Promoting 'diplomatic' or 'cosmopolitan' culture?: Interrogating ASEAN-focused communication initiatives.

• Author: Quayle, Linda

In his seminal work on international society, Hedley Bull speculated:

The future of international society is likely to be determined, among other things, by the presence and extension of a cosmopolitan culture, embracing both common ideas and common values, and rooted in societies in general as well as in their elites, that can provide the world international society of today with the kind of underpinning enjoyed by the geographically smaller and culturally more homogeneous international societies of the past [emphasis added]. (1) For Bull, a crucial mainstay of the current global international society was what he called "a diplomatic or elite culture, comprising the common intellectual culture of modernity". This shared cultural base, he suggested, included key common languages, especially English, and a concerted focus on science, development and technology. Problematically, however, "this common intellectual culture exists only at the elite level [emphasis added]". (2) In the long run, Bull feared, this would not be sufficient to sustain, let alone deepen, societal relationships faced by multiple threats.

This concern with the durability of an international society that possesses a shared elite overlay but lacks a "thick" common cultural base is strikingly reminiscent of a persistent anxiety surrounding the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which developed as a diplomatic community on the basis of elite solidarity. (3) This diplomatic culture is valuable--indeed has proved indispensable--but it lacks depth and, as ASEAN and its member governments are finding, it is difficult to extend to the larger environment of people in the region.

Yet if the goals of the ASEAN Community are to be realized, this is precisely what needs to happen. As the former ASEAN Secretary-General Rodolfo Severino puts it: "Southeast Asia cannot be an enduring security community or an effective economic community--indeed it cannot be an ASEAN Community in its truest and deepest sense--without being a socio-cultural community." (4) If regional objectives are to be lastingly and meaningfully reached, therefore, the inhabitants of Southeast Asia as a whole must be able to find enough social and cultural commonality for regional self-identification. (5) Key initial steps to this end include contact and communication, essential prerequisites for people "to imagine themselves as part of an emergent functional whole". (6)

Bull does not take his reflections on "diplomatic/elite" versus "cosmopolitan" cultures very far. Nevertheless, the duality he hints at furnishes an alternative conceptual springboard for examining current efforts to fulfil the communication goals of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC). It offers a slightly different diagnosis from the already well canvassed distinction between "top-down" and "bottom-up" regional approaches, suggesting not that official initiatives by ASEAN and member governments are redundant, pending the growth of a "we-feeling" over which they have little control, but rather that communications need to be tailored towards a somewhat different goal.

The argument is made in several stages. The first section further unpacks key concepts (international society, culture--cosmopolitan and otherwise--and identity) as well as expanding on the communicational goals of the ASCC. The second and third sections consider a variety of specific attempts to familiarize the citizens of Southeast Asia with what ASEAN has to offer. They contrast initiatives that appear more suited to promulgating a quasi-diplomatic or intellectual culture (turning citizens into representatives of a regional ideal through the acquisition of more knowledge) with others that have the capacity to develop a more genuinely cosmopolitan culture (inviting citizens to connect with, and feel at home in, their region on a deeper--discursive and emotional--level). The article concludes by arguing that Bull's differentiation can contextualize and shed light on ASEAN's communicative learning curve, while at the same time deriving from it data that put more flesh on the bones that Bull only sketched.

Society, Culture and the ASCC

"English School" ideas, of which Bull was an early exponent, encourage us to see ASEAN as the organizational superstructure of an underlying regional international society. (7) This perspective deflects attention from the constrained agential capacity of "ASEAN" as a body, and redirects it instead towards the institutions--in the sense of "habits and practices shaped towards the realisation of common goals"--that lie beneath the organizational surface. (8) These institutions continually evolve, of course, but the different views of international society's member states on the required speed and direction of this evolution make it a lumbering process. Many of the difficulties faced by international organizations (among them ASEAN) stem precisely from the clash between more ambitious cooperative goals and the slow grinding of the institutional change that is needed to support them--in other words, between "progress and its limits". (9)

The extent to which an international society needs a foundational common culture has always preoccupied English School scholars. For Martin Wight, an international society "will not come into being without a degree of cultural unity among its members". (10) For Bull, as noted, international society is possible without the presence of such glue--but its activities will always be circumscribed. The hard decisions required to tackle overwhelming common challenges are made at least somewhat easier when pragmatically derived common interests, rules and values are supplemented by a shared way of looking at the world. (European cooperation, for example, has significantly profited from large areas of shared cultural heritage, although the contemporary European case also illustrates that such a common base is no panacea when economic headwinds put national and regional interests starkly at loggerheads.)

Because of their importance in shaping the contours of any given international society, the English School showed an interest in culture and identity long before the "cultural turn" of the post-Cold War era. Yet its early assessments were rarely probing. (11) And culture is certainly a slippery idea. Even anthropologists "continue to grapple with an acceptable definition of culture that captures a sense of 'groupness' while recognizing people's profound worldliness, participation in multiple cultural milieus, and propensity to change perspectives and behaviors over time". (12) Constructivist accounts across disciplines, therefore, stress not only shared meanings and interpretations, social transmission across time and a capacity to evolve and adapt, but also the contested, dynamic, transactional and multi-faceted nature of the concept. (13)

Linked with the idea of culture--though not in any clear and unambiguous fashion--is that of identity. Scholars generally agree that identity has at least two (always interlinked and interacting) components: an outward identity that involves the ways the surrounding society sees us, and an inward identity that reflects our individual experience, processing and choices. (14) Accordingly, identities are not fixed but (at least to a certain extent) malleable; not singular but multiple; not abstract and passionless, but often associated with emotions such as pride and self-respect. (15) As with any social category, never too far away is the idea of power. (16)

The association of a fixed culture with a pre-existing identity has therefore given way to much more complex accounts of fluidity, heterogeneity and unboundedness. (17) Nevertheless, culture and identity intersect at many levels. (18) If identity is partially created through socialization, then culture(s) inevitably shape(s) that process. "Cultural identities", argues Clarke, are marked by factors such as ethnicity, gender and class. (19) Appiah seeks to separate cultures and identities, but concedes that ethnic identities stand out for "having cultural distinctions as one of their primary marks"; indeed identity precedes culture in certain instances. (20)

Because cultural markers are often very visible, they also contribute to one of the more disturbing aspects of identity: its propensity to define itself through an assertion of difference, which then readily slides into an assertion of superiority. (21)

It is at this point that the idea of "cosmopolitanism" has something to offer. Whatever a "cosmopolitan" culture and/or identity is, the business of acquiring it must be assumed to involve all the elements noted above: adaptation, sharing, and socialization, in the context of a heterogeneous, disputed, fluid, context-driven process. Bull gives us frustratingly little to work on in this respect. But the significance of his stress on cosmopolitan culture is threefold, and once scaled down to the level of the regional "cosmos", each point has a bearing on ASEAN's experience.

Firstly, it is important enough to push itself to the foreground despite Bull's general scepticism regarding things cosmopolitan. (22) This tension again recalls an often similarly uncomfortable fit between ASEAN leaders' interest in a regional identity and their general state-centredness.

Secondly, it is interesting that Bull evokes the need for a "cosmopolitan" culture, rather than a "common culture". (23) Possibly he recognized that while the latter was frankly impossible, the former might just be attempted. The difference between these two concepts might also be significant for ASEAN. The idea of cosmopolitanism, crucially, seems to point towards an aspect of shared identity that need not be predicated on difference. For Wight, "The greater the cultural unity of a states-system, the greater its sense of distinctness from the surrounding world is likely to be." (24) Even disregarding the tendency of such a...