I submitted this report in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of International Studies (Peace and Conflict Resolution) in the School of Political Science and International Studies at The University of Queensland (2013)
(simplified and summarised extract)
In consideration of coming discussion about section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, I think it is time I share this piece of work and reflexion.
In consideration of coming discussion about section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, I think it is time I share this piece of work and reflexion.
International relation literature provides evidences that freedom of expression can be seen as both a potent ‘flashpoint’ and as a prerequisite of a successful model of intercultural relations. In other words, freedom of expression is simultaneously part of the problem and part of the solution.
This thesis seeks to address the question: How can we, defend and remodel freedom of speech in conditions of growing diversity if we do not want it to be a hindrance to intercultural communication?
Through historical representation of the concepts of freedom of speech, by uncovering the structures by which intercultural comprehension maybe mutually achieved, and through careful cultural readings of the Danish Cartoons episodes, this thesis seeks to envisage possible future shift of the concept of freedom of speech. This work is needed to understand how intercultural communication ought to be conceived so as to avoid explosive conflict in pluralistic societies, when freedom of speech should no longer be used as an identity marker of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’, but hold the ultimate goal of seeking the Good life for all, not just for an elusive majority.
With 37% of New Yorkers foreign-born, 50% foreign-born in Toronto, 25% of new-borns in Britain of one parent born overseas, and 300 languages spoken in London alone, we do live in multicultural societies1. The concept of free speech, a core value of the liberal democratic system, is currently challenged by new readings in contemporary multicultural societies. An unfortunate series of events, like the Jyllands-Posten Danish Cartoons affairs (2005), leading to the killing of embassy personnel in a ‘distant-from-the-event’ country, the outrage of a few, distressing and silencing many, prompting massive outrage and demonstrations of the general population in major European capitals ... is making us reflect on the limits of what we assume as our right to freedom of expression.
On one hand, it is widely understood that freedom of speech is a pre-requisite for constructive dialogue in order to achieve a successful model of intercultural relations, with political spaces constantly needing being constructed (Todorov, Saïd). On the other hand, freedom of speech, as a core value of Western democracies, has lately appeared a contested value, and the Cartoons episode can be seen as one manifestation of this contestation.
On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a number a Cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, an act seen as an insulting to him by many Muslims. My goal is to uncover the structures by which this episode can be understood and intercultural comprehension be better mutually achieved. In order to reach such goal, the questions I will be asking are: Is freedom of speech a chance for diversity, and/or is it a prominently Western concept? How was the clash between secular freedom of speech and blasphemy narrated? Is the Danish cartoons affair a manifestation of the contestation of the principle of freedom of speech, or is it something more?
I will show that whenever freedom of speech is brandished as a weapon (identity marker to divide), it goes against its true purpose (democratic tool) of enhancing intercultural communication.
The guiding methodological questions of my analysis of the Cartoon Affair test case are the following: Where does the story come out? Is it a single story? Who is coming out with what messages? Who speaks? Is the communication proactive or reactive? Who is to gain and who is to lose? Whose freedom of speech?
I will finally draw in the findings the conditions that are necessary for freedom of speech to promote, rather than hinder intercultural dialog.
Is Freedom of speech an including or an excluding principle?
Should we understand freedom of speech as a chance for diversity and/or as an excluding Western human right based on a legacy of constraining principles such as universalism?
In front of the UN General Assembly, President Obama has argued in defence of the First Amendment in response to the controversy around the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ YouTube video:
“in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities.” (cited by Garton Ash, 2012). Garton-Ash agrees with Obama: ‘in a liberal society, a hateful tweet is best combated by popular condemnation and social pressure – which social media also allow and magnify’ (2012) rather than calling on state institutions.
For many, if freedom of speech is a chance for diversity, like Obama says it is for oppressed minorities, then it ought to be non-negotiable, in other words, an absolute concept. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America is giving a good example of an absolutist reading of the concept of freedom of speech.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. (First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, 1791)
As Paul Sturges points out, it is ‘first and foremost a statement of individual rights and offers protection against the violation of those rights by government, identified here as ‘Congress’.’ Sturges reminds us here that when quoted in full, the First Amendment protects from practising (or not) any religion, protects freedom of personal expression (often limited audience) and protects the freedom of public expression like the modern day Freedom of the press (large audience and effect). It is in order to protect the public from self-censorship that the editor of the Newspaper had published the Cartoons. Sturges, in the capacity of Professor of Library studies aware of the duty of libraries to provide access to a wide range of documents to the public whatever their beliefs, nevertheless points out that ‘outside the most libertarian circles, the right to freedom of expression is always seen as subject to certain limits and conditions’ (Sturges, 2006: 183)
The First Amendment is the most absolutist definition of all, and is inspired from past European political philosophers like Rawls: "citizens must be free from coercive threat as they would not be able to affirm and chose their own ideas about the most fundamental matters of politics (the just) and what constitutes, in their view a valuable life (the good)". Rawls argues that any attempt to discriminate, based on the content of a particular viewpoint, would threaten a regime’s democratic credentials, even if those view points were themselves deeply inegalitarian. Citizen should engage (Brettschneider, 2012: 77) in a process of reflective revision to scrutinize their beliefs, including their so-called private beliefs, in the light of democratic values.
So, how, as Obama seems to state, does the concept make space for the protection of minorities historically? The freedom of speech principle has been erected at a time when some extreme elements of reaction against the established order (XVIII century European Monarchies, Religious political power of the time) were useful to achieve inclusiveness (French Revolution). Sadurski suggests that a century later, a conceptual shift unfolds whereby the state may have a legitimate role to play in protecting minorities against majoritarian oppression (1994). A good example of legislation aimed at protecting vulnerable minority dignity is ‘hate speech’ laws (Europe).
Other factors limit the applicability of freedom of speech, such as the Harm Principle – Mill (1859) suggested that the use of freedom of expression could reasonably be limited if it caused harm to others. The limitation is that opinions may only be considered harmful when their expression leads to immediate and causal harm, because of the high regards with which Mill viewed freedom of expression (Mill 1991: 62). Immediate and causal harm, of course, remains open to interpretation.
For example, there is a notion that more harm is caused when ‘race’ rather than ‘religion’ is being targeted. We should note that the presumption in ‘civil law tradition in which the status of religious belief has come to be cast as speculative and therefore less ‘real’ than the materiality of race and biology’ may need to be questioned (Mahmood cited in Asad, 2009: 81). The idea that race suggests immutable biological characteristic, whereas religion is a matter of choice that one can change one’s religion, but not one’s skin colour is flawed. For many religious people, religion is not a choice.
One notorious limit is that race does not account for the fact that truth is elusive because complex and contextual, that ‘many utterances are not sufficiently coherent to be considered a contribution for the research for truth’ (Barendt 1985: 13; 8; 11) and that ‘truth may not emerge if hate-speech has for effect to impair the ability to talk back’ (Gelber, 2002). Also freedom of speech is fundamentally an individual right. As such, and interestingly enough, the concept of defamation does not apply to statements that threaten the reputation and dignity of a group of people, like it was the case in the Danish Cartoon affair ‘It seems to be the case that systems of law generally do not easily accommodate the concept of group defamation’ (Sturges, 2006: 186).
Lastly, there is an inherent contradiction in the dominant liberal and utilitarian arguments in defence of free speech: that ‘truth is best capable of emerging under conditions of minimal restraint on speech’, which, according to Gelber, ‘cannot be sustained historically’ ... (2002: 30). We now start having a sense that there are significant limitations to the applicability of freedom of speech and the principle is not easily applied equally to all citizens. We can now comprehend better that those on the receiving end may start thinking critically about the whole concept.
Is freedom of speech dependant on traditions of a particular world view or of religion ? In claiming what Rawl calls the “fact of pluralism”, this would be indeed an embarrassment to a state or a group of states that was committed to neutrality in terms of its world view. What shaped freedom of speech?
The genealogy of human rights has been shaped by the history of Christian theology in the Middle Ages, especially Spanish Scholasticism (Habernas, 2006:21). Talal Asad explains that ‘on one strand of Christianity, there is that belief that truth shall set you free, that the truth should be spoken openly. Freedom is thus understood as the removal of all constraints, and freedom of speech is a first principle of both truth and freedom’ (Asad, 2009). He then cites Unnik, a New Testament Scholar:
‘In spite of the opposition of those who are unbelievers, of those who criticize the apostle (John), the Christian may speak freely because he knows Him who conquers all opposition, because he knows that wonderful communion with God which transcends everything in the world’ (Unnik: 1962: 487)
The concept of free speech seems therefore imbued of the Christian idea of Truth. This could also explain why freedom of speech raises so much outrage when it is perceived as threatened, an outrage which goes beyond fighting for democratic core values. According to Asad, even if ‘the liberal principle of Free Speech does not depend on the proviso that speech to be free must be literally true, the Christian idea of Truth, as applied to speaking and listening freely helps to explain why that principle has come to be thought as “sacred” ‘ (2009: 34).
While we may contemplate Habernas’ historical claim and Asad’s postcolonial claim that freedom of speech has been influenced by the Christian legacy, it has also been influenced by Positivism, known also as Scientism. This may seem contradictory at first, but there is one commonality and I will come back to that shortly. Because of the XVII century Enlightenment presumption that the true, rational, scientific emerge only with the shedding of religious authority or ‘prejudice’, there is a conviction that critique replaces opinion in faith with truth, and subjectivism with science; that critique in short is secular. It is worth noting that most modern societies are founded on the model of the Enlightment heritage, which led to the separation of the Church and the State, and that modernisation is in great part about liberating people from the church dogma.
As we have just seen, it may appear that freedom of speech does not only shape itself in Christian faith, but also, in a seemingly conflictual fashion, in the history of secular rationality, a rationality that understands itself to be the element that binds people together. So what do Christian value and secularism have in common that shaped the meaning of freedom of speech?
Universalism
A priori a well-meaning idea, Universalism is not as pretty as it looks; it comes in different variances and is still present today in the way we conceptualise cultural encounters.
The universalist-ethnocentric uncritically makes her values, The values. ‘A good foreigner is a foreigner who can reason like us’. The peak of this kind of universalism could be seen in l’esprit classique of XVII and XVIII century Europe. This development is important because this is when Universalism began to enunciate the characteristic of a Universal Society: industrial life based on a certain work organisation, homogeneity of aesthetic tastes, international agreement on scientific method and democratic republic as the favourite mode of government. As a result to this deeply rooted preference for absolutes, when people like La Bruyère ask why all countries in the world do not form a unique nation, ‘other’ cultures are not part of the equation, and conquest is about homogenisation into a ‘unique nation’. Cultural differences are not taken seriously, they are only catalogued, observed, contemplated, what is really important is that we should all agree on democratic principles. Todorov catalogs at length the different forms of othering during intercultural encounters in The Conquest of America (1982). He explains how what happens during the first encounters (1492) is symptomatic of Universalism, or of the inability to step into the other’s cosmology and value system, and how this has bearance in the way we conceptualize intercultural relations today. Today, a main argument against freedom of speech as a Western product is that it is being imposed as part of a universally imposed package. Shapcott argues that ‘liberal thought relies on a highly abstracted, idealised conception of human agency and selfhood’ (2001: 34). According to him, it privileges a generalised other: ‘It employs abstract and impartial conceptions of human capacities, removed from their particular social, cultural contexts ... this way, it performs an assimilative task. Plurality is reduced to unity’ (35), a symptom of universalism. Alternatively, ‘communitarian thought is embedded in the contextual nature of human morality and agency and on how selfhood is relative to particular social circumstances. These divergent understandings of selfhood result in divergent understandings of the relationship between self and others in the moral community and involve different standpoints towards otherness’ (34).
So, if universalism is the root of the tension between freedom of speech and intercultural encounters, it is useful to look at the alternative ways of othering favoured by communitarians, and that still shape intercultural relations today.
Relativism
‘each nation has its own notion of what is right and what is not’
(Montaigne, De L’esprit des lois II 13 t.I, p.27).
For Montaigne, any judgement is the expression of habits solely; therefore, nothing can allow people to believe they are free. The external face of this conservatism at home is tolerance ‘outside home’. Since there is no reason to prefer a law or a custom to another, there is no reason to despise any - «je ne hay point les fantaisies contraires aux miennes» (1967: 766) which literally means ‘I do not hate follies that are not mine’ and what applies to relations between individuals applies by extension to relations between nations. Here is the great impartiality of cultural relativism. Relativism is not only a communitarian way of ordering the word, the dominant ‘Liberal neutralism recognizes the volatility of competing lifestyles or identity claims, but would like to exclude such conflicts from the public arena’ (Dallmayr: 1996:26) as we have seen earlier; the moto is ‘as long as you adhere to liberal values’. ‘Although serving as an antidote to melting-pot assumptions, despite its appealing ‘open-mindedness’, liberal tolerance tends to be purchased at a price: the price of a schism between form and substance, between public and private domains of life’ (p.24). The contemporary xenophobia has for motto «le droit à la difference» /the Right to Difference, and relegates concrete life-forms to the status of privatised folklore. The contemporary liberal relativist framework underlies no communication between cultures, and can easily extend to ‘go back to where you come from’, values that are ‘our own’, and nationalist relativism (like Barrès in Todorov, 1989: 78).
The big criticism is that this kind of relativism is not an acceptance of different values; it is a toleration of them. For the liberals, different values need not be discussed and are relegated to the private sphere. As a result, issues of identity and the good are banned from public discourse.
While these two ways of knowing (universalism versus relativism) permeate most of the way we act in cultural encounters, there are variations. Rousseau introduces a notion of ‘ethics’ beyond didactic notions of religious ethics. Ethics does not replace religion, because its role is consultative (droit de regard), not didactic. This changes everything for the concept of Universalism. For him, «tout est nature» (Universalism) and «tout est culture» (Relativism) have something in common: determinism. None of them give a chance to the freedom to say ‘no’. Rousseau will have none of this pessimist determinism. He introduced the important notion of ‘perfectibility’. The right to say ‘no’, the capacity to ‘adjust’ is for Rousseau the distinctive feature of humanity.
This argument refutes also relativism. If man is free, man can act according to his own will, he can chose his acts, assume responsibility, and accept that some of his acts should be judged as good or bad.
Another solution comes from anthropologist, Claude Levi Strauss. Drawing on Indian Cosmology, he explains that world cosmologies are ruled by different ways to tell a story, and different figurative: a different genre. The object and the method of these stories are different; and yet, there is a commonality: the goal is always to make the world around us more intelligible. What is profound is the goal. Levi-Strauss explains that our universality resides in heredity; what he means by that, is our universal aptitude in acquiring a culture. For him, whatever culture we are accidently born into, is shallow. Our true commonality is the fact that we all ‘acquire a culture’, our attempts to picture the world around us in order make sense of it. For Levi-Strauss, Renaissance humanists of the XVIII century thought of themselves as Universalists, while in reality, they were Euro-centrists.
The reason why we need to look deeply into these underlying concepts of how we picture the other and that have shaped European and Word history though its influence or impact over the last few centuries, is that our inherent inability to detach ourselves / to move away from an egocentric perspective explains in large part all the disasters that struck the world for the last 500 years, colonialism, totalitarianism, extermination camps ...
Todorov agrees with Levi-Strauss, because he sees the ethnologist as a mediator between cultures (which goes against hardline relativism), and the means for intercultural understanding as ‘détachement’. Il faut admettre que «je est un autre» avant de pouvoir découvrir que «l’autre est un je» (1973 : 49). We cannot see the other’s universal humanity if we cannot detach ourselves from your own culture. All we would see will be a projection of our own self, relative to our self, deformed by our ego. In the same fashion, Edward Said refutes universalism as a utopian line and relativism as reductionist and an exaggeration. His solution is to value counter culture and creative provocation, without which, no culture is understandable. He explains that there are varieties of currents and under currents in Western and Islam cultures which provide the necessary template to questioning. It is the questioning which characterizes, in Said’s opinion, the post war world (1996).
Freedom of speech is widely presented as a symbol of Western thought. Yet, it would be misguided to reduce the notion of ‘critique’ implied in ‘freedom of speech’ to ‘critical enquiry’ associated with Enlightment’s positivism only, and the notion of a search for Truth to Christian’s universalism. Critical thinking is not the panacea of Western culture, but a culmination of many. Rationality and democracy that come to Europe during the Renaissance after centuries of dark ages, comes from the protection by the Muslims of Hellenic culture, itself a fusion between Asia Minor, Roman, Egyptian, Macedonian, Mesopotamian, Persian, Syriac cultures. The Syriac culture itself inherits from Babylonian, Chaldean, Aramean, and Assyrian cultures. Hellenism, along Syriac culture was a great fusional culture, which dominated the Orient until the Arab invasions (Corms, 2002: 51). The notion of critique contained in the concept of freedom of speech is not a panacea of the Western culture, but has been widely embraced by diverse populations over time and continents. We have hereby acknowledged the legacy of universalism and relativism, and their many forms which still permeate international encounters today. We should now be equipped to understand better the forces at play in the Danish Cartoon affair.
Is Absolute freedom of speech irresponsible when it becomes a flashpoint in the interaction between Islam and the West? Is the Danish cartoons affair a manifestation of the contestation of freedom of speech as a Western construct or is it much more than that? Is such a phenomenon as the Cartoon Affair anything special at all? Is it something bound to happen from time to time from engagement between cultures?
We are told that after all, the Danish committee of Imams and mosque activists that was created to campaign against the Cartoons was not regarded by the majority of Danish Muslims as representing their views. We are also told that European Muslims were divided on the subject and did not look at Arab governments and International organisations to represent them, even if the latter did feel the offense. Does it mean it was not a big deal after all?
I will argue that we should not undermine the magnitude of the harm caused. The fact that we heard only ‘a few voices’ does not mean that Muslim at large were not hurt. I insist on the fact that we ought not to ignore the presence of the silent majority of Muslims victim of this act of ‘freedom of speech' who need their rights to be redressed and their sensibilities respected.
Twelves editorial Cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad were published in a Danish newspaper, the Jyllands Posten, in 2005, and then republished by several European newspapers in 2008. The Cartoons were greeted by most religious Muslims as insulting, violent, and/or blasphemous, and the publications incited rage and protest from the Muslim world. Thirty people lost their lives in Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Lybia, Nigeria and other Islamic countries during protests against the Cartoons (Singer, 2006: 1).
The story claims that the editor of Jyllands Posten made a conscious choice to publish the Cartoons because he feared that democratic safety mechanisms were at risk since the Danish media were already practised self-censorship in relation to the country’s Muslim community. The editors were thus trying to defend freedom of speech as an absolute value. It was asserted that Muslims could not impose their cultural practices on the rest of society, in other word, ‘you don’t have to depict the Prophet, but we are free to do so’ in the name of freedom of speech. That the story grew so dramatically on such thin ground suggests that this topic was already highly politicized in Denmark.
In October 2005, eleven ambassadors from countries representing more than 730 million people had asked for a meeting with the government of Denmark to discuss concerns about the eruption of political violence following the Cartoon publications (see Letter 1 – Annexe 1). The prime minister ignored the ambassadors’ concerns and denied them a meeting. From then on, the denial of dialogue is unquestionable and will make any later “apology” appear to be insincere, which is precisely how, for instance, Pakistani and Indonesian news media interpreted the prime minister’s response. From the time of the unfortunate rejection of the meeting with the eleven ambassadors, Denmark’s government found itself in a situation of crisis. The prime minister repeatedly referred to this as Denmark’s biggest crisis since World War II. The current crisis peaked in late January and early February 2006, with violent demonstrations and boycotts of Danish goods (Thomsen, 2011: 191).
After the Cartoon Affair had burst upon the international news scene, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen went out into the media, scolding corporations, some large Danish newspapers, and public intellectuals for not standing up for freedom of speech. This spin successfully transformed the issue of possible self-censorship of Cartoonists into stories about the struggle between the “good countries” with free speech and the “bad ones” without it. Countries whose governments criticized the Cartoons were accused of not having free speech. In an interview with Al-Arabiya the prime minister explained:
I have a very important message to you: The Danish population has defended free speech and the freedom of religion for generations. We have a deep respect for all religions, including Islam, and it is important for me to tell you, that the Danish people have no intentions about insulting Muslims (A.F. Rasmussen 2006).
Is the communication proactive or reactive? The prime minister established the dichotomy of two unassailable categories: “Us,” the Danes who have free speech and have done nothing wrong, and “Them,” the Muslim countries who do not have free speech and have done much wrong. This is definitely reactive communication.
Who is to gain from the story? This spin turned out to be particularly strong and successful as a means of diverting attention from the troublesome offending Cartoons and of not granting the ambassadors a meeting. Predictably, many Danes endorsed the free speech explanation their country in this light, which makes it easier to locate the source of the problem, and lay the blame, outside Denmark’s borders.
The real story is embedded in a deep context of highly dysfunctional intercultural relations within society (Denmark), namely Islamophobia, which echoed the dichotomization of native Danes vs. foreigners, particularly non-Westerners and Muslims. This is substantiated by a shift toward the radical right, with eighty percent of the voters agreeing on the necessity of a tough stance toward foreigners in Denmark (Hervik, 2004). So the spin’ intention is a denial of any provocation or racism with freedom of speech erected by the Danish government and its institutions (newspapers) as a symbol of Danish identity, not so much as to promote dialog, but in order to entertain the binary ‘Us’ (holders of freedom of speech) against ‘them’ (holders of blasphemy laws).
Whose freedom of speech? Who speaks?
The debate in the Danish news is marred by this repeated assertion that “freedom of speech is a Danish freedom”. Arguments about the offending character of the Cartoons, their necessary or unnecessary provocative disposition, and their premature nature are themselves expressions of
the functioning of free speech, the freedom of speech of the targeted minority people. As if Voltaire did not apply to Muslims (Thomsen, 2011: 196)
The much-reiterated spin statement insists that the issue is either supporting or suppressing free speech. As such, it is not unlike former US President George W. Bush’s statement, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”. As we have seen earlier, this is more a reactive than proactive stance towards communication. In the Muhammad Cartoon case, the government and the largest national newspaper used freedom of speech to lever a negative dialogue project, while arguing that provocation of Muslims was a necessary thing to do, while in reality, freedom of speech was originally conceived and is still regarded as a protection device for vulnerable minorities (see Obama Speech above). Freedom of speech activists would nevertheless pursue the rights of freedom of speech for the small minority of Danish Muslims. However, Muslims’ right to criticize Jyllands-Posten and the government was rarely defended. Instead Muslim criticism was met with arguments that they should leave Denmark; they had misunderstood democracy; that if they did not like it in Denmark, they should leave, suggesting that rights were less applicable for these minorities than for other citizens who were thought to belong more properly. Moral panic was stirred up early in the conflict through the emotional appeals to the “we” feeling of the native Danes against the Muslim outsiders who were allegedly ignorant of democratic procedures and values. The cultural outsider was constructed in order to confirm the imagined cultural community. In coming with words like “Danish values,” “connectedness,” “social cohesion,” “social glue,” and “solidarity,” the complexity of multi culturalism is being denied, trivialized, naturalized, and toned down, the chances of intercultural dialog are eluded.
In the Cartoon Affair, we can see clearly that it was not ‘as it seemed at first’ purely an issue of contested freedom of speech; it was mostly identity politics. The concept of freedom of speech was literally brandished as an identity symbol not as a goal but as a mean to assert a binary, which may seem benign, but is not.
Sizing the magnitude of the hurt
Why focus on the hurt now? As Blaney argues, ‘In a hierarchical and competitive world of oppressors and oppressed, intercultural dialogue entails joining the others as co-sufferers in challenging those understandings and social practices that produce our common victimhood as well as our common capacity to victimize’ (1994: 45).
We have seen the use of dichotomised language such as Us versus Them, a black and white perspective, embedded in didactic, aggressive language. The challenge, as we have seen in our study case, is to discover the other at even greater degrees, through understanding rather than subjugation.
One way to size the magnitude of the hurt is through understanding ‘others’ representations’ of meanings. We may not be aware of other people’s sensitivities or representations of meanings (semiotics), therefore of the extent of the misunderstanding at stake when we engage in free speech in intercultural relations. In this regard, Hans-Georg Gadamer has developed philosophical hermeneutics to show that beyond its limitations, language does not constitute an impermeable obstacle to the fusion of horizons in conversation for ‘no subjective consciousness, neither that of the speaker nor of whomever is addressed already knows enough to fully encompass what comes to light in dialogue’ (1989: 177). The stakes are high, when there is a pressing need to engage in intercultural dialog and to reason out ways that facilitate understanding beyond difference and contending claims of universalism.
Drawing in our test case, the first misunderstanding is about the semiotics of iconography and representation. Mahmood explains that Christian religious figures and authorities are distant and command-based, while Islamic pietists ‘ingest, as it were, the Prophet’s persona, emulating how he dressed ... ate ... spoke to his friends and adversaries ... slept, walked, and so on’. Unlike the distant religious Christian authority representation, the prophet is a close figure, like a role model, a person we would like to emulate, to which we may assimilate. Violating the Prophet’s persona is therefore like violating the devotee himself. Mahmood explains: ‘The notion of moral injury I am describing no doubt entails a sense of violation, but this violation emanates not from the judgement that ‘the law’ has been transgressed, but from the perception that one’s being, grounded as it is in a relationship of dependency with the Prophet, has been shaken’ (cited in Asad, 2009: 78). Thus, according to Mahmood, an attack on the Prophet’s persona does not only defile Him, but constitutes a direct assault on his followers. For Muslims, the offense the Cartoons committed was not against a moral interdiction (‘Thou shall not make images of Mohammad”), but against a structure of the affect, a habitus, that fell wounded (78). Asad explains that ‘it is impossible to remain silent (as a Muslim) when confronted with blasphemy’, because it is ‘something that seeks to disrupt a living relationship’ (Asad, 2008: 25).
Did the media and the many people who interpreted the cartoon understand to which extend they were hurting Muslim people at large in their ‘being-ness’?
What I want to highlight is that, despite the fact that the motivations for the international protesters were notoriously heterogeneous, the dominant representation of blasphemy, injury and freedom is limited by the normative framework regulating the semantic fields. In some ways, the dispute that emerged in the wake of the publication of the Danish Cartoons is one between competing moral frameworks, in understanding what constitutes blasphemy. We do not need to locate our understanding in one framework only, especially if the act of placing it in a particular framework does not achieve the ‘stabilisation’ of the phenomenon – in this case blasphemy – which precisely exists at the crossroads of competing, overlapping and divergent moral cosmologies . We may be able to absorb the possibility of two frameworks, appreciate their singularity, instead of one unique solution. The first step towards mutual respect is to understanding the outrage in response to the Cartoon. For that, we need to understand that we are dealing with a different semiotics of iconography and representation, in other words a different subjectivity. What is also important to rectify here is that ‘they are not oppositions and not developmental intervals in which, for example, Christianity represents a modernist achievement at which Islam has not yet arrived’ as is commonly understood, instead ’they are semiotic differences’. (Mahmood cited in Asad, 2009:16). ‘Without an appreciation of the difference, the offence, not only the offence that the Cartoons have caused remains unarticulated and unrecognized, and the debate remains locked in an unreflexive and one-sided hermeutic taken to be the only hermeneutic’ (17), but the extend of the injury is largely underestimated. The consequences could therefore be miscalculated, unforeseeable.
The meaning of blasphemy –
Whatever the real motives of the protestors were, Asad notes that ‘we will not understand “blasphemy” if all we see in it is a threat to freedom of speech – even if it is true that, historically, powerful punitive apparatuses have usually accompanied the charge of “blasphemy”. Asad explains what blasphemy is in Islamic vocabulary. The word Tajdif is used by Christian Arabs to identify the English word ‘blasphemy’ in the context of European religious history. The theological meaning is ‘scoffing at God’s bounty’. Other terms are : kufr – apostasy, blasphemy, infidelity, ridda – apostasy, fisq – moral depravity, ilhad – heresy, apostasy.
These words were not used in response to the Danish Cartoons, to Asad’s knowledge (2009: 38). The World Union of Muslim Scholars used instead the word Isa’ah, which means ‘insult, harm, and offense’ applied in secular contexts, not Tajdif. This means that the emphasis was on the hurt. In Is Critique secular, Mahmood reported testimonies of grief and sorrow. The first one of a young British Muslim: ‘I did not like what those raging crowds did in burning down buildings and cars in places like Nigeria and Gaza. But what really upset me was the absolute lack of understanding on the part of my secular friends at how upset people like myself felt on seeing the Prophet insulted in this way’. The second one from another man in his sixties in Cairo: ‘I would have felt less wounded if the object of ridicule were my own parents’ (Mahmood cited in Asad, 2009: 74). As Mahmood says, it is striking that the largely silent but peaceful and emphatic rejection of these images among million of Muslims around the world was so easily assimilated to the language of identity politics, religious fanaticism, and cultural, civilisation differences. Yet, I agree with him when he points out that little attention has been given to the grief, on the kind of offence the Cartoons Affair caused and the kinds of societal ethos and political practices necessary to make this kind of injury intelligible.
For Mahmood, the Christian secular understanding of blasphemy cannot fathom the violence and moral injury that the Cartoons caused to believing Muslims. Understanding others is understanding language, including the semiotics contained in language. For Mahmood,
‘This wound requires moral action, but its language is neither juridical nor that of a street protest, because it does not belong to the economy of blame, accountability, and reparations. The action that is required is internal to the structure of affect, relations, and virtues that predisposes one to experience an act of violation in the first place’ (cited in Asad, 2009: 78).
Sizing the consequences of the hurt
The displays of intolerance of some of the Danish cartoonists, and Newspaper Jytlands-Posten may have manifested themselves less violently than the violence of religious fundamentalists, but it also constitute a formal form of violence and although it takes a mild appearance, its consequences are as disastrous. The reason why it is so important to comprehend the hurt is that 1) it helps size the potential consequences of the event 2) as we already mentioned, intercultural dialogue entails joining the others are co-sufferers in challenging those understandings and social practices that produce our common victimhood as well as our common capacity to victimize 3) in reaching out to the other’s hurt, we may find spaces of commonalities. This has been widely documented in the Peace and Conflict resolution discipline.
In The Mothers of Srebrenica, ‘The [activist group called] “Mothers” crossed these borders, embracing all women who suffered and lost loved ones [in the war]. They embrace women from the “other” ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia realizing that the pain of all women and mothers is the same no matter to which ethnic community mothers and women belong, as all mothers “have the same hearts” ’ (SBS Radio, 2006 cited in Simic, 2009: 228).
Focussing now on the consequences of the hurt, Matsuda (1993: 17,22) has shown that victims and potential victims of hate speech may begin to view dominant group members with suspicion, thus placing limits on their ability to maintain broad support networks, limiting social harmony and circumscribing possibilities to form and maintain personal relationships. Victims of hate-speech may restrict their personal freedom to avoid re-occurence of hate-speech-act or confrontation with actual or potential hate—speakers. This may involve resigning from a job, leaving an educational institution, moving house and avoiding public places. Matsuda also details the effects on sympathetic non-target groups, whose liberties to associate with those who may be targeted by hate-speakers are threatened by racist hate-speech-acts due to a desire to avoid becoming victims of violence themselves (1993: 24-25).
The second effect is even worse; it concerns the internalisation of the discrimination message, such that hearers begin to believe that claims raised by hate-speakers are true (Matsuda 1993: 25). It even tends to produce in its victim the very characteristics of ‘inferiority’ that the speaker intends to ascribe to them (1993: 94-95). Patricia Williams called this process of injury “spirit-murder” (1987:151).
The third one, silence, is mostly linked to the power-asymmetry between the speaker and the hearer, which leads to intimidation and/or the fear not to be taken seriously, and the fact that victims may not possess the expertise or authority in the relevant domain to utter a meaningful response (Langton 1993: 314-316). Such predicament impedes the maintenance of conditions within which all individuals’ central human capabilities are able to develop and flourish, by preventing the elucidation of a response. Gelber argues that when the systemic power asymmetry is absent (and it is important that we recognize the significant power asymmetry in the Cartoon Affair), the speech-act cannot carry the same illocutionary force.
So the hurt visibly does not stop with the event itself. Hate-speech utterance do much more than offend or hurt people’s feelings, it helps reproduce and reinforce inequality of the grounds of race, which simultaneously appeal to norms and values which legitimate such inequality. It also fuels conflict.
An important question one could ask now is: Why has there been in Europe an inability to understand the sense of injury expressed by so many Muslims? Why are some moral claims such as free speech (and its concomitant indifference to blasphemy) legible and what Tariq Ali pejoratively calls “religious pain” is not? How can we make this kind of injury intelligible?
Mahmood offers one explanation: ‘Muslims committed to preserving an imaginary in which their relation to the prophet is based on similitude and cohabitation must contend with the transformative power of the law and disciplines of subjectivity on which the law rests’ (2009: 88). Yet, as we know, the mechanisms of law are not neutral but encoded in a set of cultural and epistemological presuppositions. Thus the sensitivities and traditions of a religious minority are necessarily less weighty than those of the majority, even in matters of religious freedoms. It is not a question of prejudice, but is constitutive of the jurisprudential tradition in which the right to free speech and religious liberty is located (and to which Muslims themselves turn for protection!). Furthermore, as Muslims have come to be perceived as a threat to state security, one can see easily why Muslims religious practices and traditions are subject to surveillance, in a context in which the language of public order reigns supreme. This point to the fact that the fate of intercultural relation does not depend so much on how secular-liberal protocols of free speech might be expanded , but on a large grass-root level ‘transformation of the cultural and ethical sensibilities of the Judeo-Christian population that undergird the practices of secular-liberal law’ (Mahmood cited in Asad, 2009: 89).
Let’s now look at ways to remedy.
I argue that the fundamental issue to remedy the harm is to avoid sliding into mis-founded forms of Universalism we brushed earlier such as ethnocentrism, which starts with a point of departure that subordinates one participant to the other point of view (like making our Danish values the values) or into Relativism (who cares what you think?).
Critical Humanism – One answer comes from Todorov who proposes to give a new sense to the existentialist yearning. His goal is not to give us a fixed content theory like universalism or relativism. Instead, he talks the participants into the necessity of a debate towards a ‘common horizon’ whose content cannot be fixed: it always needs to be revised (1989: 428) as a goal of establishing understanding that transcends ‘one’s own partiality and parochialism’. He explains that human beings have in common is not such or such culture; although humans are influenced by the context of their birth, these contexts change and so on, in time, and in space. What they have in common is their capacity to refuse these determinations, which means that Freedom is the distinctive trait of human species. We often reproduce the behaviours that we value, but we have the possibility to extract ourselves from them, which is the most important (see ‘perfectability’ of Rousseau). This way, we avoid any sliding of universalism toward ethnocentrism or scientism; neither do we fall into relativism, which renounces all judgments. What is universal is that we belong to the same species, the unity of human being can be recognized, and so should be the heterogeneity of its social corpus.
Dialog should never be imposed, but always be an invitation. Dialogic principles are at the heart of freedom of speech and once we restrict the right to participation to particular groups of people (Danish Cartoons), democracies are doomed.
Another way to reduce the harm resides in the way we conceptualise ‘people’ and ‘cultures’- as we have seen in the Cartoons Affair, there had been an attempt to create a cultural “them/us” imaginary. In order to rectify such simplistic imaginary, we need to investigate what is meant by the concept of ‘people’? We often think of ‘people’ as a distinct ethnic group, the identifying marks of which are a common language, shared tradition, a common culture. In reality, as we have seen, the histories of many groups exhibit frequent discontinuities, infusion of new cultural elements from outside and alternating degrees of assimilation to and separation from other groups (see Althuser work on ‘there is no point of departure’ – neither societies nor places are seen as having any timeless authenticity. They are always interconnected and dynamic). Cultures are essentially ‘overlapping, interactive and internally negociated’ (Rawls, 1993). Despite the obvious diversity between Muslims in countries such as Egypt or Indonesia, European Muslims are also Westerners, so it would be too reductionist to oppose Islam and the West; this would also fail to recognize the development of European Islam. European Muslims are already participants in long-running debates about questions like the prohibition on pictorial representations of Muhammad (contested within Islam – not all Muslims supported the protestors) and about larger questions like the reasonable exercise of freedom of expression within the law (freedom of speech is a contested value) (Wetherly, 2012: 38). Is such definition of ‘Danish people as Us versus Them’ relevant when cultural pluralism is often taken as a distinguishing feature of the modern state? Is this not a nostalgia for something that does not exist? Care must be taken not to apply a wishful tidiness for a more messy and fluid reality. The positions are not as rigid as they are imagined to be. Knowing that would refrain us from evoking an identity conflict; knowing that would refrain us to start conflict.
Postcolonialists, such as Edward Said, take the matter one step further. Said explains that the imperative we have to categorise people in terms of nation, territory, civilisations is a legacy of the treaty of Westphalia – a modern construction. For Said, ‘there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of self by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away’ (2001: 55). We may need to move on from the entrenched dichotomies inherited from the Westphalia cosmology or ‘way of knowing’.
A crucial way to reduce the hurt is acknowledging the hurt – I would like to mention an interesting approach from Olga Botcharova, a conflict resolution expert, which may prove useful in the post Cartoon affair. The idea is that ‘what we need to do is to honestly, fully and openly identify with the pain and suffering of the victim’ ... ‘Full support provided to the victim and recognition of the suffering helps the victim (group in our case) to gradually heal from the addiction to “sweet revenge”’. She explains how this helps the victim find her ability to see, hear and speak again, to think rationally. Ultimately, the victim wants to talk to communicate her pain to the abuser. Subconsciously, victims want to restore the sense of deep human connectedness destroyed by the conflict (that used to provide feelings of safety, belonging and love). In order to make the wrong-doer understand the pain, the victim feels he needs to experience a similar suffering (eye for an eye) as a way to opening an avenue for a ‘common language’. She explains that, in fact, the victim does not want to inflict a bigger loss to the wrongdoer, she only wants to make her feel the same way as victim does/did. If we address this need differently, ‘By asserting their [the victim’s] need to communicate their suffering to the other side – through forgiveness rather than anger – and motivated by the need to complete the healing, victims break the pattern of the victim/agressor relationship’ (2006: 623/631/633).
We need to employ a greater subtlety in self-other relations - Cultural encounter does not need entail imposed merger or fusion, but partial adaptation or assimilation through cultural borrowings. For such adaptation to happen, selective borrowing requires a willingness to recognize the distinctiveness of the other culture, while maintaining some indigenous preferences (Dallmayr 1996: 18). Thus, the other- both within and external to the self – becomes an ally in the process of critical self-reflection (Blaney, 1994: 37-38). Gadamer affirms that ‘to be in conversation (...) means to be beyond oneself, to think with the other and to come back to oneself as if to another’ (1989: 110). This is a big effort, freedom of speech then operates at its best. In following this logic, ‘Journalists may in their reporting analyse the different senses of ‘reality’ that constitute situations of conflict while avoiding lending themselves to making propaganda for one ‘true’ position. Diplomats may focus on genuine reconciliation which takes account of differing perspectives rather than scoring a win for the institution they work for.’ (Cox, 2000: 234). Freedom of speech works best when communication shifts from being 'one sided' against one another (confrontational) to being dialogical (sharing) with a readiness to comprehend the others’ cosmologies, working together toward a ‘common horizon’.
Listening to other perspectives - So how is freedom of speech comprehended from a Muslin perspective? For Asad, although there are many variances of interpretation among Muslims, ‘it is true that Islamic religious regulation restricts the individual’s right to behave as he or she wishes though public prohibition, so that the line between morality and manners is obscured and the space of choice narrowed. If speech and behaviour are constrained, it is because they should conform (willingly?) to civility. Good manners take the place of piety; the private and the public are clearly separated.’ (2009:36). According to Islamist lawyer, Muhammad Salim al-Awwa (cited by Asad, 2009: 40), publishing one’s thoughts changes their character, makes them publicly accessible signs: ‘To publish something’, he quotes an old saying, ‘is to lay oneself open to the public’. It is one thing to think whatever one wishes, he argues, it is a different thing to ‘seduce’ others into accepting commitments that are contrary to the moral order. In a well known book published in Lebanon in 1970, Jalal Sadiq al-Azm, in his famous Critique of Religious Thought, makes an explicit distinction between ‘natural, innate freedom’ and freedom as defined and limited by the law. ‘When these possibilities of freedom that a human being enjoys remain within his soul, the law especially cannot interfere with them except when the belief is moved from secrecy to broad light (min as-sirr ila al-jahr). The private and the public are clearly separated with the uninvited intrusion into domestic space, the breaching of private domains disallowed in Islamic law, although conformity in ‘public’ behaviour may be much stricter. Kant would have agreed since he conceived Critique as a process of epistemological self-correction by strict reference to established rational limits and the fixed boundaries between private faith and public reason (Asad, 2009: 50), but it was not the case for most of the sons of Enlightment (prior and after) who thought that transcendental reason and phenomenal objects should not be separated (eg Hegel).
The capability to listen to other perspectives introduces new sensibilities regarding what is decent – and therefore what is outrageous. What turns out to be important here is that, in engaging in this kind of conversation, one realises that ‘we will not understand blasphemy if all we see in it is a threat to freedom – even if it is true that, historically, powerful apparatuses have usually accompanied the charge of ‘blasphemy’’, as acknowledged by Asad himself, who thereby contend with other perspectives. New sensibilities are thereby created, and therefore command mutual respect. More importantly, we discover that the real motives of all who protest against blasphemy are not against disbelief, but at the alleged violence (Asad, 2009: 46). That is why it is crucial to engage in the rich tradition of critique practice with the other – one that draws the subject and object of critique into a relation, unlike relativist passive laissez faire, while avoiding conventional conceits of objectivity. This is freedom of speech at its best. In the very best cases, as David Linge asserts, ‘collision with the Other’s horizons make us aware of assumptions so deep-seated that they would otherwise remain unnoticed’ (in Gadamer 1977: xxi).
Finally, No ‘double-standard’ - How can I be loyal to the state if the state is not loyal to me? Fekete points out that the penalty for breaching freedom of speech for a migrant is deportation as the use of immigration legislation bypasses the need for judicial transparency and overrides the right of the accused. In this process, a parallel justice system is set up, which lacks the checks and balances on state power (2006:1). Most of the deportees were long term residents, who could have been charged under public order laws, rather than pursued under immigration law. The real concern is about the lack of transparency in the deportation procedure, absence of duty of disclosure, the collapse of the principle of ‘proportionality’, absence of legal aid and the usual safeguards provided under criminal law. What seems to be happening today is that the definition of what constitute a threat to national security is being expanded to include ‘speech'. Fekete’s research is based on 17 cases of fast track ‘national security’ deportations in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. All were Muslims, none of whom had been prior convicted in any terrorist offence. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled against deporting immigrants who have served prison sentences on the grounds of proportionality (double punishment: prison term + deportation) crimes’. It has been pointed out that litigation, not expulsion, was the answer to any alleged public order offences. Double standard extends also to the desecration of Christian symbols regulated by blasphemy laws in countries like Britain, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Germany, but the media also makes allowances to accommodate Judeo-Christian sensitivities (Mahmood: 2009: 68). For instance, in the 1997 Wingrove v. United Kingdom case, the court upheld the British Government’s refusal to permit circulation of a film found to be offensive to devout Christians. The ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) made clear that, while it found that the British government’s blasphemy laws objectionable, it supported the decision of the government in this instance on the basis of the state’s margin of appreciation for permissible restrictions operative in Article 10 of the ECHR because of the Government’s legitimate aim to ‘protect the rights of others’ and to protect against seriously offensive attacks on matters regarded as sacred by Christians. 11 It is important to note here that regardless of the double standard, some people may see in these judgements passed by ECHR, that the law tends to protect the cultural and religious beliefs of the majority, and this is problematic in increasingly pluralistic societies. It is worth noting that the ECHR was consistent with its reasoning when it upheld the Turkish government ban on a book deemed offensive to the majority of the Majority Muslim population (I, A, v, Turkey (2005)). What is widely shared in such cases is the legal tradition’s concern for public order, and by extension, the law’s privileging of majority religious sensibilities. Instead, the principle of freedom of expression should be even-handed, whether it concerns Moslems, Christians, Jews, or anyone else. As soon as lines of division are being consolidated by the state especially, it is a matter of time before violence appears. Olivera Simic, a survivor of the Bosnian war, reflects: ‘I did not know what my religion/ethnic group was when I was fourteen years old in 1995’.
Crossing the borders of human division – In the ‘Mothers’, Oliviera Simic explains: ‘By crossing the borders of ethnic divisions in my homeland and sitting at the same table with women who survived a genocide committed by men folk belonging to my ethnic group, I feel like a living network, crossing the borders of human division ... I can see no future without this effort ... with this small intervention, I am trying to create a space where these often uncomfortable but extremely important conversations can take place’ (2009: 231). That is why it is worth advocating that these crucial conversations should take place in peaceful time, when freedom of speech can be exercised in safe conditions, instead of later. If we don’t enable a safe exercise of Article 10(1) – ‘freedom of expression’ is an absolute right, Article 10 (2) – allows for the exercise of this right to be limited is the restrictions are prescribed by law and are understood to be necessary to the functioning of a democratic society.www.hrcr.org/docs/Eur_Convention/euroconv3.html. Please note that the margin of appreciation to limit free speech if the state deems it a threat to the state is ‘national security, territorial integrity, public safety, health and morals of a society, or reputations and rights of others’ freedom of speech, these conversations will still have to take place, but the human cost will be high. We should listen to survivors like Oliviera when we are warned: ‘it is better negotiating for a hundred years rather than have one hour of war: Evil is evil and it spreads like weeds’ (232).
Lastly, another way to achieve inclusiveness beside representation of self as a people, is active participation in speech for all. In The Free Speech versus the Hate Speech debate, Gelber points out that within Western Liberal democracies, Free speech policies may require more than the absence of restraint on the part of governments. She raises the question of ‘capacity and ability to respond (publicly)’ (see section on the silencing of minorities in the Cartoon affair above). Gelber explains that our current understanding of free speech may have led to inadequate policy responses to hate speech because 1) it does not describe how it will ensure that all citizens are able to participate in the exercise of their free speech liberty. She advocates a broader conception of free speech liberty including a consideration of how citizens may be empowered to participate and engage in the exercise of free speech liberty, should they be inhibited from doing so. 2) free speech does not result in equal opportunity to speak because hate-speech acts impair the development of human capabilities among victim groups. Gelber argues that ‘hate-speech acts are a discursive act of discrimination, which in (their) very expression perpetuate, propagate and maintains discrimination’ (2002: 10). Some governments are already empowering their population to respond.
In 1999, a Governmental Commission of Freedom of Expression in Norway proposed amendments to Article 100 of the constitution. In explaining the new legislation, the Commission noted that the obligation to create such conditions included an obligation to ‘help underprivileged groups to be heard by providing them with the necessary means of addressing a wider audience’ (Norvegian Governmental Commission on Freedom of Expression 1999) (2002: 137). Gelber defends active participation based on Nussman theory of ethics for intercultural dialog. Nussman Capability Theory (2004) itself is based on Aristotle theory of ethics (cited in Gelber, 2002).
“a well-ordered polity was one in which political planners ensured the provision of the conditions within which human flourishing is made possible” (Aristotle, PCapolitics, 1325aff).
According to Nussman, the task of polity should not only be concerned with the GDP of a nation, it should be concerned with the capabilities of a nation. Her Capabilities theory assesses resources according to what they can do for human beings rather than being conceptualized as an end in themselves (Gelber, 2002: 40). Nussman’s ‘broad’ and ‘deep’ conception of the Good means that policy makers will not ‘aim at producing people who function in certain ways’, but rather aim at ‘producing people capable of functioning’ (Gelber, 2002: 39).
Maybe it is time we shift the emphasis on technical-instrumental learning – the kind of learning which provides societies with increased mastery of their physical environment – (definition by Linklater, 1998: 112); there will be nothing to master at all when generations will have been denied the chance to develop a sensitivity to reach out outside of constraint cosmologies though humanities learning.
Mahmood thinks that the future of the Muslim minority in Europe depends not so much on the laws that might be accommodated to their concerns, but rather on a ‘larger transformation of the cultural and ethical sensibilities of the majority of the Judeo-Christian population that undergrid the law’ (cited in Asad, 2009: 123). Although sometimes, it happens the other way around, with spectacular cases and the resolution of the courts transforming sensibilities, fundamentally, ground work at the grassroot level is much needed, and whatever direction it will come from will be welcome.
To conclude
How helpful is the concept of free speech in intercultural communication?
Reconciling conflicting ideal human rights such as Free Speech and the inherent and equal dignity of all persons, has, since their adoption, never been easy. ‘It has become vastly more difficult as the harm produced by hate speech becomes more widely acknowledged’ – especially in academia (Massey, 1992: 1). The distress created can also be measured by the vigour of the debate concerning the extent to which governments may constitutionally restrain hate speech. Free speech ought to be exercised by all parties of a multicultural society along true democratic lines of free and equal citizenship, as it was originally intended. The state is supposed to use its persuasive powers appropriately to encourage citizens to engage in reflective revision, thereby adopting the democratic values, like freedom of speech, that underlie legitimate Law, as the Danish Prime Minister could have done in response to the Cartoons Affair, instead of brandishing freedom of speech as identity marker of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’. In such case, the Freedom of speech principle can become an hindrance to intercultural communication. The same applies when freedom of speech is imposed elsewhere in the world as part of the liberal package with no attempt to engage with the recipient entity; it has for effect the exact opposite of what was intended: silencing. If ‘muscular liberalism’ means that liberal values should take precedence over support for diversity, then, there may be a need to revisit the standard liberal position. If the universalisation of core democratic values, such as freedom of speech, is used in order to obliterate rather than welcome differences, we may be touching upon the limits of liberalism. In agreement with Brettschneider and Cox that drawing of geographical boundaries around civilizations in our times is a futile exercise, ‘the challenge in a multi-civilisation order is to find a means of encouraging popular forces struggling for an entrenchment of human rights in their society without appearing to impose one civilization’s norms upon another’ (Cox, 2000: 232). As we have seen, the way to promote intercultural dialog involves recognize the complexity and dynamism of contemporary cultural variances within society, try to understand the other’s representation of meaning (Todorov) in order to engage in meaningful conversations with good critique practices, no double standard, active participation. Foremostly, it also requires to size properly the magnitude of the harm caused because the harm is not only in the event, it lives in consequences. This relies on a synergy of public attitudes, political culture with being cautious of regulator frameworks, since rules exclude by definition. It is time we embrace a dialogue of cultures that challenges the contemporary dichotomies within and outside society with freedom of speech as a tool of excellence, not as a weapon to brandish.
‘I disagree with what he says, but I will defend to the death his right to say it’
Voltaire
