Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

Myths of Pluralism 37

demonstration on his part, perhaps, of the continuing virtues of left-of-the-party ‘wet’ Conservatism, that party and its leader were emphatically not seen in the same light. His replacement, David Hunt, was indeed Welsh by birth – but it was the same party, the same leader and the same problem. About his replacement, John Redwood, perhaps the only thing of which I need to remind the reader is the wonderful spectacle of his gallant attempt to mime Mae hen wlad fy nhadau, yn annwyl i mi – the (unofficial) Welsh national anthem – at a Welsh Conservative Party Conference.

Second, the late 1980s saw the imposition of a new system of local government finance – first, the poll tax or Community Charge, and subsequently the present Council Tax – which may suit a relatively affluent electorate in areas with high rateable values, but does not suit a great many Welsh people, whose property values, for the most part, continue to lag behind those in many other areas of Britain. Nor was Wales seen to have provided an electoral mandate for the new system. And this is to say nothing, for reasons of space, about local perceptions during this period of other Conservative policies, such as the privatization of public utilities.

Since 1997, and the coming to power of New Labour in Westminster, we may be witnessing an incipient ‘internationalization’ of the politics of the United Kingdom, even if not necessarily the ‘break-up’ about which Tom Nairn speculated (1981). Leaving the particular situation of Northern Ireland aside for the moment, the Scots now have their own Parliament, and, following a narrow referendum result in Wales, the National Assembly for Wales – admittedly with weaker legislative powers than its more robust equivalent in Edinburgh – opened for business in 1999. Cardiff continues to gain in significance as regional power centre, and does direct political business with the European Union.

Spheres of activity other than politics must also be taken into account. Inward investment – particularly, but by no means exclusively, from the United States and Japan – has been important in replacing some of the jobs lost in the traditional extractive and manufacturing industries. However, the investment decisions of Ford, Hitachi, Hoover, Sony or whoever are taken in the context of a global complex of economic and political factors within which the needs and priorities of Wales – or of any region within Wales – have (at best) to take their place alongside a host of competitors. Much the same can be said about the strategies of British companies. Nor is it simply the financing of manufacturing employment that has been internationalized. Cardiff has become an important financial centre in the United Kingdom. The prosperity that is in part attendant upon this transformation is locked into the international telecommunications networks of global markets. Similarly, much of the capital required for major civil engineering programmes such as the Cardiff Bay project was found neither in the local arena nor in the public purse (although this has not been insignificant, particularly since devolution), but in those same international markets.

Telecommunications and information technologies are important in other respects as well. While Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C, the Welsh Channel Four television station) provides the Welsh language with a new and resolutely non-traditional forum – and promotes an increasingly busy Welsh cultural industry sector – the wonders of cable and the satellite dish mean that it is now possible to watch dozens of different television channels, from all over the world, offering a varied fare of movies old and new, sport (everything from Sumo wrestling to professional

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ten-pin bowling), and news commentary. In homes, social clubs and pubs, and whether for good or ill, television and satellite technology have made a difference. Over Christmas and New Year 1989–90, for example, Welsh audiences sat down to watch a revolution in progress in Romania, at one end of the world, and the US invasion of Panama, at another. When the World Trade Center Towers came down in New York on the 11 September 2001, Wales, along with rest of the word, was watching. It is a trite cliché to observe that television has made the world smaller, but it is only trite and clichéd because it is true. The mobile phone and internet revolutions have similarly transformed experiences of the wider world (and myspace.com works as well in Welsh as in English).

Other things, too, have simultaneously narrowed and broadened horizons in south and west Wales, as elsewhere. It is no longer the case, for example, that the emigration of daughters and sons means a de facto final farewell. Where forty years ago a holiday for a family from Bargoed might have been, at best, a week at Barry Island, it is now more likely to start with a journey to Rhoose, to Cardiff-Wales International Airport. From here or from Bristol, there is a choice, summer and winter, of package tour destinations in the Mediterranean, the Balkans, North Africa, and North America. It is no longer an object of local comment to hear of somebody going for a holiday to Florida; quite the reverse, Disney World is now an ordinary destination, not much to shout about, even if it remains out of the economic reach of many. What’s more, using the latest generation of mobile phones, photographs of the holidaymakers, and their antics, can be back in Wales before they are.

The cutting edge of tourism cuts both ways, of course. The development of an organized tourist industry in the region – not just the marketing of existing ‘traditional’ resources, but the creation and promotion of ‘heritage’, the manufacture of attractions and facilities in post-industrial areas such as the Valleys, the recognition of the central significance of tourism to the Welsh economy as a whole – may turn out to be one of the most diagnostic local trends of the current times. Despite the doubtful contribution such ventures have made to the prosperity of most Valleys’ people, it seems likely that they are here to stay. Those who can no longer mine or make must, if they are lucky, serve.

Neither travel nor television necessarily liberates the imagination or undermines local chauvinism and parochial smugness. The reality of the low-cost Mediterranean resort, or, for example, the Sky television channels, is different. Mean-minded, crass, lowest-common-denominator commercialism is unlikely to be the best vehicle for improving – even if it were transparently clear what that word might mean in this context – understanding and relations between people internationally. Nonetheless, there are two sides to this story: on the one hand, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola in Russia, on the other, many thousands of people sitting round their televisions in Welsh households on a Sunday afternoon in February 1990, waiting to see Nelson Mandela walk out of imprisonment (and, just as significant, millions more in households around the world). It has become increasingly difficult not to acknowledge that the women and men on the streets of Saõ Paulo, Warsaw, Soweto or Llandysul share many similar fears, basic needs and aspirations. In a sense, the fact of their obvious – and equally important – differences only serves to make their similarities clearer.

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Many of those fears, needs and aspirations are no respecters of international boundaries, and nor are the problems to which they relate. The environmental movement is, by definition, global in its concerns and in its activities and organization. Global warming, the depletion of the rain forests, whale hunting, marine pollution, Chernobyl and Sellafield, toxic waste, food additives, etcetera, etcetera – the list is long and all of it matters to Wales. Much of it – such as radiation from Chernobyl, oil spills and climate change – ends up, quite literally, on Welsh doorsteps. These are issues that local politicians, whether their new green hue is dyed in the wool or merely a superficial tint, can no longer afford to ignore. Welsh concerns entail global issues. They are issues in the pursuit of which the narrow focus of local self-interest must, of necessity, combine with a wider perspective.

The last three decades have seen south and west Wales become ever more firmly tied into a widening international context. Although this is neither new nor a radical departure from a parochial past, it is gathering speed and momentum and shows no signs of slowing down. And the context has broadened and deepened to the point where it is genuinely global. Whether in terms of national identity, culture and language(s), the popular view of the world, the economic realities of trade and employment, the preservation or improvement of the environment, or the institutional framework of politics, the future is one in which what it means to be Welsh, and what it is to live in Wales, will reflect, to some large degree, what goes on in the outside world. And it really will be the outside world.

Modernity and globalization

There is an obvious affinity between social constructivist approaches to ethnicity and models of society as culturally plural, heterogeneous and diverse. It is a pity, therefore, that both the formal theorists of ‘pluralism’ and the recent (post)modern celebrants of ‘difference’ suggest – if nothing stronger – that plural diversity is a relatively modern phenomenon, presumably a development and progression from previous conditions of bounded cultural homogeneity. This essentially historicist model – from simple to complex, closed to open, absolutist to relativist, static to dynamic – is, if only on the evidence of south and west Wales, implausible. This chapter raises two questions. Can ‘pluralism’ be a defensible analytical – rather than a simply commonsensical or descriptive – category? And if, as I am arguing, it is routine, everyday, and nothing more than the expected state of social affairs, should we continue to talk about ‘difference’ as if it were something distinctive or special, worthy of comment or in need of explanation? My own answer is ‘no’ to both: emphatically in the first case, more equivocally in the second.

Cultural and ethnic diversity (pluralism) is nothing new. The secure hermetically bounded group is an imaginative, somewhat romanticized, retrospect. But, as the excursion to south and west Wales also illustrated, the human world of the early twenty-first century is different in some respects from what went before. It is different in the scale of the meaningful arenas within which people see themselves and others. To draw on a set of notions from the work of Alfred Schutz (1967; Schutz and Luckmann 1973), the ‘life-world’ has widened and deepened. The

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immediate everyday world of our ‘fellows’ has expanded because of improved communications of all sorts: it is now possible for people to remain in immediate and intimate contact at enormous distances – globally – and travel over global distances is no longer difficult or impossibly expensive. As Giddens has argued (1984: 110ff.) time and space are no longer bound up with each other to the degree that they used to be. The more abstract and socially distant world of our ‘contemporaries’ has changed too.

These changes are, before they are anything else, quantitative: we know about many more people we do not know personally than we did even as recently as a generation ago, and we know more about them. We also know about them more immediately: telecommunications, in particular, have been responsible for a blurring of the distinction between our fellows and our contemporaries that is one aspect of globalization. The spreading ripples of globalization are enlarging the scale of the social arenas in which identities are forged and maintained. The amount of information about Others is expanding and becoming more immediate. But these changes do not represent discontinuity and radical novelty; they are differences of degree and of emphasis. The difference between our fellows and our contemporaries remains. We should not lose sight of the fact that most of us, most of the time, continue to live in practical life-worlds that are primarily what they have always been: small-scale arenas peopled largely by those whom we know face to face (which is not the same thing as knowing them well or intimately). This is not to deny the significance or reality of globalization, merely to put it into everyday perspective.

Taking seriously the ongoing behemoth of globalization can also put another spin on the ball. It is plausible that globalization – which I take to mean a very real set of changes, albeit one with deeper historical roots than is often supposed (Frank and Gills 1993; Raudzens 1999) – has had an impact on the pluralism and diversity of the human world. Due to the vastly increased speed and availability of movement and communication, a wider array of cultural possibilities and differentiations may be on offer today. This is central to Stuart Hall’s argument, discussed earlier, and also, perhaps, fairly obvious. There are, however, at least two reasons for suspecting that it may not be as significant as authors such as Hall insist.

First, if there has been a historically recent global efflorescence of difference, this tells us nothing about the meaning of diversity in the past or the meaning of diversity now. Then, as now, diversity was experienced in many different ways, had many different consequences, and had many different meanings in people’s lives, depending upon their historical, local and personal circumstances. The simple fact of diversity – and, of course, it is anything but a simple fact – may in itself not mean very much, so more or less of it may be neither here nor there.

Second, one of the consistent themes in the literature about globalization is that globalization produces not just diversity but also greater sameness. So, if anything, we might plausibly insist that the modern world is in some respects becoming ever more homogeneous. Step off the plane in New York, the New Hebrides or Novaya Zemlya, and, increasingly, the similarities may be as striking as the differences. Nor is it simply a matter of technology: the global convergence of business, tourism and, to some extent, culture and politics is a phenomenon to be reckoned with. In terms of values – particularly with the apparent triumph of capitalism – the cultures of the world are now at least as much divided by what they hold in common

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as by their differences. One version of this thesis has become famous in the work of George Ritzer as the McDonaldization of Society (2004) and, despite the criticisms that can be levelled at it (e.g. Smart 1999), it has an obviousness that speaks vividly to a widespread experience of human life at the beginning of the twentyfirst century.

But homogeneity may not be all that it seems, either, and we should not deny the realities of diversity and fragmentation: they are certainly no less real than they ever were. As Ulf Hannerz has argued, for example, the impact of being homogenized or globalized – whether economically, politically or culturally – often calls forth local responses that in all sorts of ways and for many different reasons reemphasize and reimagine difference and diversity: the ‘global ecumene’ involves convergence and polycentric variety (Hannerz 1992: 217–67). This, to borrow a word from the new-speak of international business, via Roland Robertson (1992: 173–4; 1995), is ‘glocalization’. The global and the local are always in bed together, and the same is true of similarity and difference.

Between the global arena and the everyday world there arise tricky questions about scale and categories of identification. What, for example, is the relationship, and how do we distinguish, between local identities and ethnic, regional and national identities? These issues, among others, are broached in Chapter 4.