Whereas inland the rugged mountains and thick forests marked off one rural community from another and induced a certain isolationism and backwardness that would come to be synonymous with the term ‘Balkan’, the Dalmatian communities were more open and sophisticated. ~Robin Harris, Dubrovnik: A History

Since it first entered modern Western minds during the early stages of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, Dubrovnik has interested me ever since, but I had only just found this history of the city very recently.  This quote caught my attention and got me to thinking about how we use this language of “openness” to describe certain societies positively and others negatively.  As I have tried to argue previously, like today’s “open society” cultural “openness” may actually have nothing to do with the virtues attributed to it.  Like “open society,” this “openness” may not actually entail genuine openness, but instead may involve a severe closing-off of any number of alternative paths and the gradual elimination of the sources of genuine, indigenous social and cultural diversity.   

The above quote,opposing the backwards Balkans to sophisticated Dalmatia, annoyed me no little and somewhat, because it represents common conceptions of what constitutes a successful society.  It is, by definition, “open,” and openness is tied to sophistication, because with “openness” allegedly come cosmopolitan attitudes.  Opposed to the cosmopolitan is the native, the provincial and the backwoodsman, and we are all supposed to be able to recognise a cosmopolitan, “open” person by his attitudes towards certain key policies (among them immigration, trade, foreign policy) and by a certain general attitude towards cultural change and exchange. 

My thought, which will need a good deal more elaborating and unpacking, is that most so-called cosmopolitans and friends of “open,” multicultural societies are the most drearily provincial people, both because they are actually largely incurious about much of the rest of the world (because it is filled with hordes of “provincial” rubes) and because their response to difference is to attempt to homogenise everyone else and conform them to the cosmopolitan’s standard.  I am thinking that it is plausible that a “provincial,” “isolationist” sort living up in the mountains, so to speak may at once be the most curious about the rest of the world and also be the least put out by the customs of other men.  Having relatively less contact with the “outside” world than “cosmopolitans,” he is more driven to find out about it, and familiar with his attachment to his own native customs he is more inclined to understand the loyalties of other men.  This may be why those, on both left and right, who pride themselves on their relative enlightenment and progressiveness seem to be continually taken aback and shocked by the persistence and power of attachments to ethnicity and religion around the world: not feeling these strong attachments themselves in any way, they have difficulty imagining them as meaningful factors in society.  Another part of this would be that those who are most inclined to political defenses of multiculturalism are probably least interested in understanding or inquiring into other cultures.  Thus those who express concern for the equality and dignity of Arabs and declare their interest in bringing the benefits of enlightened modernity and democracy to them (at least when they are not lauding the bombing or torture of said Arabs) show little or no interest in promoting any extensive efforts to learn Arabic or to engage in any of the relevant cultural studies.  Control is their goal, not inquiry.  Multiculturalism is a pose an elite Westerner adopts as part of status competition among other Westerners; in a sense, it has nothing to do with the other cultures at all, but uses them as props in the play being performed for a Western audience.