Summary: October 15, 2004: Speech by Ambassador John B. Richardson (2001-05) on 'Cultural Differences in the Life of a Diplomat' at Yale University (USA)
A Japanese friend once explained to me what he regarded as the difference between civilizations and cultures. What make a civilization, he said, are the fundamental values of society. What makes a culture is the way these values are expressed in the day to day life of the citizens of a society. Today I will use this distinction to say a few words about civilization in this sense of fundamental values but I will concentrate my remarks on cultural differences between and within
societies.
Samuel Huntington's warnings about a clash of civilizations were fashionable when he first wrote his book, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order" in 1996 and have received new attention because of the perception that many terrorist acts are the work of Moslems and directed against Judeo-Christian society. Should we classify religion as a characteristic of our civilization or as an element of our culture? Since I am not an authority on this subject I think I should best
leave it to the scholars in my audience today. Let me, however, make one observation and offer one personal comment on this important question.
Even in Europe, in which church-going has been in substantial decline for many decades, religion is still seen by many of our citizens as an important element of their identity and an important part of our civilization. There has been a great debate whether and how the Christian heritage of Europe should be reflected in the preamble of the draft constitutional treaty for the European Union, which has just been negotiated and must now be ratified by all our Member States. The result has been
that those who see the EU as a much more complex result of many influences, including the humanist legacy of the Enlightenment, have prevailed, and the text in question now reads as follows:
"Drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law,"
In other words we have chosen to define our fundamental values, our civilization, in non-religious, in secular terms.
My personal comment is this. It seems to me that the three great religions of the book all share the same basic values in terms of how human beings should treat each other in society. They should treat others as they wish to be treated themselves. In this sense there need be no question of a clash between civilizations. But they each also have deeply engrained attitudes and customs, which are an essential part of the identity of their believers and are thus part of what I am here going to call
culture. And as we are more and more exposed to these cultural differences both through the globalization of the media and through increased international migration so the issue of how they interact is assuming a growing importance for national and international policymakers.
So let me begin with an assertion. It is my belief that most nations on this planet now share to a very large extent the same set of civilizational values.
We all agree that societies, whether national or international, are best governed on the basis of the rule of law. We all agree that economic prosperity is best pursued by using competition within a market economy as the engine of growth. We all agree that governments should reflect the views of their citizens and most see this as requiring one of the many variations of democracy. We almost all accept, at least in principle, the codex of Human Rights which has been developed under the aegis of
the United Nations over the last half century. In historical perspective, this is nothing short of remarkable.
Of course, we do not always live up to our high ideals. It is difficult to reconcile the US treatment of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay with the rule of law and the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib with respect for human rights. One might argue also that the role of money in US elections is hard to reconcile with the idea that all citizens have an equal influence on policy. In the EU the way we have run our agricultural policy over the last several decades hardly demonstrates belief in the
market and at present it is far from clear that the development of the EU is supported by a majority of our electorate. Around the world there are many autocratic heads of government who give lip service to democracy and the rule of law, but have no intention of yielding power peacefully. And human rights abuses around the world are the stuff of dozens of horrifying reports every year by watchdog organizations. But at least we now have a template against which to measure both imperfections and
major abuses. In this sense, I would argue that we do have something like a global civilization.
But despite the fears of the opponents of globalization, we are far from having a global culture.
Let me tell you a story, which I read in a book about Asian and European cultural differences over thirty years ago. It goes like this:
An Englishman and a Japanese, both professors of art history, get to know each other and become friends through meeting around the world at one international conference after another.
The Englishman has a standing invitation to visit his friend at his country home on the lower foothills of Fuji-san and at last he manages to do so.
He knows that the Japanese professor has a widely admired collection of early pen and wash landscapes and is eager to see them.
So, when he arrives, and after the quiet rituals of settling in to a Japanese home have been completed, he asks if he can see the collection.
"But, of course, my dear fellow!"
They go into the next room and sit in silent contemplation of an exquisite work hanging on the wall.
After half an hour, my compatriot asks if they can move on to the rest of the collection.
The reply?
"I am astonished that you can absorb more than one masterpiece in an evening!"
I often think of this story with a guilty conscience after having attempted to absorb the latest exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum by walking through it in no more than sixty minutes. But does this sort of difference matter in world affairs? Perhaps this one does not.
But let me give you an example of a cultural difference which does matter - very much - for international trade. I remember when I was responsible in Brussels for EU relations with Japan we were trying hard to get the Japanese to allow non-Japanese lawyers to compete with Japanese in the provision of legal services in Japan. The Japanese were obdurate in their resistance. At that time the American Bar Association produced a study on the role of law suits leading to damages for third party
liability in the US, comparing it with Europe and Japan. It turned out that total tort damages awarded per annum in the US ran at about 2.2% of GDP. The figure in European countries was around 1%, in Japan it was only ½%. This was prima facie evidence that the US is a much more litigious society than Europe and even more so than Japan.
The argument that the Japanese used against allowing in foreign lawyers was precisely that they would bring with them a culture of litigation and move Japanese society away from its ideals of compromise and conciliation. If you accept the thesis that such searching for harmony in business is part of the culture of Japanese society to which its citizens are greatly attached, it is difficult not to have some sympathy for the argument. But, of course, like so many similar arguments it can be
abused and be in reality a form of disguised protectionism.
When I began dealing with Japan I had little or no background knowledge of the country although I had spent two fascinating weeks there twenty years before. So I began by reading voraciously about the country, its society and its culture. It seemed to be a society in which peer pressure ruled, in which decisions were taken through a painful process of building consensus within a group. This was very different from our ideas of individuality, of the interplay of opposing ideas, the cut and
thrust of argument, thesis and antithesis producing synthesis. The group was all important, the individual stood out at his peril. Indeed there is a famous Japanese proverb: "the nail which stands up will be hammered down".
This was the context in which I was given the task of devising ground rules for a new round of negotiations to get the Japanese to remove obstacles to the increase of our exports to them. I decided, since many previous approaches had failed, that it would make sense to try to pursue a Japanese style approach rather than a typically Western frontal assault. So we worked out a formula for identifying those of our export products which did well in the rest of the world but badly in Japan and
conversely those Japanese products which did less well in Europe than might be expected and we proposed to the Japanese that we analyze together what the factors for this underperformance could be. We presented this as a common analytical exercise rather than as a negotiation.
The Japanese were nonplussed. They had gotten used to western style negotiations. But what sort of action did we want, they asked? They knew the political pressure we were under to get results. If we could tell them what we wanted they could tell us what they were prepared to give. I replied that I did not know what we wanted because that would prejudge the result of the analysis which could only be conducted successfully together. And what is more I said, we believe in fair trade and will be
more than happy to examine any problems with their exports to us. Of course I was banking on the problems of market access to the Japanese market being considerably more egregious than our access barriers, but formally I was offering the Japanese a completely reciprocal exercise and a consensual method of achieving results. After explaining our ideas to them on three separate trips to Tokyo, they eventually - although perhaps skeptically - agreed.
We spent the next two years exploring the influences on trade of one product after another, identifying wherever possible government-influenced factors. Where these could be identified on an agreed basis we were indeed often able to ask successfully for government action to remove trade obstacles. As we had hoped, few obstacles were identified on our market, the exercise was a success. Our trade deficit with Japan was 35 billion euros in 1992. When I left in 1996 after four years in the job it
had fallen to 20 billion. So it seemed that my approach had been a roaring success.
Well, it makes a nice story. But our deficit was never as low again. Whatever we had accomplished, it did not seem to have a permanent impact on trade flows. More important, though, we had demonstrated to the Japanese that we could be reliable partners, that we could build up a relationship built on trust. And EU/Japan relations have never looked back. The story also illustrates that a diplomat should know when to move on to his next posting. And for me that was in Washington, D.C.
I have spent more than eight years of my career with the European Commission working on bilateral relations between the EU and the US, beginning in 1988. Throughout that period what we called the transatlantic partnership was based on the conviction that we shared both interests and values. But the more experience I acquired, the less I was convinced that we shared a common culture. Much of what I had to do with respect to our trade relationship concerned the perception of one side or the other
that one side's regulation of economic activity disadvantaged the products produced by the other.
Attitudes to government regulation of economic activity differ on the two sides of the Atlantic and I have come to regard them as two quite different cultures. On both sides we have many thousand pages of regulations and a large number of regulatory agencies which oversee their implementation. On both sides, they are, in general, respected. Our common belief in the rule of law underpins their operation.
But Europe is the continent of Rome and of Napoleon, and their legal legacies have shaped our system. On the whole, we believe in a comprehensive, overarching system of law, which provides, at least in broad terms, for all eventualities. This approach has heavily influenced the legal and regulatory system developed within the European Union. If a sector is to be regulated, the assumption is that this will take the form of a comprehensive, legal framework for the activity concerned. Our citizens
are happy with the idea of this function as an essential role of government. You could say that our motto is, "If it moves, regulate it!"
Not so in the United States. You have a tradition - all too understandable in the light of your colonial history - of distrust of government and rejection of what you call "big government". This has led to a quite different starting assumption with respect to the regulation of economic activity. It is that individual people and companies can be left to operate freely in the marketplace, unless and until a problem arises, which is generally regarded as requiring government intervention. In other
words, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" The same attitude can be discerned in the reluctance of your society to entrust government with the provision of a social safety net, a comprehensive educational system, or a nationwide health care program.
In these areas the presumption is a different one - it is that the individual, or at least the private sector, through the medium of philanthropy, will provide what in Europe is provided by the State. It is based on the mythic idea of the American as a rugged individualist, unfettered by the constraints of government.
Of course, the US is no longer a frontier society, and anyone who has observed the intense peer pressure towards conformity evident in American schools will find it difficult to accept that modern Americans are any more individualistic than Europeans. But we still see here the deep cultural roots of attitudes to government in general, and government regulation in particular.
It may also be one of the wellsprings of the deep American attachment to the concept of liberty, whose supreme manifestation in today's society is the extensive suburban environment planned around the central role of the automobile in personal transportation, which seems so strange to Europeans used to centralized cities with efficient, modern public transport systems. This has important policy implications with respect to your Congress's reluctance to take measures to deal with global climate
change.
But the important point here is that these deeply-ingrained attitudes often underlie the different ways we regulate. And when these produce different results this can impede transatlantic trade flows and lead to conflict. Resolving such conflicts always needs to begin with developing a clear understanding of where and how cultural differences are in play.
There is, perhaps, another legacy of the frontier, and of the struggle to throw off the bonds of the colonial period. It is the right to bear arms, enshrined in your constitution as the second amendment in the Bill of Rights.
As a boy in England, I grew up on a diet of Westerns. For years "High Noon" was rerun on British television every Christmas. It was the equivalent of a fairy story, a tale set in a mythical land, with a happy ending. It had for me no connection to the society around me, in which violence was severely frowned upon and policemen did not need to carry guns.
After eight years now in the United States I have realized that things are different here. Is there not an unbroken tradition of the normality of violence? "High Noon" may no longer seem contemporary but "Dirty Harry' still does and you can all add your favorite TV cop. I wonder whether, deep down inside many Americans, there is not a presumption that violence is often cathartic, that it is ultimately the only way to solve many difficult problems, and that in conflict the Good Guy usually wins.
In Europe, in contrast, we have too long a history of the misery inflicted by violence and too jaundiced a view of its consequences, to share such a perception. It seems to me that this may explain a fundamentally different approach to foreign policy on the two sides of the Atlantic.
I think the crisis over the war in Iraq demonstrated quite clearly that most Europeans are more reluctant to contemplate the use of military force against third countries than is the United States. I do not believe that this can be attributed to substantial differences in the information available on the two sides of the Atlantic, nor do I think that it is due only to different attitudes to the UN -real though these differences are. It seems to me that a deep cultural divide exists with regard
to transatlantic attitudes to violence.
Perhaps this is also what explains one other element of American society, which violence-averse Europeans find repugnant. This is the continued use of the death penalty. This is regarded in Europe as a relic of a darker, less civilized age, and has been progressively abolished by our Member States over recent decades.
I want to turn now from some examples of how different cultures affect international relations to how they influence the workings of the EU itself.
Let us pause for a moment to remember what Europe looked like in 1945. It was a continent laid to waste by six years of war, but also a continent with a history of war going back for centuries. Each of these warring states had a strong sense of national identity. And the great European statesmen of that time - Churchill, Monnet, Adenauer, Schuman, De Gaspari - were convinced that it was an overemphasis on national differences, which we call nationalism, that was the root cause of these repeated
wars. They vowed to pursue a different path, dedicated to building up an ever closer union of the peoples of Europe, to the point where war between them would become unthinkable. That goal has now been achieved within the European Union, whose zone of peace and prosperity now extends over a very large part of the European continent.
We need to be very clear that ever closer union does not mean that we are trying to replace national identities by a single European identity. Our draft constitutional treaty talks about Europe being "united in its diversity". Partly out of necessity, because of the strength of the national identities of our member States, we are committed to treating cultural diversity as an asset and not as a problem. But this has an important implication, which has nothing to do with the national identities
of our Member States.
Of the 175 million persons, who currently reside in a country other than where they were born, 56 million are in Europe. In the EU it is now largely immigration flows which sustain population growth, And, of course, as birth rates continue to fall, as our population grows older, as a smaller and smaller proportion of our population is economically active and producing the goods and services, which are consumed by all, so our need for new hands for manual work, new brains to produce ideas, and
new parents to bring forth the next generation is also increasing.
The plain fact is that in Europe, as well as in the United States, we are seeing our populations becoming increasingly multi-ethnic. This change has been underway for some time now, although there was for a long time a reluctance to accept it as a permanent rather than a transitory phenomenon. Sweden, that land of blond Vikings, now has its first black member of parliament, so does the city of Athens.
The United Kingdom has large minorities of citizens whose parents came from the Indian sub-continent or the Caribbean, France has a large minority of ethnic Moroccans or Algerians, Germany has millions of inhabitants with origins in Turkey.
So Europe is now learning to recognize and accept this phenomenon, as the United States has long done, and to develop policies to deal with it.
It has been apparent since the beginning of the European integration process that any attempt to apply a melting-pot approach to Europe with the aim of creating a European national identity replacing national identities was doomed to failure - even if it remained for some time the secret dream of many of those involved in the construction of Europe.
Over time it has given way to a quite different conception of integration, which accepts that the aim is to give the EU the capacity for effective action in pursuit of its goals by sharing sovereignty, but also while preserving those elements of national, regional, or ethnic identity which are so essential to the well-being of its citizens.
If we wish to do this we cannot allow discrimination based on ethnicity or culture. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the European Union has been to move in the space of a half-century from a continent whose ethnically distinct nation states had made war on each other with depressing regularity for hundreds of years to one in which it is no longer differences between each other which give rise to major social tensions but rather distinctions between ethnic Europeans and immigrants from
outside our continent.
And we can surely build on the techniques we have used over the last fifty years to deal with that challenge, too.
. As Antonio Vitorino, our Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs, has said,
"I believe that integration is something that happens inside a person. It is a feeling of belonging, a feeling of being accepted and of being a part of society. But integration is also a process.
It is a dynamic and two-way process that places demands on both the host societies and the individuals concerned………Immigrants must be prepared to adapt - without having to lose their own cultural identity - to the lifestyle of the host society, understanding our norms and core constitutional values as enshrined in the European Charter of Human Rights. The host society must on the other hand welcome and respect greater diversity…."
So we have a quasi-constitutional obligation to respect cultural, religious and linguistic diversity and the EC Treaty gives us the task of contributing to the flowering of the cultures of our member States. That is why we have been active since 1983 in supporting regional and minority languages. It is our belief that helping our citizens to retain these elements of their identity is the key to gaining their acceptance of the processes of European integration and of worldwide globalization, and
thus maintaining social harmony.
I would also argue that to the extent that we can succeed in this endeavor, we will develop a set of skills, which will serve us well in today's world.
Pascal Zachary, who writes for the Wall Street Journal, recently published a book called "The Global Me". In it he uses a host of examples from around the world to argue that the most successful societies in today's globalizing world are those which manage to combine social cohesion with a culturally diverse society. He tells how countries like Singapore are consciously pursuing an immigration policy that promotes diversity and he suggests that it is people of ethnically mixed background who
are best suited to navigate the roiling waters of our diverse world.
I believe there is much truth in this idea. Individuals who have been brought up to think that they can learn from the most diverse sources and are prepared to question their own assumptions in doing so are likely to be more creative and better at understanding and getting along with those of a different background than those with a largely homogeneous cultural identity.
Having talked about cultural differences in international relations and within the European Union let me finish by looking at cultural differences, which can complicate relations even between people who think they have the same background. The best example I know derives from my own long career with the European Commission. In my experience it is possible to identify two schools of thought among my colleagues with respect to the concept of teamwork and internal information flows within a team.
There are those who believe wholeheartedly in the superior powers of teams compared with individuals and who automatically ensure that all relevant information is passed on to the whole team. In the age of informatics this has become ever easier to do. But there are also those who keep information to themselves, who "forget" to pass it onto others, who shy away from subjecting their ideas to collective scrutiny. They live in a different psychological world; their mindset is incompatible with
mine. And that is a description of a hugely important cultural difference. So even where we least expect them we need to be on the lookout for such differences.
As our societies become more multicultural, as our companies become more multinational, it seems to me that many more of our citizens will be confronted with the same question, which comes up over and over again in the life of a diplomat. How best can I avoid misunderstanding, how best can I create a positive relationship, with someone who comes from a different cultural background. We may subscribe to the same ideals, we may think that we have the same goals, we may be part of the same
civilization, but we must be constantly aware of the possibility of pitfalls due to cultural differences.
I joined the European Commission because of a passionate commitment to European integration. But I have loved the work because of the stimulation which comes from working with people of different backgrounds on a daily basis and trying to learn from them. I cannot imagine a more exciting career.
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