The Global Strategic Revolution - Third Millennium Strategic Culture Change Management

The Perspective of the Enforcement of Negotiated Strategic Solutions Worldwide

Scientific Study , 2012 , 331 Pages

Politics - General and Theories of International Politics

Those who seek military solutions by force in the global arena have not yet arrived in
the new millennium. They are trying to set precedents in this century for strategic
options and solutions by force and military might that pertain to past millennia. The
crossing of the threshold to the new millennium was a historical occasion for
progressing into a new era of global conflict resolution that has been ignored so far.
Enforcing negotiated solutions sounds like a contradiction in term, due to its
implication of using force in order to bring about negotiated solutions in the Middle
East and elsewhere in the world. Yet the use of force should be understood here as
the use of a previous strategic concept for conflict resolution intended to bring about
future oriented sustainable strategies in the shape of negotiated conflict resolution.
In other words diplomatic, economic and political strategies can be supported by
coercive forms of specific military strategy in order to force conflict partners to force
themselves to adopt the negotiated conflict resolution strategy at the exclusion of
violent military conflict resolution strategies. In other words a change of millennia
old patterns of conflict resolution strategies must be brought about, if necessary by coercive means of all forms, shapes and kinds that are below the level of hot
armed conflict. And there are quasi no limits to human intelligence as far as
alternative ways and means of conflict resolution are concerned that differ from the
old habits and patterns [...]

Inhalt

Part 1
The Strategic Revolution of the Third Millennium
1. Rethinking International Conflict Resolution Strategy

Part 2
A Transcultural Model Of Managerial Strategic Consciousness And Its Governing Principles
1. The Completion Of The Intercultural Edifice
2. Design Of A Scientifically-Based International Diversity-Integrative Transcultural Profiler
2.1 The State Of The Intercultural Art And Science: On human relativity in intercultural research
2.2 On Enhancing The Intercultural Art And Science: Sources, models and the achievement of supreme cultural intelligence

Part/Teil 3
Communication and Nogotiation Management
1. Intrapsychisches Prozess- und interkulturelles Kommunikationsmanagement
Strategie, Kultur und Kommunikation
Das ORJI-Modell
Der MIS-Faktor Prozess
Die PIE-Metapher
Das transkulturelle Management interkultureller Kommunikationsprozesse
Multimodellierung intrapsychischer Prozesse
Weitere Beiträge zur interkulturellen Kommunikationsmanagementforschung
Die goldene Formel der interkulturellen Kommunikation und die transkulturelle Lingua Franca: Best Practice
2. Managing Global Negotiations: A Review
3. Zivilisationsunterschiede im Bereich der Kommunikationskultur:
Die Einheit rationaler, prärationaler und suprarationaler Dimensionen der Kommunikationskultur
4. Der globale Stratege: Strategische Kommunikation aus dem „Auge des Orkans“
5. Die transkulturelle Integration des interkulturellen Kommunikationsprozesses: Der Paradigmawechsel von der differenzierenden interkulturellen zur komplementären integrativen transkulturellen Kommunikationskultur
6. Das Management des kulturellen Wandels

Part 4
Interkulturelle Managementinstrumente

Part/Teil 5
Bilingual English-German Inter- Transcultural Management Dictionary

Bibliography

Part 1
The Strategic Revolution of the Third Millennium

1 Rethinking International Conflict Resolution Strategy

Those who seek military solutions by force in the global arena have not yet arrived in the new millennium. They are trying to set precedents in this century for strategic options and solutions by force and military might that pertain to past millennia. The crossing of the threshold to the new millennium was a historical occasion for progressing into a new era of global conflict resolution that has been ignored so far.

Enforcing negotiated solutions sounds like a contradiction in term, due to its implication of using force in order to bring about negotiated solutions in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. Yet the use of force should be understood here as the use of a previous strategic concept for conflict resolution intended to bring about future-oriented sustainable strategies in the shape of negotiated conflict resolution.

In other words, diplomatic, economic and political strategies can be supported by coercive forms of specific military strategy in order to force conflict partners to force themselves to adopt the negotiated conflict resolution strategy at the exclusion of violent military conflict resolution strategies. In other words, a change of millennia old patterns of conflict resolution strategies must be brought about, if necessary by coercive means in all forms, shapes and kinds that are below the level of hot armed conflict. And there are quasi no limits to human intelligence as far as alternative ways and means of conflict resolution are concerned that differ from old patterns and habits.

The world has got used to the conditioned reflex of military imposition of solutions over millennia. Nothing has changed since Ancient Roman days and beyond, although, one has become aware in our time that nuclear conflicts needed to be scrapped form strategic agendas the world over. It proves that with a sufficient consciousness and awareness of intolerable threat, a change of strategic consciousness can occur. And this new type of consciousness has been effective over half a century now. The reality of the possibility of transcending conditioned strategic conflict resolution behaviours by major strategic players seems to be evident. But the new consciousness has not yet had an impact on strategic options further below the nuclear threshold, which are assumed tolerable and may even be desirable by major strategic players for reasons of prestige, power, economy and technology as well as other motives. Their nature and configuration may differ situationally.

So, the real strategic innovation of this millennium should consist in extending the momentum of forced negotiated solutions that has started with the advent of the global deterrence-based equilibrium of terror that has been initiated in the twentieth century. And here the accent is on negotiation and not on force, which needs to be understood as a means - among others - to bring about negotiated solutions, rather than enforcing solutions militarily. The new type of strategic consciousness should be extended in this first century of the third millennium to all levels of conflict, ranging from strategic global ones to regional and local contexts of conflict.

Strategic intervention by force should henceforth be limited to forcing conflict parties to negotiate their conflict until a non-military solution has been brought about. The threat of force of diverse kinds can hover above the enemies before, during and after negotiation until negotiated solutions are put in place. So, strategic options would not be the core of the conflict resolution process, but should rather provide the physical, political and psychological context for the negotiation process. In other words, a reversal of prioritization needs to occur. Based on the effectiveness of the assumption of threat and deterrence, the core of conflict resolution will now have to consist in negotiated strategies. Text and context have to be reconfigured in the sense that the carrot becomes the text and the stick becomes the context one might say using conventional coercion terminology. The difference in the new interpretation, however, resides in the new weighting of the combined approaches.

In other words, the logic of threat and its extension to all potential conflict scenarios as well as the reversal of the priorities of military and negotiated options has to occur. Whereas earlier conflict resolution tended to consider violence as the core of conflict resolution and negotiation as the context, now negotiation has to take the place of core conflict resolution while military strategy has to provide its context of threat and coercion along with an infinite amount and context-dependent variety of further strategies that promote the negotiated core conflict resolution strategy. Thus, the new millennium is about the awareness of a new conflict resolution prioritization and its global strategic implementation.

The new strategy goes together with a new infrastructure for negotiated core conflict resolution, a new psychology of attitudes, new sets of strategic behaviours and processes. All that needs to be put into place for the implementation of negotiated and peaceful conflict resolution. One might think of a Pentagon for peaceful conflict resolution that designs, coordinates and implements third millennium conflict resolution strategies that correspond to a new conflict resolution awareness and consciousness; pretty much in the same way and with the same “deadly efficacy” as the conventional military Pentagon designed and implemented old conflict resolution strategies based on the military as the heart and core of conflict resolution.

The new strategic conflict resolution model and consciousness needs to be allotted the resources it requires and the political will needs to emerge that excludes former strategies and implements the less costly and more sustainable ones in every way. There are already a number of components of a peaceful conflict resolution environment in place which need to be further developed, empowered and perfected. But first and foremost change has to occur with regard to the national political players’, governments’ and governing players’ awareness and mindsets; a change of strategic values that inaugurates new strategic behavioural patterns. The leaders - and of courses not only them - are the players who can initiate and mediate the new consciousness that can spread fractally throughout the global system of governance until the new conflict resolution culture has become second nature and the new norm for conflict resolution worldwide.

The interaction of global and local systems of negotiated conflict management can synergistically bring about a new culture of conflict management and a new civilization that exclusively uses diverse types of “force and threat” in order to implement the more advanced negotiated conflict resolution strategies. The shift of resources form the old to the new conflict resolution strategy will not produce collateral damages but immense amounts of collateral benefits that allow the transformation of the entire world.

The working out in detail and in an implementation-oriented way of the new conflict resolution strategies needs to be entrusted to professional circles that are similarly effectively structured as the old military conflict resolution hierarchies. After all they need to be effective which requires all the resources, infrastructure and skills necessary. One might think of a military-negotiation Pentagon where resources are shifted from the former to the latter of its components. With the right consciousness and awareness of the need, the political will and determination and today’s total global communication infrastructure one would be able to design face-to-face and virtual communication environments with intermediaries and a whole range of strategies that foster negotiated solutions. There is virtually no limit to the development of the new strategy, while the old strategy is limited, yet unpredictable with regard to damages and outcomes. And it rarely brings about truly sustainable solutions in the long term and frequently simply reconfigures the conflicts in new ways along with actually intolerable losses. There is no need to pay such price with a new conflict resolution awareness and consciousness and the required political will. It takes some momentum to review and redirect one’s thinking and acting in line with the new and to relativize the old in the light of the new approach. Defreezing the old strategic mindset, changing it to a new strategic mindset and refreezing it, one might say in terms of a strategy for strategic change management:

Defreezing Change Refreezing

Old military conflict Prioritization of negotiated Institutionalising resolution preference conflict resolution new conflict resolution

A Department of Negotiation and Alternative Conflict Resolution Strategy could be accountable overall to the strategic leaders - the world over. National, regional and global personnel, infrastructure frameworks and governance can jointly bring about the new civilization based on a new strategic culture. All cultures can bring their highest peaceful conflict resolution intelligence to the table of the new culture and civilization.

The world will not be free from war until this new strategic thinking occurs. And the earlier one starts with the management of strategic change the earlier the world can liberate itself and actually arrive in what could be the new strategic millennium with a third millennium strategic culture.

Here follows a brief overview of state-of-the-art negotiation culture within its wider context and I shall start by the wider context of human consciousness in the shape of the elaboration of a model of managerial and strategic consciousness with its governing principles.

There needs to be a paradigm shift in the political mind of the third millennium that uses the above inspirations as a basis for a third millennium strategic paradigm. The magnitude of such a change of paradigm can reconfigure the face of the earth and make it a peaceful place. The liberation of resources bound by the paradigm of terror, violence and military strategy and its redirection to more sustainable strategic means and ends can rid the world of famine and unnecessary violence. It is possible within the space of really exiting consciousness. That space needs to be leveraged in the same way as the vision of this planet from outer space puts this planet in a different perspective. The wider space of human consciousness can similarly put his strategic mind with its options in a new perspective, from which new political strategies can emerge.

It is a matter of evolution of strategic consciousness resulting from an extension of human consciousness horizons that put the history of human strategic consciousness evolution in an overall historical perspective. The insight gained from the wider human and strategic picture can foster change: planned and purposeful strategic change management. The key, as with all human projects, is in consciousness. Human consciousness with its dynamics of awareness and integration has been modeled in the Transcultural Profiler (see part 2) It can be applied to diverse global management imperatives, because the same human consciousness with its principles forms the substratum of human attitudes, thoughts and behaviours. That model can be termed a strategic consciousness model that elucidates governing principles of consciousness in general and of strategic consciousness in particular. With it the level of the state-of-the-art of negotiation can be raised from the pre-third millennium level to a third millennium level. The occurrence of conflicts is unlikely to end in the foreseeable future, but outdated patterns of conflict resolution can end. The emergence of new conflict resolution strategies depends on the evolution of human consciousness in general and of strategic conflict resolution assumptions in particular.

If we turn our eyes from West to East on the 1st of June 2012, while this text is being written, we notice a West-East cleavage with regard to the range of preferred conflict resolution strategies that can be arranged on a continuum from militarist to pacifist strategic value preferences.

The US reportedly talks about an intervention in the Syrian civil conflict without Security Council endorsement and US generals seem to consider the possibility of a technically very clean military, air power-based strategy which, however, may look rather dirty from the other side due to important damages to the target country.

France’s New President similarly advocates old models of conflict resolution, seemingly prompted by the French Jewish philosopher Bernard Henry Lévy.

German chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Putin have declared on the occasion of today’s state visit by President Putin in Germany that they are in favour of a political solution implying that they exclude the previous two more western options. And Chancellor Merkel also stated that further political steps should be taken in case Kofi Annan’s peace plan should fail. She wants to pursue a negotiated strategy.

And in the Far East, article 9 of the Japanese Constitution prohibits any military option and war-based conflict resolution categorically. It reflects self-imposed peaceful strategies based on historical learning followed by a change in strategic consciousness. Japanese as well as present German positions could be considered as part of an emergent strategic paradigm shift due to historical learning.

Militarism or pacifism, violence or political solutions, they are reducible to the age-old question of war and peace which is a matter of consciousness evolution from the deterministic old to a more creative new paradigm of conflict resolution. The replication of science paradigms in other fields of the one human consciousness can occur, although belatedly, in the strategic context of conflict resolution as well: a progression from deterministic Newtonian militarist preferences via indeterminist approaches to probabilistic approaches. The negotiated conflict resolution strategy dawns with the indeterminist second step of the three step strategic paradigm evolution model below. The first determinist approach is the eye for an eye and a toot for a tooth traditional militarist approach of times immemorial, whereas the third step of human strategic consciousness evolution may by termed transcultural and synergistic human conflict resolution within the context the integrity of man and creation.

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Table: Correlation of epistemological and strategic paradigms applied to human conflict resolution

Positively one can interpret the range of strategic options in the above East-West survey as a consciousness and more specifically a strategic consciousness evolution from phase 1 to phase 2 that is emergent at the turn of the millennium. More critically one may interpret the strategic options, attitudes and preferences as determined by own strategic interests rather than those of the considered target country of intervention or non-intervention. As awareness plays a key role in consciousness evolution, an awareness of motivations may serve the purpose of enhancing approaches to conflict resolution.

The US needs a certain amount of high-tech, low risk warfare for the cultivation of its overall supremacy, superior capabilities and resources as well as for the appeasement of its entire economic-industrial-military-technological establishment and their lobbies; ultimately for overall political reasons with its economic and social aspects. This does not exclude more noble humanitarian motivations of global nation and peace building. After all human consciousness evolution manifesting as strategic consciousness evolution is a process. It applies to the diverse players and also motivates the diversity of attitudes of the conflict parties in the target countries of intervention.

Bottom line: No strategic creativity but rather the continuity of strategic business as usual. The danger is that, due a high tolerance of seemingly smaller scale military conflicts, a big conflict may occur through the back door via the escalation of presumed smaller ones. The old paradigm may thus be uncontainable and surprise the world in spite of the universally acknowledged assumption of the impossibility of larger scale wars in the nuclear age.

What has a French Jewish Philosopher and a left French President learnt from European history and holocaust to want to move out of Afghanistan on the one hand, but to move into another country consecutively? The old strategic paradigm of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth of the Old Testament seems to subtly determine the former’s attitude, which is the old, strategically uncreative paradigm and the New President seems to carry on old strategic habits as well. This alternative to tolerating intracultural violence of such magnitude with crossed arms is a military strategic option of intervention that triggers its own cycles of destruction. Such ultima ratio should only be used when all other remedies are past.

As long as all alternative strategic options have not been implemented relentlessly, patiently and perseveringly outdated sole military options should be discarded. They seem to be the fast track solution that tends to turn into timeless and endless quagmire. It is the logic of strategic consciousness phase 1. It seems to be the easy and unimaginative way out and a strategic option to the detriment of the target country of the intervention, as well as ultimately to the authors of the intervention.

The array of strategic creativity is not limited to the military options, to resolutions, communiques, statements, sanctions, expulsion of diplomats and other threatening and punishing measures. Measures like the sending of UN delegations and emissaries like the former Secretary General of the UN Annan and the direct address of the Syrian President, the observers of the Arab League and the drawing up of peace plans can, however, be considered creative. In today’s high-tech civilization with its sophisticated communication technology one can imagine virtual forms of communication involving major players simultaneously, multilateral virtual conferences, for example, on an ongoing basis, so as to hold the strategic actors accountable on an ongoing basis and to progressively shift the theatre of operations form the physical to the psychological terrain of conflict resolution and to the face-to-face and virtual negotiation table. If dozens of national and supranational strategic players bring their strategic intelligence to bear on the casus belli in a globally coordinated and networked way, hardly any tyrant can resist. It is a matter of global citizenship, accountability, care and commitment, integrity of man and creation, irrespective of the location on the one planet with its processes for which all men are accountable jointly as a human kind. Shifting awareness and values to this more globally aware level underpins and natural promotes a progression on the above table of strategic consciousness progression that benefits mankind at large.

Continuing our motivational awareness review with our part of the world and turning eastward we note that the German chancellor and the Russian President can’t really afford wasting resources in warfare because they are needed for national and European crisis management at present, while Russian needs to build its new modern nation, to accomplish the complete recovery from decades of communist mismanagement and the costly maintenance of its large size military infrastructure and resources.

Japan’s position is based on historical experience and anchored in the nation’s constitution. To what extend that is self-interest is a cultural question. Otherwise it might lose its face more completely, which has already been damaged by Japan’s military warfare in the whole of Asia, in particular with regard to China and Korea. And that would have intolerable consequences for the Japanese economy. – After all, the various strategic options seem to be motivated by forms of self-interest of various degrees of more or less subtle or tangible kind rather than imputable to the awareness of the imperative of pacifying a target country for its own sake and benefit, because the new standard of civilization makes it self-evident.

Yet, interestingly, upon reaching the Far East, we think of the great US General McArthur in whom a qualitative change of consciousness seems to have occurred in connection with the Korean War. It shows that a real consciousness evolution based on first hand historical experience can occur in strategists and nations alike.

So, if any of those players and all of them jointly really wanted to help that country selflessly they could do it in a highly creative way, unseen and unheard of in strategic history, in line with an emergent third millennium strategic paradigm that not only commands troops but also a vast range of complementary peace building capabilities and uses all the modern resources of this world, technological, intelligence, psychological and legal, to pacify the area, instead of risking an escalation of a civil war into a major threat to world peace through the backdoor.

Therefore, one might argue that a substantial strategic revolution can only come from an expansion of human consciousness that encompasses own and third interests alike for the sake of the whole. That is about the most evolved state of strategic business negotiation referred to in the chapter on global negotiations management, where self-interest and interest of the other parties are seen as coinciding in the longer term. Such is also the case in geopolitics, whose globally interconnected systems are interacting unfavorably in the long term if strategies are not really in the best interest of all parties concerned. That is the new strategic paradigm, whereas the old paradigm adheres to self-interest only, however subtle it may be. And the additional application of human technical genius to the political environment would allow the engineering of effective and creative solutions in the latter domain as well. It is a matter of priority, political will and a corresponding reengineering of all conflict management-related infrastructures and resources at humanity’s command.

Part 2
A Transcultural Model Of Managerial And Strategic Consciousness And Its Governing Principles

This part embeds the strategic quest into a model of consciousness of which the former is necessarily part while the latter provides its wider context whose understanding can instruct the strategic investigation and highlight principles of consciousness in general and of strategic consciousness in particular. The contextualization of strategic issues in human consciousness can guide innovative strategic thinking. The universality of the architecture of global managerial consciousness allows its translation and application to diverse domains of management, such as the management of strategic issues in the international arena for example. It further elucidates culturally the assumed strategic consciousness evolution table below:

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Table: Correlation of epistemological and strategic paradigms applied to human conflict resolution.

1 The Completion Of The Intercultural Edifice

When one leaves the land of diversity-based duality knowledgeably one enters the “promised land” of human unity. In hindsight the former can be seen in the latter’s likeness. Both are part of a complete map of culture.

The title „The completion of the intercultural edifice” implies the end of a process; the process of reading the book of culture and to behave and act on the basis of the contents of the book. The contents are either fully understood and the book can be shelved to be reopened occasionally for purposes such as educational ones, for example, or, alternatively, the paradigm contained in the book has been transcended and the contents have become partly or fully obsolete.

The present exposé can be considered as a process of returning for a moment to the old paradigm in order to connect it to the new, supposedly more advanced one. When we look back at the brief history of culture, interculturalism and associated intercultural research that has been inaugurated in the late 20th century, we note that it responds to perceived needs in the world of globalizing business, diplomacy and strategy. Among the first intercultural scholars in the modern sense therefore were theoreticians who were more or less involved in these domains and institutional or organizational environments. One thinks of the American anthropologist Hall and the Dutchmen Hofstede and Trompenaars. The former has been the head of the Foreign Service Institute, whose task consisted in the preparation of US diplomats for international assignments and the two Dutchmen were employed by US or European global corporations such as IBM and the Shell Corporation. With the progress of globalization and information science the field of intercultural research has been pushed further by some scientists who tried to solve the enigma of cultural diversity in more sophisticated ways to further the needs of their institutional or organizational environments. If we try to recapitulate this brief history of intercultural research we can systematize it as follows

A synopsis of modern intercultural studies

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Finally, I would like to sum up the totality of intercultural research at a paradigmatic level:

Determinism Indeterminism Probabilism

Newton Quantum mechanics Modern physics

Hofstede THT (transition) Brannen and Salk Transcultural

Aggregate models Negotiated culture Integrated culture

(All these authors have undertaken their research many decades after the appearance of the quantum paradigm; Hofstede, THT and Brannen’s and Salk’s cultural assumptions are increasingly characterized by indeterminism. The table is an approximation.)

It seems to me that the history of intercultural research replicates the lead science paradigms within a more limited temporal horizon that the wider ones in which they have evolved. The development of hard science paradigms took centuries to evolve from a deterministic world view represented by Newton, for example, via quantum physics to the most modern physics of our time. See the lower table above highlighting the progression from determinism, via indeterminism to probabilism with their scholarly representatives and the associated metaphorical translation to assumptions and approaches within the field culture and its management. Of course, this replication of centuries of scientific investigation in the hard sciences could be replicated epistemologically in less than half a century because the fundamental sciences that were dealing with the foundations of existence and nature had done the preparatory work at a fundamental level whose insights could be transposed from natural to social sciences

With the advent of global strategic interests in the late 20th century and on the basis of the foundations laid by natural sciences, man became similarly puzzled by the diversity of man as the diversity of fauna and flora had been puzzling him already centuries earlier, whereupon he undertook research into the outer domain of nature. The biologist and zoologist therefore have finished their classificatory work of nature long ago and provided extensive taxonomies with associated characteristics of the organisms within the field of their interest. Therefore we know, for example, how many variations of particular animals and plants - how many phenotypes of a genotype – have been developing as well as their biological and behavioral profiles along with full information on their ecosystems and the complex interrelations of those organisms and their ecosystems. In other words outer nature, from the aunt to the galaxy, has been mapped rather completely. And the translation of this process of mapping of non-human nature to human nature has been attempted by more external criteria along with a correlation of assumptions about human internal features. But it was progressively abandoned as it was seen to promote racism and fascism.

So, the intercultural process could only be triggered when man was ready - after his inquisitive gaze had completed the outer horizon - to also direct his eyes to the inner horizons of man in order to complete a 360° perception of man. After all one had noticed that man had a cultural, an inner dimension that was part and parcel of his make-up and could not be ignored, as it was seen to determine parts of his behaviour. And when this 360° perception of man is completed the classification of the human species would be completed and fill the reference books as do the books on animals, plants and stars for example. This process is coming to an end in the same way as the processes of classification of the outer world were completed. Then the deeper inquiry in the nature of the information began that determines the live of plants and creates in general. This was the biological paradigm with the genetic highlight and its genetic engineering application which is not yet conclusive for human cultural, ethical as well as technical reasons.

Animals and plants behave according to their genetic information. There is little alternative for them. In the human case, however, things a more complex as man enjoys a greater range of freedom. And as soon as man deals with his own diversity he steps out of the realm of oneness with nature into duality and therefore dialectics between the diverse components of the landscape of human diversity. These dialects are very frequently antagonistic and produce the opposite of what they are intended to produce, which is more duality and dialectics-based antagonisms because man has only classified the distinctive features without also covering complementary human psychological characteristics of concomitantly existing integrative psychological features. In other words he has disassembled for classificatory purposes, without being able to provide the integrative information about human integrative features, within and between men. All he managed to do was to provide approaches to the reconfiguration of cultural profiles to benefit vested interests in the domain of strategy, business and other cross-border activities. The notion of synergy has arisen to consecrate the apogee of this approach, without however being able to cut the Gordon knot of the “missing link”, i.e. the identification and revelation of the whole picture of complementary differentiative-integrative information about man and in particular human psychological culture.

In other words the fundamental information that transcends the process of duality and often antagonizing dialectics of culture, which deals with a return to unity, has been disregarded so far by mainstream interculturalism. And as long as the complementary human characteristics to his diversity characteristics, i. e. his also existing characteristics of integration and return from the state of division and divisiveness of the intercultural approach, are not likewise considered, the mapping of the human cultural mind is not completed. And as long as it is not completed it does not truly reflect the more complete nature of man. And an incomplete information, however well assembled and configured, yields similarly deficitary results.

That which was supposed to solve human diversity challenges seems so be at times part of the problem rather than part of the solution. As long as one remains in the cultural space of duality and diversity one cannot expect anything else but products of duality which are frequently characterized by antagonism, because that is what is contained in the seed of this approach and, however sophisticated the approaches, they cannot transcend their dualistic nature. The state of affairs of the world that coincides with this era of research and the attempts to reconfigure international/intercultural processes based on intercultural research testify to the limited applicability of these approaches in global business and geopolitics… alike.

That does not mean that intercultural approaches are false. A child that is not fully developed is not in any way incorrect either. It has just not fully realized the information of completeness in his make-up. They are a promise. Similarly the intercultural approach is incomplete and a promise of completion. If it is not completed, however, it will not go beyond childlike solutions of playing with diversity rather than dealing with it in a truly complete and therefore much more effective way, in line with the need of our time. They real need of the completion of the intercultural edifice is bound to challenge the complete information about cultural man.

In order to complete the intercultural edifice one has to provide the complementary information about human integrative characteristics along with the divisive characteristics. That completion provides the information for the return from duality to unity. This more complete cultural information provides sustainable cultural solutions. And we can learn from the evolution of science paradigms what steps may to be taken to advance and complete the intercultural edifice. The complete information about cultural man is similarly more effective as the more complete information about nature proved to be more effective in other domains.

By now we can specify the title of the treatise by saying that the book of culture that operates in the domain of duality should be closed in order to inaugurate the paradigm shift towards complementary diversity- unity information about man that is supposed to be more in line with today’s world’s needs and human aspirations. There can be nothing new unless the old is put where it belongs, i. e. on the shelves of the archives of time and social science to give way to the new, for duality, dialectics and antagonism, though engineered as complementarity, deny the unity assumptions. Duality and unity are causally connected but they simultaneously exclude each other. However the design of man and hard science paradigms instructs us however how these two are causally connected and how they can be reassembled and reintegrated in a sense making way. Indeed their integration is the break-through to a new paradigm that provides the complete cultural information about man. This completeness provides more complete and sustainable results. So, we are, in a way, using hard science and human science to complete the comprehensive cultural mapping of man, in line with the assumption of the replication of hard science paradigm shifts in social science, within more limited temporal horizons. We are closing Volume 1 of the book of culture and we open Volume 2 which provides the complete informational mapping of cultural man whose provisional wholeness provides more wholistic cultural solutions.

I have developed the five P approach based on metaphors of physiology and physics, of metaphysics, philosophy and psychology to translate and apply complementary scientific paradigms to the furthering of the understanding of culture and to more effective intercultural management. I have described this approach often already and I would like to present it again in a nutshell: The more complete human cultural map which is more likely to light the cultural path of man; the path of diversification as well as its completion by the path of potential integration:

2 Design Of A Scientifically-Based International Diversity-Integrative Transcultural Profiler

2.1 The State Of The Intercultural Art And Science: On human relativity in intercultural research

NATO has contributed its share to the liberation of Libya. It is not yet sure, whether, from the western standpoint, that is liberation into the past or into the future, as the introduction of a form of Islamic law has also been announced. Culture and religion are important components of culture indeed and seem to be stronger than presumed attractiveness of western ideology. Exactly a fortnight ago media have been reporting about an escalating demonstration by Coptic Christians in Cairo which has caused a considerable number of victims, which has, however, been trivialized by some media by presenting it as business as usual in this part of the world. And as if I was not enough, the seismic changes of the Arab spring, which also involves Syria and other nations of the Maghreb and the Mashreg, culminates so far in a strong physical earthquake today in Turkey. The Euro crisis and the sword of Damocles of a global financial crisis are again threatening to strike and “Boycott Wall Street” movements in culturally diverse forms question the legitimacy of the global financial system. The gaps between the haves and the have-nots as well as the cultural gaps between players are seemingly widening to such an extent that the geological earth drifts apart as much as the social world. And this fragmentation and antagonizing atomization seems to have its cause in a divisive force in the human psyche which should be looked at in search of a remedy for the ongoing externalization of division with its logic of conflict. It raises the questions of integrative forces in man to counterbalance divisive forces. The spirit of division in many shapes and forms seems to prevail over the spirit of unity, from the local to the global, from the personal to a worldwide scale. Is that the shadow of today’s technologically feasible global integration? However, conditioned separation and division as well as a priori given essential unity of man are both aspects of man. When this complementary reality is lost out of sight dysfunctionalities occur in the organism of humanity. So the question seems to arise how this lopsided prioritization of human anthropological reality can be rebalanced, how the game of the perennial centrifugal and centripetal forces in many garbs can be harmonized and reintegrated. More culturally and abstractly speaking the question arises, how the integration and reconciliation of myriads of singular forms and shapes and types of human diversity on the one hand and their essential unity as members of humanity on the other hand can be realized. The realization of the complementary synergetic function of both aspects of man’s constitution has a naturally conflict preventative impact, because the natural divisive forces are contained by the natural integrative forces. The perception of the whole has a controlling function, an integrative and pacifying impact within and as a consequence also without. Deficits with regard to the perception of this reality as an interdependent whole, which results from socialization as much as cultural conditioning - in fact it is part of fundamental overall human conditioning of man across cultures and civilizations - lead to a structural and functional imbalance of man that is counterproductive to the development of humanity from a diverse human species to a solidary human family with all its diversity. In the following we want to focus our attention on the contribution of intercultural research to the correction of this state of affairs in order to complement presumable deficits in intercultural theory and practice in view of enhanced global management. Not presumptuousness moves and motivates such a lofty perspective but rather the need to address a presumed core issue of human affairs. And unity is not a form of vague idealism but rather a functional aspect of the human.

A parabolic story in which an individual is looking for an object in the light of a lantern can be considered symbolic of mainstream intercultural research. When a passer-by asks the searching individual where exactly he has lost the object, the latter answers that it must have been a little further away, whereupon the puzzled passer- by further asks why he was not looking where he assumes he has lost the object in question. The searcher answered that he was looking here in the light of the lantern because the visibility was better in the light of the lantern.

Some intercultural research does not seem unlike the search of the lost item in our didactic, parabolic anecdote, as there seems to be a tendency to enquire within the known, rather than exploring new horizons that might cast a new, creative light on the object the research. While, for example, quantified sophistication is certainly legitimate and may provide precious insights and meet a human need for formula- like certainty based on specific numbers without ambiguity it does not necessarily mean that the researcher leaves the already charted territory of the known and comes closer to the destination aimed at by the pioneers of true intercultural research, which consists, so to speak, in the realization of a form of cultural Eldorado in the sense that man may reach masterhood in the control of the ambivalence of the culture variable with its divisive as well as its integrative and synergistic potentiality alike in this era of globalization with its increasing cultural challenges across the world as we have seen and said in the few introductory examples that epitomize the state of the world.

A quantum-cultural reading of cultural and intercultural reality suggests that specific data of cultures need to be complemented by the complementary momentum of cultures. It fulfills the metaphorical imperative of the complementarity principle Niels Bohr’s as well as of the insight gained from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Both together allow us to view culture from two complementary angles and to state about the integration of the two optics: On the one hand there is the specific world of cultures with specific cultural data and coordinates based on empirical intercultural research, while the complementary optic is that of their wave dynamic and momentum. In order to integrate the two and to describe culture and its dynamics holistically, one has to leverage a neurophysiological analogy of twofold structural and functional integration. Not doing so means lagging behind scientific paradigms in the sense that the particle approach to cultures, where each culture is attributed a particular numerical position needs to be complemented by its dynamic momentum. The former tends to be more static, is classificatory and divisive per se, while the latter is dynamic and integrative. Both together constitute the more complete cultural reality that performs better globally in business management and politics alike and therefore needs to be leveraged in our time of increasing globalization challenges.

Quantum physics has not only allowed outer space conquest but it can also enable inner space conquest with the totality of its cultural conditioning. In other words the intercultural acquis (research output), as I shall try to show, needs to be complemented by the transcultural approach, which is a metaphorical application of the microphysics paradigm that has been inaugurated as long as a century ago already. Therefore it is high time to translate this epistemological breakthrough discovery as far as possible to the sociocultural domain as well.

The hope that global business, global communications and transportation infrastructure against the backdrop of an even wider scaled space research, in short, that advanced technology would also bring about the cultural integration of the planet and would complete the technically feasible global village socioculturally as well remained unfulfilled so far. On the contrary, rather than peacefully and solidarily, as in olden days but in new forms, draw the vital resources from the common wellsprings of the one village, in a spirit of worldwide interdependence and therefore solidary unity, we are in a process of technological convergence paralleled by cultural divergence. Some indicators for the drifting apart of the world, albeit coupled with the quest for the realization of synergy potentials in transnational management are, for example, that the perceived multicultural threat to the integrity of cultural identity in transnational organizational environments can lead to defensive, ethnocentric attitudes and behaviours that are humanly divisive rather than integrative. In some urban environments there is, in addition to the understandable need of cultural solidarity within foreign cultural environments, a trend to cultural ghettoization, which again is divisive rather than integrative. And in geopolitics and the economy, as one can deduce from the Euro crisis and that of the global financial system for example, there is a trend to undermine the integrative acquis of decades of integration policy by multilayered national cultural interests based divisive behaviours. National and supranational identities need further reconciliation and integration while obviously safeguarding cultural uniqueness as the basis for intercultural synergies, in the interest of a sustainable future at large. The game of the two fundamental forces – as in physics –, those that weld mankind together and those that rip it apart seem to have mankind in their grip as much as the gravitational and the antigravitational pull in nature. And when imbalances become too strong seismic change occurs as much in society as in nature. That leads to cyclical catharsis for the recovery of the balance of centrifugal-centripetal forces in diverse domains and shapes.

Half of the wars waged during the past decades were apparently motivated by the struggle for water and land and the two can be subsumed as the competition for food, as both resources together enable the resulting resource of food or in their absence lead to a lack of it and thereby undermine survival. Then the ensuing question of survival may be connected to deeply rooted and at times irrational motives like that of cultural overidentification for the sake of presumed insurance of survival – which may of course backfire and cause destruction of self an others alike – which may be difficult to control. Culture and its management-dependent ambivalence are at risk of becoming a focus of power and identity processes in the competition for food and the survival of cultural groups increasing in number and size that might be tempted to use and play the card of cultural identity in the power game about the access to resources. Culture and survival issues might therefore be at risk of forming a not so holy alliance in view of the future of humanity with its likely challenges. But in spite of this projected negative scenario that involves culture, that latter, if properly and more thoroughly understood can nevertheless also be a potential factor of integration of the planet as a whole. This dichotomy and its effective management in the interest of man is a tenor of this study. Whether culture plays the role of a factor of integration or of disintegration of mankind at its diverse scales and in its multilayered human contexts depends on the depth of its understanding and its management in the light of such enhanced insight with practical relevance.

From this vantage point one may ask whether the cultural question has been posed comprehensively enough, so as to lead to complete answers that involve the root causes of cultural processes whose understanding allows the sustainable management of culture. For, as long as one does not manage to penetrate to the root of culture and understands its rationale in depth one will keep turning in circles and gilding the cage the culture gurus have designed, assuming that one has achieved masterhood over cultural issues, without, however, ever finding the actual key that would allow one to open that golden cage and to access the path towards freedom in the sense of a more comprehensive management and control of the key cultural variable within man’s psychological constitution.

The well-known North American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was framing his architectural design challenge as the need of “cracking the box”, so as to integrate the structure with the environment in a new way. Well the intercultural box and the architectural box may indeed be likened, as both seem to require a wider and better performing contextualization in a wider whole that provides more sense and purpose.

The physical and the psychological definition of space do not lack a certain similarity. They however differ in a subtle way in the sense that the physical edifice had to be integrated into the Arizona desert at the time of Lloyds architectural research, while the psychological structure with its socio-culturally conditioned content has to be taken out of the limited desert of the mind to be reintegrated in the vaster space of human consciousness, so as to uncover the true meaning and logic of culture and to enhance the performance of its management by the wider horizon, that provides access to its governing axiomatic and thereby shows how culture can be recontextualized in a way that reengineers it from a sword into a plough that can help solving the human nutrition issue physically as well as psychologically: the need for healthy cultural identity and food alike.

In other words, the human mind with its conditioned sociocultural content needs to be relocated in its wider context of the human spirit. This opening and resetting of the limited cage or box will show what the actual meaning of culture is within the context of human evolution. By perceiving the complete picture culture becomes manageable from the widest angle of vision and therefore the greatest sustainability and effectiveness. It becomes a true resource for the future of mankind rather than a potential treat. Practically the cultural and the intercultural will have to be embedded or recontextualized in an inner space that transcends them and which can therefore be called culture transcending human consciousness or transcultural consciousness. The inter-transcultural complementarity with the command, control and integration function of the transcultural with regard to the intercultural, based on a psychophysiological axiomatic can be leveraged for the benefit of man at every level and in every walk of life by global professional manager and common man alike. Finally one may rhetorically ask whether it is not necessary to create a more solid foundation for a structure in terms of scope in order to increase the performance, the bearing power and the capacity of the building, whether the building be physical or psychological in nature. In that sense we will design a bigger and more performing edifice that can house culture and its peaceful management comfortably.

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• Author: D.E.A./UNIV. PARIS I Gebhard Deissler (Author)
• Publication Year: 2012
• Pages: 331
• Catalog Number: V195252
• ISBN (eBook): 9783656209621
• Language: English
• Tags: national-international-global conflict resolution, intercultural-interorganisational conflict mediation, conflict prevention, conflict resolution strategy, military vs negotiated conflict management, evolution of conflict management paradigms