Youth,culture, negotiation and politics

The following paper was motivated by a series of seminars held in 2004 at University of Bayreuth on the Harvard Negotiation Concept of Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton (R. Fisher, W. Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without giving in, 2nd edn, Penguin Books, New York 1991). When comparing the advices of the Harvard Negotiation Concept with my own negotiation experiences in youth politics, I realized that the Harvard Concept is rather useless in many forms of intercultural negotiations. It does not sufficiently address how much culture influences our perceptions of negotiations. Politics is not the only, but surely the most prominent field of intercultural negotiation. Therefore my focus of research was: does culture influence politics? In the first chapter, I describe the reason for the science of negotiation, the validity of universal negotiation concepts, the definition of culture and the existing research on intercultural negotiations. In the second chapter, I discuss concrete examples of how culture allegedly influences politics, such as in International Youth Politics and in the ASEM process. I also give some results from a survey that I carried out in 2004 (The extended version of the paper can be found at my webpage at http://www.karsten-wenzlaff.de). All examples cast a doubt on whether culture really influences politics.