Peace, Multiculturalism and Development

This article is an edited version of the Tip O’Neil Peace Studies Lecture, delivered on 4th February 2008 at Magee Campus, University of Ulster in Derry. Professor Kader Asmal dedicates it to John Hume “peacemaker par excellence” and to all the peacemakers in the north of Ireland.

When we talk or write about conflicts in today’s world, the word identity frequently occurs. Be it à propos of former Yugoslavia, Canada, Ireland, Britain after 7th July 2005, the Netherlands, Belgium… identity seems to provide a simple explanation of those conflicts: people are assumed to belong to a solid, immutable group which responds as one if threatened or ill-treated. Identity implies uniqueness and sameness.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

What attracted me to the political settlement based on the Good Friday Agreement was the recognition that many citizens here have multiple loyalties, based on identities that may differ from each other, and even be contradictory.

This contrasts with jurisdictions where good sense has been replaced by demands for the recognition of the alleged core values of a society to which everyone, especially immigrants, must subscribe, in order to build a single identity.

In South Africa, under apartheid, the core value system of separation based on race destroyed any chance of the majority feeling a sense of belonging.

So, in order to ensure that separateness was replaced by unity, we, the lawyers in the African National Congress, drafted Constitutional Guidelines for a Democratic South Africa in 1988, proposing that:

‘It shall be state policy to promote the growth of a single national identity and loyalty binding on all South Africans. At the same time, the state shall recognise the linguistic and cultural diversity of the people and provide facilities for free linguistic and cultural development.’

We soon realised though that a single national identity could not be imposed by diktat and that civil war could result if such a concept had to be ‘binding on all South Africans’. So we replaced the bogus nationalities created by apartheid with a single citizenship for all South Africans, a revolutionary step which we hoped would provide a basis for a durable peace and an understanding of our common humanity.

We hoped that the core values of our constitution – liberty, equality, justice and dignity, which do not belong to any one culture, would provide what Fintan O’Toole has called ‘a map of integration, setting out the relationship between rights and duties in a way open to everyone’. I think we have succeeded in this aim.

In South Africa – a country which for so long denied the humanity of most of its people – we have sought to construct the very antithesis of apartheid: a politics of humanity. We have done so by infusing our constitutionalism with a cosmopolitan, multicultural ethic. This ethic can best prompt reform at an international level as well, so hopefully securing, at both domestic and global level, a durable peace.

We have attempted to secure this politics not by denying our differences: the Constitution guarantees rights which best protect our freedom to be individuals, unlike any other, but also guarantees the rights we enjoy only in and through our communities – that protect our enjoyment of the society of those like ourselves. We thus continue the tradition of the Freedom Charter which, in the midst of the madness of apartheid, declared that all South Africans had the right to their own languages and to develop their own cultures and customs.

This determination to celebrate rather than abolish difference, may seem counter-intuitive. It is not long since we emerged from a past in which our differences were our defining feature; the basis on which the State determined the rights, resources and level of care we were due. Some have accused our multicultural vision of emphasizing social divisions and exaggerating cultural differences, rather than uniting the disempowered. If this view were correct, the politics of identity would certainly be counter-productive to nation-building.

But this view is wrongheaded. Multiculturalism is necessary because we recognise that life in the contemporary world makes for multiple allegiances and loyalties that are enriching. Individuals require different contexts, inputs and life choices to develop their fullest abilities. We also value multiculturalism because we want to preserve a wide range of human conditions, allowing free people the best chance to make their own lives. In South Africa we seek to value not only allegiances of long standing but also contemporary trends towards global citizenship. Thus we see the growth of the human rights movement, as well as new forms of women’s citizenship and of ecological citizenship.

Multiculturalism is also necessary because a society in which each is able to demonstrate his or her difference and diversity equally is a society much more likely to encourage its members to see beyond signifiers of religion, race and ethnicity as the sole markers of identity.

In the words of Judge Albie Sachs of our Constitutional Court, a constitution and its human rights provisions must ensure the right to be the same – equality of rights – and the right to be different.

The type of multiculturalism we seek to promote could be called a cosmopolitan multiculturalism. Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by them all. So we hope and expect that different people will embody different values, but in an important caveat noted by Kwame Anthony Appiah in Cosmopolitanism: ethics in a world of strangers, they have to be values worth living by, because there ‘simply is no decent way to sustain those communities of difference that will not survive without the free allegiance of their members’.

South Africa’s constitutional embrace of multiculturalism is demonstrated by the large number of provisions guaranteeing individuals’ rights to belief, language, culture, as well as the rights of communities – whether cultural, religious or linguistic – to practise those activities which evidence their community.

Similar provisions can be found in many constitutions the world over as well as in countless international instruments. A more distinguishing feature of South Africa’s multicultural constitutionalism is a critical attitude or ethos that at the best of times guides the branches of government in reconciling rights within our society. It is a critical approach that unambiguously seeks to shape a shared future.

South Africa’s Constitution has been called a ‘transitional constitution’ – one which is both backward- and forwardlooking. It is backward-looking in that what counts as justice, going forward, is determined and informed by our knowledge of the terrible injustices of the past. But it is not equally poised between the future and the past. It looks back only to repudiate the illiberal past. And a repudiation of the past requires us to marshal reasons in the present day for rejecting the values and practices of the apartheid past.

We especially want to reclaim and restore histories that have been all but obliterated – histories of marginalised peoples and societies. In the articulation of our constitutional project we must make our decisions by reference to South Africans’ shared future and what we want that to look like, and how that involves departure from our past.

This mode of reasoning – an articulation of the society we are reaching for – strikingly resembles what has been called a ‘culture of justification’, a culture South African human rights lawyers hope will be firmly instantiated by a bill of rights. We look to our Bill of Rights not only for its explicit content, but also to enrich laws by fostering justificationthinking. It was the poverty of law, in the shape of pervasive authority-thinking that made apartheid possible. Our Bill of Rights aims to restore discipline to a system grown slothful about justification.

The Divisiveness of ‘National Identity’

Were it to be otherwise, if our past, and not the future, were our lodestar, then I fear we would venture too close to divisive, contemporary political projects, as seen in Britain today with the espousal of ‘British values’ – what Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called ‘a clear shared vision of national identity’. This imagining of Britain, based on a purported rediscovery (or reinvention) of its past brings with it the alienation of many immigrants and communities. This is not the Britain which claimed to hold dear the values of liberty, tolerance and social justice. These immigrants, by virtue of their multiple identities and sometimes conflicting allegiances, must necessarily contest such a ‘clear, shared vision of national identity’.

In Minister of Home Affairs and Another v Fourie and Another; Lesbian and Gay Equality project and Others v Minister of Home Affairs and Others, CCT 60/04; CCT 10/05, involving the right of same-sex couples to marry, our Constitutional Court showed itself acutely conscious of the need to formulate a jurisprudence that speaks to a shared future, one that rejects what was unconscionable in our past. Justice Sachs noted:

‘Our Constitution represents a radical rupture with the past based on intolerance and exclusion, and the movement forward to the acceptance of the need to develop a society based on equality and respect by all for all. Small gestures in favour of equality, however meaningful, are not enough. In the memorable words of Mahomed J: “In some countries, the Constitution only formalizes, in a legal instrument, a historical consensus of values and aspirations evolved incrementally from a stable and unbroken past to accommodate the needs of the future. The South African Constitution is different: it retains from the past only what is defensible and represents a decisive break from, and ringing rejection of, that part of the past that is disgracefully racist, authoritarian, insular and repressive and a vigorous identification with and commitment to a democratic, universalistic, caring and aspirationally egalitarian ethos expressly articulated in the Constitution. The contrast between the past which it repudiates and the future to which it seeks to commit the nation is stark and dramatic.” ’

In South Africa our constitutional justification must be unequivocally aspirational, future-bound, preserving from the past only that which is justifiable. And while this style of reasoning, of justification, may seem especially suited to South Africa, I would suggest that it is fitting for much of the world as well.

In our public life and discourse, in our laws and jurisprudence, we need to encourage a culture of justification that seeks to shape a shared future based on a very critical examination of our past. This culture of reasoning/justification is much less likely to alienate peoples whose cultures/societies are not well represented in our past – at least our ‘official’ past. And people who make their homes in South Africa today, without any representation in our past, are much more likely to find a place, a sense not just of being, but of wellbeing, in South Africa, as they too participate, as full members, in articulating a vision of a shared future.

I have saluted the political arrangements in the North of Ireland which have brought peace to a deeply divided society. This ‘consocial’ form of political settlement allows for weight to be given in the structures of government to ethnic, or in this case, community, representation. In other words, administration is by consensus, not majority rule. In the same spirit, it has been suggested in the Good Friday Agreement and elsewhere that a bill of rights for Northern Ireland should be enacted: binding human rights rules would encourage development towards a shared future based on what must not be seen as simply restraints on the government but as instruments of empowerment of citizens.

A bill of rights would be part of a healing experience and an instrument to deal with the pathologies of society which may exclude fellow citizens because of their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or lifestyle, as in the case of travelling people.

The twentieth century can be described as the period in which the nation-state system reached its apogee; it will also be remembered for the terrible barbarity of totalitarianism and war. But it is not just the excesses of nationalism that compel a more cosmopolitan commitment. This commitment is also compelled because democracy at a national level is weakened when, due to the erosion of the State’s autonomy, its capacity to respond to democratic demands is undermined.

Appiah argues for a more rooted cosmopolitanism – whereby people are attached to particular places or homes with cultural specificities, ‘but take pleasure from the presence of the different places that are home to other different people’ and are also able to choose their own homes. Appiah’s articulation is consistent with Kant’s vision of a cosmopolitan world: one divided into states in which cosmopolitan right trumps the claim of sovereignty. Specifically, rights accrue to individuals and the nation state exists in order to best facilitate the realisation of these rights. It is not the reverse: that the nation-state grants rights to individuals and that rights do not exist independent of the nation-state.

Thus a cosmopolitan vision does not entail the evisceration, but rather a re-conceptualisation, of the nation-state. This re-conceptualisation is also needed at the international level if we are to bring about the reforms needed to secure durable peace.

This age of globalisation creates another reason to emphasise nationhood – albeit not a nationhood based on exclusive, immutable features. While the process of globalisation affords some positive goods, it has also brought about tremendous political and economic instability and rupture. In the face of such uncertainty, identity politics in the narrowest sense, predicated on certain immutable features and ideals, assumes a particular potency. Identities are constructed and emphasised for the purposes of political mobilisation. They offer a new sense of security in a context where the political and economic certainties of previous decades have vanished.

As Mary Kaldor notes in Cosmopolitanism and Organised Violence, identity politics provides: ‘a new populist form of communitarian ideology, a way to maintain or capture power, that uses the language and forms of an earlier period. Undoubtedly, these ideologies make use of pre-existing cleavages and the legacies of past wars. It is also the case that the appeal to tradition and the nostalgia for some mythical or semi-mythical history gains strength in the social upheavals associated with the opening up to global pressures.’

Right now Kenya is in turmoil. It may not be a Rwanda, but the fact that one of Africa’s most stable countries should now be the site of so much violence and displacement, animated supposedly by ethnic divisions mirroring political affiliations, speaks to the enormous and destructive power of identity mobilisation.

Such political or ethnic affiliations, as we know from other countries, are also used for allocating benefits and resources.

The appeal of narrow identity politics is not confined to post-colonial states or post-communist states. It is also apparent among the most established Western democracies, as in contemporary Belgium where strong antipathy exists between the richer Flemish north and the poorer French-speaking Walloon region.

A sense of identity founded on a nationality that is itself predicated, not on immutable ideals, but on a sense of shared future, will go some way to undermining the allure of narrow, identity politics. Realistically, this emphasis on individual rights and a sense of shared future cannot hope to counter the appeal of divisive identity politics where such politics holds out the prospect of real advancement and where multiculturalism simply becomes a cover for unequal social and economic relations.

Again Belgium today is instructive – much of the Walloon/ Flanders tension is rooted in uneven development. In securing equitable development within multicultural societies, we have to move beyond a narrow distributionist account of development towards an assessment of the extent to which people’s ability to make reasoned choices is positively supported by the social opportunities of education, employment and participation in civil society.

This is what real ‘development’ is about, harnessing people’s energies for the common good or, as the preamble to the South African Constitution puts it, to ‘[…] improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person’.

National identity, even conceptualised in its most cosmopolitan, multicultural ideal, brings with it certain forms of exclusivity – an exclusion of those who cannot or may not make their homes within the nation-state. This requires further exploration. Kant, in his formulation of a cosmopolitan ethic, argued that the enactment of cosmopolitan laws (i.e. laws guaranteeing the right to hospitality), would ensure the security of strangers when they set foot in a foreign land. This would address the rights-gap wrought by statelessness. In this formulation Kant makes plain that rights attach to individuals qua individuals and such rights are to be realised irrespective of where the person finds him or herself.

Multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism must inform a more equitable international order

Globalisation, for better or worse, is an unstoppable process. At its best it promotes democratisation, exerting pressure on previously insulated regimes to introduce political reform as a precondition for economic reform, to reduce corruption, increase respect for human rights and introduce/enhance democratic institutions.

At its worst it locks states, particularly weaker states, into entrenched patterns of inequality and uneven development. It promotes the erosion, and often complete negation, of state autonomy leaving the state unable to respond to democratic demands. It offers incentives for supranational, more exclusive affiliations, which lay claim to what were previously the monopolies of the state – i.e. force and taxation. As Mary Kaldor notes, it is this ‘lack of authority of the state, the weakness of representation, the loss of confidence that the state is able or willing to respond to public concerns, the inability and/or unwillingness to regulate the privatisation and informalisation of violence that gives rise to violent conflicts’.

In order to minimise the danger that globalisation’s upheavals and uncertainties present, there needs to be reform at the international level. We need a rights-based system of global governance – where the individual rights-bearer and not the state is placed at the centre. There must be an evolution from the classical international law formulation which took as its subject the nation-state towards what Kant envisioned as the ‘status of world citizen’ which would afford legal protection to citizens against their own criminal regimes.

Today, for many, globalisation has become a source of despair, widening the gap between rich and poor in an increasingly polarised world. If the notion of human rights has a future, it must be in harnessing global forces to a politics of hope. But how can globalisation, this source of despair, be turned into a repository of hope?

When I chaired the World Commission on Dams, we worked out an approach to decision-making in development projects that I called ‘globalisation from below’. Within a human rights framework, this approach considered the rights and risks of global investors but it insisted on highlighting the human rights of people who were most directly affected by the project, as well as the considerable risks they faced. As we brought peasants, workers, women’s groups and representatives of indigenous people into the negotiations, we saw the tremendous potential of grassroots globalisation for advancing human rights in transnational negotiations. In many other areas, I believe the future of human rights will also depend upon this new ‘globalisation from below’.

Globalisation from below is producing new forms of social activism across national borders. Jorge Castaneda has identified these new initiatives as ‘longitudinal nationalism’, which is advanced by social actors from various nations who work together to challenge policies in one or more states. Unlike the old nationalisms, which tended to represent narrow national interests, this ‘longitudinal nationalism’ seeks to advance what I have been calling the public good that is ultimately in everyone’s interest.

The debate on a bill of rights for Northern Ireland – which I support very strongly – has shown a huge degree of community involvement which politicians will ignore at their peril. This in itself is a form of ‘public good’.

The concept of public good directly engages the global economy as an alternative to the commodification of values. As such, our commitment to the public good goes to the heart of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s call to clarify ‘the values and ethics that shape our conception of the global world’. Revitalising our conception of the public good – as a basis for national sovereignty, democratic governance, and economic development – holds the promise of transforming our despair into hope in a globalising world.

As a transformative agent, human rights will be deployed at their best every time we engage the sources of our despair as avenues for revitalising hope. All of this, of course, requires great courage and imagination. We can only seek to seize this moment for the public good.

We will find enormous value as we work in Northern Ireland and elsewhere to strengthen international solidarity. Our links with each other should not be seen in terms of our geographical distance. Rather, we should see our relations in terms of the historical closeness arising out of our common legacy of displacement, oppression and struggle for freedom.

Cosmopolitan Multiculturalism vs. The Clash of Civilizations

The human dignity found in genuine multi-cultural societies contradicts any assumption that humanity can be divided into separate ‘civilizations’. As a space of mixing and merging, diaspora disproves any apartheid-like attempt to carve up the world into separate and distinct peoples, cultures, or civilizations. Samuel Huntington, in his notorious volume, The Clash of Civilizations, developed a ‘simple map’ of the world. He fixes civilizations in place; allows for no movement; recognises no exchanges. We would have forgotten all about his map by now if it had not been found useful by strategic planners in Washington, DC. Huntington’s map violates our understanding of a non-racial world; his is a world of us against them.

First, in Huntington’s account, all civilizations are racialised, regarded as natural organisms, with roots and branches, which are unified by allegiances among ‘kin countries’.

Second, civilizations are reified, treated like things, like machines, or even worse, like the machinery of war. ‘In a world where culture counts’, Huntington writes, ‘the platoons are tribes and ethnic groups, the regiments are nations, and the armies are civilizations’.

Third, citizenship, with its political rights and responsibilities, is depicted as a unique feature of the West. While societies of the West engage in politics, the rest are supposedly seduced by appeals of cultural identity. ‘Politicians in non- Western societies do not win elections by demonstrating how Western they are’, Huntington asserts. ‘Electoral competition instead stimulates them to fashion what they believe will be the most popular appeals, and those are usually ethnic, nationalist, and religious in character.’ Recent elections in Denmark and the Netherlands belie this superior attitude and raising of the spectre of immigration in the US, Britain and many European countries shows that ethnic chauvinism is not the prerogative of the Third World.

Finally, considering national sovereignty, Huntington claims that a state’s ‘cultural identity’, preferably of the Protestant kind, entirely determines its role in world politics. For those who assume the cultural superiority of the West, he provides a rationalisation for intervening in the sovereignty of other nations.

The recent high-powered report: Civil Paths to Peace: report of the Commonwealth Commission on respect and understanding, prepared for the 2007 Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference, provides a sharp riposte to those who blithely talk of the new wars of religion. It highlights the urgent need to address the ‘many root causes of conflict’ and draws attention to the post-9/11 debate that ‘culture is neither the defining nor the only fault line over which people conflict’.

While cultural influences can contribute to violence ‘they are not the only causal factors, nor are they immutable or irresistible’. The report explores the various ways through which violence is generalised and sometimes ‘wilfully nurtured’. It raises questions about the role of poverty and inequality in promoting hatred and violence. These questions require sophisticated analysis and the report draws attention to what it calls ‘manifest inequality’ and its relationship to the psychological dimensions of humiliation.

It makes devastating reading, and should be compulsory for prime ministers, presidents and their advisers who often display a total lack of understanding of the reaction of their citizens whose culture and religion are demonised and marginalised. It is understandable if not acceptable that the resulting alienation of these citizens leads them to take up violence.

By contrast,The Economist’s gung-ho approach to British homeland security is typified by columnist Bagehot, writing on the 15th December 2007 that:

‘[The Prime Minister] sensibly compares the Islamist threat Britain now faces to the cold war, describing it as a generational struggle that must be waged in classrooms, libraries and prisons, as well as with bullets.’

Such war-talk, which the writer refers to as a ‘grown-up reaction’, with all its implied abuse of human rights, will simply strengthen the hands of those intent on violence.

We cannot afford to allow our world to be reduced to such cruel simplifications, or to be imprisoned within the confines of Huntington’s map. Our multiple identities must be encouraged to flourish, not forced into the mould of some racialised or other stereotypical identity. Africans, for example, cannot be contained within the racist categories that were designed to dehumanise them. None of us has a fixed and frozen cultural identity, because we live in a complex and changing process of cultural creativity. The people of the diaspora cannot be put in some kind of rigid box, because the world around them is constantly being created and recreated by people who experience themselves as displaced.

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust’s recent report Power to the People, draws an alarming picture of what it describes as the ‘disengagement’ from politics by people in Britain who are neither apathetic nor lacking interest. It is the absence of democratic processes and the absence of opportunities for engaging with the process which is responsible. The empirical evidence illustrates the desire of people to have a greater say over policies and decisions that affect their lives. The study shows a clear need to ensure that parties and the electoral process reflect the diversity and complexity of people’s lives. Democracy needs debate and the articulation of difference.

Also, the administration of justice today shows a greater tendency to hold to account those in authority who resort to violence for personal political reasons.

Robert Fine, in Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, writes:

‘Cosmopolitans find reason for hope today in the establishment of albeit imperfect institutions to prosecute and punish heads of state and officials who commit atrocities against those they have in their power. It finds hope in the proliferation of human rights conventions and legislation against crimes against humanity and genocide. It finds hope in the use of military force not for raison d’état but to stop genocide and crimes against humanity taking place in far-off places.

[...] It finds hope in the cosmopolitan intellectual currents now traversing the disciplines of the social sciences, which confront the vast contradictions inherent in the rights of man without resorting to cynicism on the one hand or naïve wishfulfilment on the other.’

Today in Africa the former head of one state, Charles Taylor of Liberia, is prosecuted by an international tribunal for his alleged complicity in the gross violations of humanitarian law in a neighbouring state, Sierra Leone. The head of the African Union, John Kufor, and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recently travelled to Kenya in a bid to mediate and quell tensions arising from the recent elections, marred by widespread irregularity and killings. The new Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) Tribunal, headquartered in Namibia, in its very first judgment, has ordered that a Zimbabwean farmer be granted interim relief.

All these signify a recognition that the concept of state sovereignty is and must be porous. It may only be claimed by a state to the extent it secures the protection of rights-holders within the state. That said, to the extent that the nation-state is democratically representative of its population and reflective of its democratic aspirations, it must be accorded equality with all other states as the vehicle by which such people and claims are advanced at global level.

There is still much to be done: how best to secure fairer, more democratic representation within international authorities and institutions? In particular, how to secure fairer representation within global financial institutions so that globalisation does not just become a watchword for the inequitable development and enrichment of some states at the expense of others? How can we secure a means of enforcing states’ obligations to their inhabitants without allowing such means to become a pretext for selective and/or opportunistic interventions by larger, more powerful states?

How, in other words, to avoid the hegemonic unilateralism pursued by the US in respect of Iraq, by which the US Government believes itself entitled to disregard both international law and the opinions of the international community in pursuing its own strategic interests and in imposing its own values.

These must be the intellectual projects of our age – peace, justice and development within and beyond states.

They constitute an exciting challenge. In this journey, we may take for guidance the torch of Antigone whose free spirit shines down the ages and lights the way forward. As she said: ‘I was born for love, not for hatred’. In our troubled world this may appear a romantic vision, yet the world desperately needs this vision, so we can experience the boundless march of humanity for peace; so that the saying of Sophocles will come true – that the universe has many miracles, but the finest of all is humanity.

Kader Asmal was a Minister in the governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. He retired as a Member of the National Assembly, Parliament of South Africa in February 2008. He is a Vice-President of the Haldane Society.

This article can be found in the print edition of Socialist Lawyer number 49, April 2008.