II. They may fill cultural essentialism with different content, but they employ one and the same schema of culturalization, which they mobilize in fundamental opposition to the other schema – that is, against Culturalization I. This is where my interpretation differs most explicitly from Samuel Huntington’s. In Huntington’s view, the various national varieties of religious fundamentalism, right-wing populism, and nationalism each formed their own distinct “cultures,” whereas now it is clear that they all follow the same pattern. Conversely, “the West” does not simply constitute an additional culture, as Huntington suggested; rather, in its late-modern instantiation, it enables a form of culturalization that is structured in a fundamentally different manner: Culturalization I (hyperculture). That said, it would be too simple a dramatization to characterize the relationship between these two regimes as one of “the West against the rest.” As I have already mentioned, the historical roots of hyperculture may lie in Europe and North America, but it has long since globalized beyond these trans-Atlantic confines. Conversely, moreover, cultural essentialism is by no means restricted to just Asia or Eastern Europe but is, rather, prevalent in Western Europe and the United States as well. “The West” is not a spatial, geographical concept; it is a symbolic concept.
What happens when hyperculture encounters cultural essentialism?24 Many of today’s global and intra-societal conflicts can be deciphered as part of the conflict between these two regimes of culturalization. In this conflict, there are always two possible ways for each side to deal with the other: a strategy of coexistence qua assimilation, and a strategy of rejection as an absolute enemy. Assimilation entails making attempts to integrate phenomena of the other cultural regime into one’s own perspective and thus to make them manageable and coexist with them. Rejection as an absolute enemy entails perceiving the radical otherness of the different cultural regime and, accordingly, dramatizing this relation in the form of a friend–enemy schema. In all, there are thus four possible strategies for dealing with one another, and there are plenty of empirical examples of each one (see Table 1.1).
Table 1.1 Relations between Culturalization I and Culturalization II
| Culturalization I in relation to Culturalization II | Culturalization II in relation to Culturalization I | |
|---|---|---|
| Coexistence | Multiculturalism | Theory of cultural spheres |
| Antagonism | “Open society and its enemies” | “Decadence of the West” |
During the 1980s and 1990s, one formula for coexistence between hyperculture and cultural essentialism was multiculturalism.25 The multiculturalism of Western liberals proceeded from the idea that diverse ways of life represent a fundamental enrichment, so that ethnic or religious communities, for instance, were tolerated even if they were relatively closed off. Essentially, multiculturalism looked at cultural communities through a pair of cosmopolitan-diversity glasses, and what it saw was groups cultivating different lifestyles in which people chose to participate. The result, in short, was that orthodox Islam, veganism, and teenage subcultures were all regarded as being on the same level. From the perspective of multiculturalism, different sorts of groups are embodiments, as it were, of cultural options and styles, and they make no claim to absoluteness. Cultural capitalism, too, is ultimately based on economically applied multiculturalism: cultural communities with local roots thus appear as welcome contexts or reservoirs from which “authentic” cultural goods can be drawn, and these goods can then be commodified and appropriated (the tattoos of sailors, Middle Eastern cooking, the meditation of Buddhist monks, and so on).
Conversely, cultural essentialism has also produced its share of strategies for coexisting with liberal hyperculture. One common strategy consists in viewing cosmopolitanism itself as the worldview of a foreign cultural community that, though peculiar, is not threatening. This attitude is apparent, for instance, in the behavior of non-Western governments that, in response to accusations of violating human rights, insist on the value of their native traditions. From this viewpoint, liberal cosmopolitanism appears, in a sense, as a special feature of the Western cultural community and its history: Westerners may indeed support hyperculture, and they are free to do so – but only on their own turf! From this perspective, which is based on a political theory of cultural spheres, different cultures are ultimately thought of as being distinct from one another, and cosmopolitan hyperculture represents just one of these varieties: the sphere of Western (that is, North American and Western European) culture.
Hyperculture and cultural essentialism can thus interact in a state of peaceful coexistence. However, a coexistence of this sort only seems possible if both sides systematically misunderstand one another. In other words, this can only happen if, from the perspective of market-based and self-actualization-based culturalization, identitarian movements embody just another style or another chosen identity among many others, and if, from the perspective of cultural essentialism, hyperculture is merely a particular aspect of Western societies. However, as soon as these two regimes of culturalization begin to perceive one another as contrary ways of dealing with culture – which, from a sociological perspective, they in fact are – they see themselves as being fundamentally threatened. What follows is a culture war: a struggle over culture itself.
We have thus come to the third and fourth possible modes of interaction. If cosmopolitan hyperculture recognizes the cultural-essentialist aspects of identitarian culture, then it switches over into a mode that is based on a struggle between the open society and its enemies. This is frequently the case today. Now, liberal cosmopolitans perceive cultural essentialism as totalitarian: proponents of hyperculture become aware of the fact that cultural essentialism – with its antagonism between believers and nonbelievers (between “us” and “them”) – hopes to put an end to the pluralistic game of hypercultural differences, and they are accordingly forced to revise their model of multiculturalism. Religious fundamentalism, for instance, is no longer regarded today as just another cultural lifestyle that can be freely chosen among others (and thus as a “colorful” enrichment of society); instead, it is perceived as an attack on the foundations of cosmopolitanism. Likewise, a nationalistic claim of “white supremacy” is not regarded as a welcome new option but is, rather, seen as an inimical position, and this is because it undermines, instead of supports, the ideal of equal rights and hybrid ways of life. The result is the line of conflict that divides, in Karl Popper’s terms, “the open society and its enemies.”26
A complementary course of confrontation is pursued by the other side. In the attacks waged by various forms of cultural essentialism against cosmopolitan hyperculture, the latter is made to seem like nothing more than an expression of Western liberal decadence, which has paved the way for the permissive triumph of consumption-based individualism and has corroded national and religious communities. Hyperculture’s ever-shifting ascriptions of value, which dissolve fixed distinctions between ingroups and outgroups, and its prioritization of the individual over the collective, now seem like a threat to the collective morality that cultural-essentialist communities claim for themselves. From this perspective, the West – or the liberal cosmopolitans in one’s own country – thus become a symbol of cultural decay. Hyperculture, cosmopolitanism, and hybridity have become the preferred counterexamples from which to distance oneself. In this process, as mentioned above, former enemies within the cultural-essentialist camp repeatedly end up being surprising allies in their common cultural struggle against hyperculture: Evangelical Christian and orthodox Muslim communities will join forces in the fight against gay marriage, or diverse groups of European populists will come together in opposition to the American “cultural imperialism” of Google and CNN.
