The Age of Diversity: The New Cultural Map

By Jean-Louis Roy

In twenty-five years, 80% of the world population will live in Asia and Africa. What changes, culturally I particular, should be expected in this century? This is the vast and fascinating question Jean-Louis Roy tries to answer with the help of correspondents from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. The author argues that shifting wealth from the West to Asia, Latin America and Africa causes the reconfiguration of the economic map. This tilting also transforms the global cultural space. The dominant cultural position occupied by the Atlantic area will not disappear overnight. However, it is important to note that emerging countries are working earnestly, well served by the tools of the digital age. For example, China is already the world leader in the art market, and Nigeria, the second in international film production after India. Diversity emerges from all sides. Welcome to the twenty-first century!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mosaic Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781771612234

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INTRODUCTION

This book relates the emergence of a new world, our world, resembling nothing that successive generations of the modern and contemporary period have known. A considerable event explains this transition that is dominating our present-day history and structuring what is to follow. The abilities that allowed the West to control the planet for five centuries are no longer its exclusive property. They are being progressively mastered by the whole of humanity: from China to Brazil, from Turkey to India, from Mexico to Indonesia, from South Africa to Vietnam.

Touched off by a radical upheaval in international economic relationships and by the universal deployment of the digital era, this transition is redesigning connections between the regions and nations of the world. It is causing historical North-South and East-West historical classifications to implode. With a sweep unprecedented in history, a boundless energy has moved the human abilities to produce wealth and development from the West toward Asia, and from Asia toward Latin America and Africa. This planetary chain is reconfiguring the relationships between the regions and countries of the world as well as the lives of billions of people. It is affecting the whole of humanity and creating an unlimited world space.

This space has appeared suddenly as a result of a spectacular advance that had been desired for so long, but had never been reached before this century: the progressive and verifiable inclusion of all people in growth and development. The old ideal of universality so longed for by humanity is, this time, perhaps, in the process of materializing. This space is also due to the mind-boggling creation of the virtual world, whose potential has attracted billions of individuals in a few short decades. Consequently, digital humanity and universality are converging. They are inseparable.

Described as a breathtaking and accelerated mixing,¹ this entry of humanity into a new era has already contributed to the radical modification of the economic, financial and commercial map of the planet. Is it having the same impact on the cultural map of the world? If so, what can we say about the evolutions that it is bringing about as concerns the restructuring of the world’s cultural space?

Western culture imposed itself on the world. The West is everywhere, Amin Maalouf points out quite rightly, because it had the technical means to dominate the planet. What will happen at a time when these means are in the process of becoming the most widely shared thing in the world? Admittedly, the civilization of our planet that is emerging will include certain contributions and norms that the West has integrated into history. Other cultures, however, called the wounded ones, have henceforth at their disposal the necessary levers to promote their heritages, their own perspectives and ambitions. They will likely want to reinsert into history, either in whole or in part, what they had to abandon during the long period of Western supremacy.

How does this transition manifest itself and unfold? What contents of it are already discernible, the ones which, in a not-too-distant future, will ensure that modernisation and westernization will no longer by synonymous, that they will be replaced progressively by the triptych modernisation, plural identities and membership in the human community? ² In short, if the cultural diversity of mankind has been placed on the back burner during the modern and contemporary period, it is apparent that this diversity is henceforth awake and already shaping a new, common, plural and universal cultural map of the world. This book has its origins in these hypotheses and questions. They make up its essential framework. ³

Planetary Rendezvous

There was a time not so long ago when international sport and festive events were held in the so-called developed part of the world. They were broadcast from this region, including big shows emphasizing the ancient and present-day heritages that generally accompany these mega-encounters. These rendezvous would migrate exceptionally toward the so-called developing part of the world only to return promptly to their natural space. This schema has completely imploded in recent years as a result of the universalization of financial, organizational and technological capacities that are no longer the exclusive property of the West, and because of the rise in ambitions that are not all related to sports.

In 2008, 4.7 billion television viewers watched the Peking Olympic Games at one time or another, not counting the tens of millions of Web users who, for the first time in history, could witness the athletes’ performances directly on their mobile screens. In 2010, 250 million web surfers visited the site of the International Football Federation (FIFA) during the World Cup that took place in Johannesburg. The same years, the Shanghai World Fair welcomed 70 million visitors and its on-line version registered more than 700 million hits. In 2011, a billion television viewers followed the match between India and Pakistan on the occasion of the Cricket World Cup that unfolded in three South Asian countries (India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) and which was broadcast in two hundred countries and fifteen languages. In 2014, the Winter Olympics were held in Sotchi, in the south of Putin’s tsarist republic. The same year, Dilma Rouseff’s multi-racial democracy hosted the soccer World Cup and, in 2016, welcomed the Summer Olympic Games.

In the near future, many events will be held in these same regions of the world: in 2017, the World Fair will take place in Astana, in Kazakhstan; in 2020, it will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates; and, in 2022 the soccer World Cup will be broadcast from Qatar which, for a short period of time, will be the centre of the world for lovers of the most popular sport on the planet.

China, South Africa, India, Russia, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar will host large manifestations of the human family. They will be in charge of transmitting these everywhere in the world and will thus be able to show their ancient and present-day heritages, which would have been almost impossible even several years ago. There is a symbolic connection between the expressions Man has walked on the moon and The World Cup will be held in Johannesburg.

Welcome to the 21st century.

This century is like no other. Growth, that is, the production of wealth, is migrating from the west to the east and the south of the planet, whereas the Atlantic zone is having trouble pulling itself out of an economic and social crisis that has plunged it into the throes of structural adjustment, which up till now had been the characteristic trait of the world’s poor countries. The ability to produce growth has spread to all regions of the globe. The new distribution of wealth has changed the lives of billions of people by integrating them into the economy or by pulling them out of poverty.

We can no longer view the world outside of this upheaval. The G20 has replaced the G8. China has become the world’s second economic power with a volume of annual exchanges higher than 4000 billion dollars. Moreover, with the Emirates of the Persian Gulf, she boasts the most important financial reserves on the planet.

This transformation has coincided with the emergence of the digital era and its universal deployment. There are 3.4 billion people who have become web surfers over the past twenty-five years, and more than 20 million are added to the list every month, or twice the population of Belgium! In 2020 5 billion of them will inhabit the digital planet, from the most fragmented Asiatic megalopolises to the most isolated South American villages. ⁴ Pope Francis, Lady Gaga, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and the Dalai Lama twit, but they are not the only ones to master the new tools of communication. Cotton producers in Mali, cattle breeders in Argentina, Vietnamese fishermen and Malagasy truck farmers follow daily on their laptops the fluctuations in prices on national and international markets. In Teheran, Tunis, New York, Cairo, Athens, Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Santiago, Moscow, Ouagadougou, a few clicks have been sufficient to fill public spaces and disrupt the various States’ monitoring apparatuses. One or two more clicks and, in real time, these local public spaces have become world spaces where one could see simultaneously the greatest hopes and the most archaic barbarity.

One can no longer conceive the world outside of this technological nervous system. Like all historical scientific advances, the digital revolution has breathed a singular energy into human activity. This revolution’s specificity consists in conveying that energy to almost all regions of the earth. No power can dispose of it as though it were a material possession, as was the case, for example, of important components of the industrial revolution in the 19th century. The digital revolution is irremediably universal. It unfolds between nations, but also within each individual one, in each socio-economic category of which that nation is composed, except for those which suffer from extreme poverty.

By universalizing information and communication, the digital revolution undermines frontiers, forces economies, national and international relationships to restructure themselves, and shakes up the governing bodies of societies and the world. It reveals an immense and mysterious desire to communicate outside of all the known avenues. How else can one explain the emergence of the digital civilization at the end of the preceding century and the fact that it has set itself up, in a less than short time span, in all societies and in the lives of one person out of two in the world?

Working inseparably, the rebalancing of capacities for producing growth and the universal extension of the digital age mark the entrance of the human family into the third millennium.

New Cultural Ambitions

One question guides the contents of this work. Is a new cultural map of the world emerging as a result of the mutations that have shaped the new economic, technological and commercial map, the existence of which is undisputed and indisputable? ⁵

We have examined the ambitions and the political cultures of the new powers (China, India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa) and those of emerging countries (Turkey, the Gulf states, Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico, among others.) We have taken into consideration the fact that these ambitions and policies are unfolding in the real universe, but also in the virtual universe, this double of the world that absorbs, transforms and magnifies the whole of human activity.

This exploration has confirmed our initial hypothesis. Culture is not a separate entity, immunized against mutations within the world. It is actively involved in these mutations. The latter universalize world cultures, bring together and enrich their multiple audiences, old and new, local and international, on the whole planet. Culture shapes and nourishes the innumerable influxes circulating today in the 11 billion technological platforms that give life to the network of networks, thereby linking the world to people and people to the world. Culture now enjoys a central position because of its contribution to the economy, its connection with technologies, its importance in the job market and, for the most ambitious states, its ability to enrich their reputation and their global influence. ⁶

Prospective terminology itself espouses these new curves and is enriched in the process. The American dream coexists henceforth with the Chinese dream, which can appear strange in the West, but a little less so in Africa, South and South-East Asia and in Latin America. There seems to be an Asiatic model in addition to the Western one. Could it be that China is borrowing from America its tendency to abuse superlatives? Is not the National Art Museum of China presented as the greatest in the world? Is not the secular formula invented by India, having little to do with French secularism that governments on both sides of the Atlantic never cease devaluing, presented as the panacea for the identity crises afflicting our times? People also refer to the cultural miracles of Korea, Brazil and Nigeria, the Turkish model in the Muslim sphere of influence and the social potential of the policies elaborated by President Lula.

A historical marathon is taking place and an unusual number of participants are registered in it: at the finish line they will acquire reputations and influence in addition to having access to the international market of cultural goods and services, that is worth more than 2.12 trillion dollars, of which one quarter, according to the United Nations (UN), comes from creative industries. ⁷ Eminent virtues are ascribed to the latter: promotion of individual creativity, potential for the production of wealth and the creation of jobs, spin-offs resulting from intellectual property. The concept has been the subject of numerous analyses and its implementation is a high-priority objective in the national policies of a large number of countries. ⁸

The new world distribution of capacities to produce growth and the universal deployment of the digital era both underscore the entrance of humanity into the 21st century. Our research has established without a doubt that these mutations affect culture as well. It remains for us to measure their effects. The system in place at present seems solid. One will not easily topple the dominant cultural position that the Atlantic zone of the globe occupies. But this position appears less assured when one replaces it in the world of the future.

This work contains four chapters: the first is devoted to the ongoing reconfiguration of the world as wealth moves from the West towards the East and South of the planet; the second deals with the effects of this reconfiguration on the cultural space, namely, in the internationalization of the activities in the domain; the third proposes a detailed exploration of public and private investments made by the new powers (China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates), investments that are causing an upheaval on the world cultural map; and the fourth describes the possible scenarios concerning the future of culture.

Change belongs to the DNA of humanity, so dominant has been its influence on the latter’s past and present-day history. Nevertheless, what is happening in our time is not so much change as a break with the past. The world emerging from the new distribution of wealth coupled with the deployment of the digital era is without precedent. It encompasses the whole of the real world space regenerated by the shift in the capacities to produce wealth and to favor development. It also encompasses the whole of the virtual space, in addition to including the universal sharing of its potentialities.

The totality of the real world space represents far more than the extension of what existed. It brings together all cultures within its framework, including those which have only a limited interest. As for the whole of virtual space, it still remains unknown to us, but what we do know recalls the first words of Genesis: Let there be light! And there was light. A new world is emerging and its rise explains the transformation of the planetary cultural configuration much better than the evolutions peculiar to the domain of culture. Indeed, the economic and technological tsunami that is flooding the planet is overturning everything it touches, and it touches everything.

Shared Economic Levers

In a pithy formula, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has characterized the economic upheavals presently taking place as the shift in wealth from the West towards the East and South of the world, a shift that is producing a new sharing of capacities on a universal scale. For the first time in history, the essential economic levers belong to all.

Before 2020, the economies of the seven principal emerging countries ⁹ should outstrip those of the G7 ones ¹⁰ and, in 2050, they should be 25% more important. ¹¹ Nevertheless, what is happening right now does not affect exclusively the member countries of these two select clubs. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of developing countries that reached a rate of growth equal to two times the average of the richest ones has gone from twelve to sixty-five, and their relationships have developed considerably. It is estimated today that the South-South flow of investments and trade will enjoy continuous growth from now until 2020, whereas the North-North trade will diminish. Consequently, the share of countries of the former South in the world economy, that had been at 38% in 1990, might reach 57% in 2030; the West’s portion would probably go in the opposite direction, from 63% in 1990 to 43% in 2030. ¹² In the meantime, financial reserves, stock market activities, scientific production, the conception and manufacture of advanced technological products as well as the mastery of the most specialized services have migrated--and are still migrating--from the West towards the East and the South of the world.

In a not-too-distant future, China will occupy the first place in the world economy and India may very well follow closely, thereby radically and durably modifying the economic map of the globe. According to the World Bank, the middle class will have five billion people, 3.4 billion of which will be Asian. Asia will also occupy a predominant part of the virtual world space. One can surmise that by the middle of the century the number of Asian users of Internet will be more than 4 billion people. The economist Homi Kharas of Harvard University maintains that this Asian middle class with aspirations towards democracy and consumerism will effect far-reaching changes in the world order. More particularly, it will constitute the most important market on the planet at the very moment when the Atlantic zone will contract as a result of its sagging demographics and the aging of its population.

Our exploration of this new world will point out other major upheavals that will affect the international community in the coming decades: the demographic predominance of Asia and Africa, where 80% of the world population will live in 2050 and as a result of which one person in four will be African; the enrichment of the world urban space where, by the middle of the century, 66% of the inhabitants of the planet will live because of the move, in Asia and Africa, of 2 billion people from rural regions to cities; and the exponential increase in the circulation of human beings on the planet, which could reach 5 billion journeys annually. Theses upheavals will have considerable effects on the economy, including the part of it linked to culture.

The shifting of wealth is not just tangible. It is quite possible that its intangible dimension will be more radical, so greatly does it already modify and will continue to modify relationships between all heritages, holdings and value systems in the entire world. André Malraux declared that Europeans only understand that part of China which resembles them. We have now entered an era where human beings, wherever they may live, will have to understand that which does not resemble them.

These gigantic upheavals are unfolding in a real space known since the origins of time and in a space unknown by all the generations that have preceded us: virtual space.

Shared Technological Levers

The universal spreading of the digital era constitutes in itself a major cultural transformation. Consequently, it occupies a significant place in this book. It blasts apart the paradigms that up till now had defined the cultural production and situations determined by those who, in the West and from the vantage point of the West, had monitored access to them, their promotion and circulation. The unlimited geographical or sociological accessibility and networking inaugurated by the digital era are in sharp contrast to the multitude of obstacles which, up till now, were preventing human societies and communities from mingling. The digital age puts culture definitively out of the custom inspectors’ reach, since it defies boundaries to such an extent and makes them obsolete. It gives access to the heritages, the memories, the modern and ancient knowledge of all humanity. It brings together people from all walks of life with shared interests, objectives and hopes. Finally, it generates infinite waves of connections that run into the billions. Some people detect worrisome drifts in these new paradigms: denials of human rights, economic rip-offs, trading of personal data and state monitoring of its citizens. ¹³ Nevertheless, these criticisms do not diminish at all the qualities of the digital age.

This virtual space is not just a new space. It is added to and tends to be substituted for real space. The political and media spheres are the first to undergo the shock of this substitution. In the political domain, where hierarchical obsession too often is reduced to a bureaucratic monologue preaching the status quo, if not closed statuses, virtual space allows interaction, free access to everything it encompasses, the sharing of information, open communication as well as almost instantaneous mobilisation. In the media domain, the editorial relentlessness of which consists most often in an instantaneous commentary on all and nothing made by the new non-specialists, virtual space allows access to facts in real time, to the assessment of the actors and witnesses as well as to the dialogue between all those who show an interest in what is going on. Let there be no doubt about it, the digital age sweeps away deeply entrenched, societal forms of logic, and which are also cultural ones.

If the works and products of culture turn up in the traditional places of the real world, they have also invaded virtual space. The publishing industry has become digital, films can be ordered, music can be listened to, downloaded and purchased on line, and 35 billion videos are viewed daily on YouTube. Museums appear on their portals and can be visited on line, free ports are created to preserve digital works of art, ¹⁴ art auctions take place on the Internet, digital libraries are proliferating and creators exhibit their works on their sites. The goal is to satisfy as many people as possible from among the 3.4 billion surfers who plug more and more into the network of networks thanks to a mobile device. They are called mobile surfers. There are more than a half a billion of them in China alone.

Hundreds of millions of people have access on a daily basis to this digital culture on their television screens, their computers, their tablets and their mobile telephones, which have today 7.5 billion subscribers. As a result, proximity limitations and border constraints are dissolved, and culture is accessible everywhere in the world. In addition, culture finds, in virtual space, totally new platforms for the production, circulation and marketing of what it creates, as well as new partners. Finally, culture can spread out there and illustrate its diversity while being universally visible and accessible. As a result, the issue of the promotion and protection of cultural diversity leaves the lofty spheres of principles to fall into the more prosaic one of economic competition, which guarantees nothing and protects only what is sustained by an active public will coupled with considerable private interests.

By partially opening up the vast domain of culture and entertainment to the private sector, and by closing its market to foreign cultural products, the Chinese government has acknowledged this obvious fact. The Indian government has done the same by barring from its territory technological products of the digital age in a clear desire to assert its national sovereignty combined with a fierce determination to participate in the development of national enterprises in this area.

The universal deployment of the digital era has required gigantic technological, financial and political efforts, and considerable investments equal to the anticipated positive effects. It also gives rise to ferocious competition. One notices this especially in the production of contents, which is, according to Frédéric Martel, the cultural battle of the century. ¹⁵ One can also see it in the production of material devices necessary for maintaining the planetary network and ensuring that its billions of users remain connected. In addition, national markets which, in certain cases, take in hundreds of millions of consumers, are more accessible. Finally, the digital age tempts states, particularly the biggest and richest ones, to control the web applications (search engines, electronic commerce, online games) and draw from them considerable resources.

This control is the object of an intense competition that opposes governments and private enterprises in the domain: India and international suppliers of mobile devices supported by the United-States; Moscow and Washington over search engines; France and certain other European states about the taxation of multinationals operating on their territories; China and the United-States concerning the whole body of web applications, the entry of cultural and entertainment products into their respective markets and the opportunity for their businesses to operate in others country; Brazil and the United-States over the policy of quotas practiced by the former in the audiovisual sector. Furthermore, they are all determined to preserve the largest possible part of the national market and conquer a part of the international one, either through investments in national companies or through the extension of web applications available on the national territory. Russia, for example, has made available its search engine in the states located in its regional zone of influence, but even beyond, especially in Turkey. The big battle to come will oppose Peking and Washington. The two powers, moving along parallel lines, have at their disposal all the web applications (including translation platforms) and are aiming for their world-wide deployment. In front of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon stand the large Chinese groups: the Baidu search engine, the Sina Weibo network, the Youku Tudou and iQiyi platforms, and the online business site 360buy.

This competition is political, technological and economic. The digital market was worth 1.3 trillion dollars in 2015, with the construction of physical infrastructures, telecommunication systems, places for storing and treating data, internet services like software clouds, mobile payments, electronic trade and online services.

The designing, the launching and the managing of this vast planetary nervous system constitute a universal and powerful lever for growth and economic development. Innovation-thirsty and the cause of intense competition, this technical and financial machine is reshaping the whole of human transactions, transforming modes of production and consumption, and modifying the results of international trade because the markets it serves are colossal.

Although nonexistent barely three decades ago, the Internet galaxy has since then attracted more than 4 billion people. Two thirds of them are connected to social networks, a large number of which deal with culture. In 2015 these users in particular exchanged more than 4.4 billion e-mails daily, ¹⁶ livened up thousands of social networks in which 2 billion surfers participate, viewed every day 62 billion videos and made hundreds of millions of online purchases. This spectacular deployment of the virtual world functions at a dizzying speed and its mastery is universal. It creates a totally new structuring of the whole of human activities, privatizes social relations and links interacting individuals in virtual communities devoid of hierarchies.

If the historical world still relies on geographical, political and cultural memberships that determine identities in particular, the virtual world, by contrast, does not recognize frontiers and leads to transnational and intercultural communities that combine identities. It also makes advances in a direction that will dominate in the decades to come: the coexistence of men and machines.

Photos and X-Rays

Seen from the West, the production of cultural goods has not undergone the upheavals that have transformed the production of general and specialized goods and services as a result of the shift in wealth. At the beginning of this century, the Atlantic zone of the world, and more precisely the United