IMPLICATIONS FOR CONFLICT MANAGEMENT

The mutual problems faced by parties in international conflicts and permanent negotiations are more amenable to solutions when seen from a wide perspec­tive with many alternatives.

For public and private negotiators to create microcultures, both high- and low-context communications and intuitive and conceptual styles of reasoning are important. The primary process for creating and expressing new ideas is the intuitive style of reasoning, which is richer in meanings (Bordon, 1991). The primary process for organizing and elaborating those ideas is the more precise conceptual approach. When mindsets are quite different, the participants who are more explicit, direct, and concise (low context and conceptual) in their com­munications may be able to share information more effectively. Such sharing will be especially important early in meetings when the negotiators are trying to define their situation. When building and maintaining relationships are of greater concern, higher context communications with their more affiliative con­notations (restricted codes) are more important.

Facilitated intercultural exploration can combine the ideas and approaches of individuals with different subjective cultures into something new that none of them could have conceived alone. Cultural integration will produce successful problem solving and successful problem solving will strengthen the relation­ships of the collaborators and reduce destructive conflict.

A Diplomatic Example: Camp David

There is a great deal of evidence of major differences in the styles of reasoning used by the Egyptian and Israeli negotiators in their meetings at Camp David in the late 1970s. As Weizman (1981) notes, much of the hostility between the Egyptians and Israelis during these negotiations was fueled by remarks and actions that the negotiators felt were insulting, offensive, and reflected badly on their honor. The United States’ diplomacy added a third style of reasoning to the negotiations. There were also differences in cognitive and communication styles among the negotiators.

The Americans’ style of communication was usually frank and to the point with most of the meaning explicitly contained in the words. It was low context and conceptual. The Egyptians’ style was usually more rhetorical; many of their communications were intended to preserve and promote social interests. They were high context and intuitive. It is not surprising that the Egyptians sometimes found the Americans blunt and tactless, while the Americans felt the Egyptians were at times unclear, evasive, and elliptical (Cohen, 1991). The Israelis’ style of communication varied more than that of the Americans or the Egyptians during these negotiations. When dealing with the substantive aspects of the negotiations, they were often more blunt, legalistic, and to the point than the Americans. But in their relationships with the other parties, they were usually sensitive to the social context and the implicit meanings of communications.

While many of the American negotiators publicly acknowledged the impor­tance of honor and face, they became impatient with these “distractions” from the substance of the negotiations and seldom saw these cultural factors as potential resources for reaching agreements (Ting-Toomey, 1988).

The Americans at Camp David felt that the development of a mutually acceptable framework would facilitate the working out of later agreements. When focused on details early, the Israelis and the Egyptians brought up their familiar bargaining positions, increasing the adversarial atmosphere in the nego­tiations. In an effort to implement a more conceptual, low-context approach, the Americans kept Begin and Sadat physically separated at Camp David and worked on a single text using jurists from each of the delegations to try to find wording acceptable to both sides. The hope was that the single text would evolve into a peace agreement.

However, the Israelis came to see the Americans as favoring the Egyptians, whom they felt were impulsive and eager to foil the conference. The Egyptians saw the Israelis as intransigent and offensive and the Americans as ineffective in producing Israeli compliance with important principles. The Americans were upset with Egyptian and Israeli unwillingness to be “realis­tic” and lack of appreciation for all that the United States was doing for them. It took the pressure of different factions within the Israeli delegation on Begin, a concession wrested by Carter from Sadat on one of his principles, and leav­ing many important issues open, to get a last-minute signing of two frame­work agreements (not the single text that was hoped for)(Weizman, 1981).

Although these agreements broke down barriers between the Israelis and the Egyptians, they did not improve relationships among the Egyptians, Israelis, and Americans or create a microculture within which their negotiations could con­tinue. There was little growth in cultural understanding and much miscommu­nication in these Egyptian/Israeli/American negotiations.

As this example illustrates, to develop an international microculture is a dif­ficult and complicated process.

Saunders (1987) recommends that nations focus on their relationships before and while engaging in such international policy making. In our terms, he is sug­gesting personal interactions that would contribute to the development or enrich­ment of microcultures. Saunders hopes for a change in the perceptions of negotiators in conflict situations from “us and them” to “we.” If the negotiators in question have different subjective cultures, training in intercultural exploration is crucial to making this change. Cultural analysis should precede conflict manage­ment and cultural integration is critical for accurate analysis (Avruch, 2005).

Constructive Controversies, Intercultural Explorations, and Peace Building

Integrative discussions among those who can intentionally shift their mindsets will have the qualities of what David and Robert Johnson have called con­structive controversies (see Chapter Three). The international microcultures that come out of such constructive controversies will benefit all parties in their efforts to end destructive conflict, solve problems, and build relationships. When we engage in such constructive controversies, we are challenged to represent more clearly our values and the cultural assumptions underlying them. Instead of polemicizing on the truth or virtue of a fixed position, as we might when speaking exclusively from our own mindsets (ethnocentrically), we must exam­ine our positions in the context of the larger ecologies in which they are embed­ded (with cultural understanding). In this way, constructive controversies become intercultural explorations and promote peace building.

Peace-building skills include empathy, imagination, innovation, commitment, flexibility, and persistence. To be effective peace builders, we must be devoted to the development of relationships and the creation of consensual meanings and outcomes (Kimmel, 1992). Instead of relying on the Golden Rule, which empha­sizes one’s own subjective culture, peace builders follow the Platinum Rule, “Do unto others as they would do for themselves if they could.” The Platinum Rule requires genuine cultural understanding. Implementing it depends on finding or training cultural integrators.

As Stanley Hoffman (1984) and Lloyd Etheridge (1987) point out, modesty and graciousness are key personal ingredients in intercultural explorations. Indi­viduals with cultural understanding and the ability to engage in intercultural explorations with others have a sense of modesty and graciousness that serves them well in peace building. Those with more ethnocentric views and adver­sarial approaches often project a sense of arrogance and righteousness that does not promote constructive controversies (Kimmel and Stout, 2006). If you are a cultural integrator, you will be modest because you will be aware of the con­text, cultural assumptions, and limitations of your own positions. You will be gracious because you will more accurately perceive how your actions and words affect others.

There is little possibility that ethnocentrism, calculation, and misrepresenta­tion can succeed in intercultural explorations. Attempts to misuse the intercul­tural exploration process to deceive others may have limited success with more ethnocentric individuals, but only until later actions undermine the deceivers. At this point, they will alienate the other negotiators, hurt their own reputation (and perhaps those they represent), and miss potential solutions to existing problems and conflicts. Those with cultural understanding will expose such deceptions, especially in permanent negotiation situations. “Word about you will get around a conference very quickly.

It is important to remember that in times of stress and frustration, even the most culturally understanding and integrative among us will make fundamen­tal attribution errors. Such errors can be detrimental to communication and the development of international microcultures. “An international microculture does not usually have documentation, institutional support, or historical precedent. As such it can be a very fragile thing. Its development and maintenance rely on sustained good intentions, constant monitoring, and mutual trust” (Fontaine, 1989, p. 100). But it is these microcultures and the relationships supporting them that can get us through the stress and frustration that are inevitable in international conflicts.

Problems Created by Minimization

A basic assumption of many Western diplomats and social scientists is that there are generic principles of human behavior. Such minimization of cultural differ­ences may be culturally based. “Americans typically believe that everyone is basi­cally alike, and other people have the same needs that they have. Since the important differences among people are believed to be individual, not cultural or social, Americans are sensitive to similarities in others rather than to differences” (Stewart and Bennett, 1991, p. 151). This assumption of basic universal patterns of behavior explains the American use of a single text at Camp David. It also can be seen in John Burton’s work (1987) on deep-rooted conflicts. He attributes a basic ontological set of needs to all humans and assumes that deep-rooted con­flicts among peoples result from the denial or frustration of those needs. His per­spective is grounded in the needs hierarchy of Maslow (1970) who stressed that our needs for survival, security, identity, recognition, and control are innate.

This perspective pays little attention to the cultural meanings of the individ­ual’s needs. It ignores the ways in which these meanings vary over time or from one group of people to another. Although Burton acknowledges that deep-rooted conflict may involve the “culturally determined ways in which needs are expressed” (Burton and Sandole, 1986, p. 343), he agrees with Maslow that the behaviors involved in this expression follow patterns orchestrated by the biol­ogy of the individual rather than the social or cultural context of the group. As Burton (personal communication) wrote, “culture is a set of customs and beliefs followed by the members of a given society and accommodated to by members of other societies that are not as important as their more fundamental, onto­logical, universal, biologically based needs.” Thus, for Burton, the most basic conflicts are about needs, not about cultural values or assumptions.

Although this theoretical perspective may be useful in understanding some conflicts within or between similar common cultures, especially English-speaking Western cultures, it can be very misleading in analyzing conflicts between peo­ple from different cultures or ethnic groups (such as the Egyptians or Iraqis and Americans). The intercultural perspective described in this chapter assumes that the most basic intercultural conflicts are grounded in cultural differences and are about the nature of social reality (Avruch, 2005; Avruch and Black, 1991; Black and Avruch, 1989; Emminghaus, Kimmel, and Stewart 1997). Such conflicts are usually found in international situations, but may also occur between different peoples within heterogeneous nations as illustrated by current conflicts among ethnic and religious groups in the Newly Independent States, the former Yugoslavia, Ireland, Sudan, Iraq and Sri Lanka, for example.

The great danger in being oblivious to the impact of one’s own culture when building theories to explain human behavior lies in the promotion of one’s own cultural beliefs to formalized “scientific knowledge” (Avruch and Black, 1991; Black and Avruch, 1989). The search of Western science for such universal schemes can blind us to other cultural perspectives and information that would increase our ability to understand and improve negotiation and conflict management processes among different peoples (Emminghaus, Kimmel, and Stewart 1997; Kimmel, 1984). We are functioning at the mini­malist level of cultural awareness when we could be promoting cultural under­standing and integration.