Cultural Diversity and Human Development

1. Ugo Pagano University of Siena and CEU Cultural Diversity and Human Development Global Governance Program. Florence, 10 May 2013 What policies are needed to turn cultural diversity into an asset for socio-economic development?

2. Cultural diversity at the heart of human development • The most important factor, which has differentiated humankind from the other species, is the long process of selection of culturally diverse groups that characterizes our pre-history and history. • Since gene-flow makes groups rather unstable, natural selection could not produce such a powerful process of group selection. • Cultural selection was favored by the existence of clearer group boundaries marked by cultural differences. It was only possible in a species that had evolved an embryonic culture or, in other words, required the evolution of what made us humans. • The blossoming and the selection of different cultures has allowed a human development that has no counterpart in others species. Cultural diversity is at the heart of human development.

3. Did wars favor human development? • Because of cultural evolution and group selection, our species has been characterized by a high level of inter-group aggression and of intra-group solidarity. Some scholars have claimed that conflicts and wars were a fundamental mechanism that, via group selection, favored intra-group cooperation and economic development. • However, wars can lead to both inclusive and extractive institutions. Theorizing the benefits of wars requires very stringent assumptions, perhaps satisfied in the early period of human civilization. Early hunting and gathering societies needed the mobility and dispersion of their members on a large territory and this high dispersion and mobility made the enslavement of the losers very difficult. • With the advent of agrarian societies, this situation underwent a radical change. When production was tighten to precise territories, losers could be easily controlled. At that point, wars started producing extractive institutions by which the winners could exploit the losers.

4. Vertical and horizontal cultural differentiation • In agrarian societies, conflicts and wars did not involve the assimilation or the elimination of the losers. Wars did often end with their subordination and enslavement. • In this societies, the nature of cultural diversity changed. Cultural vertical differentiation between dominant and subordinate classes was added to the horizontal cultural differentiation existing among different ethnicities. • Cultural differentiation was associated to stable hierarchies and to a complex division of labor. This social and economic complexity marked a clear advantage of agrarian societies with respect to earlier social arrangements.

5. Vertical cultural differentiation:an obstacle to economic development • Some limited development occurred within the framework of agrarian societies. However, the vertical cultural differentiation and the division of labor, characterizing agrarian societies, constrained economic development with a tight straitjacket. • Vertical cultural differentiation involved that the merits and the innovations of the individuals could not be rewarded: whatever their achievements, they would have found insurmountable obstacles in the vertical cultural barriers among social classes that characterized agrarian societies. • Moreover, the horizontal cultural fragmentation of the uneducated folk involved that individual capabilities could not be easily exported outside narrow territories.

6. Development and the national abatement of cultural barriers • Fast economic development required a drastic abatement of vertical and horizontal cultural barriers and a removal of horizontal cultural barriers. • Thanks to the abatement of vertical barriers, individuals could be rewarded for their contributions and innovations by moving up in the social ladder and, thanks to the removal of horizontal barriers, they could exploit their opportunities in a larger territory whose culture the Nation State had not only vertically but also horizontally homogenized. • Perhaps, the military competition among Nation States, sharing different cultures, continued to be a painful source of economic development but the cost of wars became so high to threaten to the very existence of our species. The wars among different groups, which in our prehistory could be even regarded as a possible mechanism of sustainable development, could now rather mean the end of our history.

7. Globalism: the highest stage of nationalism? • In many respects, modern globalism is the "highest stage" of nationalism. • Since the expansion of markets and cultural standardization reinforce each other, the dynamics, generated by their mutual reinforcement, cannot be contained within national boundaries. • Smaller national cultures are absorbed by more powerful national cultural standards and the process of cultural standardization acquires a global dimension. • However, cultural globalization is an uneven process that divides national communities into classes with unequal access to the global standards. • Moreover, unlike the Nation, cultural globalization does not involve the sharing of a common heritage and the establishment of common institutions of social protection.

8. Let us now come to our question: What policies are needed to turn Cultural Diversity into an asset for socio-economic development? A tentative answer in 10 points...........

9. 1-3: Cultural differentiations blocking human development • 1) Vertical cultural differentiation, related to ethnic, gender or class divisions, is an obstacle to economic development and a sound national, or global, governance should try to remove it. • 2) Vertical cultural differentiation, forced by intellectual monopolies and involving unequal opportunities, is an obstacle to economic development. • 3) Even if conflicts and wars among horizontally differentiated cultures may have favored (via group selection and intra-group cooperation) some sort of economic progress, the virtues of this mechanism were (perhaps) only evident in pre-agrarian societies.

10. 4-7: Cultural differentiation as an asset for human development • 4) If communities can freely specialize in the fields where they have a comparative cultural advantage and they can learn from each other, then horizontal cultural diversity can still be very valuable asset for individual nations, and an engine of development for the entire world economy • 5) Intercultural learning requires cultural differentiation to be limited by large and robust bridges mixing different cultures. • 6) Since cultures are also defined by a common cultural heritage, inter-cultural bridges must be also supported by the construction of a common inter-cultural heritage. • 7) The identity of national groups should not only be defined in terms of their differentiation from other communities but it should also include a vision of the role of the nation in the development of the global commons shared by humankind.

11. 8- 10: Human culture as a global common • 8) Besides global environmental goods (such as the atmosphere and the oceans), knowledge is the most important and distinctive human global common and its global open access is a fundamental condition for developing a fruitful cultural diversity. • 9) The present regime of over-privatization of knowledge is a possible cause of global economic stagnation and depletes the sense of identification of the different nations with a common human heritage (to be defended and augmented by the means of an appropriate global governance). • 10) Global institutions, such as the WTO with their annexed TRIPS agreements should be reformed. WTO should allow access to the benefits of international trade only to countries that spend a minimal percentage of their GNP in the augmentation of global open-access knowledge.