A few hours ago attacks to a government building in Oslo and to a Labour Party youth camp in the Utaya Island have occurred. Casualties are being confirmed (so far, 10 and 80 people, respectively), as well as the motivations of the perpetrators. A radical Islamist group seems to have claimed one attack. But the only person detained to this moment is as a far-right extremist of Norwegian nationality.
Whatever the precise reasons, this is a great tragedy, all the more when it happens in a country committed to peace making all over the world, whose capital has given name to peace processes and treaties, and hosts every year the ceremony of the Peace Nobel Prize award.
These are difficult times for Europe. European societies are undergoing huge changes due to major internal mobility and also to immigration from outside the continent. Cultural differences can give ground to reciprocal enrichment but also to social discrepancies. And the only way to deal with those, in order to advance collective harmony is dialogue. Inside homogeneous groups the common ground for dialogue is a shared culture. But when dialogue has to be established between groups with different culture, an intercultural dialogue is necessary.
Intercultural dialogue is more difficult because it implies the usage of a language that transcends certain cultural categories and finds translation in other cultural categories. It is more difficult but not impossible. Human beings are, all of them, human beings. That they have in common. Culture is important but not an insurmountable absolute. An intercultural dialogue requires a transcultural language.
The idea of a transcultural language calls for more specification. Among other reasons, because the conceptual distinction between language and culture has to be clarified. Particularly important is to show how language, that always springs from a cultural background of which it is expression, can travel beyond such background. But what is obvious is that intercultural dialogue, before a transcultural language, needs some predispositions of which all human beings are capable in principle and yet not everyone adopts. The killer at Utaya is an eloquent example.
Intercultural dialogue necessitates education. In other words, attitudes like tolerance, peaceful interaction, openness to learn from the other, patience before what is different, civilised exchange of arguments, do not just appear spontaneously. They cannot be decreed by law either. Those moral attitudes have to be learned. There has to be an education for peace.
European liberal democracies have been living from moral resources that might be running out. With the advent of more pronounced diversity, the social structures of the European polities seem to be shaking. Where moral education for peace falters, the possibility of intercultural dialogue—even the very existence of a transcultural language—fades away. Then another alternative gleams for those who do not know how to deal with difference: the language of violence.
As Europe becomes increasingly diverse, that is an alternative it can ill afford. It is time for Europe to draw from moral traditions like Judeo-Christianity, secular Enlightenment, and others (Islam perhaps?), to promote intercultural dialogue and ground the peace and prosperity of the future.
