The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity was adopted unanimously in a most unusual context. It came in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, and the UNESCO General Conference, which was meeting for its 31st session, was the first ministerial-level meeting to be held after those terrible events. It was an opportunity for States to reaffirm their conviction that intercultural dialogue is the best guarantee of peace and to reject outright the theory of the inevitable clash of cultures and civilizations.
Such a wide-ranging instrument is a first for the international community.
It raises cultural diversity to the level of “the common heritage of humanity”, “as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature” and makes its defence an ethical imperative indissociable from respect for the dignity of the individual.
The Declaration aims both to preserve cultural diversity as a living, and thus renewable treasure that must not be perceived as being unchanging heritage but as a process guaranteeing the survival of humanity; and to prevent segregation and fundamentalism which, in the name of cultural differences, would sanctify those differences and so counter the message of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Universal Declaration makes it clear that each individual must acknowledge not only otherness in all its forms but also the plurality of his or her own identity, within societies that are themselves plural.
Only in this way can cultural diversity be preserved as an adaptive process and as a capacity for expression, creation and innovation. The debate between those countries which would like to defend cultural goods and services “which, as vectors of identity, values and meaning, must not be treated as mere commodities or consumer goods”, and those which would hope to promote cultural rights has thus been surpassed, with the two approaches brought together by the Declaration, which has highlighted the causal link uniting two complementary attitudes. One cannot exist without the other.The Declaration, accompanied by the main lines of an action plan, can be an outstanding tool for development, capable of humanizing globalization. Of course, it lays down not instructions but general guidelines to be turned into ground-breaking policies by Member States in their specific
contexts, in partnership with the private sector and civil society.
This Declaration, which sets against inward-looking fundamentalism the prospect of a more open, creative and democratic world, is now one of the founding texts of the new ethics promoted by UNESCO in the early twenty-first century. My hope is that one day it may acquire the same force as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Koïchiro Matsuura(Nguồn: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/)
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