Page 109 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

104 Jürgen Habermas

space. But in the context of increasingly unstable horizons (a context
shaped through media technologies, through travel, and the like),
any essential link between localism and parochialism is eroded.
Parochialism can be sustained by both lifeworld and system
dynamics. One entails the active resistance of participants to the
increasing porosity of modern lifeworlds, which derives from
living, working and travelling in a variety of different contexts, the
cultural heterogeneity of geographical locales, and the reception
of media symbols. The increased global mobility of symbols and
cultural forms frequently presents itself as a threat to the narrative
coherence of identities and heritage and not simply as an opportunity
to embrace the diversity and flux of a deterritorialised cosmopolis.

The systemic factors commonly include such phenomena as cultural
protectionist policies (which is not the same as saying that all state
support and protection for indigeneous culture actually promotes or
aims to promote parochialism), government and/or commercially
sponsored ‘nation building’ (emphasising heritage, patriotism or
xenophobia, for example) in education and the cultural industries,
socially divisive urban planning (for which the gated community
is the operative metonym), or the unintended consequences of
economic and technological developments that promote greater
consumer choice and ‘bespoke’ media and cultural goods. What is
certain is that withdrawal into fundamentalisms, ethnic nationalisms
and insular localisms arises as a reaction to, and thus as a consequence
of, contemporary globalisation, and is not simply a festering residue
of an earlier age. But the extent to which globalisation elicits those
reactions rather than the opening out of cultural and discursive
boundaries is an empirical rather than a theoretical question. We
could easily adduce numerous illustrations of both the centrifugal
and centripetal consequences of globalisation. And yet the increasing
vigour (and violence) with which so many groups and communities
seek to police their symbolic and/or physical boundaries is the
corollary of a reorganisation of space which sees the continual growth
in potential for localised, critical discourse between participants who
inhabit intersecting, rather than homogeneous, lifeworlds.
The communications media are critical in destabilising cultural
boundaries and thus eroding that essential link between localised
discourse and parochialism. In doing so, however, the large-scale

media also reveal their own limitations. For it’s difficult to see how
either the exclusivism of imagined bonds, as in an ethnically conceived
nationhood, or the ethnocentrism (and hollow abstractions) of

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Goode 02 chap04 104 23/8/05 09:36:11