Culture, Politics and Negotiation
The paper discusses the development of negotiation and culture literature, different concepts of culture and the link between culture and politics. It includes personal experiences in youth politics and results from a survey on international youth conferences.This paper “Culture, Negotiation and Politics – A Youth Perspective” was written for a seminar on “Teilen und Verhandeln” by Prof. Dr. Rudolph Schüssler and Gina Fritsche (MA) Wintersemester 2004/2005
Abstract
The link between culture and politics is often discussed, but it is unclear how this culture-politics link works.
The author compares different concepts of culture and explains why culture is difficult to model. He also speaks about the difficulties of identifying the place of culture in political context.
Furthermore, the paper discusses the methodological problems of intercultural negotiation literature and recent surveys on culture. It shows that negotiation literature is often unscientific while surveys on culture don’t yield pragmatic results.
The author uses an approach to battle the shortcomings of each approach: he reflects on personal experiences in youth politics, analyses the culture-politics link in the framework of the ASIAN-EUROPEAN MEETING (ASEM) and conducts a survey on youth politics.
The survey is the first one to directly adress youth activists on the international level. Respondents from 84 countries reflected on their approach to international youth politics and especially international youth conferences.
Both the survey and the personal reflections of the author indicate that the culture-politics link seems to be very weak in reality, but the political analysis and the perceptions of the youth activist show that the culture-politics link is perceived as strong, even though in reality it isn’t. The author gives a few explanations why cultural differences are perceived even though they are not existing.
View the paper here:culturenegotiationpolitics.pdf
