Selen Ayirtman Ercan
TOPIC: 'Beyond multiculturalism: The deliberative politics of cultural diversity'
This study seeks to identify enabling conditions for deliberative politics in culturally diverse societies. It argues that the deliberative approach offers the most promising framework for accommodating cultural differences in these societies. This framework suggests a new way of engaging with cultural differences without essentialising them. This takes the deliberative approach far beyond the conventional forms of identity politics, most notably that of multiculturalism. In order to show the distinctiveness of the deliberative approach, this study focuses on specific cases that multicultural societies have been struggling to resolve democratically. These cases entail the accommodation of ‘deep differences’ and the resolution of ‘deep disagreements’. Examples of such cases include the accommodation of non-liberal practices embodying violence in various forms.
In this context, the central claim of the study is that if deliberative democracy is to suggest an alternative form of politics, it should offer a way of dealing with such deep differences. There are however several issues that arise when such differences become salient and make cross-cultural deliberation a distant ideal. A powerful example that leads to polarization of cultural identities, and thus threatens the possibility of cross-cultural deliberation, is honour killing cases in multicultural societies. Honour killings are extreme acts of violence resulting in the murder of young women by family members on cultural grounds allegedly breaching the principles of community honour. As a result of such cases, the majority draws rigid boundaries between the minority and themselves. Honour killings also lead to the emergence of ‘crisis situations’ which can be characterized by a breakdown of both formal frameworks (such as laws) and informal frameworks (such as the imagined bonds between citizens). Even though these circumstances make cross-cultural dialogue extremely hard to realize, they should not discourage democratic societies to pursue the deliberative ideal. The strength of a democratic society lies in its ability to foster necessary conditions for dialogue even in such instances of breakdown.
By drawing on comparative examples from reactions of culturally diverse societies to honour killing cases, this study will asses whether and how deliberative systems accommodate deep differences. This requires a close examination of various components of the broader deliberative system including courts, informal public spheres and their interplay with each other in a given society. |
