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access to Challenging Multiculturalism
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Part I
Theorizing Multiculturalism
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political parties accept. Those are its origins and, though skilfully
promoted in the theories of liberalism espoused and elaborated by
such eminent Canadian philosophers as Will Kymlicka and Charles
Taylor, multiculturalism as Canadian political practice and a defin-
ing characteristic of Canadian identity give it the semblance of
immortal life.
Apart from Canada, the Netherlands has long been considered to
be a pioneer of multiculturalism. Dutch scholarship on the subject
has been extraordinarily comprehensive and sophisticated. From
within it emerged some of the first sceptical assessments of the multi-
cultural model. While early critiques can be found in other European
countries, it has been said that ‘Blaming multiculturalism for social
ills is a Dutch national sport’ (Bowen 2011). Has it now become a
European sport too, competitive like Champions League football?
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But the two Canadian authors find that ‘In many countries, civic inte-
gration programmes are being layered over multicultural initiatives
introduced in earlier decades, producing what can be thought of as a
multicultural version of civic integration’ (ibid.). They categorically
conclude, therefore, that liberal forms of civic integration can be
combined with multiculturalism.
Not only that: for Banting and Kymlicka few countries (the
Netherlands being a clear exception) have actually retreated from mul-
ticulturalism. In the 2010 compilation of their Multiculturalism Policy
Index (MCP), data indicate that
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in Britain. But after the 7/7 bomb attacks in London, Muslims, not
blacks, became identified as the most threatening ‘other’. This, for
Modood, subsumed a cultural racism grounded in the idea that
culture is static or ‘quasi-natural’ and ‘cultural racism naturalises
culture . . . as if culture is automatically reproduced’ and ‘does not
change over time’ (2005: 13). The impact of Modood’s book was to
heighten awareness of the pluralism of cultures in Britain.
A decade after Parekh’s book was published, two studies grudg-
ingly recognized that multiculturalism was on the run but neverthe-
less they refused to offer an obituary for it. The Multiculturalism
Backlash noted how ‘the term has successfully been associated with
the idea of misguided policy. Politicians to the right and left of
centre prefer to disassociate themselves from multiculturalism’ even
as ‘Policies and programmes once deemed “multicultural” continue
everywhere’ (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010: 14, 21). In addition,
Alessandro Silj’s collection European Multiculturalism Revisited
(2010) provided an examination of the crisis of the model in six
countries (all covered in our volume) but its rootedness as well. Most
recently, Anna Triandafyllidou, Tariq Modood and Nasar Meer
(2012: 10) framed multiculturalism’s ‘disappearing act’ differently:
if there has been an observable retreat from multiculturalism, they
write in European Multiculturalisms that ‘this does not necessarily
mean that the desirability of recognizing minority cultural differ-
ences as a means of cultivating an inclusive citizenship has been
eliminated’.
Back to Canada and its ‘immortal’ multiculturalism. With firm
philosophic foundations cemented by Kymlicka and Taylor, vibrant
début-de-siècle scholarship on multiculturalism is found in a book
examining cross-national case studies and statistical analyses of
the relationships among diversity policies, public attitudes and the
welfare state (Banting and Kymlicka 2006). The volume examines
whether a conflict between the politics of recognition and the politics
of redistribution may arise, and it provides data shedding light on the
recognition/redistribution linkage. Banting and Kymlicka conclude
that there is no inherent tendency for the politics of recognition to
undermine redistributive policies.
That is not what other studies of the Canadian experience indi-
cate. Redistribution of power, in particular, may be what the ideol-
ogy of multiculturalism is cryptically designed to prevent. Left-wing
critic Richard Day (2000: 3, 12) suggested that Canada represents a
modern-colonial nation state that has embraced a messianic mission:
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way that political leaders and parties gain power in the country; it is
a calculated strategy that even includes mathematical formulae used
across political party lines (Anderson 2012). This is not to say that it
produces egalitarian outcomes: some migrant groups become part of
the Canadian core while others remain marginal, so that Canadian
multiculturalism has the effect of differentiating between insider and
outsider groups. Of course we can find similar processes occurring in
European states.
Critiques of multiculturalism originate out of many different
normative frameworks; right-wing, nationalist, crypto-racist attacks
on the model receive the most publicity, but by no means are they
the most piercing. Cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek has imaginatively
approached multiculturalism as a way of ‘quarantining’ ‘others’ and
simultaneously ‘decaffeinating’ them. As he puts it:
Socially, what is most toxic is the foreign Neighbor – the strange abyss of
his pleasures, beliefs and customs. Consequently, the ultimate aim of all
rules of interpersonal relations is to quarantine (or at least neutralize and
contain) this toxic dimension, and thereby reduce the foreign Neighbor
– by removing his otherness – to an unthreatening fellow man. The end
result: today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism is an experience of the
Other deprived of its Otherness – the decaffeinated Other. (Žižek 2010)
For Okin, the call for group rights for minorities in liberal states
usually ignores the fact that minority cultural groups are themselves
gendered, and that they prioritize ‘personal law’ concerned with mar-
riage, divorce, child custody, control of family property and inherit-
ance. The defence of ‘cultural practices’ more profoundly impacts
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‘the lives of women and girls than those of men and boys, since far
more of women’s time and energy goes into preserving and maintain-
ing the personal, familial, and reproductive side of life’. Okin wraps
up her critique of multicultural theory with the assertion that ‘most
cultures have as one of their principal aims the control of women by
men’ (1997). Significantly, of the many lines of attack in recent years
on the multicultural experience in Europe, very few articulate this
feminist perspective.
Both beneficiaries and critics agree that multiculturalism is a way
to make claims on the state – justifiable ones for the first group,
opportunistic ones for the second. Critics on the left inveigh against
the model for failing to address fundamental structural inequali-
ties; some add that it only reproduces the deep structures of power.
Migrant communities are sometimes persuaded that neither their
integration into a multicultural society nor their complete cultural
assimilation is sufficient proof – in the view of the receiving society
– of real citizenship integration and undivided loyalty to the receiv-
ing society. Indeed, assimilation can still keep the foreign-born fixed
as ‘others’. One final less commonplace frame on multicultural-
ism is that it is in essence a postcolonial project: ex-colonizers and
colonized negotiate terms of a truce to be upheld on the territory
of the metropole. In a relatively recent self-proclaimed multicultural
society such as South Korea, multiculturalism is seen as sharing
Korean values and culture with the less fortunate – migrants from
poor Asian countries. Colonial relations have been reproduced even
here.
We acknowledge that critiques of multiculturalism often aim at
a moving target: by nature multicultural policies are not static but
rather adaptive, malleable, in flux. This is a phenomenon docu-
mented across our case studies. Accordingly, the systematic cross-
national campaign against the model is all the more remarkable.
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References
Anderson, Christopher (2012), ‘The adaptive qualities of Canadian
multiculturalism’, paper for presentation at the International Studies
Association’s Annual Convention ‘Power, Principles and Participation in
the Global Information Age’, San Diego, CA, 1–4 April 2012.
Banting, Keith and Will Kymlicka (eds) (2006), Multiculturalism and
the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary
Democracies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (2012), ‘Is there really a backlash against multiculturalism policies?
New evidence from the multiculturalism policy index’, paper for pres-
entation at the ECSA-C 9th Biennial Conference, Ottawa, 26–8 April
2012.
Bevelander, Pieter (2000), Immigrant Employment Integration and
Structural Change in Sweden, 1970–1995. Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell International.
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