Intercultural exchanges target and source
Codes, adaptation, history

A critical moment for the intercultural field

Intercultural studies as an independent field of research and as an applied discipline came into being during the second half of the 20th Century. It addresses several fields: international relations, business, immigration, European construction, as well as the arts and the media.

Although this new field has continued to develop, it tends to lose sight of the fact that it is based on analysing de facto human interactions and creating functional responses to them, irrespective of whether these exchanges are seen as desirable or not, whether they are constructive or destructive, positive or negative, peaceful or violent. Globalization has been the key driver for the development of the field as well as the determinant of which intercultural exchanges or interactions should be studied. Globalisation has led us to discover just how diverse people, groups and societies really are.

We cannot lose sight of the fact that Intercultural Studies take place in a context of selectively chosen human intercultural exchanges that define it and on which it continues to be focused. If we ignore this, then how we deal with these exchanges runs the risk of being amateurish and simplistic. It suggests that it can solve problems that are, in fact, beyond its scope.

So, we are right to be suspicions and to raise questions about “intercultural studies.” This is especially true when “intercultural” is proposed as an instant analysis and a “quick fix.” “Intercultural” becomes an attractive label that gets plastered over the real ingredients of problems and gives the illusion of being a panacea. (1) A thorough critique is needed to define how these “selected” intercultural exchanges are linked to the very intercultural studies that give rise to them.

I/ Problems of the intercultural field

First, let’s look at several problems raised by the critical observers of the field of intercultural studies

1 / Knowledge of Cultures and limits to empirical surveys

Intercultural studies are based on limited and often imprecise knowledge of cultures. They do not clearly distinguish between truth and prejudice, nor give clear data about how long cultural phenomena have lasted and, even less, how long they will last in the future. Empirical investigations cannot settle these points.

Attempts to do so with questionnaires and instruments are based on definitions which are believed to be obvious and yet remain debatable. Unconscious understandings and expectations that are put into the questions come out in the results. In interviews, however thorough, the cultural characteristics addressed are clearly subjective. Given such processes, and in order to make sure that the cultural answers of yesterday are always topical, empirical investigations are continually repeated.

2 / Even References to acquired Cultures are inadequate

If the intercultural field has a limited conception of established cultures, it has even less understanding of emerging cultures. Very often, it is not even aware of these. Thus, in a major German chemical multinational, the head office and its French subsidiary are at odds. The latter is waiting for the planned delocalisation of a Belgian production unit to be carried out in its favour. Preliminary work has been carried out but the transfer is not happening.

The French people in charge pose the issue in terms of a Franco-German intercultural problem, in terms of the “reliability of a German decision”. The reality is elsewhere! The German multinational is being threatened by a large South Korean firm to which it will end up selling one of its departments. The people in charge of the subsidiary company were still in the intercultural problem of acquired cultures, whereas the company was already struggling with the sustained emergence of globalisation. (2)

3 / Insufficient attention to the ability of cultures to adapt to new circumstances

The “disciplined” intercultural approach treats cultures as more or less positive resources whose synergy it can manage. However, the quality of a cultural response does not exist in itself; it depends on its capacity to adapt to contexts which can change. The invented culture which can be of service in one context can do disservice in another. Thus, a policy of unification in a country can, on the one hand, strengthen it, and on the other can impoverish it by an excessive control of the diversity which sustains it.
If it has no concern for the adaptive problem which relates to any cultural response, the disciplined intercultural approach is part of a less than dynamic evolutionary conception of cultures.

4 / Culture: Code, Programme and Adaptive Freedom

With the desire to be based on stable cultural characteristics, which it needs for its pragmatics, the intercultural field tends to treat cultures simply as codes. Admittedly, a culture is part of a shared code, so that it can be stated and transmitted. But it was initially the fruit of adaptive research. Forgetting this source results again in treating cultural characteristics like “programmes.” As a result, adaptive freedom disappears, where it is, at least potentially, always present.

A cultural response, taken as a dimension of the identity of a group, leads the group to hold on to it even if the response is also partly “counter-adaptive”. Only an inventive new cultural adaptation can articulate this type of contradiction.

5 / interactions between different cultural actors: obstacles or resources. Intercultural exchange as a target

We can now clearly identify the two different perspectives for intercultural studies. The first one, concerns implementing “adjustments” to communication, co-operation between people, groups, and organisations from different cultures. This is a very noble task which occupies many people in many sectors. Not only is this work not likely to die out, on the contrary, it should develop. However, it becomes distorted if it fails to clearly define its limits.
It is a disciplined approach, but it is uncertain about the truthfulness or the timescale of the cultures to which it refers. It is limited to being “with hindsight” in relation to those cultures which it takes as read, even though these cultures are also involved in contradictory evolutions and unforeseen developments.

6 /Interactions between different cultural actors: building of another culture

Intercultural exchange as a source

It is the constantly interacting human strategies which produce an interculturation (intercultural exchange), which is real, whether we like it or not. It is as much the product of violent exchanges as of peaceful ones. (3) Day to day intercultural exchange remains the fundamental matrix of human history. The knowledge and management of this exchange exceed current human possibilities by a long way.

The profound authenticity and the effectiveness of the disciplined intercultural approach depend on the modesty with which it can situate itself in relation to day to day intercultural exchanges.

II. Resources and methods in the intercultural field

1 / Reasoning from the perspective of identity without regard to interity

Identity reasoning was initially found in the construction of myths, cosmogonies and religions by resorting to totems and gods. It then spread to history through the figures of civilizing heroes, military leaders, kings and emperors. Lastly, scientific thought developed and defined its role as the recognition and identification of things and beings.

Identity reasoning is thus based on three levels: religious, political, informational. Identity reasoning takes otherness as its opposite. But this otherness is merely the other’s identity. It is astonishing that what opposes identity and otherness was never given a name. Hidden in the galaxy of terms that include the prefix inter “, interity” (4) appears to be the forgotten or occulted concept. It is important to give a name to the fundamental situation in which human beings relate with each other or with nature. “Interity” precedes interaction and the intercultural academic field.

Indeed, “interity” first defines all the conditions in which interactions take place, second all the means that strategies encompass and, finally, the ensemble of the results that constitute cultures. Interity is thus both inter-strategic and intercultural. By denying ourselves the use of this word, we forego the need to highlight this overall complexity.

To ignore or to reject the primacy of this interity, human kind remains divided in individual and collective entities, always both opposed to each other and united. The door remains open for the totally foreign, for the unrecognisable and for that which always comes back at us as inhumane monstrosity that we cannot deal with.

2 / Reasoning from the two perspectives: identity and antagonism

Identity reasoning unceasingly leads to conflicts which it considers inevitable between opposing individuals or groups. It is not able to understand that, in “interity”, opposition and bond are associated. Only antagonistic reasoning can highlight the dynamic source from which oppositions will develop and become destructive or, conversely, bonds which will become constructive.
Identity reasoning is based on stability and consistency. Insofar as it is not used to contradictions, when they arise, it lets them degenerate into extreme violence. They are likely then to become deeply and durably destructive, before a slow and laborious rebuilding of bonds can be initiated.
Thus, after the denial of “interity”, the refusal of antagonistic reasoning still deprives human thought of one of its fundamental supports.

3 / From intercultural to inter-strategic (Devereux)

Taking interity and antagonisms into consideration helps greatly to show that at the origin of the field that we call “intercultural”, we must discover the “inter-strategic” field. In fact, the intercultural field and the inter-strategic field are profoundly linked.
George Devereux has clearly underlined this link, through the concept of “antagonistic acculturation”. (5) The one who is dominated is not only subjected to the culture of the dominant person but, has at his disposal strategic responses.
Devereux highlights three of those strategic responses, in the ethnological field that are applicable to international relations. Thus Japan practised defensive isolation for two and a half centuries. Then, in the middle of the 19th century, Japan was threatened militarily by the recently industrialised West. Consequently, it used these very new means to carry out its own industrial revolution. That did not prevent it from reinforcing at the same time, a whole part of its traditional culture: operational and collective. (Chie Nakane 1973) (6)

It was able, in turn, to increase military engagements: from the war against the Russians, as early as 1905 to World War II, started with the famous surprise attack on Pearl Harbour.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese dynamism did not fade but was transposed to the economic sphere. Without this new Japanese challenge, the Western powers would not have been pulled into the exacerbated competition which was going to lead nations to globalisation and the USSR to implosion. (7)

4/ Looking at the particular, the general and the singular.

Intercultural research must position itself in relationship with reasoning as a whole. Thus it can, undoubtedly, testify to cultural characteristics. For example, in the West, to refer to oneself one puts one’s hand to one’s chest. The Japanese point to their face with their forefinger.

Admittedly, the ocean of cultural characteristics is totally real but it should not contribute to the distortion in the understanding of cultures. As we have seen, this understanding is impossible without resorting to their fundamentals that have initially developed in the great adaptive processes common to all human actors.

Later, we will identify other general fundamentals of cultures. On the one hand, the main societal sectors- religious, political, economical, informational - in which human actors always get involved even if they do so in different ways, in different times and places. On the other hand, the main successive types of societies, tribal-communitarian, royal-imperial, national-trading and, today, based on a world informational economy, that we will come back to later on.

Only this double knowledge of the characteristics and of the generalities of cultures will make it possible to conceive each one as unique. Indeed, uniqueness is precisely the specific way in which a culture brings together generalities and characteristics. As a single whole, a culture is comparable with others from the angle of its characteristics and of the general information it shares.

Thus, the comparative-descriptive method, constantly called upon, would remain finally very poor if it did not also seek to develop the understanding-explanatory method, the only one able to resort to these two matrices of understanding of cultures that are adaptation and history.
While defining the main general types of societies, we will be able to better perceive the emergence of exceptional unique societies in the transitions from one to the other, as was the case with democratic ancient Greece, or modern parliamentary Britain.

5 / Different Humanities: adaptation and geo-history (Diamond)

The incapacity to refer at the same time to human adaptation and to geo-history leads to erroneous interpretations when it comes to understanding the uniqueness of man’s cultural destinies. For example, we know that on the whole there were more cultural developments over many centuries, in Asia and Europe than on the African and American continents. The famous American physiologist Jared Diamond is irritated at the continuing attempt to seek genetic explanations. (8)
In such a case, one starts from particular cultural differences and looks for a general theory to explain them. One thinks in terms of “characteristics” and of “general information” without going into “uniqueness”. “Uniqueness” comes from the fact that man’s interculturation only takes place in the context of human interactions with the whole of its geo-historic environment. What is then, the unique difference in fate between Eurasian, African and American humanities? Diamond tells us.
In Eurasia, which is a one block continent, development happened on close and comparable latitudes, facilitating transfer, accumulation and improvement of cultural answers. On the African and American continents, human groups had to cross extremely different geophysical zones (relief, climate, fauna and flora). This geophysical and temporal division of space was a real obstacle to exchanges. These successive individual zones made it difficult to tap into acquired cultural answers; new answers had to be found. Human development could start from the same adaptive capacities but it faced profoundly disadvantageous or unfavourable conditions.
Such are the true reasons for cultural shifts between the various human groups.

6 / From factual adaptations to the comprehension of an adaptive system

Human actors move from their completely factual adaptations to overall reflections on their adaptive system when they start to write and read their histories.
At this point in time they discover that, to adapt, they must not so much choose one orientation in preference to another but rather compose opposing orientations and thus make them complementary, if they want to adjust as well as possible to the changing contexts which are theirs.

A society totally “open” would undoubtedly be likely to fall prey to various aggressive societies– it was perhaps the case of the area of the forgotten Pyramids of Caral, in Peru –(9) An almost closed off society – as was the case with Japan for two and a half centuries - would be deprived of external stimuli, its evolution would slow down and it would also finally be attacked. As a permanent adaptive process, a culture must always be able to go back to its earlier choices and to adapt them to changes. This adaptation is always antagonistic.

Openness but also closedness, unity but also diversity, stability but also change. It is from these main antagonisms that adaptation can be unceasingly repeated.
When the actors discover an opposition, they finally understand that these opposite orientations cannot suppress each other. Instead there will only be adaptation because of the possibility of composing them.
Only then do they become aware of the need of inventing better compositions, better articulations in order to found societies which are both more complex and better balanced. We will now highlight the three main elements structuring interculturation (intercultural exchanges): antagonistic adaptations, areas of activity, and types of society.

III. Founding components of intercultural exchanges.

1 / An antagonistic adaptation which opposes or composes

To facilitate recognition of antagonistic adaptation, we will show how two authors, as related to intercultural studies as Hall and Hofstede, were close to its discovery. But let us first review its basic foundation. Establishing oneself in opposition, including to oneself, is one of the constitutive elements of human nature. A person who identifies himself solely to his cultural identity can only do so in total denial of this existential chasm.
Only the possibility of dissociation/association with oneself creates the possibility of dissociation/association with another. Adaptation is antagonistic. It can oppose one of the poles, whether it is oneself, that of another person or even of a way of behaving. It can also choose complementary association. Instead of fighting, the modernist and the traditionalist can seek the respective parts of tradition and modernity which are appropriate in a specific situation. Antagonistic and complementary adaptation creates the permanent intercultural foundation in the relationships of men among themselves and with nature.

2 / Hall: communication between adaptation and culture

Hall brilliantly showed how this antagonistic adaptation works with regard to communication. (10) With a close acquaintance, I have high context: I must be implicit, allusive, so as not to repeat to him what he already knows. With a stranger, I must define what I am speaking about and sometimes even define the words I use. Communication does not choose one orientation or the other; it must dose them according to the uniqueness of my fellow speaker at that time, neither completely familiar, nor completely foreign.

A culture which is only explicit or only implicit is unsuitable.
Unfortunately, Hall does not go any further, leaving aside history which is the only element that can reveal to us the origins of national cultural biases. As it unifies, a society constitutes a broad common context which lends itself to implicit communication. Thus France brings together Roman, catholic, royalist and republican. Japan closed itself off to foreigners for two and a half centuries and is at the top of the list in implicit communication.

Conversely, in any country where there is diversity of subcultures, those who move around in them must resort to explicit communication, if they want to be understood properly. The more people use it, the more it will become, to some extent, part of the shared culture. Germany (11) and the United States are cases in point, to differing degrees and at different levels.

3 / Deconstructing Hall and Hosfstede

On the basis of Hall’s comments on communication, Hall and Hofstede need deconstructing to save them from their culturalism. Thus, Hall should have referred to monochronic and polychronic cultures through their antagonistic adaptive function: attention. Attention must be able to be centred, decentred or, as a rule, balanced between these two orientations. A tourist in a dangerous part of the city, who is looking for a street on a map, must be monochronic for the map and polychronic for danger which may come from anywhere.
To be always monochronic or always polychronic would be counter-adaptive.
Similarly, Hofstede refers to judicious “cultural indices”, except that he makes national cultural “programmes” of them. (12) But if humans can be so different, it is precisely because they operate within major antagonistic adaptive problems. Should “hierarchical distance” be reduced or increased? The “uncertainty avoidance mechanism”, encouraged or fought? The “individual”, come before the “collective” or the reverse? “Masculine culture” before “feminine culture” or the reverse?

How can one claim that a certain dosage, having become a “cultural indicator”, should be closed again on itself, once and for all! The problem must, on the contrary, remain open to allow the invention of new dosages adapted to new situations.

4 / Complex antagonistic adaptation: ternary and quaternary

The examples taken from Hall and Hofstede are those of binary adaptive antagonisms. They do not remain separate but interfere, constituting a complex unit to which ternary adaptive antagonisms can be added. (13) For example, that which in economics opposes and associates “supply, demand and exchange”. Or, in constitutional law, opposes and associates “legislative, executive and legal”.

We will also shortly see two examples of quaternary antagonisms which constitute the two other founding principles of the intercultural field we will overview: professional fields and the societal forms.

5 / Antagonistic dynamics: destructive, constructive, regulatory

The concept of antagonism is divided into three different semantic universes.

1 / From cosmology to biology and sometimes in psychology, the term antagonism defines opposition as the very place of its adaptive regulation. If the opposition between men and nature could in no way be controlled, humanity would disappear.

2 / In history and sociology, antagonism consists of a generally radical, systematic and extreme opposition, which can even lead to mutual destruction.
So then, why does antagonistic regulation – which allows life to subsist in its changing environment – fall short when it comes to psychological and sociological interactions?

3 / Regulation, quite the contrary, is a must. As such, life, along with its actors, acquires further freedom making it possible to invent cultural responses adapted to changing specific situations. Man thus positions himself very clearly between the benefits of nature’s regulating antagonisms and the luck or the evil resulting from the lack of their society’s regulating antagonisms. They are neither bees, nor ants, nor termites; they therefore have to build those regulating antagonisms. Institutions attempt to do this when they try to reconcile distance and proximity, unity and diversity, individual and collective, masculine and feminine, taking risks and staying cautious, etc.

6 / Religion, politics, economics and information

Man’s activities over time diverged, gradually constituting societal sectors: religion, politics, economics and information. Religion is the foundation of what men believe together, and which consequently bonds them and motivates them. Political power is the holder of the only legitimate use of violence. Economics was essential to produce the necessary resources for survival and beyond that, the resources allowing for the existence of religious and political activities. The information sector initially intertwined with the three others. Its demarcation took time and is still not clear even today.
Each sector emerges through specific assets, attempts to replace the other sectors, and through this dynamic, getting weakened and strengthened, seeks its uniqueness.
Throughout history, kingdoms and empires emerged from the powers associated with religion and politics, controlling economy and information. With the birth of the modern trading nations, the association of economy and information came to control the religious and the political. The principal societal sectors mentioned above thus continued their development through an antagonistic and complementary interculturation.
With the current emergence of worldwide information-based societies, the information sector appears increasingly not as a dominating sector, but as the principal stake in human development. (14)

7 / Tribes, kingdoms, trading nations and globalisations

The major forms of society were not quickly developed as the central element of interculturation between societies. (15) Only unique societies constituted this central element. Georges Dumézil first clearly showed, in the case of Indo-European societies, that under the hierarchy of the gods as depicted in the epics and pantheons, lay, in fact, a hierarchy of the dominant societal sectors in these societies’ organisation. The politico-military, associated with the religious sphere, controlled the economy and information. Several post- Dumézil historians held that this situation defined the kingdoms and empires which succeeded the communities and tribes. They succeeded in doing so since politics had benefited from the unifying role of religion.
From the beginning of the emergence of the third societal structure, the trading nation, unlike the above examples, it was the association of the economy and information spheres that became the driving force.

Today, the cross-breeding of information and of planetary space and time, in all their dimensions, constitutes the new and real stake of knowledge and power in society. In this light, we can refer to them as “an information world”, even if the economic sphere still appears to occupy the dominant sector.
A society is unique only as a product of the principal forms of society which, over the years, have woven its history and compose today. (16) Recognising the uniqueness of each society present on the planet today is essential to the understanding and analysis of interculturations in progress.

The failures of the IMF, the revelations linked to multiple conflicts, ongoing changes, keep us from believing that the term “nation” is appropriate to characterize countries whose deep differences are so well known.

IV. Processes at work in the transformation and invention of cultures

1 / Transductions, articulations and crasis (Bateson)

To understand the beginnings of societies and cultures requires the knowledge of the processes of interculturation wherever and whenever they happened. However, history and the beginning of societies and cultures do not concern only traditional scientific methods: induction and deduction. Induction establishes a law, starting from particular facts regularly found in investigations.
Deduction seeks to highlight the demonstration of a general law in particular situations, renewable if need be. These methods, although judicious, must be supplemented by the recourse to the transductive analysis which is essential to follow the interactions and interferences between societies and groups, themselves unique actors in unique situations. Transductions follow the methods of the transformation of existence and situations because of their unforeseen meeting or of their durable coexistence in the same place. Their action is often facilitated by mediating third realities.
The varieties of transduction all deserve to be studied, whether they are simple diffusions, transfers, gatherings, additions or hybridisations. As we will see later, the transduction of the sacred, a sort of hybridisation, has spread over the major areas of activity – religious, political, economic and informational. Then, we will highlight two opposite kinds of transduction: articulations and crases. We will use Gregory Bateson to better distinguish between them. In his view, human relationships are structured either around competition, or around complementarity.
Complementarity is expressed through the invention of institutions which link human beings or opposing situations. Such is democracy. On the other hand, competition often involves the emergence of extremes, whence a violent process of interculturation: crasis. This marked the 20th Century and remains present today.

2 / The transduction of the sacred: from the religious to the political and economic

Within the framework of Christendom, the political powers were subject to the religious powers but tried, at least partially, to free themselves from them. This remained difficult, as long as the religious powers had the resources of the sacred available to them. It was thus a crucial transduction which led the political powers to constitute themselves as sacred. It was a long story, of which we will recall only a few elements. The Protestant schism played a large part in this. Luther addressed the Christian nobility of the German nation.
In England, Henry VIII founded Anglicanism, the national Christian religion. In France, through “Gallicanism”, the state distanced itself. In Russia, the Tsars recovered the sacredness of Orthodoxy: and came to speak of “Russian faith” and of the “Russian God”. (17) Finally, the nation and its state become completely sacred. At the same time, from a Catholic point of view, the economy is devalued. There too, Protestantism plays a large part as Max Weber has shown. (18) For Protestants, the economic actor operating through the seriousness of his work ethic, of his profits, of his investments is as respectable, if not more so, than a corrupt Catholic priest.
Economics is from now judged worthy of being made sacred, at least in the present world, just as much as any other activity carried out in the respect of God.

3 / Some examples of articulation: democracies

Our first example is that of Rome. The king had died without descendents; a foreign king was to succeed him. The Roman aristocrats rejected the monarchy, then, offering their hand to the people agreed to give them a part in government: the Roman Republic was born.
Another successful articulation: Greek democracy. Athens regrouped four tribes who wanted to dominate each other. To avoid a division which threatened the City, they resorted to the Sages.

Thus, Clisthenos divided the four tribes into ten, each one obliged to contain populations from the city, the coast and the interior. (19) J-P. Vernant has well described this “power sharing”. (20)
A third example. The British aristocracy was traumatised by two political excesses: on the one hand, the violence of the absolute monarchy of the Stuarts, on the other, the dictatorship of Cromwell and the Puritans leading to the execution of the King. Norbert Elias highlights this: they have “to wait several generations before the antagonistic groups are again reconciled to live in peace.”
They succeed on the understanding that the tensions are necessarily “part of the parliamentary system whose non-violent struggles obey carefully laid down rules” (21)
Our fourth example, closer to us, the return of Poland to democracy. Its articulation between different camps and actors was clearly expressed by the expression of the time: “for you, the President” (Jaruzelski) “for us, the Prime Minister”, (Mazowiecki from Solidarnosc).

4 / Genesis of the European crases of the 20th Century

Although not very visible, to begin with, through the maelstrom of events at the end of the 19th Century, a very grave trans-political schism was happening in Europe. Alongside the traditional kingdoms and empires, a new form of society was being sought and was already to be found in Italy, the Netherlands and England. Choices were being made. The United States was becoming a trading nation under British influence. France was going to hesitate for nearly a century to join in, with the Republic. On the other hand, Central Europe was refusing “democratic” options.
Similarly, Russia remained an Empire. This great schism between empires and trading nations led Europe to the First, then to the Second World War. Indeed, in order to succeed in overcoming their failure by whatever means, empires were transformed into even more violent dictatorships. The type of transduction which brought them to that point is called “crasis” which forced together cultural resources, however incompatible, such as nationalism and socialism. Thus, the Fascisms were born – Italian, Spanish, Japanese –German Nazism, and in yet another perspective, Stalinist terror.
As can be seen, “crasis” is a singular transduction put in place by societies in difficulty who want to give themselves a last chance. In these conditions, it is often a monstrous phenomenon. It is important to take this into account, to understand its beginnings and the provisions necessary to avoid it, namely: the invention of articulations.

V Acting and reasoning in the light of societies’ strategic and cultural futures. Monitoring and looking forward, articulations and crases.

1 / Intercultural exchange in all its forms

Let us summarize the tasks of the comprehensive-explanatory method of cultural geneses, when it becomes a prospective approach of interculturation in progress and to come. (22)

1. Interculturation must be taken into account when referring to principal adaptive problems.
   
   Which balances will take place tomorrow on different continents and in the world at large between unity/diversity, authority/freedom, equality/inequality, closedness/openness, for example between protectionism and free exchange ?
2. Interculturation must also be taken into account when referring to conflicts and arrangements in the main areas of human activity. Is politics able to redefine its place and its functions at a world level, by relating to certain consequences of economic domination? Will information remain segmented – as a scientific, technical, aesthetic, media – and thus easily dominated by actors in other sectors?
   Or will it be able to become a fourth power? What will become of religion, caught between its seizure from conflicts of identity and its unifying strengths?
3. Interculturation must finally be taken into account with reference to the major opposing structures of society. The opposition between empires and trading nations which drenched the 20th century in blood is still present on a planetary scale. We have observed that empires define themselves by the power that political ideologies exert on the economy and on information. Around the world today, is not this definition still appropriate as regards several countries?
4. Interculturation between types of society oblige us to augment our usual vision of the oppositions between societies. We can see it from the geopolitical angle when dealing with certain resources: oil, water, etc. We neglect the trans-political dimension which deals with the incompatibility between diverse types of society. It is here that we have to take into account the fork in the road between two opposite forms of intercultural exchange: “crasis”, which moves opposition to destructive ends; or the “articulation” which invents their composition. We can only launch the debate here with a few observations.

2 / Opposing transductions between Europe and the United States (Kagan and Rifkin)

Shortly after September 11, 2001, the American conservative Robert Kagan produced an analysis of the comparative evolutions of cultural orientations in Europe and the United States. (23) Although he does not employ the term, he shows how two opposite transductions can be shown to work between the United States and Europe. In the beginning, “Atlanticism” was born from a clear community of interests in the face of the threats of “the East”. So the United States, on a war footing, continued to fortify itself.
On the other hand, Europe, thus protected and who wanted to be turn the page on its tragic past, did not strengthen itself militarily. Eager to clean up the source of past violence, Europeans unified their societal references; the old authoritarian countries became democracies. Choosing a concerted mode of development for its nations, based on an implicit rejection of the recourse to war, Europe was embarked on the need to link the countries of which it was composed. For one part of them, this peaceful viewpoint even became an international model.
The analysis of this typically European transduction, as made by Kagan, makes it possible to understand how another American thinker, Jeremy Rifkin, can, in his recent work, present the emergence of a “European dream” which “passes Community relations before individual autonomy, cultural diversity before assimilation, the quality of life before the accumulation of riches, durable development before unlimited material growth, personal satisfaction before hard work, the universal rights of man and the rights of nature before ownership, and worldwide co-operation before the unilateral exercise of power” (24)

3 / Europe: from reality to dream?

Before reconsidering this “European dream” which Rifkin presents, it is essential to situate it within the reality of Europe. (25)

1. Europe was unable to control the sudden outbreak of war and the beginnings of genocide in the Balkans. Even in this intra-European situation, it called upon the American military.
2. Europe is incapable of producing real unity among its nations. That was widely seen during military engagements in Iraq. Eastern Europe, so recently under Soviet military domination, is far from having the dominant pacifist references of Western Europe.
3. Europe was unable to rally its most privileged populations, as the “no vote” of France and of the Netherlands (26) showed in 2005.

These failures however have not yet managed to dissipate the lessons that Europe has drawn from its own history.
Trans-political division, which it has been unable to avoid, has destroyed and dishonoured it. It is precisely because it had plumbed the depths of horror that it wanted to make the links between its nations the key to a peace which would be definitive because it is in permanent construction. (27)
How could it advance in this articulation? How could Rifkin then be right to ask: “What if Europe were not only our chance but that of the whole world?” The answer is clear: it is only because of the incredible effort in interculturation that Europeans will have to do to get there. (28)
There will be no articulation of their individual societies without effort on the fundamental articulations necessary to it; on a new articulation of the relations between the religious, political, economic and the informational; on new adjustments to the major antagonisms: unity/diversity, authority/freedom, equality/inequality which underpin democracy. If Europeans advance in this direction, they will thus be able to contribute to the most difficult articulation: that of the four great models of society (tribal, imperial, national, world-informational) which still deeply divide the whole planet.

4 / the United States and the world

The truth is that Europe is only very insufficiently engaged in this process. It undoubtedly still looks more in another direction: that of constituting itself as a power. Consequently, it is not the “articulation” which shapes its perspective but “crasis”. A kind of world-national “crasis” of the type which in a relative way the United States uses on the basis of its power. Admittedly, this crasis is profoundly part of the current climate since it tries to make associations between the two groups of cultural assets: those concerning national and those concerning a world culture.
At the same time, another unique “crasis” has happened, that of Al-Qaeda imposing its power which originates as much in pre-Islamic as in worldwide cultural assets. (29)
Under these conditions, could the American world-national crasis be forced into becoming an imperial world-national crasis?
For multiple reasons, it is undoubtedly not what is most probable, even today. But if others crases of power were put to work in the world, what could happen? An analysis by Jacques Sapir tries to define the possible components of a US “crasis”.
Isolationism and interventionism are certainly two opposite orientations of American political culture. However, the reference to Providence and to the manifest destiny of the United States connects these opposites. This is why Jacques Sapir qualifies the possible American crasis as “providentialist isolationism-interventionism”. (30)

You will appreciate that it is not possible to develop such complex points here. All these analyses about the United States or Europe need to be pursued, without positive or negative prejudices.
Similar analyses about the world need also to be set in motion. We think we have shown that from now on we have better and more varied recipes for success.

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