Another post originally intended for another forum on issues involved in re-articulating the vision of democracy in the context of multiculturalism (TGA is Timothy Garton Ash):

DEMAGOGIC CLICHES OF RIGHT AND LEFT is the title of the (syndicated) article I was responding to!

Coming back to yesterday's discussion, we can agree that the high degree of alienation pervading sections of the Islamic community in Britain does indeed raise issues and pose challenges. TGA's preferred solutions of working to bring them into accord with the collective narrative (into accord the collective understanding of what it means to be British) as well working on the front of integration in schools seems to me to be misguided. Or as at best very partial as a means of addressing this.

If we were to think in TGA's terms we would at least have to go so far as to accept that the received narrative need adjusting to allow conscientious Muslims to believe that they are not compromising themselves in agreeing to climb on board. We would also have to acknowledge that British foreign policy is actively fueling the alienation found out there in the local communities; and further that in its well-springs __meaning the driving parameters motivating the policy or the ethical-cum-political values that constitute 'its inner vision'__ it is in many way deeply inamicable to Islamic values. By which I mean in its materialism as shown in the angloamerican-led thrust to monopolise the resources of the Arab world in the service of global speculative capital as well as in the evidence of its recurring issues with or difficulties regarding the FACTS OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE.

Brits are wont to pat themselves on the back over their relative success in bringing about a resolution of hostilities in Northern Ireland and to proffer their experience there as a potential model for settling other long-standing conflicts persisting elsewhere as in the Basque Country, Israel-Palestine etc. One feather in their cap for diplomats representing the country's interests abroad!

However I prefer to view things differently in thinking that we need to learn to live WITH MORE DIFFERENCE and not less. Part of the problem as I see it is the ATOMISED CONCEPTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS that is especially prevalent in the anglosaxon countries and that STRUCTURALLY __albeit often unconsciously__ FEEDS DIRECTLY INTO the depradations of global capitalism. The desideratum or imperative for political thinkers is to articulate a COMMUNAL conception of the notion of rights; and moreover a conception that is potent enough to constitute an ideological challenge (or threat) to the present extant hegemonic configuration in its resonance for the collective consciousness!

Some theorists have begun to talk about the imperative for a new multipolar world order in the context of an emergent collective need for an international framework of checks-and-balances on the global level to contain an increasingly lawless US __as well as to displace the extant UN-based framework which is seen as having been effectively hijacked or coopted into almost exclusively serving American strategic interests. This latter would amount to cohabitation between/ among poles of CULTURAL DIFFERENCE on the large scale.

Alternatively, and on a more microsocial scale, or indeed quite possibly in a relationship of complementarity to the above, we could recall and consider something like the DHIMMI MODEL OF AUTONOMOUS ETHICAL COMMUNITIES that was prevalent in Mediterranean regions and the Levant during the Ottoman era. The telos here is the setting in place of NODES OF AUTONOMY outside the reach of the centralising articulations of (venally aligned) Western regimes of law __or at the least operating from a basis of relative strength and cultural-cum-legal autonomy.

Implicit in the above is the pivotal significance of the COMMODITY FORM to the constitution of (let us say!) the 'western polity' AS AN ETHOS; and that said commodity form in its structuring implications at the level of the production-cum-reproduction of 'the Social' is very malign particularly if validated, as is universally the case today, as untrammeled ethical ground.

There are tactical questions as to the optimal mode of proceeding in the project of assertion for the aforementioned nodes of autonomy and among these is the issue of level and scale. Thinking in terms of the imperative for a new multipolar world order is thinking large-scale! Thinking self-organising communities engaging with local issues on the ground and asserting themselves in the context of locally experienced tensions is microsocial and small-scale. The hope in proceeding along these latter lines is building upon extant sympathies in existing communities and, via networking, building up over time into a counter-hegemonic movement of greater impact and on larger scale.