Abstract
ABSTRACTThe political backlash against multiculturalism alongside the media portrayal of the global refugee crisis would suggest that the spaces for cultural difference have contracted and moved into a mode of transnational crisis management. This article addresses the moral panic over cultural difference by challenging some of the philosophical frameworks that have justified naturalized negative attitudes towards migrants and dismissed the viability of cosmopolitan perspectives. In particular, the author will critically evaluate the antagonistic perspective developed in Peter Sloterdijk’s writings and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonism. To grasp the complex and hybrid forms of cross-cultural exchanges, the author argues that a more robust vision of cosmopolitanism is necessary.
Highlights
Why does the presence of cultural difference inspire such hostility? Even if the proportion of people who are defined as a minority is expanding, and the role of cultural difference is assuming greater significance in public life, why is this presence interpreted as such a threat to the nation, and why is the arrival of the other rendered as the apocalyptic end of civilization? The fear of the other, and, in particular, the scapegoating of refugees and migrants, have never been so central to political discourse
Despite the ceremonial boasts about Australia as the multicultural success story, the political status of multiculturalism is increasingly distorted by fears that reflect both a specific manifestation of an “invasion complex”,4 and the influence of a new transnational “crisis” discourse.[5]
How will an agonistic politics envelop and “tame” this force? If antagonism precedes the politics of agonism, surely antagonism will determine the political conditions for its own regulation? Or, put the other way, will any political process and cultural intervention that is agonistic in its nature, have the capacity to both restrain the violent urges in human nature and impose a moral social order? Mouffe does not have direct answers to these questions, but her general argument appears to rest on the belief that “second order observations” and the institutional frameworks of liberal democracy have the capacity to override brute power. This preliminary critique suggests that agonism suffers the same limitations that Sloterdijk noted in relation to cosmopolitanism, that is, that reasoned debate, ethical relations and aesthetic interests are not “first order” rivals that co-exist with the destructive forces of antagonism, but are to be relegated to a mere second-order construct
Summary
Why does the presence of cultural difference inspire such hostility? Even if the proportion of people who are defined as a minority is expanding, and the role of cultural difference is assuming greater significance in public life, why is this presence interpreted as such a threat to the nation, and why is the arrival of the other rendered as the apocalyptic end of civilization? The fear of the other, and, in particular, the scapegoating of refugees and migrants, have never been so central to political discourse. Sloterdijk’s critique of the ascending culture of globalization and the decline in the political authority of the nation state is embedded in a deeper philosophical and anthropological worldview that asserts fear of difference as a fundamental feature of human nature.
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