Fixing the Broken Mirror: Diversity and Survival in the Global Village

Rumi was a medieval jurist and mystic, born in what is now Afghanistan, in the closing years of the Islamic Golden Age. His family fled the Mongol invasions of 1215, wandering westward in search of refuge. Ripped away from his home, Rumi’s childhood journey took him along the Silk Route, through the cosmopolitan cities of Baghdad and Damascus, to the Anatolian lands of the Byzantine Empire, an odyssey of wondrous sights, and bewildering diversity. His poem on the broken mirror was a meditation on shared meaning in a world of loss and suffering. A thousand years later, grappling with the horrors of totalitarianism, Jürgen Habermas would introduce “the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding” to critical social theory. A leitmotif of the Frankfurt school, it would be celebrated by postmodern thinkers as a cutting-edge concept, oblivious to the roots of pluralism in ancient wisdom. The relationship between past and present, tradition and modernity; the cultural self-understanding of our place in history is a befitting point of departure in exploring diversity in international law. We in Canada are Indigenous and immigrants, francophone and anglophone. We have embraced a multicultural postnational identity and a rule-based international order. It was a philosopher among us—a certain Marshall McLuhan—who popularized the term “global village” in the 1960s. Half a century ago, it described a technology-induced transcendent consciousness, a prescient vision of the hyperconnected internet world of today, where we can explore the delicate boundaries of “self” and “other” through Instagram selfies and Twitter tantrums! There is of course another, less appealing side to Canada: our Indigenous brothers and sisters struggle with the legacy of colonialism; in Québec there is the hijab hysteria known as Bill 21, in the shadow of the 29 January 2017 massacre at Québec City’s Islamic Cultural Centre; and there are ominous undercurrents of racism, misogyny, and homophobia, just beneath the surface. “Canada’s New Far Right,” the Globe and Mail reported, is “actively recruiting new members, buying weapons and trying to influence political parties.” Where at the end of the Cold War, Western liberalism celebrated the “end of history,” today we live in an age of rage, gripped by a hateful populism, battering the ethos of diversity and multilateralism that we once took for granted. We are witnessing, it seems, a prolonged episode of infantile regression in that reality TV show we call politics. Whether we are critical theorists or progressive practitioners, we condemn these sinister forces of xenophobia and isolationism. But if we stare long enough in the mirror what do we see? Beyond liberal platitudes, have we embraced the more profound meaning of pluralism? And why should it matter at this particular point in the evolution of humankind? The idea of international law is inherently cosmopolitan. Put differently, it is a response to a traumatic historical experience arising from the violent negation of diversity. The Westphalian peace treaties of 1648 that first recognized the sovereign equality of states emerged from the catastrophic Catholic-Protestant wars. The natural justice proclaimed by Hugo Grotius was conceived amidst the Dutch War of Independence against Spanish rule. The contemporaneous Thirty Years War, between the House of Habsburg and the Kingdom of France, had resulted in an estimated eight million deaths, mostly in the Holy Roman Empire. “Throughout the Christian world,” Grotius wrote in 1625 in The Law of War and Peace, “I observed a lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even barbarous races should be ashamed of.” For him, the ideal of religious tolerance was not a philosophical abstraction; it was born from intense suffering. Beyond the Christian family of nations, jurists were …