INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE

Parekh argues that the sorts of minimum universal values that do most of the heavy lifting in debates around free speech and its limits have no founda-tions in the sense of indisputable and objective bases but do have grounds in the form of intersubjectively discussable reasons, and are, therefore, not arbitrary (e.g., Parekh 2006: 128). ‘Although we might try to arrive at uni-versal values by analyzing human nature, uniuni-versal moral consensus and so on, as philosophers have done over the centuries, the more satisfactory way to arrive at them is through a universal or cross-cultural dialogue’ (ibid.; cf.

Gutmann and Thompson 1996: 55–56). Moreover, this intercultural dia-logue is to be understood as an ideal that embodies virtues of ‘sensitivity and empathy’ (Parekh 2006: 77) as well as ‘respect for other cultures’ (128).

Each side is to recognize that the other is drawing on its own culture as reasons for holding human values and that the other has a right to give its reasons as well as a responsibility to listen to opposing reasons (128–129).

‘If they offer no reasons or ones that are flimsy, self-serving, based on crude prejudices or ignorance of relevant facts, they are being unreasonable and have in effect opted out of the dialogue’ (129). In other words, intercultural dialogue requires ‘such essential political virtues as mutual respect and con-cern, tolerance, self-restraint, willingness to enter into unfamiliar worlds of thought, love of diversity, a mind open to new ideas and a heart open to others’ needs, and the ability to persuade and live with unresolved differ-ences’ (340).

According to Parekh, the exercise of these virtues is not a sufficient condi-tion for full intercultural dialogue. New forums may be required: dedicated spaces for intercultural dialogue open to all but especially to minorities

who ‘lack enough political and economic power to be a significant political presence’ (Parekh 2006: 306–307). ¹⁷ These dedicated spaces for intercul-tural dialogue must be provided in addition to familiar legal institutions, not least the institution of free speech (340). But does this mean, then, that there is to be a moratorium on any new hate speech legislation pending the out-come of intercultural dialogue on such legislation? If so, surely that would put at a disadvantage those cultural communities who are already subject to hate speech: they may find it more difficult to get their point across or to be heard if the larger ecosystem of intercultural dialogue is already polluted with hate speech. I would say that Parekh should support no such mora-torium. For one thing, his vision of intercultural dialogue is not exhausted by the willingness to listen; it is also exemplified in ways in which people address each other, including in their speech. Intercultural dialogue is very far from being a dialogical anarchy, in other words.

Consider the Rushdie Affair as an illustration of when, in Parekh’s eyes, Western democracies failed to live up to the ideals of intercultural dialogue in both the content and manner of their discourse. Parekh’s concerns refer not to the content of The Satanic Verses but rather to the content and manner of the public discussion that ensued. At the time Parekh was critical of the British press for vilifying those Muslims who objected to the publication of Rushdie’s book. ‘Muslims were called “barbarians”, “uncivilised”, “fanat-ics”, and compared to the Nazis’ (Parekh 1990a: 62), which are forms of negative stereotyping and stigmatization. ¹⁸ What is more, Parekh lamented the fact that the cultural communities that clashed on the issues remained at arm’s length from one another. ‘Rarely did the two meet together to debate as fellow-citizens the kind of Britain they wished to create and the terms of their membership of it’ (73). What this suggests is that the deeper threat to society posed by the Rushdie Affair was not so much an attack on a tradi-tion of free speech or on the human rights of an author or even public peace but a departure from a process of intercultural dialogue in which different identities come together to contest and work through the right response to controversial written material in a spirit of mutual respect (cf. Modood 1990: 160). Following on from this, Parekh proclaims that under certain circumstances ‘the law might need to intervene’ if doing so ‘helps create a climate of civility and mutual respect’ (Parekh 2006: 317). Unfortunately, once again Parekh does not pause to explain what he means by ‘the law’, but sticking with the example of the British press, one relevant distinction is between media regulation, wherein persons can make complaints to the press regulator about British newspapers negatively stereotyping Muslims, and the Public Order Act 1986 as amended by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, wherein persons can make complaints to the police and ultimately public prosecutors could decide to prosecute newspapers for committing offenses relating to stirring up religious hatred.

At any rate, I read Parekh as arguing that regulatory and in some instances criminal law approaches to hate speech are not merely an appropriate subject matter of intercultural dialogue (i.e., the debate between cultural

communities who defend free speech and those who back the protection of groups through hate speech law); they are also potentially a precondition of mutually respectful intercultural dialogue (i.e., shared rules that forbid certain forms of hate speech as modes of expression that are unacceptable in the context of intercultural dialogue). ¹⁹ In these ways Parekh’s argument is an instance of what I shall call the Principle of Intercultural Dialogue, that legalistic constraints on uses of hate speech are (N-)warranted if they serve to protect and promote the public good of intercultural dialogue.

But why is intercultural dialogue a public good? In his recent work Parekh has suggested that intercultural dialogue—in particular when both sides in public disputes, including public disputes over free expression and its limits, choose to honor the values or ideals of mutual cultural respect—

has two main advantages for Western societies that contain significant Mus-lim populations. First, ‘[i]t reassures MusMus-lims that their culture is valued by the wider society and that they need not panic, turn inward, or become intransigent’ (Parekh 2009: 73). ‘It also reassures the wider society that it remains in charge of its civic and cultural institutions, that Muslims will not seek to undermine it by irresponsible demands, and that the differences between the two can be resolved through a rational dialogue’ (ibid.). The relevant advantages, then, belong to everyone. Nevertheless, if what I have said previously is correct, then the values of mutual cultural respect must also extend to how Muslims are represented by Parekh as he attempts to articulate the particular challenges and opportunities for intercultural dia-logue in societies that contain significant Muslim populations.

There is, then, a way of seeing the types of laws/regulations/codes dealing with hate speech that can be found in Europe, Canada, Australia, and other parts of the world as supporting not merely the values and concerns of the politics of recognition and multiculturalism but also interculturalism. At this stage, however, these laws face a further objection. According to Post, ‘hate speech regulation must necessarily enforce social norms that represent the well-socialized intuitions of the hegemonic class that controls the content of the law’ (Post 2009: 132). ²⁰ According to Post, this is true ‘even in a society that purported to adopt a “multicultural” perspective enforcing norms of respect among disparate groups’ (ibid.). If correct, it means that when in the late 1990s the Canadian Supreme Court affirmed that hate speech law is N-warranted partly by virtue of safeguarding cultural diversity and harmo-nious relations within a multicultural society, ²¹ what it was actually doing was enforcing ‘hegemonic community norms’ (ibid.). The decisions of the US Supreme Court are another matter, or so Post would have us believe. The Court ‘pressures the state to be neutral with respect to the many competing communities that seek to control the law by enforcing their own particular ways of distinguishing decency from indecency, critique from hatred’ (133).

Since civility norms ‘always reflect the view of some particular community’, to regulate speech on the basis of one particular set of norms would be to favor one community over another (ibid.).

What is particularly striking about Post’s argument, however, is that hav-ing made the suggestion that legalistic constraints on uses of hate speech must necessarily enforce social norms, Post does not reflexively consider the possibility that even the absence of legalistic constraints on uses of hate speech must also enforce social norms. He depicts the First Amendment as standing above the fray, like a referee, steadfastly refusing to choose between competing cultural communities and their social norms. He seems to believe in the unencumbered First Amendment. But if his own observa-tions are correct, there is no such thing. Post also criticizes defenders of hate speech law for being blind to the power dynamic underpinning the enactment of hate speech law. ‘Hate speech regulation imagines itself as simply enforcing the given and natural norms of a decent society [. . .] but from a sociological or anthropological point of view we know that law is always actually enforcing the mores of the dominant group that controls the content of law’ (Post 2009: 130). Yet arguably the First Amendment, or the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment in striking down hate speech law, is as much a product of hegemonic community norms as any hate speech law. This logic applies to Post’s own belief that speech acts that constitutes public discourse or contributions to the formation of public opinion ought to receive full First Amendment protection by way of protect-ing core democratic values (2012: 12). But what else is this belief if not the statement of a kind of social norm? It is no less a social norm simply because Post happens to endorse it as showing the First Amendment in its best light.

So if the present objection is well founded, it would seem to afflict all justifi-catory approaches to free speech and its limits, not just multiculturalism and interculturalism. That is because all of these views reflect ideological com-mitments or value choices of one sort or another (cf. Gerber 2004: 37–38). ²²

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By way of summary, in this chapter I began by investigating what liberals who take culture seriously might say on behalf of the right to free expres-sion and how this relates to arguments about hate speech law. Here, the arguments turned on the importance of cultural diversity as a public good that is important for choice between cultures or choice embedded within culture. I also suggested that cross burning statutes and Holocaust denial legislation may in fact undermine the diversity and richness of cultural com-munities. I then sought to consider what the advocates of the politics of rec-ognition have said, and could say, on behalf of hate speech law. Given that misrecognition is a multifaceted phenomenon, it turned out that these sorts of arguments support an array of hate speech law: from laws/regulations/

codes that disallow the public expression of hatred through to Holocaust denial legislation. Finally, I considered the perspectives of multiculturalism and interculturalism on the issue of hate speech. Some of the principled arguments turned out to favor the use of media regulators to limit negative stereotyping of protected groups. In one sense, this result is as one might