Magazine / Society / Euro-Islam / Article | 02/05/2007

Political Applications of Cultural Dialogs

Criticism of civilisation is always linked with the belief that one's own culture is superior. In order to promote the breakdown of mental barriers in a dialogue between cultures, above all patience is necessary.

It is common to talk about engaging in cultural dialogs in politics. The general public may often consider cultural dialogs to be idle talk by do-gooders with no political impact.

Mosque open day at the Fatih Mosque in Bremen
Photo: AP

In the editorial pages of newspapers, some writers jump on the band wagon proclaiming cultural dialogs would lead to nothing and that "they are among a wide range of political statements of intent whose sole aim it is to create virtual debates that have nothing to do with reality and only stimulate political and cultural involvement”[1].

These allegations illustrate to what extent a large portion of the public has been caught in the exclusiveness of the debate about the alleged "clash of cultures." The short-sightedness and lack of knowledge of the function and effect of cultural dialogs become completely apparent when there is violent rejection of the claim that such dialog be conducted on an equal footing and without prerequisites. If someone proposed that cannibals and vegetarians, arsonists and firefighters, drug dealers and junkies engage in a dialog, it would be common to order him/her to reconsider his/her perspective.[2]

Derogatory comments such as "dialog industry," "dialoguitis," "Goethe Institute debates," and "phrasal omnipotence" show how little the term's claim to change the political sphere means to the public. The biggest obstacle to accepting cultural dialog is impatience. A cultural dialog is a process, a sequence of repeated activities linked to each other to create products or services. As is the case with other processes, it is important that the sequence is repeated in order to create a product or service: more security, system stability, the establishment of integration mechanisms, conflict management, and the dismantling of dogmatic paradigms that lead to the belief in an inevitable culture clash between larger and smaller groups within a given society (at a national level) and between competing civilizations (at the international level).

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