For several decades, interculturality has occupied an important place in cultural policy, education, international cooperation and practices of cultural mediation.
The term generally refers to encounters between people or groups from different cultural contexts and to the possibility of dialogue capable of fostering understanding, exchange and mutual learning.
This definition remains useful.
It becomes insufficient, however, when it suggests that participants meet under comparable conditions, that cultures constitute clearly bounded entities or that dialogue itself can neutralise differences in power.
The question is therefore not whether interculturality should be abandoned.
It is rather under what conditions the concept can still help us understand cultural relations that have become more mobile, more entangled and often more asymmetrical.
From encounters between cultures to relations between actors
A first difficulty lies in the term itself.
Speaking of relations “between cultures” can suggest that two relatively stable entities come into contact and subsequently enter into dialogue.
Concrete situations are rarely so simple.
It is not abstract cultures that encounter one another, but people, organisations, institutions, artists and social groups carrying multiple and sometimes overlapping frames of reference.
A single person may be shaped by several languages, affiliations, migration experiences, professional practices or family histories.
An institution may likewise operate simultaneously across several national or international spaces.
Interculturality therefore becomes more analytically useful when it does not seek to define fixed cultural identities, but instead examines the relationships that develop between situated actors.
Dialogue does not erase asymmetries
Intercultural discourse often places considerable emphasis on exchange, mutual understanding and dialogue.
These dimensions remain essential.
But they are not sufficient to describe the actual conditions of many cultural collaborations.
Two partners may participate in the same project without having access to the same financial resources, international networks, decision-making capacity or institutional visibility.
An intercultural encounter may therefore be open to dialogue while remaining structurally asymmetrical.
Acknowledging this does not mean denying the possibility of cooperation.
It allows its conditions to be examined more precisely.
The relevant questions then become: who defines the framework of exchange? Who selects the themes? Who controls the resources? In which language is the project developed? And which actors ultimately have the greatest capacity to circulate its outcomes?
Interculturality remains relevant when it also allows these questions to be asked.
Not every difference is cultural
A second limitation appears when “culture” becomes the default explanation for disagreement.
Differences between partners may be interpreted as cultural even when they actually arise from institutional, professional, economic or political conditions.
A disagreement over project management is not necessarily a “cultural misunderstanding”.
Different approaches to deadlines may reflect unequal staffing resources.
Communication difficulties may result from an imposed working language.
An unequal distribution of responsibility may be produced by funding arrangements rather than differences in values.
Attributing tensions too quickly to culture can therefore obscure the concrete structures that produce them.
Intercultural analysis becomes more precise when it distinguishes what genuinely relates to cultural frames of reference from what results from organisational conditions, resources, status or relations of power.
Interculturality in an age of mobility
Contemporary mobility also complicates the idea of clearly separated cultural contexts.
Migration, diasporas, international education, professional networks, digital platforms and transnational artistic collaborations produce trajectories that move across several territories at once.
In such situations, individuals do not simply move from one culture to another.
They build practices, references and relationships across several spaces simultaneously.
Interculturality can still help analyse these situations, provided the relationship is not reduced to an encounter between national origins.
The concept must be able to accommodate fluid identities, multiple affiliations and forms of circulation that make cultural boundaries less clear-cut.
The issue is therefore not that cultures have disappeared.
It is that their relationships can no longer always be understood as encounters between separate and clearly defined blocs.
Language, translation and the power to contextualise
Every intercultural relationship also has a linguistic dimension.
The language used in a meeting, exhibition, publication or international collaboration influences the capacity of participants to intervene.
Those who are fluent in the dominant working language can generally express greater nuance, negotiate more easily and access the references being used more directly.
Participants who are less comfortable in that language may find their position simplified by the conditions of exchange themselves.
Translation can reduce some of these differences, but it does not automatically remove them.
It also involves choices about terminology, explanation and contextualisation.
Interculturality therefore cannot be separated from the linguistic infrastructures that make relationships possible.
The question is not merely whether participants can speak to one another, but under what conditions each person can genuinely formulate a position and be understood without having to adopt the other party’s categories entirely.
Europe–Africa: beyond the rhetoric of dialogue
This requirement is particularly important in cultural relations between Europe and Africa.
The language of intercultural dialogue can be useful in expressing an aspiration towards reciprocity.
But the rhetoric of dialogue does not itself produce reciprocity.
Cultural cooperation often takes place within systems where financial resources, mobility opportunities, cultural infrastructures and capacities for dissemination remain unevenly distributed.
A relationship may therefore be described as intercultural while preserving a strong dependency of one partner on another.
The point is not to oppose Europe and Africa mechanically.
Situations are far more diverse.
Rather, it is necessary to examine, project by project, how decisions, resources, mobility, narratives and visibility are organised.
Interculturality then becomes less an abstract ideal of encounter and more a practical question about how to organise relations between actors who occupy different positions.
From exchange to negotiation
This perspective suggests a slight shift in vocabulary.
Intercultural relations are not only about exchange.
They often involve negotiation.
Negotiation does not necessarily mean conflict.
It means recognising that several actors may enter a relationship with different expectations, references and capacities.
The conditions of collaboration then have to be defined together, methods adjusted, misunderstandings clarified and, at times, certain differences accepted without being fully resolved.
This dimension makes interculturality more concrete.
It no longer rests on the assumption of perfect understanding between cultures.
Instead, it describes relational work that enables cooperation despite differences that continue to exist.
A useful concept, but not a self-sufficient one
Interculturality therefore retains analytical value.
It reminds us that cultural relations require attention to context, interpretive capacity and recognition of multiple frames of reference.
But it can no longer operate as a complete explanatory framework on its own.
Understanding contemporary cultural relations requires connecting interculturality with other dimensions: the circulation of people and works, translation, institutional infrastructures, resources, visibility, relations of power and conditions of recognition.
This combination avoids two opposing mistakes.
The first would be to abandon the concept altogether because it has become too general.
The second would be to continue using it as a positive label assumed to describe any international encounter adequately.
Between these positions lies a more demanding approach: retaining interculturality while specifying more clearly what it can actually help us observe.
Conclusion
Interculturality remains an operative concept, but under certain conditions.
It becomes less useful when cultures are treated as fixed entities, symmetry between actors is assumed or every difference is explained as cultural.
It regains analytical strength when it is used to examine situated relationships: who encounters whom, under what conditions, with which resources, in which language and with what capacity to define the framework of exchange?
The contemporary challenge is therefore not to move definitively beyond interculturality.
It is to reposition it.
From an abstract model of dialogue between cultures towards a concrete analysis of the relationships, negotiations and asymmetries that structure cultural interactions.
Under these conditions, interculturality can still contribute to a more precise understanding of contemporary cultural relations.
