Centre for Intercultural Studies

Workshop organised by the Centre for Intercultural Studies, and within the framework of the Council of Europe Confidence Building Measures Programme

In this workshop we shall be concerned with the cultural possibilities that may be inherent in the transnationalisation process. Is the logic of globalisation actually bringing into existence something that we might describe as being, in some meaningful way, a new kind of media and cultural order? How might it be associated with a new ethos of multiculturalism or even cosmopolitanism? Our discussion is intended as a contribution to the debates on the nature of any future transnational media and cultural order, and particularly, though not exclusively, a new European order.

When they consider the new transnational media and media cultures, communications researchers are generally responsive to the possibilities for change: the general inference is that the combined logics of globalisation and technological revolution are now conspiring to produce significant cultural transformations. And what comes across is a positive commitment to the possibilities inherent in new global mobilities and in the creation of new transnational cultures across the global and European scene.

But, we have to be aware that there is nothing automatic or inevitable about change, and particularly about change in the direction of a better - more multicultural or cosmopolitan - order. We have to be vigilant about the forms of cultural inertia or closure that continue to stand in the way of a more cosmopolitan cultural arrangement. The mentality of the old national order is not easily overcome; it will not be at all easy to move beyond the national imagination and condition. And, second, it will be also necessary to recognise that, if the potential of transnationalism is to be in any way realised, the imperative is for us to actually think about what this potential could be. A critical transnationalism requires a more serious commitment to the elaboration of new cultural arrangements and practices. How, we have to ask, might it be possible to forge post-national - or perhaps they are better regarded as counter-national - dispositions and sensibilities in the context of contemporary developments in communications? On what basis, according to what values and objectives, might it be possible to institute a meaningfully transnational cultural order?

A key issue for the workshop will be the idea of community, and particularly imagined community. For there is a great tendency to conceive transnational cultures and identities in terms of, and in the context of, imagined communities . This concept, which has been so much associated with the imagination of national culture and identity, has now become widely accepted as the theoretical basis for thinking about supposedly transnational or post-national developments. One is sometimes left with the sense that no meaningful changes are actually anticipated in the way that transnational cultures should imagine and organise themselves. The analysis of transnational media remains grounded in the conventional ideal of community bonding and the sharing of a common culture. In the end, in spite of all the evocations of the possibilities inherent in global flows and mobilities, there often seems to be a basic inability to move on from the core ideas and concepts of the national imagination.

Is not this concern with imagined community especially perverse among scholars who are clearly interested in thinking about cultural transformation and potential alternative cultures? Is not the problem that, within the diminished framework of imagined community, any consideration of what might be new in the contemporary cultural transformation is foreclosed from the very outset?

Do we not now have to elaborate alternatives ­ beyond imagined community? Do we not have to open up other intellectual spaces, to think about cultures in terms of the ever more complex possibilities - in terms of heterogeneity, encounter, transformation, mobility - that contemporary societies are throwing up?

The workshop resulted in the publication:
Bewegte Identitäten: Medien in mutlilingualen Kontexten.