Cosmopolitan internationalism: UNESCO’s ideological ambiguity and the difference/diversity problematic

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the ways in which UNESCO’s ideological engagements are negotiated in the difference/diversity discourse as they are transferred from the international standard-setting level to the national and local contexts. It proposes the discursive construction of cosmopolitan internationalism as a framework for analysing the intersections of difference, located in the practicalities of internationalism, and diversity, tied to the ideals of cosmopolitanism, as they are manifested at the level of both the implementation of UNESCO’s Diversity Convention and urban policy making in the city of Sydney. The analysis suggests that ruptures challenging the homogenising diversity discourse rise from the national and local policy-making level, with such discourse simultaneously becoming an instrument for international differentiation. UNESCO’s normative cosmopolitan international tradition thus manifests itself as an obstacle against the emergence of transnational political spaces beyond the confines of the state, while it also carries with it a promise of facilitating such developments.

KEYWORDS:

• UNESCO
• cosmopolitan internationalism
• difference
• diversity
• discourse

Introduction

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is an actor defined by its ideological aspirations. As one of the most notable post-war peace organisations, ideologically grounded moral argumentation is both UNESCO’s primary means of legitimising its own existence and justifying the realisability of its mandate and mission. On the ideological level, UNESCO’s strategy is to benefit humankind as a whole, but the attempts to put its ideals into practice have proven challenging (see e.g. Duedahl 2016), as UNESCO suffers from inefficiency in the implementation of its resolutions, declarations, conventions, and initiatives. Most notably the World Heritage Programme (see e.g. Foster and Gilman 2015; Lázaro Ortiz and de Madariaga Celeste 2021) and the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity (see e.g. De Beukelaer, Pyykkönen, and Singh 2015) have been a source of major controversy and criticism. Yet, UNESCO’s ideological basis has remained solid since its outset (see e.g. Singh 2010).

The part UNESCO plays on the world political stage is to function as a mediator between nations and cultures, and more importantly, as a preventative force against the problems possibly arising from the differences between them. UNESCO (1945) Constitution points a finger to cultural difference as the root cause of war and conflict: ‘That ignorance of each other’s ways and lives has been a common cause, throughout the history of mankind, of that suspicion and mistrust between the peoples of the world through which their differences have all too often broken into war’ (UNESCO 1945, Preamble). Yet, at the same time, the Constitution rather confusingly calls for the preservation of cultural diversity: ‘With a view to preserving the independence, integrity and fruitful diversity of the cultures and educational systems of the States Members of the Organization, the Organization is prohibited from intervening in matters which are essentially within their domestic jurisdiction’ (UNESCO (1945), Article 1(3)).

Diversity is thus positioned as a positive phenomenon worth protecting and preserving, and located within the state. Difference, on the other hand, is an ultimately negative force and exists in the gaps between states. Conceptualisable through the moral perspective of cosmopolitanism and the political principle of internationalism, respectively, diversity becomes the business of the people, while difference is that of the state. Much has, however, changed since UNESCO’s founding in 1945, as the safeguarding of cultural diversity has determinately been transferred into the inter-state realm, complicating the matter even further. These developments took their most concrete form in UNESCO’s Our Creative Diversity report (1995) and the ‘Diversity Convention’’ (UNESCO 2005) with the recognition of national differences becoming a foundation for UNESCO’s diversity policy as well.

This article takes as a starting point the ideological entanglements of the slightly contradictory notions of difference and diversity within the world order UNESCO aims to establish. The aim of this article is to examine the ways in which the ideologisation of UNESCO’s core principles is discursively framed on the international standard setting level, how the norms for its practical implementation are set, and how policy makers, in turn, follow the programme set by the ideologisation process of these principles. It addresses the question of how UNESCO’s ideological engagements are negotiated in the difference/diversity discourse as they are transferred from the international standard-setting level to the national and local contexts. In order to do so, we propose an analytical framework we call the discursive construction of cosmopolitan internationalism, which provides the conceptual means to address the state/non-state dynamic within the UNESCO system through the notions of difference and diversity. In this conceptualisation, cosmopolitanism refers to the value base of world citizenship and shared world culture, while internationalism serves the purpose of maintaining the practicalities of the primacy of the nation state within the UNESCO system.

UNESCO’s founding followed a wider trend of cultural internationalism, or ‘the fostering of international cooperation through cultural activities across national boundaries’ (Iriye 1997, 3), a development in international politics starting from the late 1800s. Already in the UNESCO Constitution, the explicitly stated purpose of the organisation was to increase mutual understanding between nations and to promote its view on common heritage through emphasising the diffuse and diverse elements of culture, which together were seen to formulate a net-like world culture (UNESCO 1945). The shift to understanding culture in terms of a way of life and focus on the issues of development emphasised this side of UNESCOs work even more from the late 1950s onwards, as the organisation’s initial focus on post-war reconstruction gave way to addressing new challenges brought about by the exhilarating decolonisation process. At the same time, the new opposition created by the Cold War ensured that antagonistic ideological engagements became a central component in both shaping the UNESCO system and questioning the basis of the trust placed in international post-war peace organisations (Sluga 2013). UNESCO’s role as a strategic organisation of cultural and educational diplomacy and peacekeeping was crucial during the Cold War era (Singh 2010). This enhanced UNESCO’s role not only as a formulator of international norms, but also of international ideology.

This article turns to the notion of political ideology with the aim of locating the occasionally contradicting intersections of the practicalities of internationalism and the ideals of cosmopolitanism. It analyses the step from the international policy principles to national policy directing guidelines and finally to the implementation of those guidelines into practice on the local level, making use of two specific case studies. The first case concerns the principles of national differences, cultural diversity, and one-worldism as expressed in UNESCO’s Diversity Convention (UNESCO 2005), and both UNESCO’s own guidelines and national guidelines for its implementation. The Diversity Convention has been ratified by 150 countries (August 2021). When ratifying the Convention, a country becomes legally bound to the terms stated in it. The Intergovernmental Committee (IC) that oversees the implementation of the Convention created regularly updated ‘Operational Guidelines’ (OG) in 2007. Forming a part of the data of the first case, “[t]hey are to be considered as a ‘roadmap’ for [national] understanding, interpretation and implementation of specific articles of the Convention” (UNESCO 2021a). The guidelines define a framework of ‘obligatory passage points’ (Callon 1986) that member states should follow when implementing the Convention. The main data of the first case consists of the period reports that the IC has required countries to submit every four years since 2012 (see UNESCO 2021b). At the time of writing this, there were 248 of them.

The second part of the analysis descends from the national to the local level, examining views on and understandings of the jointly held principles set out in the Convention and the ways they guide – or don’t guide – local policymaking. The analysis turns to the politics of difference and diversity through the notions of welcoming and inclusion in the urban policy making context by analysing data obtained by interviewing policy makers in Sydney, Australia. Australia has been a party to the Convention since 2009. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with two key government socio-cultural policy actors from the New South Wales Department of Planning, Industry and Environment and the City of Sydney Local Government Area (LGA) between September and December 2019. Starting from the premise that cultural diversity is vital to what makes cities attractive, creative, safe, and sustainable (UNESCO 2016), the analysis connects the local level with the principles and values expressed in the Diversity Convention as a vital part of UNESCO’s mainstream discourse. The analysis also investigates the (theoretical) cosmopolitan ideals that undertone UNESCO’s ideological construction concerning cultural diversity, differences and one-worldism which UNESCO seeks to establish in cities and in and between nation-states. The case-studies have been selected on the following basis: UNESCO’s Diversity Convention is one of its key mechanisms in trying to tackle the challenges of the globalising world according to its ideological canvas. Australia has been an active party both in the creation of the Convention and its implementation. Sydney strives for being a model city for cosmopolitanism and diversity, and refers to the Convention in these endeavours (Sydney 2017; Mar and Ang 2015).

We have used critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the analysis method of the data. In CDA the focus is on the textual production of ideologies and power relations and structures (see e.g. Fairclough 2013; van Dijk 2006). Utilising discourse analysis as the main methodological device, the focus of inquiry is placed on the different ways UNESCO’s underlying ideological engagements are manifested in the form of specific discourses. Our focus is specifically on the significations and ideologies, but we also look at the relations and structural implementations through the analysis of the difference/diversity significations in different contexts (UNESCO, nation-states and one capital city). In practice we – by following one of Foucault’s (1972) key rules of archaeology of knowledge – observe the regularities in the data texts. The group of utterances, themes, and keywords with a regular relation to each other and a regular way of objectifying their targets, give significance and regular order to the words and concepts used. The analysis of utterances then reveals how certain – and, by definition, arbitrary – words and concepts formulate statements, which represent cosmopolitan internationalism in a particular way.

For the purposes of the CDA, ideology is understood following Ball and Dagger (1991, 8–10) as ‘a fairly coherent and comprehensive set of ideas that explains and evaluates social conditions, helps people understand their place in society, and provides a program for social and political action’. A political ideology thus performs four functions in its attempts at linking ideas to action: 1) the explanatory, 2) the evaluative, 3) the orientative, and 4) the programmatic. The relationship between discourse and ideology is understood as reciprocal. Ideologies influence the formation of discourses, and discourses construct and reproduce ideologies (Fairclough 2013, 25–69; van Dijk 2006). Through determining the possibilities to think and speak about a certain issue, ideological discourses tend to control beliefs and attitudes of their ‘users’ (van Dijk 2006, 116). In this case, they define how diversity and difference, and cosmopolitanism and internationalism should be approached. Yet, as our analysis will show, such ‘indoctrination’, starting from the international and descending through the national level to the local level, is far from an effortless and straightforward endeavour.

The discursive formation of the political ideology of cosmopolitan internationalism

In the context of international organisations, ideologies essentially speak to the question of how societies – both domestic and international – should be organised according to specific interests and ideals (see e.g. Voeten 2021). The distribution of ideas serving certain interests requires the ideologisation of meanings and frames of signification, i.e. discourses. This takes place by using discursive, rhetorical, and practical means and strategies through which particular opinions and views are represented as truths and related actions as compulsory and inevitable. This requires mastery of the necessary means of communication; the ability to mobilise the right kinds of knowledge producers, such as legitimate experts; appropriately problematic social conditions for backing up the arguments; and the right kind of problematisation of existing rationalities, discourses, and practices (van Dijk 2006, 36; Laclau 1996, 35–39). In institutional and organisational settings – like the one UNESCO provides – the ideologisation is easier than in arbitrary contexts, because these structures and practices prevail.

UNESCO’s paradoxical vision of the organisation of the international community, manifested in the notion of ‘the one world ideal’, or the cultural unity of all humankind (see e.g. Duedahl 2011; Pemberton 2001, 121–3; Sluga 2010), lies at the root of the problem with addressing UNESCO’s ideological underpinnings. When it comes to UNESCO’s call for the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind as the basis of a peaceful conduct of world affairs, the central paradox is embedded in the juxtaposition between national interests and cosmopolitan ideals characteristic to the UNESCO system. In the words of Niebuhr (1950, 10): ‘In one sense the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind is an unattainable goal. The world community will be distinguished from particular national communities for ages to come by the higher degree of heterogeneity in its moral, intellectual, ethnic and linguistic forms of culture’. To make it possible to realise UNESCO’s vision in practice, this heterogeneity – based, however, in this case still on a traditional division between ethnically and linguistically constituted nation states – must be made natural and normative. This then requires the ideologisation of the key concepts, and the values and the practices they bear. In the case of this article, it is the idea of cosmopolitan internationalism that has to go through this formulation in different contexts.

The main challenge to this could be phrased in the words of Sathyamurthy (1964, 16) as ‘the irreconcilable demands of nationalism and internationalism’ within the UNESCO system. Buehrig (1976, 680), commenting on early UNESCO’s ‘tribulations’, likewise identifies a fundamental contradiction. The relationship between the organisation’s internationalist aims and its practical influence on fields such as national education was marked by an intrinsic juxtaposition, which would suggest a reinforcement of national differences instead of promoting internationalism. For UNESCO, however, the national and the international are intrinsically dependent on each other rather than in conflict – and rightly so, as internationalism by definition cannot exist without nations. Political scientist and one of the architects of UNESCO, Alfred Zimmern, noted in 1923, that in the traditional sense of the term, internationalism is concerned with cooperation between states, not between nations (Zimmern 1923). For Zimmern, true internationalism was about contact between nations. The same can be said for UNESCO, even though for practical reasons a nation is often equated with a state in UNESCO’s rhetoric.

The notion of cultural diversity provides a novel solution to addressing the problem between nationalism and internationalism. UNESCO’s understanding of cultural diversity puts forward the argument that not only the differences between countries but the differences between their citizens alike are something that should be understood as a common nominator for humankind and cherished in their potential to work as a unifying factor between nations. In its understanding that all states are, in fact, heterogeneous and consist of diverse cultural groups and their expressions, cultural diversity becomes a new way of emphasising such one-worldism.

In terms of cosmopolitanism, this is also a rather radical twist. Immanuel Kant (2006) believed that it was our duty to aspire towards the establishment of a cosmopolitan society, thus outlining what he saw to be the necessary conditions for the establishment of peace. For him, the ideal solution to achieving lasting, universal peace would have been a form of a world government that respects the human rights of not only those with the status of a citizen, but also those of others. Yet, recognising that due to the restrictions posed by the likely reluctance of states to surrender their sovereignty, Kant was forced to compromise and to replace his ideal with a practical proposition much resembling internationalism – just as is the case with UNESCO. The Kantian tradition suggests that there are universal commitments to respect the moral worth of individuals everywhere (Miller 2007) and positions the nation state as well as the cities as an extension of welcoming and inclusion (Conley 2002).

Such commonly held principles of organising the international community that apply regardless of, but not detached from, particularistic interests form the basis of multilateral cooperation (Ruggie 1992, 571). While the high, principle-based cosmopolitan ideals UNESCO speaks of are ones we should all share as members of the human race, there are restrictions to how UNESCO can pursue its goals – namely its unbreakable ties with the nation state. Thus, the question of how well the practicalities of cultural difference rooted in the acknowledgement of separate national cultures fits together with the equally forceful ideal of globally shared values becomes pressing. It is precisely the ideological contestation embedded in the clashes between particularistic national interests and general, jointly held, principle-based ones that fundamentally shape the politics of multilateralism (Voeten 2021). In order to conceptualise the coexistence of the two levels of global communities making up the UNESCO system, this article proposes bridging these two together through what we call cosmopolitan internationalism. In this conceptualisation, internationalism refers to a community of states confined by formal borders and maintaining the practicalities of the primacy of the nation state, and cosmopolitanism to a community of different and diverse peoples transcending them and capturing the organisation’s value base of world citizenship and shared world culture.

As Voeten (2021, 3) suggests, if we are to understand the challenges to the multilateral order in the form it takes in international institutions, we must take a serious look at the ways these principles are being challenged both nationally and internationally. In terms of this article, this means turning a critical eye to the ways UNESCO’s idealistic principles are negotiated and contested as they are transferred from the international level to the national and local contexts.

The case specific discourse of analytically produced understandings of cosmopolitan internationalism in the UNESCO context is interpreted here in a framework within which to compare, contrast, and analyse ideologies, as proposed by Ball and Dagger (1991, 8–10). Ball and Dagger’s framework provides a practical four-step model for examining ideologies and their practical manifestations while simultaneously serving to determine whether something actually is an ideology instead of, for example, a religion or a political programme – although it must be acknowledged that the boundaries between these can be rather hazy. An ideology, according to this model, must serve four primary functions. First, an ideology offers an explanation for why things are the way they are, be this in reference to social, political, or economic conditions. These explanations are often on the simple side, as this type of a formulation is more likely to convince the widest audience possible that the proposed explanation indeed is the best one for making sense of the world and what is happening in it. Second, an ideology seeks to evaluate the conditions it explains and to provide standards according to which its followers are to decide whether a certain action, policy, or state of affairs is good or bad, and to propose solutions for improvement if deemed to be the latter. Essentially, ideologies tell us what to think about the way things are, thus providing grounds for drastically different reactions to the same phenomena among the followers of differing ideologies. Third, an ideology supplies its followers with a sense of who they are and where and how they fit into society, providing orientation and identity in terms of their relationship with the world. Fourth and finally, an ideology sets out a program for social and political action. It gives guidelines and advice for what to do and how to move forward.

An ideology and its implementation

UNESCO is the most prominent international actor when it comes to signifying culture and setting norms and guidelines to realise them in practice (De Beukelaer, Pyykkönen, and Singh 2015; Garner 2016; Hoggart 1978; Singh 2010). Like all international players promoting specific causes and serving certain interests, UNESCO needs to ‘ideologisise’ its messages, actions, and existence (Sluga 2013; Voeten 2021). It uses justificatory concepts with moral foundations the purpose of which is to make itself and its messages as self-evident and uncontested as possible. We observe two cases here, both of which explain how UNESCO discursively frames its ideology of cosmopolitan internationalism, sets norms to it and its implementation, and how countries and cities, in turn, follow UNESCO’s ‘programme’ of cosmopolitanism in their practices.

The first case is about UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO 2005). We pay specific attention to the Operational Guidelines (OG) that UNESCO has set for the ratified parties implementing the Convention (UNESCO 2009). We read the reports of the parties reflecting upon how they follow the ‘spirit of the Convention’ and the ‘rules of practice’. The analysis opens a window for the relations and tensions that take place between international organisation and nation states in the post-Convention processes, where the ideological orientation and programming of the member states happens. The second case is the City of Sydney, where UNESCO (2016) positioned cultural diversity as a crucial component in the construction of the universal ideology of welcoming and inclusion, and where the protection and promotion of cultural expressions are promised to be guaranteed.

We follow Ball and Dagger’s (1991) model in analysing how UNESCO explains the current conditions of cultural diversity and how it provides moral and normative standards for evaluating these conditions. As Ball and Dagger suggest, we also examine how the roles of the actors are defined and what the policies for them to follow are. Furthermore, the analysis sheds light on how cosmopolitan internationalism – like any other ideological constellation – is not a ‘bullet-proof’ discourse, but includes contradictions, cracks, and ruptures especially in the context of its implementation by parties such as nation states and Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs).

Ideologisation, the state, and the diversity convention

The Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions defines UNESCO’s principles, conceptualisations, and methods concerning cultural diversity and its enhancement. Translated into the terminology proposed by Ball and Dagger, the Convention lays the ideological normative foundations for contemporary cosmopolitan internationalism by explaining its core meanings, providing reasoning for its necessity, and evaluating and polishing its value and significance. It also aims to frame and stir up orientations towards it and create programmes for its implementation.

Concretely speaking, in the Convention, ‘cultural diversity’ refers primarily to cultural expressions: visual arts, music, heritage and traditions, crafts, cinema and theatre, but also to cultural differences between and among groups, organisations, and individuals. The spirit of cosmopolitanism emerges at the beginning of the Convention in the statements regarding its fundamental principles such as:

[a]ffirming that cultural diversity is a defining characteristic of humanity

and

[b]eing aware that cultural diversity creates a rich and varied world, which increases the range of choices and nurtures human capacities and values, and therefore is a mainspring for sustainable development for communities, peoples and nations.

It is also outspoken in utterances describing how cultural diversity is part of human nature, basic rights, and equal opportunities for socioeconomic development. A reader familiar with the traditional, especially Kantian, discussions on cosmopolitanism notices that UNESCO is not giving up nations or ethnicities for the revelation of the ‘citizen of the world’. Rather, it constellates a concurrency of belonging to a more or less definite ethnocultural entity, and respect for corresponding entities and their cultural expressions. We call this combination here cosmopolitan internationalism.

These somewhat cosmopolitan fundamentals build upon UNESCO’s ‘one-worldism’ written in its Constitution, which not only positions cultures as different due to the contexts of their birth and existence, but also because of the variances in identity production rooted in national or ethnic institutions. These differences are seen as ‘natural’ and therefore they create ‘natural’ tensions between nations, cultures, and communities. On the other hand, the Constitution envisions a peaceful coexistence of cultures, rooted in the idea that precisely because of its internal differences, mankind needs ideas to unite behind – namely knowledge, appreciation, and mutual understanding as the elements of UNESCO’s aspirations towards the ‘moral solidarity of mankind’ (UNESCO 1945). In order for UNESCO to achieve its vision, this fundamental principle needs to be disseminated as widely as possible and as uncontested as possible. In other words, it needs to be ideologised. This is where UNESCO’s measures of conduct, such as the Convention, step on stage.

The Convention is a legal instrument. […] It supports governments and civil society in finding policy solutions for emerging challenges. The Convention ultimately provides a new framework for informed, transparent and participatory systems of governance for culture (UNESCO 2019).

The Convention offers Operational Guidelines (OG) for supporting diversity of expression, which all UNESCO member states – in particular those that have ratified the Convention – should implement in their policy practices. They aim at giving form to the above-mentioned principles and naming the key actors, who not only implement them autonomously, but who can be steered by UNESCO’s soft power measures, such as the evaluation of their periodic reports. The key actors are the nation states, but also their unions and some bigger NGOs have a part to play.

The first step defined by the OG is, not surprisingly, the integration of the Convention into national legal frameworks. Second, the texts contain suggestions for the means of information-sharing and transparency concerning country- or party-specific practices of implementation and related knowledge production, material for education, visibility of the Convention, and public-awareness raising. Third, they offer models for enabling the participation of civil society actors, and ideas regarding ideal partners and the division of labour amongst them. There are specific suggestions for cooperation and networking related to development issues along with tools for evaluation, monitoring, and reporting. In addition, Convention-related publications and documents describe the key measures achieved and identify good practices (Sekhar and Steinkamp 2010; UNESCO 2019). Last but not least, an International Fund for Cultural Diversity as envisaged in Article 18 of the Convention has been established.

In other words, the OG operationalises and fixes the ideological basis of the Convention by repeating its core meanings and values and intertwining with recommended and regulated practices. Discursively it lays the foundations for speaking about cultural diversity, directing to use certain words, expressions, and significations in a specific order. All periodic reports of the parties must include an explanation of how they tackle the following goals:

• support sustainable systems of governance for culture,

• achieve a balanced flow of cultural goods and services and increase the mobility of artists and cultural professionals,

• integrate culture in sustainable development framework, and

• promote human rights and fundamental freedoms.

The form of the reports is dictated by the questions that parties must answer and the specified sub-sections they have to address. This means that all the parties will express manifestations and utterances echoing the spirit and ideology of the Convention in a more or less similar manner. The contents of the reports include: national cultural policy system and laws applying the Convention; national actions that can be considered as a part of the Convention implementation; indications of measures, practices and actions, which follow the requirements of the OG; practices and actors, which implement the measures; actions that indicate the tackling of the current trends that the Convention defines significant (such as cultural and creative industries, civil society cooperation, digitalisation, mediation); other treaties and agreements signed for cultural diversity; emerging national issues, challenges and achievements; and the follow-up and evaluation actions of the implemented public measures. In addition, state parties must collect and represent reports by civil society organisations about the measures and initiatives taken that have implemented the spirit and goals of the Convention.

One could argue that the ‘ideologisation’ in the Convention implementation process tends to be all-encompassing. It penetrates all levels of implementation actions and their conduct, from the possibilities to understand and speak about cultural diversity to the parties’ conceptions of succeeding in the realisation of the Convention ideals and goals. In other words, the ideology works like a self-fulfilling machine. Hence it corresponds with the premises that Ball and Dagger (1991) set for the ideological process: It explains and evaluates (the Convention) the idea and rules of practices and orientates and programs (the OG and the periodic reports) the parties to follow them.

However, each party must implement the Convention according to its own legal and political-administrative arrangements. Hence rates, routes, and degrees of implementation – and thereby certain parts of contextual ideological orientation and programming – vary remarkably, for example in terms of how the parties understand culture and cultural diversity and their expressions. Roughly speaking, five categories can be distinguished from the point of view of the issues raised in this article. First, for some, basically everything can be fitted under the title ‘cultural diversity’ (e.g. the Netherlands and Sweden), resulting in somewhat openly striving for cosmopolitanism in and through culture. This is the case especially in countries where ministerial cultural policy approaches culture and cultural diversity in the broad sense, and culture and cultural policies are not tied to one specific aspect of culture, such as the arts, above all others. These are mostly countries with a long cultural policy tradition of welfare, democracy, and equality on the one hand, and somewhat liberal and pluralistic political ethos on the other hand.

Culture is by and for everyone. […] Our society will become more diverse in the coming years, in terms of the cultural background of its members as well as other factors, and hence also more diverse in who produces, practices and enjoys culture. New generations have a preference for novel genres and stories […] By extending its focus to include ‘alternative’ forms of art and new generations, the government particularly hopes to reach groups that may not currently engage with the stories being told in ‘traditional’ theatres, concert halls and museums. (Netherlands 2021).

Second, some countries, such as Finland, Greece and Slovenia, focus on the arts, arts policies, and artistic expressions. Diversity and inclusion are present in the reports, but not so much as holding value of their own, but rather as aspects, which can or should be added to arts and culture or which can be envisioned to be influenced by them. Their reports also emphasise culture as a part of a broader creative industries and, thus, link it to economic implications, productivity, and growth. On the other hand, the arts and cultural institutions, like art museums and publicly funded theatres and orchestras, are considerably noted in the discourse. This focus seems to be typical for countries with a tradition of strong public support for arts and culture. Many of the reported actions and initiatives do not concern diversity as such but speak about cultural policies more generally. This discourse is challenging to rigorously locate on the cosmopolitanism – internationalism axis, mainly because the economic and institutional cultural initiatives are there to support national objectives with inclusion and diversity often explicitly embedded in them.

The Ministry of Culture prioritizes the connection of culture with the creative economy over the whole range of culture (cultural heritage and contemporary creation). It has already started the implementation of a program of mapping the whole cultural and creative industries of the country, aiming to a comprehensive understanding of the cultural creation (of needs and their problems) and the development of specific supporting policies. (Greece 2016).

Third, some country reports talk about principles, actions, and measures, which paint a somewhat nationalistic picture of approaching cultural diversity. There are two clear orientations in operating within this discourse. For some, it stems from what can be thought of as a minority position of national culture or an element of it, such as language, like is the case with Ireland and Iceland. For others, it arises from the nationalistic and conservative political ideology of the government, as is the case with, for example, Hungary, Poland and to some extent Slovakia. Here the pattern usually is that the party does not speak about the diversity of ethnic or other minorities at all, but rather points out examples about diversity within the dominant culture, such as rural culture showcasing different local cultural traditions. These conceptions of diversity do not match UNESCO’s cosmopolitanism, but rather the intrinsic ‘national’ component of its internationalism.

The establishment of new funds (the Art Support Fund and the Fund for the Promotion of the Culture of National Minorities) and the increase in fund budgets (including that of the Audiovisual Fund) have clearly contributed to the development of artistic production. (Slovakia 2020).

Fourth, in some cases the reports speak within the frame of traditional multiculturalism. They emphasise services, projects, and funding for different cultural groups separately. The mentioned initiatives do not usually extend to the interaction of people, expressions, or styles across cultural boundaries. Rather this approach strengthens what has been called the ‘cultural mosaic’ (e.g. Gibbon 1938; Porter 1965) of different kinds of cultural entities inhabiting the same societal space. In a way, this category is close to the Convention’s idea of internationalism, but on a smaller scale – within a single state or society. Montenegro and Poland are examples of countries using this category in their reports.

Poland has been a multicultural country for centuries. the Polish national identity is a multi-layered concept shaped by diverse collective experiences of people coming from various ethnicities, languages, religions and traditions. As a meeting point for Western and Eastern cultural traditions, Polish cultural heritage represents the European civilization’s essence. […] Poland creates a friendly climate for building an exciting and diverse cultural life. Each year, it hosts dozens of festivals promoting music, theatre, fine arts, film, and other nations’ folk traditions and ethnic minorities living in this country. (Poland 2020).

Fifth, some country reports highlight intercultural connections and dialogue between the different groups of a society. Mostly this theme appears in the parts of the reports, where the role of civil society actors or initiatives directed at them are explained. Reports of Italy and Germany are included in this category, for instance. Although cosmopolitanism is never mentioned explicitly in their reports, the content of the ‘culture’ and cultural subjectivity they construct is somewhat similar.

Enabling international and intercultural encounters between different people of all ages; using music as a world language […] Promoting intercultural education and mobility for artists; bringing professional musicians together with children. (Germany 2020).

Therefore, in some cases, national cultural policies – including understandings of culture and cultural diversity – have become more significant than UNESCO’s principles regarding internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and diversity, reaching their impact also to the discursive shape that the ideology gets in the reports. Even though UNESCO requires ratified parties to act according to the Conventions rules and guidelines, it does not possess the necessary mechanisms of control and discipline to ensure their compliance in practice, due to the leading UN principle of state sovereignty. This, then, easily leads to a situation where the praxis of the parties becomes ‘just’ ideology. The parties tell what UNESCO wants to hear in the reports, but may act otherwise, even contrary to the principles – and sometimes rules – of the Convention, in practice. Both the discursive practice of reporting, and the international institutional relationship between the parties and UNESCO then feed the discursive performative repetition of ideology, which in this sense is more ‘rhetoric’ than ‘reality’.

All in all, our cross-analysis of the Convention, the OG, and the reports reveals the discursive ambiguities and practical challenges of the ideological construction of cosmopolitan internationalism. The significations of culture and cultural diversity vary between administrative levels and nations, as arts, lifestyle, culture, creativity, education, and development, for instance, mix mostly with no apparent logic in the texts. This leads to an ambiguous situation, where one part of the discourse emphasises a purer cosmopolitan one-worldism, and the other is rooted on national and ethnic boundaries. Furthermore, this exemplifies that while UNESCO puts considerable effort into building international practices and a ‘world spirit’ of governance, the system of conduct is still in practice very much ‘methodologically nationalist’, resulting from the sovereignty of the states involved and the respect for more or less monocultural nations or ethnicities (Beck 2006).

The contradiction of welcoming on the level of the city

The term ‘world city’ has become a laboratory for testing the lived reality of difference and diversity among people. It is also a place for testing ideologies and philosophical debates regarding internationalism, localism, and cosmopolitanism of everyday life. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (2007) notion of rooted cosmopolitanism emphasises local differences with the aim to reconcile universalist and contextualist ideas. Kantian cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, allows for the identification of wider problems and debates, including the new socio-cultural and economic differences that reach beyond ethnic, national, and political boundaries (Zürn and de Wilde 2016). In this regard, cosmopolitanism and its local manifestation in welcoming and inclusion are closely aligned with the universalist ideology that sees diversity and differences as contextual and often reserved for the local community (ibid). Pairing the notion of cosmopolitanism with that of localism aligns these two levels for the purposes of analysis. Accordingly, an interviewee describes the city of Sydney and its problems:

I think the pressing problem we see, Sydney is a very wealthy city, a very rapidly growing city, is a city where I think there is a sense of increased inequality built into it. And you see elements which clearly push toward a kind of demographic informalities. (Syn1)

In terms of Ball and Dagger’s (1991) approach, this statement performs the first, explanatory, function by addressing the core questions of diversity and differences in Sydney in the context of internationalism – concerns for moral equality, recognition, and under-representation that stand at the centre of cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan tradition builds upon universalist claims like open borders, the formation of global institutions, and individual rights and dignity as the primary frame of diversity and inclusion. This ideological focal point follows the Kantian tradition that heavily impacted the formulation of UNESCO’s founding principles. The interviewees seem to directly draw this connection when addressing issues falling under the second function of ideologies, the evaluative one, speaking of the way the situation in the Sydney Central Business District (CBD) should be thought of from two possibly contradictory angles:

Technically, it would be usually, we are using that term, it is probably, more common we use the term multicultural and it would mean multi-ethnicity, people born in other parts of the world, err-m, it’s kind of general Australian sense that most people living here even they were born somewhere else, or their parents were born somewhere else or grandparents were born somewhere else with the exception of the aboriginal population, nobodies ancestors have been here for a certain period of time. (Syn1)

And

[…] I think what it is, is effectively used as a synonym for being a ‘world city’. So people often like to refer to Sydney as Australian world city as it is the only city but is not the truth, but it is a common thing to hear, is that Sydney is a city that, compete from err from a perspective attracting from town, producing world-class you know, people and content and all that. (Syn2)

The city of Sydney is thus pursuing two potentially conflicting goals: raising Sydney’s status as a world city that attracts talents while affirming multicultural values that would ensure the cohesion and identity of the city. However, the city being in favour of internationalisation does not naturally transform locals and international residents into cosmopolitan ones (Zürn and de Wilde 2016). Cosmopolitanism in this context integrates the concern for global institutions and their organisation while considering the repercussions of internalising differences for all residents irrespective of one’s city of birth.

In addressing Sydney’s simultaneously cosmopolitan and internationalist core, the interviewees speak about the identity of the city and its relations with the world, and the complexity of the levels of government in Australia. They identify key issues related to Ball and Dagger’s orientative function, as they position the conflicting role and power struggles of the federal, state, and local governments as a factor in making governing different people challenging. Those who are in support of policing borders do not have to be cosmopolitans or non-cosmopolitans. Federal and State institutions draw upon these ideological arguments in favour of protecting borders, upholding state and national sovereignty, quality community life and self-determination as the primary tool for governing differences in cities and communities (ibid.). In this context, one can simply identify the patterns of who is welcomed and how they are welcomed. We see that welcoming others without limitation is the primary determinant of openness. However, when it comes to welcoming as a key component in the cosmopolitan ideal, the interviewees both separate underlying principles from practice:

From the city government’s perspective, err-m, pretty much anybody, but […] from the federal perspective, the people who control immigration policy, much much narrower and have grown narrow overtime. Err-m, when we include these kinds of aspirations, value statements in our policy documents, they are coming directly out of strong community support for I mean, everything we get comes out saying people value Australia not being a mono-culture. (Syn1)

And

I will argue that from the perspective of an immigrant, Sydney is not necessarily welcoming in practicality. Even though every public official that you will meet and most people that you will meet from the street, will say, yes, of course, you are welcome, welcome to Sydney and that sort of thing. (Syn2)

The juxtaposition between city government and federal institutions is intrinsic. Both city and federal perspectives are essentially about establishing whether or not it is feasible to give perfect rationality for internationally valid norms without favouring definite ethical values that limit openness to others. The city government thinks the principles of welcoming apply to every individual regardless of their ethnic background, and welcoming others is seen as a value in itself, standing against under-representation of a community. The immigration as a federal institution, however, points to the need to protect communities by having meaningful borders, challenging the virtue of openness and welcoming others as presented by the city government – the principle of Sydney for all.

The question of differences and diversity arises from an institutional context of affordability instead of societal membership. Following Ball and Dagger, the difference/diversity discourse speaks to the programmatic function of ideologies, recognising it as a peculiar political ideology of socio-cultural institutions applicable through the state and city council putting its residents into exclusive institutional obligation. In that regard, the principles of differences and diversity vary with the given institutional framework in which people interact and socialise. As an interviewee phrases it:

Okay, so, if you are asking that question in a formal sense, I would say everyone is welcome. But there are barriers, you know, and I think and I again specify that we are talking about the CBD, affordability is a massive issue. Your affordable housing targets are generally not met from is massively under stock from an affordable housing perspective. So even though there is a strong public housing community in Sydney.

From an actual logistical perspective, I don’t see how Sydney could be very welcoming. Because it is extremely expensive, the immigration laws around Australia, in general, are quite strict, err-m, you know, we don’t have a reputation for being particularly welcoming of refugees largely because of these laws. (Syn2)

Analysing affordability through the programmatic function, the ideology of welcoming cannot be realised because the situation in the CBD generates and sustains inequalities among people and provinces, as shown by huge income differences and limited life chances across Sydney. This is especially interesting in the light of considering a cosmopolitan city as an extension of welcoming (cf. Conley 2002). However, the independence of both private and public institutions does not allow for interference within the city and its institutions, the sovereignty of which at times affects everyday life that does not uphold the principles of equality and affordability:

[I]f we are trying to reinstigate that it would properly come down to ways to interrupt into housing markets close to the city and we don’t have those policies list in place, we have a bit of them, to do it, we need larger space of public land, we don’t have a lot of government-owned lands same way a lot of the rest of the world does, that’s the legacy of private land ownership in Australian very very built into the fabric of the country. (Syn1)

In its focus on residents and visitors under the umbrella of humankind as a whole, the City of Sydney CBD is thus argued to consistently uphold the ethical idea of human rights and its violations are seen to limit the inclusion of others into the socio-cultural fabric of the city. The issue of the lack of affordable housing plays an indirect role that affects both the communal status and its relationship with people within the local government area, placing the debate between cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan at the heart of Sydney. The clashes between principles and practice bring to light the challenges inherent to the discursive formation of the ideology surrounding welcoming and cosmopolitan internationalism.

Conclusions

In this article we have analysed the discursive construction of cosmopolitan internationalism in UNESCO’s work. Our purpose was to observe how and why the principles that seem to be somewhat contradictory exist side by side in UNESCO’s multifaceted policies and what does this contest provoke in terms of key significations on difference and diversity and their practical implementations. As an outcome we identified the move from principles to policy and from rhetoric to practice, which illuminates the central problematic of UNESCO’s difference/diversity discourse. While often equated on the level of rhetoric, these two notions operate differently and carry almost contradictory implications in practice. The ideologisation of UNESCO’s values manifested on the international standard setting level seeks to unify difference through the homogenisation of the diversity discourse, resulting in what can be labelled as not much more than normative cosmopolitanism. Yet, ruptures are visible in practice. These ruptures that can be identified in the analysis of empirical cases are framed and represented as belonging in the same tradition dictated by UNESCO’s core values and as a part of the wider diversity narrative on the one hand, and to a certain extent ignored and written out of the official discourse on the other hand. At the same time, the national and local diversity discourse speaks back to the international level as it becomes a means of international differentiation.

The difference/diversity discourse thus directly addresses the inherent issues of the state/non-state dynamic in the ideological construction of the UNESCO system. Being an international organisation aiming to serve the entirety of humankind despite the occasionally contradicting allegiances different members of it might hold, the UNESCO system is defined by an inherent contrariety between national culture driven by the practicalities of the nation-state and world culture growing out of the ideal of the solidarity of all humankind. The empirical analysis reveals how through the contradictory notions of difference and diversity, UNESCO’s ideology of cosmopolitan internationalism is discursively framed and the norms for its implementation are set, and how policy makers, in turn, follow the programme set by the ideologisation of UNESCO’s core principles.

The four functions of ideology (Ball and Dagger 1991, 8–10) are present but work ambiguously in the case of the Convention and its implementation. The Convention makes room for cosmopolitan internationalism in a way characteristic to all international legislation by explaining the need for the concept and polishing the greatness of its core rationale and principles. It also constructs the orientation for more practical measures, which the OG then explains in detail and this way, not only continues the orientative function, but also turns the ideology programmatic. The reports of the parties, however, speak about the uncertainty involved in the operational stage: parties understand culture and cultural diversity sometimes very differently and especially the ways of implementation vary a lot. Nevertheless, this ambiguous ‘discursive regularity’ (Foucault 1972), while creating challenges to the straightforward implementation of the Convention, is something that reveals the difference/diversity discourse to not be just about cosmopolitanism or internationalism, but about cosmopolitan internationalism.

The second case of the analysis transcends from the ratified state level to the local level by analysing the views and conceptions of the shared principles set out in the Convention, and the ways they are translated into local policy discussions. Through the analysis, Sydney is positioned as a space for analysing the political ideology of the cosmopolitan in the local context, as the focus shifts to considering both cosmopolitanism and its local ideology of welcoming as logically significant and genuine responses to the issues of differences and internationalism. In the case of Sydney, UNESCO’s cosmopolitan internationalism as expressed in the Convention gets its concrete form through the notions of welcoming, one-worldism and inclusion. As the analysis makes evident, there are universal duties at the city level to respect the moral value of individuals despite their nationality and city of birth. However, the debate between diversity and difference is at the very heart of Sydney as various factors, such as the lack of affordable housing costs, directly and indirectly influence and shape the discursive formation of the ideology surrounding welcoming and cosmopolitan internationalism.

As the analysis indicates, UNESCO’s cosmopolitan ideals manifested in the notion of the promotion of diversity are primarily communicated in transnational terms, while the practicalities of cultural difference rooted in internationalism are understood in the local and national context. The issues identified in this article fall within the realm of formal, institutionalised cultural policy. Due to UNESCO’s normative role, possible solutions to these problems must also first arise from the normative level. Rather than a quick fix, our proposed framework of the discursive construction of cosmopolitan internationalism seeks to provide the means for a critical examination of the points of friction between difference and diversity within the UNESCO system. It provides the tools for laying the ideological foundations of cosmopolitan values and internationalist practicalities out in the open, exposing for examination the intersections where the two collide in practice. Explicitly acknowledging this problematic is crucial for both UNESCO to keep living up to its noble doctrine and to its states members putting the organisation’s ideals into practice.

Descending from the highly ideological and idealistic international standard setting level to the practicalities of national and local policies crystallises the contradiction between UNESCO’s normative role tied to the nation state and the creation and emergence of transnational political spaces outside the confines of the state (cf. Beck 2006). It could then be argued that the normative cosmopolitan internationalist ideological tradition with its ties with the nation state might actually come across as a preventative force against the emergence of such spaces. On the other hand, it could also be imagined to carry a promise of facilitating such developments. This, however, would require a radical rethinking of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and internationalism within the UNESCO system.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).