Community. A word/concept that is very rarely used in parts of Europe – or it is used in very narrow terms to describe an administrative area or population of a small town – and yet it’s so widespread and fundamentally central to American everyday and civic life. It’s not just a case of using different words to describe the same thing (lift/elevator or pavement/sidewalk). It is true that some of the functions of ‘community’ are just called different things in the UK or in Europe. But most times when Americans talk of ‘community outreach’, ‘community leaders’ etc they are talking about concepts and practices which do not have a direct equivalent in other parts of the world (in Europe we make use of the terms ‘society’ and ‘civil society’ instead). For me that difference is of huge importance, and unless we can understand its roots (going back not only to Tocqueville but possibly even the first settlers, the geographic spread etc) we won’t be able to unlock and interpret key differences even at the level of international relations and global politics, let alone at that of political systems.
Recommended reading:
- Amitai Etzioni (2011), “On Communitarian and Global Sources of Legitimacy”, The Review of Politics, 73: 1
“If one adopts a full-blown relativistic position, one has no foundation (by definition) to judge the legitimacy of the acts of others, at least not if they are members of other communities. Such a rejection of the possibility that there are values that hold for all people precludes transcultural moral claims. This in turn leads one not merely to give up the moral high ground, but to give up any ground for laying moral claims on others”.
(Etzioni 2011: 119-120)