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Round Table: Dialogue among Civilizations United Nations, New York, 5 September 2000 Provisional verbatim transcription

Address by Richard Bulliet (United States of America)

Mr. Bulliet: This topic of dialogue of civilizations is one that has engaged me for the last year and a half and I come at it from a somewhat more operational point of view than a philosophical point of view. While I was particularly struck by President Khatami's evocation of dialogue of civilizations as something for artists, poets and mystics among other people, it would be unfortunate to lose this opportunity to have something more concrete as an objective. Let me suggest three areas in which I would like to see a focus achieved.

The first area would be for people interested in this topic to begin to focus on a number of issues that are issues of our time, not issues of the 1940s, not issues that were particularly addressed in the Charter or the Universal Declaration, but ones that I think call for collective international consideration. These are issues such as sovereignty intervention in the role of non-governmental organizations, where I think the world could benefit from a collective consideration of these issues from different civilizational perspectives; issues such as the one you, Mr. Chairman, mentioned dealing with immigrant labour, expatriates, refugees, and the status and rights of these people; and issues dealing with the environment as the common heritage of humankind, and so forth. I would hope that an agenda for discussion could focus on some of these specific issues.

Beyond that I have a second concern which has to do with globalization and the Internet. We all recognize that this is the particular point in history where something dramatically new and different is occurring in the world of information and in the world drawn together by information. It is important in the dialogue of civilizations to enlist actively not just scholars, statesmen, artists and philosophers but also to seek to engage the people who are creating this new information world and to go to the people who are creating the new information order and ask them not simply to look at their profit and loss bottom line interest but to look at what they, as the specialists in this field, can do to make it an international issue. Someone must take an initiative to try to work towards that focus because unless selected people are drawn in, in a very active way, they will simply be responding out of self-interest.

Thirdly, as a university professor who has spent close to the past 40 years studying Islamic society I am very conscious of the fact that knowledge of non-Western civilizations is declining as an agenda, at least in the United States and to some degree in other Western countries. We have seen a relegation of specific knowledge about other cultures being dismissed as "local knowledge" and we have seen the emphasis in higher education go towards theory, particularly in areas of politics, economics, and so forth. I think we can recognize, partly through the work of my colleague at Columbia, Edward Said], that there is some rationale to this. That is to say, the type of knowledge about civilizations that arose and climaxed in the decades just after the Second World War, was perhaps the kind of knowledge that was stimulated and oriented towards the era of imperialism. Perhaps that knowledge is in a state of decline. I feel we must try to formulate new parameters, new expectations, for a new type of study of other civilizations, one that is formed within the sense of dialogue of civilization rather than simply exploring the museum of humanity from a Western point of view.

His Excellency the President of Mali said that communication is not necessarily dialogue and that is a very important observation. As we try to revitalize and redirect concrete knowledge of other cultures, whether working from a Western, East Asian or African background, we should do it in the spirit of dialogue rather than in the spirit simply of informing ourselves about the other. That is a very important mission for the academic world that could be stimulated by it becoming a focus of this enterprise.

Mr. Picco: I should also add at this point perhaps to make the conversation more stimulating, that apart from the distinguished guests invited to this conversation, we also have a number of people here who have a different kind of expertise perhaps. There are also information technology entrepreneurs present here so if the information technology industry is brought into this conversation, which I think it probably should be, let us not hesitate to bring into the conversation entrepreneurs who know exactly what this information technology means in practical terms at both the economic and technological levels. Perhaps we could then also benefit from their wisdom. We could perhaps come to this when we talk about globalization in more detail.

On this same question of what the focus should be, could I have the benefit of the wisdom of other participants around the table. I will ask each of you to comment. For reasons of practicality I shall start with Mr. Morin.

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