralizing efforts of the nation-state, but, increasingly, from the most destructive aspects of the neoliberal dismantling of public institutions. While the EU’s record as a proper supranational, pluralist, peace-building body has been widely praised, ²¹ its key institutions are unable to stem the tide of neoliberal attacks on cultural diversity.

And while the EU’s continuous internal challenges from nationalism and xenophobia call for more effective and legitimate central institutions, such centripetality will need to be tempered by an adamantine commitment to the respect of diversity – to the point of actually promoting and enhancing, not simply accepting or tolerating, cultural diversity as a public resource.