Pursuit of the Third Way

An Essay by Barbo Turgunova

By the organisers’ kind invitation three managers of culture projects, funded by the Swiss Cooperation in Central Asia, participated in the 4^th Federal Congress on Cultural Policy “culture.powers.europe”. The congress was fantastically well organised, and, looking at the list of speakers, we were expecting that the content of the speeches and forums would be extremely interesting and useful. Working for the organisation, which intends to contribute to the building of pluralist and participatory societies in Central Asia, we were very much interested in listening the politicians, those brought together in Berlin to discuss European cultural policy. Along with politicians, we were  acquainted   with speeches of distinguished “cultural” and “academic” people that were invited to the congress.

Central Asian countries got their independence in relatively recent time – 16 years ago. Now all of them are going through a process of creative reconstruction of their identities. Ironically, in present time three of our small projects are also going through a process of integration and applying of the regional approach to our work. It also implies building a regional cultural strategy within our organisation. Though magnitude of the “integrations” is different, it was a little discovery to notice some similarities of our regional endeavours within the development programme and efforts of politicians to integrate national cultures of EuropeThe two-day congress is unlikely to give to an inapt eye much insight into the problems relating the cultural policy of the European Union. Even more so, if we take into consideration our lack of knowledge regarding its structure, decision-making processes and so forth. Apparently, we’ll need at least several days to clarify for ourselves the structures of the EU and the functioning of the European institutions. Two days of listening to various-level presentations and different objectives just enabled us to formulate some questions.

"Our brain struggles to adjust to new forms of thinking. We can learn to use our brains only having developed a new adequate language. This task is being confronted by philosophers and physicists, who are obligated to resolve the task by joint efforts in order to facilitate evolution of the human race." These words were uttered by outstanding French physicist Paul Langevin. Similar statements were made by other renowned scholars, who treated thinking, logics and language stringently.

At the forum, this stance was demonstrated only by one person, I mean well-known writer Adolf Muschg. Unlike other spokespersons, who used popular «global terminology», he managed to pose such questions as «What is culture?» or «Who do we call Europeans?» and put forward the issue of languages. He was the only one, who placed himself as the “reflexive unit” in the centre of socio-cultural context. I suppose that if EU people were to study only the issues raised by Muschg, this might change a lot in developing the cultural policy.

Europe has supplied the world with great thinkers, and the scientific approaches and methods were formed in Europe. On which philosophical principles and which fundamental studies does the cultural policy of the EU rest? To what extent humanitarian technologies have changed in our century of exact sciences?

Taking into view the fact that the culture exists either in the form of a product or in the form of behaviour of the bearers of culture, it would be more appropriate to consider the bearers of culture as the subject of studies, – or rather bearers of cultures.

The culture is multiple and embraces many meanings. The history of European thought testifies to the fact that understanding the culture as the diversity of cultures was initiated in Europe. But the policy of multiculturalism is quite another matter. How far will the notion of multicultural society take us if we do not define the limits of the notion of «multi-cultural»? After all, in that case any sub-culture has the right not only to exist, but also to self-disseminate.

I’m not going to list problems that have already emerged in Europe due to ambiguous understanding of political correctness in regards to other cultures, - perusing TV and radio news of the last two years will suffice.

Socio-cultural space of Europe, historically defined by cultural richness and diversity, has become even more complex over the last decades. Cultural values of the social environment form within three spheres, i.e. religion, science and arts.

Immigration processes and accession of new members into EU makes these spheres increasingly complex, and now one can plunge into long listing, trying to answer such questions as what religions do the Europeans profess, what languages do they speak, who in Europe makes science and arts. Apprehensive prognosis of demographists makes the situation even more dramatic.

Expansion of socio-cultural context due to enlargement of the EU, as well as immigration processes, may affect the anticipated outcomes of the cultural policy. The nature of this impact can be determined only by serious research. Only one presentation (out of those that I was able to attend, because we naturally could not attend all forums at a time) showed that these were in place. The presentation that I mean was by Grzegorz Gorzelak on the correlation between the level of economic development in various regions of Poland and cultural attitudes.

The politicians that made presentations and the representatives of various institutions have told us of their projects. The projects were beautiful and impressive scale-wise. Here too, the questions that struck me were as follows: Are there links between projects, are there projects banding those projects together? That might make it possible to apply the system conception in developing the cultural policy.

It would be interesting to hear of the dynamics of the system of values in ever-changing European milieu. Common identity implies at common system of values… Maybe I am wrong, but it seems that is why creating EU identity will not be easy.

There are two relatively easy ways to overcome this issue – (1) abandon freedom for the sake of certain dominant ideology, (2) surrender to the stream of mass, global culture with its simple and plain values. But in both cases Europe will not be Europe any more. That’s why I see organising of such congresses as a wonderful initiative, promoting democratic discussions and search. It’s a pursuit of the third, genuinely European way... And maybe the world will follow Europe again.

Going back to our small project aiming for the creation of the regional programme in supporting art and culture in Central Asia I would like to say a few words about notorious “East-West” antithesis. This contraposition has been existing for a long time on the level of discursive philosophical debates, which should help to make a good basis for further researches. However, in practice, the East and the West are not merely intersected but partially have merged together, and it looks as  this process will continue till its total merging and mixture.

Our project is based on the principle of cultural diversity, and since there are more than hundred different cultures on the territory of Central Asia, the European experience will help us to facilitate our task.

Though our project has quite different scope, it generates, like any other project, a surrogate sub-culture and surrogate identity of the “project participants” during the period of its functioning. We want this sub-culture to be resonant with its socio-cultural context, so that the project has a sound impact on this context.

So as not to be in the situation of the “East-West” contraposition (e.g., inside the project – the West, and in surroundings – the East) we do our best to create some universal midst inside the project. Not in the sense of artificial and quite common combining of eastern cultural traditions with western technologies, but rather putting into interaction the eastern and western lasting values, as well as benchmarking with the best eastern and western cultural products. Why not to build a new identity just on the basis of the “old good values?” 

Barno Turgunova is National Programme Officer Art & Culture Programme Uzbekistan of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC. E-mail: barno.turgunova@sdc.net
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