The Predicament of Intercultural Dialogue: Reconsidering the Politics of Culture and Identity in the EU

Abstract

This paper examines the ‘intercultural dialogue’ paradigm to ask whether, as conveyed through EU discourses, its conceptualization is flexible enough to encompass the challenges of an increasingly multicultural EU environment. It is argued that, in the past two decades, the notion of a ‘European culture’ has become instrumental to envisioning the EU and has been pushed forward by two main occurrences: the 1989 collapse of cold-war Europe and the subsequent incorporation into the body of Europe of the new central and eastern Europeans, and the processes of globalization, which have rendered Europe’s presence on the global map increasingly vulnerable. Therefore, critical encounters with the employment of ‘culture’ and its support concepts of identity and difference are crucial to the framing of ‘intercultural dialogue’ beyond the cold-war cultural and mental geography, as well as to managing the predicaments which its use may generate in global contexts.