Limits to pluralism

I grew up in the Netherlands but spend most of my professional life abroad and my current home is in Asia. Over the years, I have grown accustomed to many different cultures and customs, different governance systems and different beliefs on the role and rights of people with different ethnic, religious and national backgrounds.

I also learned a lot about how non-Western people view Europe and the EU

The EU plays a particular role in economic and international relations. It uses the power of the internal market to force adherence to its particular value set. In economic relations, this comes through regulation of product safety, environmental standards, competition law, artificial intelligence safety, and consumer protection. In international relations and aid, it comes through advocacy of liberal democracy values and deploying it as a lens to assess the civilizational progress of other nations

This normative approach is what irritates non-Westerners about Europe.

Take pluralism for example, which has become an ideological lightning rod within both Europe and the United States. Much of this discussion is ugly. However, it is plain to see that there are limits to the plurality ideal through what Europe does in practice.

First, Europe seems to forgotten its own history. Europe didn’t arrive at its current multi-ethnic make-up because it adopted pluralism as a societal principle. Europe became progressively more multi-ethnic through other forces - economic and post-colonial migration - and then adopted the idea of the multi-cultural society as a positive value

Building a national narrative to support accomodation is a natural response and the underlying moral principles are genuinely commendable. In reality though, this narrative mostly serve the population group that needs to do the accomodation. For minorities, the narrative matters less and what matters more are the actions of the nation

Foreign policy is one particular lens. The long term political and economic alliances that a nation crafts, the positions a nation takes in international conflicts, all reflect a nation’s civilizational core: its philosophical and religious inheritance, values and principles, historical narrative and legal and institutional DNA. What a country decides on the international stage, shows what matters most

For example, Germany’s position in the various Middle East conflicts demonstrates absolute loyalty to a historical narrative that supersedes the freedom of expression of its citizens. It actively chooses to disenfranchise a current minority for a history it doesn’t share. It even subjegates the foundational values of post-war Germany to service a historical debt. The lived experience of one societal group takes precedence over the pluralism ideal.

The limits are also visible internally. The constant renegotiation of what is required to be called a citizen, the changing constraints to religious and political expression, the continued questioning of minorities for the actions of their ancestral homelands all illustrate that the standing of some minorities is conditional, subject to the political agendas of the day.

None of this serves as criticisms of the actions nations take. It simply is a description of lived reality and it is up the nations themselves to reckon with their actions.

What irritates non-Westerners is that Europe creates the narrative of the liberal ideal, fails to live up to it in structural ways, and then still export this ideal to judge other nations

Non-Westerners don’t naturally share the narrative, all they see are the actions