multiculturalism for and against essay

The Challenges of Multiculturalism Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction, how multiculturalism contributes to racism, multiculturalism and cultural intolerance, multiculturalism and racial discrimination.

It is arguable that one can view multiculturalism and racism as two sides of the same coin. This follows from the prevailing possibility of manipulating the two to achieve similar results, which include the marginalization of minority groups both economically and politically.

However, multiculturalism when viewed in the objective light is important to a cosmopolitan nation such as the United States. People can use it to fight such racist deeds as ethnic stereotyping and the coining of identity labels, which carry with them connotations that are in most cases negative. However, multiculturalism can also result to racism.

The premise that multiculturalism is based on seems to rely more on the view of a certain culture and individual’s relationship to that culture. However, this cannot hold true since cultures are not distinct and they seem to exist in a network of others. This is because of the rise of cultural hybridism.

In cases where systems such as class, religious beliefs, and political alignments and so on, define the lives of people, engaging in multicultural activities by upholding traditional practices of a certain aboriginal culture may not gain people’s seriousness, who takes it only as an exciting anthropological experiment.

In this case, the moment people engage themselves in efforts to define their own culture and cultural practices distinctively; they tend to form an aspect of the other on the opposing cultures, which can have serious results linked with racism. These include cultural intolerance and exploitation of the minority groups.

Multiculturalism aims at strengthening different cultures to ensure that members or people who share such culture become proud of themselves. However, this can breed trouble incases whereby some people take advantage of this to propagate adverse cultural practices some of which people consider violating with human rights. These might include such cultural practices that encourage forceful circumcision or even refuse people to access medical care when sick.

This creates a sense of being hardliners and the capability of harming others to defend such practices. For instance, when people engage themselves in the politics of identity and tend to align themselves to a certain cultural identity, they seem to disregard the other cultures and always view themselves in relation to the other culture. This can even result to cultural intolerance, which may have catastrophic repercussions.

Multiculturalism results to the coining of identity labels that regard people as bound by a particular culture. However, people can manipulate it to deprive others of their basic rights or exploit them both politically and economically. This is in cases whereby certain people regard others as belonging to the minority groups, which define the handling of their welfare and grievances.

For instance, most organizations and institutions classify their employees as belonging to different cultural identities, which relate to the way of handling their grudges and social welfare issues. One can regard this as discrimination since he/she can handle the needs of a certain social class that the workers belong to without paying attention to what cultural identities they bear.

For instance, in cases of pay increment demands raised by workers, institutions and organizations that have classified the workers in such cultural identities with the motive of promoting cultural diversity may experience problems especially when most of the pressure seems to be coming from a minority group. This can even result to suppression of these demands and even victimization.

Multiculturalism as a practice to enhance cultural diversity bears more harm than good with regard to issues of racism. This is because it seems to bring about a more refined version of racism, rather than helping curb the problems arising due to racism.

This is through advocating for the preservation of the different cultures of which some of them encourage racism. Therefore, other than multiculturalism, authorities should instead advocate for systems that will dissolve the stereotypes and prejudices held at different cultures and encourage identities based on class since this will make sense to roughly everyone.

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IvyPanda . 2022. "The Challenges of Multiculturalism." April 1, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/multiculturalism/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Challenges of Multiculturalism." April 1, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/multiculturalism/.

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IvyPanda . "The Challenges of Multiculturalism." April 1, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/multiculturalism/.

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Multiculturalism

The idea of multiculturalism in contemporary political discourse and in political philosophy reflects a debate about how to understand and respond to the challenges associated with cultural diversity based on ethnic, national, and religious differences. The term “multicultural” is often used as a descriptive term to characterize the fact of diversity in a society, but in what follows, the focus is on multiculturalism as a normative ideal in the context of Western liberal democratic societies. While the term has come to encompass a variety of normative claims and goals, it is fair to say that proponents of multiculturalism find common ground in rejecting the ideal of the “melting pot” in which members of minority groups are expected to assimilate into the dominant culture. Instead, proponents of multiculturalism endorse an ideal in which members of minority groups can maintain their distinctive collective identities and practices. In the case of immigrants, proponents emphasize that multiculturalism is compatible with, not opposed to, the integration of immigrants into society; multiculturalism policies provide fairer terms of integration for immigrants.

Modern states are organized around the language and culture of the dominant groups that have historically constituted them. As a result, members of minority cultural groups face barriers in pursuing their social practices in ways that members of dominant groups do not. Some theorists argue for tolerating minority groups by leaving them free of state interference (Kukathas 1995, 2003). Others argue that mere toleration of group differences falls short of treating members of minority groups as equals; what is required is recognition and positive accommodation of minority group practices through what the leading theorist of multiculturalism Will Kymlicka has called “group-differentiated rights” (1995). Some group-differentiated rights are held by individual members of minority groups, as in the case of individuals who are granted exemptions from generally applicable laws in virtue of their religious beliefs or individuals who seek language accommodations in education and in voting. Other group-differentiated rights are held by the group qua group rather by its members severally; such rights are properly called “group rights,” as in the case of indigenous groups and minority nations, who claim the right of self-determination. In the latter respect, multiculturalism is closely allied with nationalism.

Multiculturalism is part of a broader political movement for greater inclusion of marginalized groups, including African Americans, women, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities (Glazer 1997, Hollinger 1995, Taylor 1992). This broader political movement is reflected in the “multiculturalism” debates in the 1980s over whether and how to diversify school curricula to recognize the achievements of historically marginalized groups. But the more specific focus of contemporary theories of multiculturalism is the recognition and inclusion of minority groups defined primarily in terms of ethnicity, nationality, and religion. The main concern of contemporary multiculturalism are immigrants who are ethnic and religious minorities (e.g. Latinx people in the U.S., Muslims in Western Europe), minority nations (e.g. the Basque, Catalans, Québécois, Welsh) and indigenous peoples (e.g. Native peoples and indigenous groups in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand).

1. The claims of multiculturalism

2.1 recognition, 2.2 equality, 2.3 freedom from domination, 2.4 addressing historical injustice, 3.1 cosmopolitan view of culture, 3.2 toleration requires indifference, not accommodation, 3.3 diversion from a “politics of redistribution”, 3.4 universalist ideal of equality, 3.5 postcolonial critique, 3.6 feminist critique of multiculturalism, 4. political retreat from multiculturalism, related entries, other internet resources.

Multiculturalism is closely associated with “identity politics,” “the politics of difference,” and “the politics of recognition,” all of which share a commitment to revaluing disrespected identities and changing dominant patterns of representation and communication that marginalize certain groups (Gutmann 2003, Taylor 1992, Young 1990). Multiculturalism involves not only claims of identity and culture as some critics of multiculturalism suggest. It is also a matter of economic interests and political power: it includes demands for remedying economic and political disadvantages that people suffer as a result of their marginalized group identities.

Multiculturalists take for granted that it is “culture” and “cultural groups” that are to be recognized and accommodated. Yet multicultural claims include a wide range of claims involving religion, language, ethnicity, nationality, and race. Culture is a contested, open-ended concept, and all of these categories have been subsumed by or equated with the concept of culture. Disaggregating and distinguishing among different types of claims can clarify what is at stake (Song 2008). Language and religion are at the heart of many claims for cultural accommodation by immigrants. The key claim made by minority nations is for self-government rights. Race has a more limited role in multicultural discourse. Antiracism and multiculturalism are distinct but related ideas: the former highlights “victimization and resistance” whereas the latter highlights “cultural life, cultural expression, achievements, and the like” (Blum 1992, 14). Claims for recognition in the context of multicultural education are demands not just for recognition of aspects of a group’s actual culture (e.g. African American art and literature) but also for acknowledgment of the history of group subordination and its concomitant experience (Gooding-Williams 1998).

Examples of cultural accommodations or “group-differentiated rights” include exemptions from generally applicable law (e.g. religious exemptions), assistance to do things that members of the majority culture are already enabled to do (e.g. multilingual ballots, funding for minority language schools and ethnic associations, affirmative action), representation of minorities in government bodies (e.g. ethnic quotas for party lists or legislative seats, minority-majority Congressional districts), recognition of traditional legal codes by the dominant legal system (e.g. granting jurisdiction over family law to religious courts), or limited self-government rights (e.g. qualified recognition of tribal sovereignty, federal arrangements recognizing the political autonomy of Québec) (for a helpful classification of cultural rights, see Levy 1997).

Typically, a group-differentiated right is a right of a minority group (or a member of such a group) to act or not act in a certain way in accordance with their religious obligations and/or cultural commitments. In some cases, it is a right that directly restricts the freedom of non-members in order to protect the minority group’s culture, as in the case of restrictions on the use of the English language in Québec. When the right-holder is the group, the right may protect group rules that restrict the freedom of individual members, as in the case of the Pueblo membership rule that excludes the children of women who marry outside the group. Now that you have a sense of the kinds of claims that have been made in the name of multiculturalism, we can now turn to consider different normative justifications for these claims.

2. Justifications for multiculturalism

One justification for multiculturalism arises out of the communitarian critique of liberalism. Liberals tend to be ethical individualists; they insist that individuals should be free to choose and pursue their own conceptions of the good life. They give primacy to individual rights and liberties over community life and collective goods. Some liberals are also individualists when it comes to social ontology (what some call methodological individualism or atomism). Methodological individualists believe that you can and should account for social actions and social goods in terms of the properties of the constituent individuals and individual goods. The target of the communitarian critique of liberalism is not so much liberal ethics as liberal social ontology. Communitarians reject the idea that the individual is prior to the community and that the value of social goods can be reduced to their contribution to individual well-being. They instead embrace ontological holism, which acknowledges collective goods as, in Charles Taylor’s words, “irreducibly social”and intrinsically valuable (Taylor 1995).

An ontologically holist view of collective identities and cultures underlies Taylor’s argument for a “politics of recognition.” Drawing on Rousseau, Herder, and Hegel, among others, Taylor argues that we do not become full human agents and define our identity in isolation from others; rather, “we define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us” (1994, 33). Because our identities are formed dialogically, we are dependent on the recognition of others. The absence of recognition or mis-recognition can cause serious injury: “A person or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves” (25). The struggle for recognition can only be satisfactorily resolved through “a regime of reciprocal recognition among equals” (50). Taylor distinguishes the politics of recognition from the traditional liberal “politics of equal respect” that is “inhospitable to difference, because (a) it insists on uniform application of the rules defining these rights, without exception, and (b) it is suspicious of collective goals” (60). By contrast, the politics of recognition is grounded on “judgments about what makes a good life—judgments in which the integrity of cultures has an important place” (61). He discusses the example of the survival of French culture in Quebec. The French language is not merely a collective resource that individuals might want to make use of and thereby seek to preserve, as suggested by a politics of equal respect. Instead, the French language is an irreducibly collective good that itself deserves to be preserved: language policies aimed at preserving the French language in Québec “actively seek to create members of the community” by assuring that future generations continue to identify as French-speakers (58). Because of the indispensable role of cultures in the development human agency and identity, Taylor argues, we should adopt the presumption of the equal worth of all cultures (66).

A second justification for multiculturalism comes from within liberalism but a liberalism that has been revised through critical engagement with the communitarian critique of liberalism. Will Kymlicka has developed the most influential liberal theory of multiculturalism by marrying the liberal values of autonomy and equality with an argument about the value of cultural membership (1989, 1995, 2001). Rather than beginning with intrinsically valuable collective goals and goods as Taylor does, Kymlicka views cultures as instrumentally valuable to individuals, for two main reasons. First, cultural membership is an important condition of personal autonomy. In his first book, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (1989), Kymlicka develops his case for multiculturalism within a Rawlsian framework of justice, viewing cultural membership as a “primary good,” things that every rational person is presumed to want and which are necessary for the pursuit of one’s goals (Rawls 1971, 62). In his later book, Multicultural Citizenship (1995), Kymlicka drops the Rawlsian scaffolding, relying instead on the work of Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz on national self-determination (1990). One important condition of autonomy is having an adequate range of options from which to choose (Raz 1986). Cultures serve as “contexts of choice,” which provide meaningful options and scripts with which people can frame, revise, and pursue their goals (Kymlicka 1995, 89). Second, cultural membership plays an important role in people’s self-identity. Citing Margalit and Raz as well as Taylor, Kymlicka views cultural identity as providing people with an “anchor for their self-identification and the safety of effortless secure belonging” (1995, 89, quoting Margalit and Raz 1990, 448 and also citing Taylor 1992). This means there is a deep and general connection between a person’s self-respect and the respect accorded to the cultural group of which she is a part. It is not simply membership in any culture but one’s own culture that must be secured in order for cultural membership to serve as a meaningful context of choice and a basis of self-respect.

Kymlicka moves from these premises about the instrumental value of cultural membership to the egalitarian claim that because members of minority groups are disadvantaged in terms of access to their own cultures (in contrast to members of the majority culture), they are entitled to special protections. It is important to note that Kymlicka’s egalitarian argument for multiculturalism rests on a theory of equality that critics have dubbed “luck egalitarianism” (Anderson 1999, Scheffler 2003). According to luck egalitarians, individuals should be held responsible for inequalities resulting from their own choices, but not for inequalities deriving from unchosen circumstances (Dworkin 1981; Rakowski 1993). The latter inequalities are the collective responsibility of citizens to address. For example, inequalities stemming from one’s social starting position in life are unchosen yet so strongly determine our prospects in life. Luck egalitarians argue that those born into poor families are entitled to collective support and assistance via a redistributive tax scheme. Kymlicka adds cultural membership to this list of unchosen inequalities. If one is born into the dominant culture of society, one enjoys good brute luck, whereas those who belong to minority cultures suffer disadvantages in virtue of the bad brute luck of their minority status. Insofar as inequality in access to cultural membership stems from luck (as opposed to individual choices) and one suffers disadvantages as a result of it, members of minority groups can reasonably demand that members of the majority culture must share in bearing the costs of accommodation. Minority group rights are justified, as Kymlicka argues, “within a liberal egalitarian theory…which emphasizes the importance of rectifying unchosen inequalities” (Kymlicka 1995, 109).

One might question whether cultural minority groups really are “disadvantaged” and thereby, owed positive accommodations. Why not just enforce antidiscrimination laws, stopping short of any positive accommodations for minority groups? Kymlicka and other liberal theorists of multiculturalism contend that antidiscrimination laws fall short of treating members of minority groups as equals; this is because states cannot be neutral with respect to culture. In culturally diverse societies, we can easily find patterns of state support for some cultural groups over others. While states may prohibit racial discrimination and avoid official establishment of any religion, they cannot avoid establishing one language for public schooling and other state services (language being a paradigmatic marker of culture) (Kymlicka 1995, 111; Carens 2000, 77–78; Patten 2001, 693). Linguistic advantage translates into economic and political advantage since members of the dominant cultural community have a leg up in schools, the workplace, and politics. Linguistic advantage also takes a symbolic form. When state action extends symbolic affirmation to some groups and not others by adopting a particular language or by organizing the work week and public holidays around the calendar of particular religions, it has a normalizing effect, suggesting that one group’s language and customs are more valued than those of other groups.

In addition to state support of certain cultures over others, state laws may place constraints on some cultural groups over others. Consider the case of dress code regulations in public schools or the workplace. A ban on religious dress burdens religious individuals, as in the case of Simcha Goldman, a U.S. Air Force officer, who was also an ordained rabbi and wished to wear a yarmulke out of respect to an omnipresent God ( Goldman v. Weinberger, 475 US 503 (1986)). The case of the French state’s ban on religious dress in public schools, which burdens Muslim girls who wish to wear headscarves to school, is another example (Bowen 2007, Laborde 2008). Religion may command that believers dress in a certain way (what Peter Jones calls an “intrinsic burden”), not that believers refrain from attending school or going to work (Jones 1994). Yet, burdens on believers do not stem from the dictates of religion alone; they also arise from the intersection of the demands of religion and the demands of the state (“extrinsic burden”). Individuals must bear intrinsic burdens themselves; bearing the burdens of the dictates of one’s faith, such as prayer, worship, and fasting, just is part of meeting one’s religious obligations. When it comes to extrinsic burdens, however, liberal multiculturalists argue that justice requires assisting cultural minorities bear the burdens of these unchosen disadvantages.

It is important to note that liberal multiculturalists distinguish among different types of groups. For instance, Kymlicka’s theory develops a typology of different groups and different types of rights for each. It offers the strongest form of group-differentiated rights—self-government rights—to indigenous peoples and national minorities for the luck egalitarian reason that their minority status is unchosen: they were coercively incorporated into the larger state. By contrast, immigrants are viewed as voluntary migrants: by choosing to migrate, they relinquished access to their native culture. Immigrant multiculturalism, what Kymlicka calls “polyethnic rights”, is understood as a demand for fairer terms of integration into the broader society through the granting of exemptions and accommodations, not a rejection of integration or a demand for collective self-determination (1995, 113–115).

Another set of arguments for multiculturalism rests on the value of freedom. Some theorists such as Phillip Pettit (1997) and Quentin Skinner (1998) have developed the idea of freedom from domination by drawing on the civic republican tradition. Building on this line of argument to argue for recognition, Frank Lovett (2009) maintains that domination presents a serious obstacle to human flourishing. In contrast to the conception of freedom as non-interference dominant in liberal theory, freedom as non-domination, drawn from the civic republic tradition, focuses on a person’s “capacity to interfere, on an arbitrary basis, in certain choices that the other is in a position to make” (Pettit 1997, 52). On this view of freedom, we can be unfree even when we are not experiencing any interference as in the case of a slave of a benevolent master. We are subject to domination to the extent that we are dependent on another person or group who can arbitrarily exercise power over us (Pettit 1997, ch. 2).

Frank Lovett has explored the implications of the value of freedom from domination for questions of multicultural accommodation (2010). He begins from the premise that freedom from domination is an important human good and that we have a prima facie obligation to reduce domination. He argues that the state should not accommodate social practices that directly involve domination. Indeed, if freedom from domination is a priority, then one should “aim to bring such practices to an end as quickly as possible, despite any subjective value they happen to have for their participants” (2010, 256). As for practices that do not involve subjecting individuals to domination, accommodation is permissible but not necessarily required. Accommodation is only required if accommodation would advance the goal of reducing domination. He discusses one stylized example based on a familiar real-world case: the practice among Muslim women and girls of wearing headscarves. Suppose, Lovett suggests, a detailed study of a particular Muslim community in a liberal democratic society is undertaken and it reveals that women’s educational and employment opportunities are discouraged, generating “severe patriarchal domination,” but the study also shows that the practice of wearing headscarves does not (2010, 258). Lovett argues that the practice of wearing headscarves should be accommodated because failure to do so might strengthen the community’s commitment to other shared practices that reinforce patriarchal domination.

A key empirical assumption here is that combating patriarchal practices within minority communities would be easier if the burdens on more benign practices, such as wearing headscarves, are lessened. Cecile Laborde’s analysis of the headscarf controversy in France provides support for this assumption: the effect of preventing Muslim girls from wearing headscarves is to encourage their parents to withdraw their daughters from civic education and send them to religious schools where they would not be exposed to the diversity of world views found in public schools. Formal restrictions on Muslim religious expression in the public sphere may make, in Laborde’s words, “members of dominated groups close ranks around the denigrated practice, precipitating a defensive retreat into conservative cultural forms and identities” (2008, 164).

Another situation in which accommodation is warranted on Lovett’s account is when individuals’ subjective attachment to particular practices makes them vulnerable to exploitation. He discusses the case of Mexican immigrant laborers with limited English language skills and limited knowledge of American laws and policies. Lovett argues that extending “special public measures,” such as exceptions to general rules and regulations and public legal assistance, is required insofar as such measures would reduce the domination of these workers (2010, 260). In contrast to the communitarian or liberal egalitarian arguments considered above, the basis for the special accommodations is not a desire to protect intrinsically valuable cultures or considerations of fairness or equality but the desire to reduce domination.

Mira Bachvarova has also argued for the merits of a non-domination-based multiculturalism as compared to liberal egalitarian approaches. Because of its focus on the arbitrary use of power and the broader structural inequalities within which groups interact, a non-domination approach may be more sensitive to power dynamics in both inter-group and intra-group relations. Also, in contrast to approaches developed out of egalitarian theories of distributive justice that focus on distributing different types of rights, a non-domination approach focuses on the “moral quality of the relationship between the central actors” and insists on continuity of treatment between and within groups (2014, 671).

Other theorists sympathetic to multiculturalism look beyond liberalism and republicanism, emphasizing instead the importance of grappling with historical injustice and listening to minority groups themselves. This is especially true of theorists writing from a postcolonial perspective. For example, in contemporary discussions of aboriginal sovereignty, rather than making claims based on premises about the value of Native cultures and their connection to individual members’ sense of self-worth as liberal multiculturalists have, the focus is on reckoning with history. Such proponents of indigenous sovereignty emphasize the importance of understanding indigenous claims against the historical background of the denial of equal sovereign status of indigenous groups, the dispossession of their lands, and the destruction of their cultural practices (Ivison 2006, Ivison et al. 2000, Moore 2005, Simpson 2000). This background calls into question the legitimacy of the state’s authority over aboriginal peoples and provides a prima facie case for special rights and protections for indigenous groups, including the right of self-government. Jeff Spinner-Halev has argued that the history of state oppression of a group should be a key factor in determining not only whether group rights should be extended but also whether the state should intervene in the internal affairs of the group when it discriminates against particular members of the group. For example, “when an oppressed group uses its autonomy in a discriminatory way against women it cannot simply be forced to stop this discrimination” (2001, 97). Oppressed groups that lack autonomy should be “provisionally privileged” over non-oppressed groups; this means that “barring cases of serious physical harm in the name of a group’s culture, it is important to consider some form of autonomy for the group” (2001, 97; see also Spinner-Halev 2012).

Theorists adopting a postcolonial perspective go beyond liberal multiculturalism toward the goal of developing models of constitutional and political dialogue that recognize culturally distinct ways of speaking and acting. Multicultural societies consist of diverse religious and moral outlooks, and if liberal societies are to take such diversity seriously, they must recognize that liberalism is just one of many substantive outlooks based on a specific view of man and society. Liberalism is not free of culture but expresses a distinctive culture of its own. This observation applies not only across territorial boundaries between liberal and nonliberal states, but also within liberal states and its relations with nonliteral minorities. James Tully has surveyed the language of historical and contemporary constitutionalism with a focus on Western state’s relations with Native peoples to uncover more inclusive bases for intercultural dialogue (1995). Bhikhu Parekh contends that liberal theory cannot provide an impartial framework governing relations between different cultural communities (2000). He argues instead for a more open model of intercultural dialogue in which a liberal society’s constitutional and legal values serve as the initial starting point for cross-cultural dialogue while also being open to contestation.

More recent work has emphasized the importance of developing more contextual approaches that engage with actual political struggles for recognition and give greater voice to minority groups. Through detailed examination of how national museums in Canada and the U.S. have sought to represent and recognize indigenous groups, Caitlin Tom identifies three principles for the practice of recognition: self-definition, responsiveness, and internal contestation. Whether it be museum officials seeking to exhibit the history and culture of minority groups or government officials deciding whether official apologies for historical injustices are in order, they should respect individual and collective self-definition, respond to demands for recognition on terms that align with the terms of those being recognized, and accommodate internal contestation of group meanings. As Tom argues, practices of recognition guided by these principles come closer to fostering freedom and equality of minority groups than existing approaches (2018).

3. Critique of multiculturalism

Some critics contend that theories of multiculturalism are premised on an essentialist view of culture. Cultures are not distinct, self-contained wholes; they have long interacted and influenced one another through war, imperialism, trade, and migration. People in many parts of the world live within cultures that are already cosmopolitan, characterized by cultural hybridity. As Jeremy Waldron argues, “We live in a world formed by technology and trade; by economic, religious, and political imperialism and their offspring; by mass migration and the dispersion of cultural influences. In this context, to immerse oneself in the traditional practices of, say, an aboriginal culture might be a fascinating anthropological experiment, but it involves an artificial dislocation from what actually is going on in the world” (1995, 100). To aim at preserving or protecting a culture runs the risk of privileging one allegedly pure version of that culture, thereby crippling its ability to adapt to changes in circumstances (Waldron 1995, 110; see also Appiah 2005, Benhabib 2002, Scheffler 2007). Waldron also rejects the premise that the options available to an individual must come from a particular culture; meaningful options may come from a variety of cultural sources. What people need are cultural materials, not access to a particular cultural structure. For example, the Bible, Roman mythology, and the Grimms’ fairy tales have all influenced American culture, but these cultural sources cannot be seen as part of a single cultural structure that multiculturalists like Kymlicka aim to protect.

In response, multicultural theorists agree that cultures are overlapping and interactive, but they nonetheless maintain that individuals belong to separate societal cultures. In particular, Kymlicka has argued that while options available to people in any modern society come from a variety of ethnic and historical sources, these options become meaningful to us only if “they become part of the shared vocabulary of social life—i.e. embodied in the social practices, based on a shared language, that we are exposed to... That we learn...from other cultures, or that we borrow words from other languages, does not mean that we do not still belong to separate societal cultures, or speak different languages” (1995, 103). Liberal egalitarian defenders of multiculturalism like Kymlicka maintain that special protections for minority cultural groups still hold, even after we adopt a more cosmopolitan view of cultures, because the aim of group-differentiated rights is not to freeze cultures in place but to empower members of minority groups to continue their distinctive cultural practices so long as they wish to.

A second major criticism is aimed at liberal multicultural theories of accommodation in particular and stems from the value of freedom of association and conscience. If we take these ideas seriously and accept both ontological and ethical individualism as discussed above, then we are led to defend not special protections for groups but the individual’s right to form and leave associations. As Chandran Kukathas (1995, 2003) argues, there are no group rights, only individual rights. By granting cultural groups special protections and rights, the state oversteps its role, which is to secure civility, and risks undermining individual rights of association. States should not pursue “cultural integration” or “cultural engineering” but rather a “politics of indifference” toward minority groups (2003, 15).

One limitation of such a laissez-faire approach is that groups that do not themselves value toleration and freedom of association, including the right to dissociate or exit a group, may practice internal discrimination against group members, and the state would have little authority to interfere in such associations. A politics of indifference would permit the abuse of vulnerable members of groups (discussed below in 3.6), tolerating, in Kukathas’s words, “communities which bring up children unschooled and illiterate; which enforce arranged marriages; which deny conventional medical care to their members (including children); and which inflict cruel and ‘unusual’ punishment” (Kukathas 2003, 134). To embrace such a state of affairs would be to abandon the values of autonomy and equality, values that many liberals take to be fundamental to any liberalism worth its name.

A third challenge to multiculturalism views it as a form of a “politics of recognition” that diverts attention from a “politics of redistribution.” We can distinguish analytically between these modes of politics: a politics of recognition challenges status inequality and the remedy it seeks is cultural and symbolic change, whereas a politics of redistribution challenges economic inequality and exploitation and the remedy it seeks is economic restructuring (Fraser 1997, Fraser and Honneth 2003). Working class mobilization tilts toward the redistribution end of the spectrum, and claims for exemption from generally applicable laws and the movement for same-sex marriage are on the recognition end. In the U.S. critics who view themselves as part of the “progressive left” worry that the rise of the “cultural left” with its emphasis on multiculturalism and difference turns the focus away from struggles for economic justice (Gitlin 1995, Rorty 1999). Critics in the United Kingdom and Europe have also expressed concern about the effects of multiculturalism on social trust and public support for economic redistribution (Barry 2001, Miller 2006, van Parijs 2004). Phillipe van Parijs invited scholars to consider the proposition, “Other things being equal, the more cultural... homogeneity within the population of a defined territory, the better the prospects in terms of economic solidarity” (2004, 8).

There are two distinct concerns here. The first is that the existence of racial and ethnic diversity reduces social trust and solidarity, which in turn undermines public support for policies that involve economic redistribution. For example, Robert Putnam argues that the decline in social trust and civic participation in the U.S. is strongly correlated with racial and ethnic diversity (2007). Rodney Hero has shown that the greater the racial and ethnic heterogeneity in a state, the more restrictive state-level welfare programs are (Hero 1998, Hero and Preuhs 2007). Cross-national analyses suggest that differences in racial diversity explain a significant part of the reason why the U.S. has not developed a European-style welfare state (Alesina and Glaeser 2004). The second concern is that multiculturalism policies themselves undermine the welfare-state by heightening the salience of racial and ethnic differences among groups and undermining a sense of common national identity that is viewed as necessary for a robust welfare state (Barry 2001, Gitlin 1995, Rorty 1999).

In response, theorists of multiculturalism have called for and collaborated on more empirical research of these purported trade-offs. With respect to the first concern about the tension between diversity and redistribution, Kymlicka and Banting question the generalizability of the empirical evidence that is largely drawn from research either on Africa, where the weakness of state institutions has meant no usable traditions or institutional capacity for dealing with diversity, or on the U.S., where racial inequality has been shaped by centuries of slavery and segregation. Where many minority groups are newcomers and where state institutions are strong, the impact of increasing diversity may be quite different (Kymlicka and Banting 2006, 287). Barbara Arneil has also challenged Putnam’s social capital thesis, arguing that participation in civil society has changed, not declined, largely as a result of mobilization among cultural minorities and women seeking greater inclusion and equality (Arneil 2006a). She argues that it is not diversity itself that leads to changes in trust and civic engagement but the politics of diversity, i.e. how different groups respond to and challenge the norms governing their society. The central issue, then, is not to reduce diversity but to determine principles and procedures by which differences are renegotiated in the name of justice (Arneil and MacDonald 2010).

As for the second concern about the tradeoff between recognition and redistribution, the evidence upon which early redistributionist critics such as Barry and Rorty relied was speculative and conjectural. Recent cross-national research suggests that there is no evidence of a systematic tendency for multiculturalism policies to weaken the welfare state (Banting et al. 2006). Irene Bloemraad’s comparative study of immigrant integration in Canada and the U.S. offers support for the view that not only is there no trade-off between multiculturalism and the welfare-state but multiculturalism policies can actually increase attention and resources devoted to redistributive policies. She finds that Canada’s multiculturalism policies, which provide immigrants with a variety of services in their native languages and encourage them to preserve their cultural traditions even as they become Canadian citizens, are the main reason why the naturalization rate among permanent residents in Canada is twice that of permanent residents in the U.S. Multiculturalists agree more empirical research is needed, but they nonetheless maintain that redistribution and recognition are not either/or propositions. Both are important dimensions in the pursuit of equality for minority groups. In practice, both redistribution and recognition—responding to material disadvantages and marginalized identities and statuses—are required to achieve greater equality across lines of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, and class, not least because many individuals stand at the intersection of these different categories and suffer multiple forms of marginalization. A politics of recognition is important not only on account of its effects on socioeconomic status and political participation but also for the sake of full inclusion of members of marginalized groups as equal citizens.

A fourth objection takes issue with liberal multiculturalist’s understanding of what equality requires. Brian Barry defends a universalist ideal of equality, in contrast to the group-differentiated ideal of equality defended by Kymlicka. Barry argues that religious and cultural minorities should be held responsible for bearing the consequences of their own beliefs and practices, just as members of the dominant culture are held responsible for bearing the consequences of their beliefs. He does think that special accommodations are owed to people with disabilities, but he believes religious and cultural affiliations are different from physical disabilities: the former do not constrain people in the way that physical disabilities do. A physical disability supports a strong prima facie claim to compensation because it limits a person’s opportunities to engage in activities that others are able to engage in. In contrast, religion and culture may shape one’s willingness to seize an opportunity, but they do not affect whether one has an opportunity. Barry argues that egalitarian justice is only concerned with ensuring a reasonable range of equal opportunities, not with ensuring equal access to any particular choices or outcomes (2001, 37). When it comes to cultural and religious affiliations, they do not limit the range of opportunities one enjoys but rather the choices one can make within the set of opportunities available to all.

In reply, one might agree that opportunities are not objective in the strong physicalist sense suggested by Barry. But the opportunity to do X is not just having the possibility to do X without facing physical encumbrances; it is also the possibility of doing X without incurring excessive costs or the risk of such costs (Miller 2002, 51). State law and cultural commitments can conflict in ways such that the costs for cultural minorities of taking advantage of the opportunity are prohibitively high. In contrast to Barry, liberal multiculturalists argue that many cases where a law or policy disparately impacts a religious or cultural practice constitute injustice. For instance, Kymlicka points to the Goldman case (discussed above) and other religion cases, as well as to claims for language rights, as examples in which group-differentiated rights are required in light of the differential impact of state action (1995, 108–115). His argument is that since the state cannot achieve complete disestablishment of culture or be neutral with respect to culture, it must somehow make it up to citizens who are bearers of minority religious beliefs and native speakers of other languages. Because complete state disestablishment of culture is not possible, one way to ensure fair background conditions is to provide roughly comparable forms of assistance or recognition to each of the various languages and religions of citizens. To do nothing would be to permit injustice.

Some postcolonial theorists are critical of multiculturalism and the contemporary politics of recognition for reinforcing, rather than transforming, structures of colonial domination in relations between settler states and indigenous communities. Focusing on Taylor’s theory of the politics of recognition, Glen Coulthard has argued that “instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the Hegelian idea of reciprocity, the politics of recognition in its contemporary form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend” (2007, 438–9; see also Coulthard 2014). There are several elements to Coulthard’s critique. First, he argues that the politics of recognition, through its focus on reformist state redistributionist schemes like granting cultural rights and concessions to aboriginal communities, affirms rather than challenges the political economy of colonialism. In this regard, the politics of recognition reveals itself to be a variant of liberalism, which “fails to confront the structural/economic aspects of colonialism at its generative roots” (2007, 446). Second, the contemporary politics of recognition toward indigenous communities rests on a flawed sociological assumption: that both parties engaged in the struggle for recognition are mutually dependent on one another’s acknowledgement for their freedom and self-worth. Yet, no such mutual dependency exists in actual relations between nation-states and indigenous communities: “the master—that is, the colonial state and state society—does not require recognition from the previously self-determining communities upon which its territorial, economic, and social infrastructure is constituted” (451). Third, Coulthard argues that true emancipation for the colonized cannot occur without struggle and conflict that “serves as the mediating force through which the colonized come to shed their colonial identities” (449). He employs Frantz Fanon to argue that the road to true self-determination for the oppressed lies in self-affirmation: rather than depending on their oppressors for their freedom and self-worth, “the colonized must initiate the process of decolonization by recognizing themselves as free, dignified and distinct contributors to humanity” (454). This means that indigenous peoples should “collectively redirect our struggles away from a politics that seeks to attain a conciliatory form of settler-state recognition for Indigenous nations toward a resurgent politics of recognition premised on self-actualization, direct action, and the resurgence of cultural practices that are attentive to the subjective and structural composition of settler-colonial power” (2014, 24).

Taylor, Kymlicka, and other proponents of the contemporary politics of recognition might agree with Coulthard that self-affirmation by oppressed groups is critical for true self-determination and freedom of indigenous communities, but such self-affirmation need not be viewed as mutually exclusive from state efforts to extend institutional accommodations. State recognition of self-government rights and other forms of accommodation are important steps toward rectifying historical injustices and transforming structural inequalities between the state and indigenous communities. Coulthard’s analysis redirects attention to the importance of evaluating and challenging the structural and psycho-affective dimensions of colonial domination, but by arguing that indigenous peoples should “turn away” (2007, 456) from settler-states and settler societies may play into the neoliberal turn toward the privatization of dependency and to risk reinforcing the marginalization of indigenous communities at a time when economic and other forms of state support may be critical to the survival of indigenous communities.

The set of critiques that has ignited perhaps the most intense debate about multiculturalism argues that extending protections to minority groups may come at the price of reinforcing oppression of vulnerable members of those groups—what some have called the problem of “internal minorities” or “minorities within minorities” (Green 1994, Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev 2005). Multicultural theorists have tended to focus on inequalities between groups in arguing for special protections for minority groups, but group-based protections can exacerbate inequalities within minority groups. This is because some ways of protecting minority groups from oppression by the majority may make it more likely that more powerful members of those groups are able to undermine the basic liberties and opportunities of vulnerable members. Vulnerable subgroups within minority groups include religious dissenters, sexual minorities, women, and children. A group’s leaders may exaggerate the degree of consensus and solidarity within their group to present a united front to the wider society and strengthen their case for accommodation.

Some of the most oppressive group norms and practices revolve around issues of gender and sexuality, and it is feminist critics who first called attention to potential tensions between multiculturalism and feminism (Coleman 1996, Okin 1999, Shachar 2000). These tensions constitute a genuine dilemma if one accepts both that group-differentiated rights for minority cultural groups are justifiable, as multicultural theorists do, and that gender equality is an important value, as feminists have emphasized. Extending special protections and accommodations to minority groups engaged in patriarchal practices may help reinforce gender inequality within these communities. Examples that have been analyzed in the scholarly literature include conflicts over arranged marriage, the ban on headscarves, the use of “cultural defenses” in criminal law, accommodating religious law or customary law within dominant legal systems, and self-government rights for indigenous communities that reinforce the inequality of women.

These feminist objections are especially troublesome for liberal egalitarian defenders of multiculturalism who wish to promote not only inter-group equality but also intra-group equality, including gender equality. In response, Kymlicka (1999) has emphasized the similarities between multiculturalism and feminism: both aim at a more inclusive conception of justice, and both challenge the traditional liberal assumption that equality requires identical treatment. To address the concern about multicultural accommodations exacerbating intra-group inequality, Kymlicka distinguishes between two kinds of group rights: “external protections” are rights that a minority group claims against non-members in order to reduce its vulnerability to the economic and political power of the larger society, whereas “internal restrictions” are rights that a minority group claims against its own members. He argues that a liberal theory of minority group rights defends external protections while rejecting internal restrictions (1995, 35–44;1999, 31).

But many feminist critics have emphasized, granting external protections to minority groups may sometimes come at the price of internal restrictions. They may be different sides of the same coin: for example, respecting the self-government rights of Native communities may entail permitting sexually discriminatory membership rules enacted by the leaders of those communities. Whether multiculturalism and feminism can be reconciled within liberal theory depends in part on the empirical premise that groups that seek group-differentiated rights do not support patriarchal norms and practices. If they do, liberal multiculturalists would in principle have to argue against extending the group right or extending it with certain qualifications, such as conditioning the extension of self-government rights to Native peoples on the acceptance of a constitutional bill of rights.

There has been a wave of feminist responses to the problem of vulnerable internal minorities that is sympathetic to both multiculturalism and feminism (see, e.g., Arneil 2006b, Deveaux 2006, Eisenberg 2003, Lépinard 2011, Phillips 2007, Shachar 2001, Song 2007, Volpp 2000). Some feminists have emphasized the importance of moving away from essentialist notions of culture and reductive views of members of minority groups as incapable of meaningful agency (Phillips 2007, Volpp 2000). Other feminists have sought to shift the emphasis from liberal rights towards more democratic approaches. Liberal theorists have tended to start from the question of whether and how minority cultural practices should be tolerated or accommodated in accordance with liberal principles, whereas democratic theorists foreground the role of democratic deliberation and ask how affected parties understand the contested practice. By drawing on the voices of affected parties and giving special weight to the voice of women at the center of gendered cultural conflicts, deliberation can clarify the interests at stake and enhance the legitimacy of responses to cultural conflicts (Benhabib 2002, Deveaux 2006, Song 2007). Deliberation also provides opportunities for minority group members to expose instances of cross-cultural hypocrisy and to consider whether and how the norms and institutions of the larger society, whose own struggles for gender equality are incomplete and ongoing, may reinforce rather than challenge sexist practices within minority groups (Song 2005). There is contestation over what constitutes subordination and how best to address it, and intervention into minority cultural groups without the participation of minority women themselves fails to respect their freedom and is not likely to serve their interests.

The biggest challenge to multiculturalism today may not be philosophical but political: a political retreat or backlash against immigrant multiculturalism in particular. Some scholars have diagnosed a “retreat” from multiculturalism in Europe and Australia, which they attribute to a lack of public support based partly on the limited success of such policies to foster the integration of minorities (Joppke 2004, McGhee 2008). But other scholars argue there is lack of evidence of any such retreat. Based on their analysis of British policies, Varun Uberoi and Tariq Modood find that legal exemptions for minority religious practices, anti-discrimination measures, and multicultural education policies remain in place, and there is no country-wide evidence suggesting that public services are no longer delivered in different languages (2013, 134). Further research is needed on whether and why there has been a retreat from multiculturalism policies.

Perhaps the claim about a “retreat” from multiculturalism has less to do with any actual changes in state policies and more with concerns about lack of social unity and increasing tensions among diverse groups in liberal democratic societies and the sense that multiculturalism is somehow to blame. Consider then-Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2011 speech: “Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they [young Muslims] feel they want to belong” (Cameron 2011). According to Cameron, multiculturalism stands for separation and division, not integration and unity. But the survey of different theories of multiculturalism above demonstrates that most theories of immigrant multiculturalism do not aim at separation but rather devising fairer terms of inclusion for religious and cultural minorities into mainstream society (Kymlicka 1995).

Going forward, public debate about immigrant multiculturalism should be pursued in a broader context that considers the politics of immigration, race, religion, and national security. Multiculturalism may become an easy rhetorical scapegoat for public fear and anxiety whenever national security is seen to be threatened and when economic conditions are bad. In Europe, concerns about the radicalization of Muslim minorities have become central to public debates about immigration and multiculturalism. This was especially true in the face of the European migration crisis as over a million people fleeing war and violence in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere made perilous journeys by sea and land into Europe. This crisis tapped into fears about terrorism and security, especially after the November 2015 Paris and July 2016 Nice attacks; it also renewed concerns about the limits of past efforts to integrate newcomers and their descendants. Evidence from across Europe suggests that Muslims are struggling to succeed in education and the labor market in comparison to other religious and cultural minorities (Givens 2007).

Socioeconomic and political marginalization interacts with immigrants’ own sense of belonging: it is hard to imagine newcomers feeling integrated before they make significant steps toward socioeconomic integration. Integration is a two-way street: not only must immigrants work to integrate themselves, but the state itself must make accommodations to facilitate integration, as many multicultural theorists have emphasized. As Cecile Laborde observes, North African youth in France are “routinely blamed for not being integrated,” but this blame “confuses French society’s institutional responsibility to integrate immigrants with immigrants’ personal failure to integrate into society” (Laborde 2008, 208). The challenge of integrating immigrants has been heightened by increasing public acceptability of expressions of anti-Muslim sentiment. The rise of far-right political parties and their anti-Muslim publicity campaigns, coupled with the media’s willingness to report, often uncritically, their positions damage the prospects for integrating Muslims in Europe (Lenard 2010, 311). Muslim political leaders report that it is “part of mainstream public dialogue” to refer to the “menace of foreign cultures and the threat posed by immigrants in general, and Muslims in particular, to social solidarity and cultural homogeneity” (Klausen 2005, 123). Muslims have been, in Laborde’s words, “reduced to their presumed identity, culture, or religion, and consequently stigmatized as immigrant, Arab, or Muslim” (2008, 17). The challenges posed by integrating Muslims are thought to be more complex than the challenges of integrating earlier waves of immigrants, but as Patti Lenard argues, this alleged complexity derives from the simplistic and unfair elision between Islamic fundamentalism and the vast majority of Muslim minorities in Europe who desire integration on fairer terms of the sort that multiculturalists defend (Lenard 2010, 318).

In light of these concerns with immigrant multiculturalism, multicultural theorists need to continue to make the case that the ideal of multicultural citizenship stands for fairer terms of integration, not separation and division, and offer answers to questions such as: Why is multicultural citizenship more desirable than the traditional liberal ideal of common citizenship based on a uniform set of rights and opportunities for everyone? Are multiculturalism policies actually fostering greater integration of immigrants and their descendants? How should we think about the relationship between multiculturalism and struggles to address inequalities based on race, indigeneity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability? It is also important to study the development of multiculturalism beyond the West, including whether and how Western theories and practices of multiculturalism have traveled and been incorporated. For example, what lessons have states that only recently opened up to significant immigration, such as South Korea, drawn from the experiences of other states, and what sorts of multiculturalism policies have they adopted and why? (Lie 2014)

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• Simpson, A., 2000, “Paths toward a Mohawk Nation: Narratives of Citizenship and Nationhood in Kahnawake,” in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples , D. Ivison, P. Patton, and W. Sanders (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 113–136.
• Skinner, Q., 1998, Liberty before Liberalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Song, S., 2005, “Majority Norms, Multiculturalism, and Gender Equality,” American Political Science Review , 99(4): 473–1489.
• –––, 2007, Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2008, “The Subject of Multiculturalism: Culture, Religion, Language, Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race?” in New Waves in Political Philosophy , B. de Bruin and C. Zurn (eds.), New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 177–197.
• Spinner-Halev, J., 2001, “Feminism, Multiculturalism, Oppression, and the State,” Ethics , 112: 84–113.
• –––, 2012, Enduring Injustice , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Taylor, C., [1992] 1994, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition , A. Gutmann (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 25–73.
• –––, 1995, “Irreducibly Social Goods,”, in Philosophical Arguments , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 127–145.
• Tom, C., 2018, Rethinking Recognition: Freedom, Self-Definition, and Principles for Practice , Ph.D. Dissertation, Political Science Department, University of California/Berkeley, available online .
• Tully, J., 1995, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Uberoi, V. and T. Modood, 2013, “Has Multiculturalism in Britain Retreated?,” Soundings , 53: 129–142.
• van Parijs, P. (ed.), 2004, Cultural Diversity versus Economic Solidarity , Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck.
• Volpp, L., 2000, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior,” Yale Journal of Law and Humanities , 12: 89–116.
• Waldron, J., 1992, “Superseding Historic Injustice,” Ethics , 103(1): 4–28.
• –––, 1995, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” in The Rights of Minority Cultures , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 93–119
• Williams, M., 1998, Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Young, I.M., 1990, Justice and the Politics of Difference , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Multiculturalism: A Critical Introduction

Michael Murphy, Multiculturalism: A Critical Introduction , Routledge, 2012, 196pp., $35.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780415260435.

Reviewed by Brady Heiner, California State University, Fullerton

Michael Murphy takes on the challenge of providing a concise critical introduction to multiculturalism -- a subject whose terrain and terminologies remain analytically confused, culturally entangled, and deeply contested (Hall, Ponzanesi). Indeed, the proliferation of diverse and contradictory uses of the concept in academic, policy, and mass media discourses, especially since 9/11, confirm what postcolonial, literary, and critical race theorists have argued about "multiculturalism" for fifteen years: that it has become a "conceptual grab bag" with "elastic boundaries" and "a corresponding dilution of content" (Mills 2007, p. 89), a "floating" or "empty signifier" onto which "a range of groups project their fears and hopes" (Bhabha, p. 31; Gunew, p. 19), "an incoherent concept, which cannot be meaningfully either affirmed or rejected" (Fish, p. 78; quoted in Murphy, p. 12).

"Multiculturalism" refers to anything from the cultural and political discourses and practices of foreign nationals and immigrants, to those of racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, and subnational minorities; from the social characteristics and problems of governance posed by any society composed of different cultural communities, to issues of tertiary education and curriculum reform; from the strategies and policies adopted to govern or manage the problems of diversity and multiplicity that multicultural societies engender, to the normative justifications of those strategies and policies (Bhabha, Hall, Sharma). Not only do the descriptive, normative, and legal senses of multiculturalism frequently get conflated -- a problem that leads Murphy to spend nearly a quarter of the book engaging in what he calls "philosophical brush-clearing" (p. 28). It's also the case that the literature on multiculturalism is vast, multidisciplinary, theoretically fragmented, and (as one might expect) developed and focused in disparate ways in different countries.

To "bring a sense of clarity and coherence" to this complexly contested field of discourse, Murphy "follow[s] the methodology of Wittgenstein, by seeking to understand how the term 'multiculturalism' has been used in actual philosophical debates," and he adopts two "organizational strategies" to make this task "more manageable" (pp. 6, 13, 62). First, he organizes the discussion around different types of arguments that recur in the literature, rather than focusing on the theoretical trajectories of particular philosophers. Second, he focuses mainly on the ideas of "some of the more influential multiculturalists [and critics], whose work is broadly representative of the diversity of perspectives and approaches in the field," trying, in good multicultural fashion, "to be as inclusive as possible" (p. 62).

Regrettably, the book is not nearly as broadly representative of the diversity of perspectives and approaches in the field as it purports (and ought) to be, especially given its representative pedagogical aims. Murphy docks multiculturalism on a rather exclusive island of Anglo-American political philosophy. The book is thus not, as it claims and as one might infer from the title, a critical introduction to  multicultural  political philosophy. Nor does it reflect the kind of methodological pluralism and cross-disciplinarity that the subject demands.

A more apt, though admittedly less marketable, title for the volume would be  An Introduction to Anglo-American Liberal Political Philosophy of Multiculturalism . For, with the exception of passing reference to Seyla Benhabib and engagement with the works of Iris Young, the book almost entirely ignores relevant literatures from critical theory, continental philosophy, and pragmatism (e.g., Balibar, Brown 1995, 2006, Butler 1998, Fraser and Honneth, Goldberg, Willett, Žižek). It also disregards or marginalizes foundational critical perspectives from area studies and intersectional analyses from postcolonial theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and feminist philosophy that exceed the framework of liberalism (e.g., Blasius, Blum, Chakrabarty, Crenshaw, Davis, Ford, Gooding-Williams, Guha, Gunew, Hancock, Mills 2007, Mohanty, Morris, Narayan and Harding, Ortega and Alcoff,Pateman, Pateman and Mills, Takaki, Vasta and Castles, Williams). [1]  Furthermore, it overlooks notable political philosophers of color working from within the liberal tradition on issues of race and reparative or corrective justice (e.g., Boxill 1972, 1984, 2003; Corlett 2003, 2010; McGary; Roberts) -- a germane aspect of the debate about "multicultural accommodation," which runs through Murphy's text, that is hastily dismissed (esp. pp. 103-11, 118-27).

Strategic selection and omission are, of course, the stock-in-trade of single-authored introductory textbooks of this kind. However, the text's organizational and methodological framework and the way it defines, delineates, and situates the field -- in addition to the omissions just mentioned -- are philosophically problematic, in my view, and they lessen the text's value as a pedagogical resource. I'll substantiate this criticism in the degree of depth that this forum permits. But first, I'll lay out the structure of the book and point to some of its notable strengths.

Strengths and Structural Overview

Murphys'  Multiculturalism  begins with three introductory chapters. The first chapter is schematic. It enumerates the three core issues of multiculturalist political philosophy around which later chapters are organized (i.e., equal consideration and justice, the limits of multicultural accommodation, and cultivating social cohesion in diversity). It sketches four impediments to clear debate on the pitfalls and benefits of multiculturalism (including the failure to acknowledge perspectival diversity within the political philosophy of multiculturalism, and the failure to distinguish multiculturalism as a political philosophy from the multicultural policies adopted by particular states and institutions). And it concludes with a one-page outline of the book.

The second chapter aims to succinctly lay to rest three alleged misconceptions about the relation between multiculturalism and cultural difference that are held to "impede productive debate" (p. 28): (1) the  cultural essentialism misconception , which is the notion that multiculturalism is tethered to an untenable and potentially harmful doctrine of cultural essentialism; (2)  the radical moral relativism misconception , which holds that multiculturalism is a recipe for radical moral relativism; and (3) the  politics of distraction misconception , the charge, advanced principally by theorists engaged in struggles against racial and economic injustice, that multiculturalism necessarily entails a myopic focus on objective cultural differences (i.e., beliefs, practices, traditions, languages, lifestyles) to the exclusion of racial, gender, and sexual domination, and socioeconomic injustice.

Murphy adeptly disarms (1). Reconstructing Jeremy Waldron's cosmopolitan argument about the intrinsic cross-fertilization, intermixing, and temporal instability of culture, Murphy drives home the point -- originally made by poststructuralist and postcolonialist theories (from which the logic of Waldron's argument derives, [2]  but which are absent from Murphy's text) -- that cultural identity is, in Rey Chow's words, "always already mediated by the slow but indismissible labor of temporality." Or, as Judith Butler phrased it vis-à-vis gender, "identity is a stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity." To demand that subjects or cultural communities manifest and maintain self-identity at all times is to participate in ethical or political violence (Chow, p. 176; Butler 1990, p. 192; 2005, p. 42; Anzaldúa; Blasius; Collins; Hall 1990; Lugones).

Murphy also dispenses with (2). He distinguishes between moral anti-foundationalism and radical moral relativism, and persuasively argues that the former position, which most multiculturalists adopt, does not necessarily entail the latter, which most multiculturalists reject. With respect to the  politics of distraction  charge, however, Murphy's  Multiculturalism remains fraught. While Murphy is right to argue that multicultural political philosophy does not  necessarily  involve an evasion or obfuscation of racial, gender, and sexual domination -- and  critical  multiculturalisms certainly do not -- the introduction to this  Critical Introduction  explicitly excludes these categories of analysis from the scope of the book. Designating such analytic categories as "specialized themes," Murphy maintains that to substantively include them in a critical introduction "would either require a much longer book or a thinning of the existing analysis to the point where it would no longer serve anyone's purposes" (pp. 5, 7). Thus, Murphy's text itself performs the very exclusions and "theoretical vanishing-act[s]" on account of which critical race theorists decry the conventional categories of multiculturalism (Mills 2007, p. 104; Blum; Ford, p. 45). The problems that this evasion generates will be the subject of my concluding critique.

Chapter three provides a welcome typology of common multicultural policies, offering seven categories: voice, symbolic recognition, redistribution, protection, exemptions, assistance, and autonomy. Discussion of each category provides a general description and series of concrete policy examples, the purposes they are intended to serve, the types of justification to which they are subject, and the types of groups to which they are addressed. The close connection constructed throughout the book between philosophical principles and arguments, on the one hand, and comparative governmental policies, on the other, is among its greatest strengths, as it regularly invites readers to explore the political and legal implications of the theories under consideration. Foregrounding the common range of policies adopted by various governments in response to diversity within their borders prioritizes this bridgework between theory and policy. Absent from this bridgework, however, are rich connections to political practices, especially minority social justice activism and social movements beyond the horizon of the state.

Chapter four, a transitional chapter, traces the intellectual origins of multiculturalist political philosophy to the breakdown of the liberal-communitarian debate that had dominated Anglo-American liberal political philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the genealogy that this chapter provides is symptomatic of what I take to be the book's underlying inadequacy, I will save further comment on it for my concluding critical remarks.

The heart of the book, chapters five through eight, focuses on what the text refers to as "the philosophical champions of multiculturalism," a circle centered around Will Kymlicka,Chandran Kukathas, Bhikhu Parekh, and Charles Taylor, and some of their critics (Brian Barry and Susan Okin most prominently, but also James Tully and Iris Young, among others). The champions first defend multiculturalism, in chapter five, via what Murphy categorizes into seven types of argument: liberal culturalism, tolerationist multiculturalism, the value of cultural diversity, the politics of inclusion, deliberative multiculturalism, democratic multinationalism, and the politics of recognition. Then the champions meet critics in debates organized around the three core issues enumerated early on in the book: equal consideration and justice (chapter six), the limits of multicultural accommodation (chapter seven), and cultivating social cohesion in diversity (chapter eight).

These chapters, like most of the book, are exceptionally clear in their organization. Arguments are coherently rendered and classified, policy examples are readily and demonstratively referenced, and the prose succeeds in constructing a very coherent, pleasurable -- what Roland Barthes might have called a "readerly" -- narrative replete with expert summary conclusions in each chapter.

Chapter nine ends the book with a welcome introduction to methodological contextualism, exemplified by Joseph Carens'  Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness  (2000). Organized around two case studies (language laws in Quebec, and the controversy surrounding the representation of the Prophet Muhammad in a series of Danish political cartoons in 2005), the chapter aims to articulate and illustrate the benefits of grounding multicultural political philosophy in the realities of specific political problems and contexts. The strength of this chapter is not only that it breathes some life into the practical political stakes of multicultural political philosophy. It also allows normative theorizing about multiculturalism to be guided by concrete struggles. However, the chapter is unfortunately organized like an applied ethics debate textbook, with a description of each case followed by arguments "for" and "against." While this format could be viewed as a strength by the instructor wishing to stage a debate among students, like all such formats, it arguably encourages binary, adversarial thinking about contemporary social and political issues.

Critical Remarks

The text's analytical disregard of differences such as race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and their intersecting systems of domination is concurrent with its disengagement from critical theories of postcolonialism and feminism. This omission produces a series of problematic symptoms, two of which I will briefly address.

First, Murphy's text distances itself from and reifies minority discourses of critique and activist demand even when it seeks to overcome that distance. For example, contextualist political philosophy, as Murphy indicates in the final substantive chapter, has sought to overcome the excessive degree of theoretical abstraction that has plagued much of twentieth-century Anglo-American political philosophy. This distance from concrete struggles and injustices, he writes, "was undermining [political philosophy's] persuasive power and its relevance to public policy and institutional design" (p. 129). One of the aspirations of contextualist political philosophy is thus to be "more sensitive to the specific  claims , characteristics and circumstances of different cultural minorities" (ibid., my emphasis). While this is a welcome departure from "ideal" methods of political theorizing that, as a matter of principle, exclude, or at least marginalize, such actualities from critical interrogation (Mills 2005, Tessman), the way that Murphy's text articulates this aim reinscribes the very distance it is intended to overcome.

The objective of contextualist political philosophy is described as one of being "more  empirically  informed," closer to "the  facts  on the ground" (ibid., my emphasis). Such philosophy would then, we are told, attend to minority demands,  qua  "facts," and theorize how they "could be justified and accommodated in policy terms" (ibid.). Murphy erroneously categorizes minority discourses of critique and activist demand as  empirical facts  to be extrinsically "justified" by theory and "accommodated" by policy rather than as  normative and theoretical discourses  in their own right -- discourses to be addressed at the level of the concepts and values they articulate, the justifications they offer in support of those values, and the norms for governance they propose. The methodological exclusion of these perspectives  qua  normative discourses at the outset, facilitates their reification in the belated attempt to contextually incorporate them. Put bluntly, it's difficult to ultimately overcome the "distance" between Anglo-American multicultural political philosophy and the specific claims, characteristics, and circumstances of different cultural minorities so long as that philosophy excludes those claims and perspectives from its conceptual horizons on account of a "lack of space" (pp. 129, 62, 7). Here, as elsewhere, the methodological and organizational framework of Murphy's text forecloses the possibility for genuine recognition of and dialogue with marginalized and oppressed groups, and the theoretical and practical (including policy) innovation which could result from that dialogue.

A second, related problem with Murphy's text is that it is animated by what postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha calls a  nondifferential  concept of cultural time :

It is not that liberalism does not recognize racial or sexual discrimination -- it has been in the forefront of those struggles. But there is a recurrent problem with its notion of equality: liberalism contains a  nondifferential  concept of cultural time . At the point at which liberal discourse attempts to normalise cultural respect into the recognition of equal cultural worth, it does not recognize the disjunctive, 'borderline,' temporalities of partial, minority cultures. The sharing of equality is genuinely intended, but only so long as we start from a historically congruent space; the recognition of difference is genuinely felt, but on terms that do not represent the historical genealogies, often postcolonial, that constitute the partial cultures of the minority. (Bhabha, p. 32; my emphasis)

Murphy's terms do not represent the historical, postcolonial, post-enslavement genealogies that constitute many of the minority cultures at issue in his discussion. In fact, in Murphy's 150-page book (196 pages with notes, bibliography, and index), histories of colonization and domination are only generically intimated in but a handful of references when not obfuscated by euphemisms such as, for example, the suggestion that dominant majority groups and "ethnonational minority communities," such as indigenous peoples, have been "thrown together by historical circumstances" (p. 125). [3]  This eclipse of European imperialism enables Murphy, in chapter four, to trace the intellectual origins of multicultural political philosophy not to the claims, concepts, and normative trajectories of the many (antiracist, anticapitalist, anticolonial, queer, indigenous, feminist) social movements of the early- to mid-twentieth century and their refugees in the diaspora. Rather, he traces those intellectual origins to "the many refugees [ sic! ] from the liberal-communitarian debate that so dominated western political philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s" (p. 46). As such, Murphy's  Multiculturalism  advances an ethnocentric, methodologically parochial account of the philosophy of multiculturalism that renders invisible the way that it has been shaped by colonial histories -- what Sneja Gunew calls the "colonial seeds of multiculturalism" -- and forecloses the possibility for genuine recognition of and dialogue with marginalized and oppressed groups (Gunew, p. 33).

To those who might object that many of the references I've criticized Murphy for disregarding in his volume are not works of political philosophy, but rather history, social, cultural, and legal theory, I would reply that the topic and task of critical multicultural or postcolonial political philosophy requires an openness to the multicultural questioning and redrawing of the traditional methodological, disciplinary, and thematic horizons of western political philosophy. The strict -- strictly western, white, masculine, heteronormative -- conception of political philosophy is precisely that which a genuinely critical multiculturalism calls upon us to "provincialize" (Brown 1988; Chakrabarty; Dotson; Mills 1997, 1998, 2005; Pateman; Patemanand Mills; Smith).

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987.  Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Balibar, Etienne. 2003.  We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship . Trans. James Swenson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1974.  S/Z: An Essay . Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang.

Benhabib, Seyla. 2002.  The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bhabha, Homi. 1998. "Culture's in Between." In  Multicultural States -- Rethinking Difference and Identity. Edited by  David Bennett. London: Routledge: 29-36.

Blasius, Mark (ed). 2001.  Sexual Identities, Queer Politics . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Blum, Lawrence. 1994. "Multiculturalism, Racial Justice, and Community: Reflections on Charles Taylor's 'Politics of Recognition.'" In  Defending Diversity: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives on Pluralism and Multiculturalism . Edited by Lawrence Foster and Patricia Herzog. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Boxill, Bernard R. 1972. "The Morality of Reparation."  Social Theory and Practice  2.1

-- -- -- -. 1984.  Blacks and Social Justice . Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

-- -- -- -. 2003. "The Morality of Reparations II." In  A Companion to African-American Philosophy . Edited by Tommy Lott and John Pittman. Malden, MA: Blackwell..

Brown, Wendy. 1995.  States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

-- -- -- -. 1988.  Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory . Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

2006.  Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1990/2006.  Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.  New York: Routledge Classics.

-- -- -- -. 1998. "Reply to Robert Gooding-Williams."  Constellations  5.1: 42-47.

-- -- -- -. 2005.  Giving an Account of Oneself .  Fordham University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000.  Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.  Princeton University Press.

Chow, Rey. 2002. "The Interruption of Referentiality: Poststructuralism and the Conundrum of Critical Multiculturalism."  South Atlantic Quarterly  101.1: 171-186.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. "Some Group Matters: Intersectionality, Situated Standpoints, and Black Feminist Thought." In  Fighting Words: Black Women and The Search   for Justice. University of Minnesota Press: pp. 201 -- 28.

Corlett, J. Angelo. 2003.  Race, Racism, and Reparations . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

-- -- -- -. 2010.  Heirs of Oppression . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 2000 [1989]. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics." In  The Black Feminist Reader . Edited by Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Davis, Angela Y. 1981.  Women, Race, and Class . New York: Random House.

Dotson, Kristie. 2012. "How is this Paper Philosophy?"  Comparative Philosophy  3.1: 3-29.

Fish, Stanley. 1998. "Boutique Multiculturalism." In  Multiculturalism and American Democracy.  Edited by A.M. Melzer, J. Weinberger, and M.R. Zinman. Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas.

Ford, Richard T. 2005.  Racial Culture: A Critique.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth. 2003.  Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange . London: Verso.

Goldberg, David Theo (ed.). 1994.  Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader . Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Gooding-Williams, Robert. 1998. "Race, Multiculturalism and Democracy."  Constellations  5.1: 18 -- 41.

Guha, Ranajit (ed.). 1997.  A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995 . University of Minnesota Press.

Gunew, Sneja. 2004.  Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimension of Multiculturalisms . New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart. 1990. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." In  Identity: Community, Culture, Difference . Edited by Jonathan Rutherford. Lawrence and Wishart: pp. 222-37.

-- -- -- -. 2000. "Conclusion: The Multicultural Question." In  Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements,   Transruptions . Edited by Barnor Hesse. London: Zed Books: pp. 209 -- 41.

Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2007. "Intersectionality as a Normative and Empirical Paradigm."  Politics & Gender  3.2: 248-253.

Lugones, María. 1994. "Purity, Impurity, and Separation."  Signs  19: 458 -- 79.

McGary, Howard. 1999.  Race and Social Justice . Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Mills, Charles W. 1997.  The Racial Contract.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

-- -- -- -. 1998.  Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

-- -- -- -. 2005. "'Ideal Theory' as Ideology."  Hypatia : A Journal of Feminist Philosophy  20.3: 165-184.

-- -- -- -. 2007. "Multiculturalism as/and/or Anti-Racism?" In  Multiculturalism and Political Theory. Edited by  Anthony Simon Laden and David Owen. New York: Cambridge University Press: pp. 89-114.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003.  Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity . Durham: Duke University Press.

Morris, Rosalind. 2010.  Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea.  Columbia University Press.

Narayan, Uma and Sandra Harding (eds.). 2000.  Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Ortega, Mariana and Linda Martín Alcoff. 2009.  Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader . Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Pateman, Carol. 1988.  The Sexual Contract . Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Pateman, Carol and Charles W. Mills. 2007.  Contract and Domination . Cambridge: Polity.

Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2007. "Feminist Theory and Multiculturalism."  Feminist Theory  8.1: 91-103.

Roberts, Rodney C. (ed.). 2002.  Injustice and Rectification . New York: Peter Lang.

Sharma, Ashwani. 2006. " Shooting the Brazilian: White Anxiety and the Terrors of Multiculturalism ."  Rising East . Issue 4(Accessed 10 Aug 2012).

Smith, Justin E. H. 2012. " Philosophy's Western Bias ."  The New York Times. The Stone , June 3.

Takaki, Ronald. 1993.  A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America . Little, Brown, and Co.

Tessman, Lisa (ed.). 2009.  Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal . New York: Springer.

Vasta, Ellie and Stephen Castles. 1996.  The Teeth Are Smiling: The Persistence of Racism in Multicultural Australia.  St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin.

Waldron, Jeremy. 1995. "Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative." In  The Rights of Minority Cultures . Edited by Will Kymlicka. Oxford University Press: pp. 93-119.

Whyte, Kyle P. 2012. "Now This! Indigenous Sovereignty, Political Obliviousness and Governance Models for SRM Research."  Ethics, Policy & Environment  15.2: 172-187.

Willett, Cynthia (ed.). 1998.  Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate . Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Williams, Patricia J. 1992.  The Alchemy of Race and Rights . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. "Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism."  New Left Review  225: 28 -- 51.

[1]  The work of Susan Miller Okin is discussed as one of two critical perspectives in chapter seven, "The Limits of Multicultural Accommodation," pp. 96-101.

[2]  The article of Waldron's upon which Murphy's argument relies opens with an extended passage from Salman Rushdie, in which Rushdie argues for the hybridity, impurity, and temporal disjunction of cultural identity. Explicating and adopting this conception for his own argument, Waldron writes dismissively: "If I knew what the term meant, I would say it was a 'postmodern' vision of the self. But, as I do not, let me just call it 'cosmopolitan'" (Waldron, p. 95).

[3]  Indigenous philosopher Kyle Whyte refers to obfuscating euphemistic language such as this, specifically when employed to describe indigenous peoples, as "political obliviousness," about which he provides insightful critical analysis (Whyte, pp. 178-182).

Fix on Fail I: Everyday Arguments for Pluralism, Multiculturalism and Diversity

This is the first in a small series of essays about everyday forms of social reason behind commonly defended values or propositions, each of which will argue that those values are now profoundly at risk. Political elites, intellectuals, and civil society activists often assume that there is or ought to be broad acceptance of those values. They act as if breaches and challenges to those dominant beliefs are the result of ignorance and backwardness, and that these challenges will fade eventually over time if sufficient power is used to contain and suppress those challenges in the present. Instead, I believe that the arguments for these values are in serious crisis, that they no longer persuade many people in many societies (if they ever did), and that elites in many cases are stuck enforcing views that risk becoming parochial or local values held by their own social class. We must undertake the work of rethinking, refurbishing and revisiting these ideas in the real everyday experiences of 21st Century humanity.

First up: pluralism, multiculturalism and diversity.

Whatever happens in today’s Brexit vote, the fact that the vote to leave the European Union was strongly supported by many voters in the United Kingdom, largely in connection to antipathies towards immigration and unrestricted border control, is precisely the kind of graveyard that cosmopolitan elites, liberal policy-makers, self-satisfied activists and Hallmark-card level celebrators of multiculturalism have contrived to whistle past, louder and louder as the close calls have become razor-thin and the documented failures of actually-existing pluralism to achieve most of what it has congratulated itself for achieving have piled higher and higher.

I am a person of my own social class, and pluralism and diversity are values that I deeply support and aspire to practice in my decision-making and everyday life. So the following critique is very much intended to protect and strengthen these values with the ardent conviction that many people who are not part of my immediate social world should share these values. It has come to the point, however, that if we cannot investigate with an open mind why pluralism is at risk and with whom, and thus begin to understand how to renew what it might mean to cherish an ideal of pluralism across our society, I fear very much that in thirty years time some forms of performed and expressed fidelity to diversity will be drawing-room manners for an aging and sequestered elite.

Keep in mind that valuing self-conscious commitments to pluralism, valuing the idea of building communities that cherish a wide range of life experiences, cultural and expressive practices, convictions and beliefs, is not the same as living in necessarily pluralistic societies. Even if we lose an aspiration to intentional pluralism, we will still live alongside people who are different in many respects than we ourselves are. That’s a deeply human experience, in greater profusion and intensity over the last four centuries. So the alternative to cherishing and building pluralism is not homogeneity.

This is a good place to start with refurbishing the argument for intentional pluralism. It starts with thinking about what has been wrong with the sort of pluralism that grows out the accumulated relations between peoples and identities which have been thrown together by the accidental, organic or incidental movement of groups or through the forced or violent migration of one group under the oppression of another. Groups living next to one another or alongside each other within a single place have often reached practical understandings about the limits and rules of their relations, but they have not often had any principled or persistent view of those rules. In many cases in history, peaceful and mutually advantageous relations between relatively equal groups or societies hold for as long as the overall political economy of a region or place is stable (a rare enough circumstance) and as long as no one thinks they can gain a permanent advantage through violence or subordination directed at other groups. Or as long as a small minority group of residents have some particular skill or resource that the dominant majority find useful. Merchants who have access to long-distance trade networks, scholars from far away who have linguistic or interpretative competencies, artisans who keep some craft knowledge opaque to others, and so on.

Why try to build communities, societies, nations, or a world that set out to be pluralistic on purpose, and that enshrine pluralism as a central value or belief system? What many people today might support is the promise that this is a way to break the wheel of uncertainty about accidental neighbors, to escape from a cycle where violence, flight, compulsion and mistreatment are always the threatening possibility of every understanding or contract. But this then is the first place that we’re failing, badly. Intentional pluralism defended as a state ideology or a civic virtue in the early 21st Century does not feel to many people as if it is an alternative to being left to your own devices to work out as best you can an understanding with neighbors welcome and unwelcome, and if necessary, to violently resolve a bad understanding with whatever collective power your own communities can mobilize. There is no greater security or understanding for most people in most nation-states that arises out of an official or civic endorsement of pluralism. Nation-states rarely offer safety, protection or rights evenly to all identifiable groups and communities within their territories. Having neighbors who are different religiously, ethnically, or in terms of lifeways and everyday practices, is for many people not a source of strength but of danger, even if the overall society claims otherwise. The only people who consistently experience multiculturalism and pluralism as an empowering and affirming value system are those with the resources to take the best of what it offers materially and socially, who are associated with historically dominant groups, and who are in charge of civic and governmental institutions that take pluralism and multiculturalism as their authorizing principle.

Wider populations in nations or across transnational boundaries will never embrace pluralism as an official political and civic value system until it actually keeps people more secure in their bodies, their hearts and their material circumstances. More secure and consistent in outcomes than the unpredictable processes of negotiation and struggle that unfold between groups that have been thrown together by history. No matter what, groups will deal with other groups as they must–and struggle or fight when they judge that inevitable–unless official pluralism is a consistently and truthfully better alternative. Unless it’s safe to be different, unless the language of rights and the realities of power conventionally and commonly align.

What else do we need to know or need to rethink? Elites who delight in cosmopolitanism and diversity need to listen carefully to individuals and communities who tell us about the times that diversity exhausts, weakens or exasperates them. That’s not just in the case often described by social justice activists, who justifiably point out that having to explain your difference to majority or dominant groups largely for the educational benefit of those dominant elites is at the absolute minimum a tiring cost of co-existence and at the worst feels degrading and affirming of the power of those elites. It’s even true in situations where groups have some degree of parity in their social power and have substantial reservoirs of understanding about the other social worlds that exist alongside them. It’s true even for groups that are dominant over others: they do not need remedies or special consideration, but their emotional experience of difference matters in trying to make sure that diversity and pluralism thrive as real values that are actually held by consensus. In-group social life has all the affordances (and dangers) of intimacy: the possibility that you can simply exist without explanations, in comfortable fellowship. That you can have the inward discoveries that long shared experience allows. Much of our valedictory rhetoric about pluralism and diversity ignores, downplays or denigrates the value of exclusive social belonging, or justifies it only in an instrumental and functionalist sense that historically oppressed groups need such exclusivity in order to feel safe. But this feeling is not just practical or politically necessary: it is in some sense a necessary part of a good pluralism. Without groups that also have a sense of exclusive, inward belonging and intimacy, there is no pluralism. Without heterogeneity that is genuine, there is no diversity.

We are often blithe about just how hard it is to live in a continuously diverse or heterogenous situation, how abrading it can be to a sense of selfhood and autonomy to have to constantly defer to every other practice or lifeway in the name of being happily multicultural. We also forget how profoundly confusing it is in the context of everyday life to have to distinguish between the diversity that we are called to embrace and the divergence that we are called to oppose or condemn. Educated cosmopolitans sometimes act as if this is a simple matter (though others, thankfully, regard this as among the hardest kind of everyday work we do as human beings .) We have got to acknowledge how hard it is to do, and how many difficult cases there can be when we set out to distinguish between a way of life that we should embrace as part of the range of diversity and a way of life that we should condemn as a violation of basic democratic or moral principles. The current trend in a lot of left or liberal activism is the opposite, to mock and condemn some for their hesitation at that boundary and to see the distinction between the two as obvious and undebatable. When we act as if it’s easy to be pluralistic, as if it’s a simple and obvious moral imperative to embrace diversity at all times and in all places, we are again substituting a narrow, class-bound and institutionally privileged habitus for the values we hope to see our entire society adhere to. It’s not even easy, really, for highly educated professionals who live within communities that have a picture-perfect kind of visual diversity. Until we let people have back a kind of honesty about what’s hard about living with difference and hard about being labelled as different, we will see people quietly slip away from pluralism. More and more will come to see pluralism as the parochial view of a narrow elite, as the specific cultural belief of a specific kind of person who lives somewhere else.

We also have got to get real about when pluralism and diversity have at least some relationship to the zero-sum games that neoliberalism in particular but not neoliberalism alone or exclusively have established within the global economy. Here I do not mean the idea that racism is an ideology that the dominant elites encourage in some subordinate but favored group of proxies for the sake of social control. I mean instead simply this: that if there is a fixed pool of wealth and power with an upper bound, then a justly pluralistic society where diversity is protected and supported is also a society that is redistributive. Even in a situation where that redistribution was absolutely equitable, that means some people will have less than they did. A lot of elite liberal or left commenters who live in more privileged situations with mannered cosmopolitanism tend to either politely ignore objections about redistribution or to regard redistribution as a just outcome about which they are entitled to gloat–as long as it’s happening to someone else. Now the real answer to all of this has nothing to do with pluralism or diversity: it is really about the ghastly consequences of extreme concentration of wealth in very small groups, and about the need to find as many ways as possible for economic and material life to not be subject to strict zero-sum limitations. People who believe in pluralism and diversity as supreme social values are not doing their cause any favors when they mock or ignore fears among those who stand to lose some wealth or power, however modestly or justly, if we move towards a more just and equitable kind of pluralism.

All of this points the way to more listening, less telling. In particular, more listening about how people experience difference and pluralism. Maybe even the best parts of that experience are not what political and cultural elites in many nations expect. The 21st Century cannot become more securely pluralistic, more committed to diversity in all nations and across nations, unless the people and institutions that hold to those values stop lecturing and hectoring and condescending to those who have violated, condemned, or most worrisome of all, quietly and without fuss slipped away from those values. A better world will be, must be a pluralistic one. The desire to make that the world we live in has had and will continue to have real enemies who have to be fought. But it needs many more friends than it has, and that takes doing more work to keep the friends we have and seek out the ones we’ve lost.

5 Responses to Fix on Fail I: Everyday Arguments for Pluralism, Multiculturalism and Diversity

The idea of “redistribution” grew out of the idea that gold was the commodity that gave value to our money. There was not enough to go around, so redistribution was necessary, or so it seemed. But FDR, realizing that fighting our way out of the Great Depression would require more money than our supply of gold would support, he, in 1933 and acting on his own initiative, took us off the gold standard. So, for more than 80 years we have had an infinite supply of money. We have more dollars than there are subatomic particles in the universe.

Now our task becomes how much money each citizen will need in order to avail himself of the resources, opportunities, rights, and protections that our new democracy and our new economic system will provide, and thereby enable him to build a long life that is worth living for himself and his loved ones. I have already computed this annual income so you won’t have to: it is $36,000 to each and every citizen from birth to death. Because this money, I call it the Social Security Lifetime Stipend (SSLS), will come from our unlimited supply of money and will be given to each citizen, we will be distributing, not redistributing. Equal distribution—how American is that?

And this brings us to the question I asked you several years ago: “What are the lessons of history?”

The answers are many and easy to see. You describe them in your posts all the time. The lessons of history are the myriad examples of man’s inhumanity to man. And the greatest lesson of all is that, even though we catalog them daily all over the world, we never learn from them. We should take such lessons and translate them into new systems that will remove the causes of these inhumane acts, and if we can’t do that we can at least minimize their effects.

But there is no cry from the people for new systems. Instead they demand that offending officials be replaced, and when the new ones are no better they repeat their demand. Bad systems will always produce bad results no matter who operates them. We live in a world of ideologies and false hypothesis, and we are destroying our civilization and possibly our species.

Ideology: ideas or beliefs that are taught or believed to be true, but which are not supported by rational argument, and which give exact rules, directions, or instructions about how one should do something.

We need to live in a world of systems:

System: a process containing mechanical, biologic, and intellectual components that are brought together in rational ways, and which together operate on resources or relationships to produce results that are of benefit all humankind.

A new democracy can be rational, it can be fair, and it can be moral. The same is true of a new system of economics.

There are four fundamental questions that we must answer or meet our doom. “Where do we stand?” “How did we get here?” You and others of your profession have the answers already.

“Where do we want to go?” We want to cure the ills you describe.

“How do we get there from here?”

I cannot tell you how much I love this article. Sometimes I’m ready to give up on progressive values entirely – not because I disagree with them, but because the arguments for them are so often undeveloped, blinkered, and in-groupy. I find myself thinking that if I really care about society’s underdogs, I should be more interested in their opinions than in those of people who routinely dismiss their perspectives.

As you say, more listening and more honesty. If a position cannot survive being discussed with the people it will affect, outside a fog of buzzwords and self-congratulation, it shouldn’t survive at all.

This blog is such a breath of fresh air! I look forward to the rest of this series.

Thanks for this Tim. On a sad morning in London it provides not just solace but hope.

I really think you nailed this, and around the side of your larger points I’m struck by the analogies to teaching, where so often the approved diversities run afoul of the unapproved ones, and the costs of real people pluralism cause the ideologies of respect, celebration, and inclusion to collapse right when they could actually be doing some good.

Tim, it’s clear by now that Brexit was a very, very elite project, conducted by the Tories and some extremely wealthy media barons. For example, Murdoch confessed that he was for Brexit because he had more clout with the U.K. PM than with Brussels.

Most of the policies which impoverished many Britons were very elite policies, quite deliberately implemented by The Tories (with support from the neoliberal wing of Labour – i.e., the more elite wing). The consequences were then quite deliberately used by those same elites.

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Multiculturalism and Equal Human Dignity: An Essay on Bhikhu Parekh

• Published: 11 March 2011
• Volume 17 , pages 141–156, ( 2011 )

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• Joshua Broady Preiss 1  

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Bhikhu Parekh is an internationally renowned political theorist. His work on identity and multiculturalism is unquestionably thoughtful and nuanced, benefiting from a tremendous depth of knowledge of particular cases. Despite his work’s many virtues, however, the normative justification for Parekh’s recommendations is at times vague or ambiguous. In this essay, I argue that a close reading of his work, in particular his magnum opus Rethinking Multiculturalism and the selfproclaimed “sequel” A New Politics of Identity, reveals that his claims frequently rely upon a Kantian account of moral dialogue and indeed moral personhood that he remains unwilling to claim. Recognizing this latent Kantianism is essential to a thorough assessment of Parekh’s work on identity, and his criticisms of other theorists. It is only because of his ambiguity that his multiculturalism is able to avoid the sort of charges that he levels against other responses to diversity, including those of such authors as Rawls, Habermas, Kymlicka, and Raz.

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Still No Evidence for a Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy

Nathan Cofnas

Public Attitudes Towards Multiculturalism and Interculturalism in Australia

Amanuel Elias, Fethi Mansouri & Reem Sweid

Antonio Gramsci’s Theory of the Civil Society

Witness the persistent Islamophobia, on several continents, in debates over cultural and religious accommodation.

For an extended discussion of issues of minorities within minorities see Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev 2005 .

He adds, ‘Secondly, even if the principles are shown to be universally valid, some might not accept them or, even if they do, they might not feel so committed to them as to be motivated by them in their relation to others… Thirdly, even if they are accepted by all concerned, the abstract universals need to be interpreted, and here people are likely to disagree… universal moral principles have to be balanced, prioritized, and applied to the unique circumstances of specific societies, and that too generates much disagreement. Since such disagreements cannot by definition be resolved by references to the principles themselves, we are left without any guidance’ (Parekh 1999b , p. 166).

Parekh’s use and understanding of ‘operative public values’ is surely influenced by his study of Michael Oakeshott’s anti-universalism, though not in ways that further or undermine the claims made in this essay. It is perhaps notable that Parekh doesn’t reference Oakeshott in his discussion of operative public values. See (Parekh 1995 ) for his review of Oakeshott’s political philosophy.

I am grateful to a reviewer at Res Publica for highlighting this revision.

Why must a society periodically reassess its operative public values? Where does this obligation come from if not a society’s operative public values? I will suggest an answer in the next section.

Other works that emphasize the importance of intergroup dialogue include (Dryzek 2006 ; Bohman 1996 , 2007 ; James 2004 ; Tully 1995 , 2009 ; Benhabib 2002 ).

Which Parekh seems to take as almost self-evident, and not in need of justification.

See Chap. 13 (Parekh 2008a ) for Parekh’s discussion of the universal value of democracy.

I am struck by various conversations I have had with what might be called Conservative Christian Evangelicals (by no means an endangered group in contemporary American society). A common and powerful reason for a claim in these conversations has been a personal knowledge of God’s will. What happens to reasonable discourse if, for example, the statement ‘I see what your saying but that is not what God tells me’ is a legitimate if not irrefutable counterargument?.

Rawls ( 1993 , p. 193). Elsewhere, I argue that Rawls’ account of neutrality of aim, by focusing on illiberal or undemocratic beliefs and practices, fails to consider that there might be good reason to address the potentially preventable bad effects of specific policies of liberal states. States could address these concerns, I argue, by recognizing certain cultural rights claims. Such policies would make political liberal societies more consistent with what Rawls calls the ‘criterion of reciprocity’ (Preiss 2009 ).

For a thorough analysis of the normative foundations of Habermas’ discourse ethics and Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, see Baynes 1992 .

Parekh criticizes Rawls’ claim that the difference principle requires a ‘sense of cohesion’ to be effective, (Parekh 2008a , p. 46). It is not clear, however, that Rawls’ conception of solidarity requires any more than the ‘thin’ set of shared values (Parekh 2008a , p. 83) that underpin Parekh’s model of intercultural dialogue.

By ‘instrumental’ here I don’t mean non-moral. I am simply recognizing that dialogue may be justified in terms of its likely ends, as opposed to a justification by reference to foundational principles.

There is a sense, perhaps not too different from Parekh’s vision of a ‘humane and just world,’ in which Kant’s humanity formulation of the categorical imperative is itself fundamentally concerned with the ends of actions (Wood 1998 ). If what we mean by ‘ends-justified’ theories is interpreted in such a broad and normatively loaded way, then both theorists work from the ends backwards. The parallel holds.

See, in particular, section 87 of A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971 ).

Though the ‘assimilationist wrongly asks for a greater degree and range of unity than is possible or necessary’ (Parekh 2008a , p. 83).

For an argument that the humanity formulation is most central to Kant’s moral philosophy, see (Wood 1998 ).

Which Parekh himself recognizes in his brief discussion of Kantian moral philosophy and children or those with severe learning disabilities (Parekh 2008a , p. 211).

Or reference a positive case of earlier theorists.

Though Kant is perhaps too singularly focused on the human capacity to reason (Parekh 2008a , p. 218).

I wonder how this lexical priority of the impersonal differs in practice from Kymlicka’s liberal restriction, which Parekh criticized at length in Multiculturalism Reconsidered (Parekh 2000 , pp. 100–105).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Martha Nussbaum, Michael Green, Amy McCready, Michael James, and two extremely helpful anonymous reviewers at Res Publica for feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

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Preiss, J.B. Multiculturalism and Equal Human Dignity: An Essay on Bhikhu Parekh. Res Publica 17 , 141–156 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9148-0

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• Published: 17 May 2018

War of words: interculturalism v. multiculturalism

• Christian Joppke 1  

Comparative Migration Studies volume  6 , Article number:  11 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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This article tackles the relationship between interculturalism and multiculturalism from the points of view of both. Interculturalism owes its existence to a critique of multiculturalism, but of highly distorted visions of it. I distinguish between two versions of interculturalism, a majoritarian (practiced in Québec) and a post-majoritarian (in Europe), which yield diametrically opposed visions of multiculturalism, as either footloose cosmopolitan or parochial-segregationist. Among the problems of interculturalism is the vacuity of the local as its preferred site of intervention, and its rushed embracing of “diversity” that is also a central plank of neoliberal ideology.

Introduction

Over the past decade or so, "interculturalism" has established itself as new approach to manage cultural diversity in liberal-democratic societies (a comprehensive overview is Grillo, 2017 ). While its near-namesake "multiculturalism" is heavily contested or even discarded in more and more places, especially in Europe, interculturalism enjoys unbridled support, particularly among policy elites, and it has been firmly institutionalized, for instance, in pedagogy or social work, whose curricula now include required courses in "intercultural competence". In Germany, never a standard-bearer of multiculturalism, recent integration laws passed in several Länder prominently sport the "intercultural opening of public administration", which requires the state bureaucracy to be attentive to the linguistic, religious, and other cultural needs of its immigrant-based clientele. The latter even entails prioritizing the hiring of people with a "migration background" ( mit Migrationshintergrund ), now the official speak for the near 20% of the German resident population with at least one foreign parent.

Several elements mark interculturalism:

a stress on communication and "dialogue" across ethnic (as still the most critical of cultural) boundaries—hence the "inter" in the name;

a preference for the local over the national as site of policy intervention and group and interpersonal exchange;

a concrete policy as against abstract theoretical focus, and closely related, a preference for pragmatic and compromise-minded over principled reasoning and decision-making;

finally, a non-ideological diction and cross-party appeal (all these elements can be found in Zapata-Barrero, 2017 ).

In each of these respects interculturalism derives its distinction in contrast to a discarded multiculturalism,

as favoring group separation over inter-group exchange and finding a common ground;

as being into national-level grand posturing while ignoring the local hic et nunc ;

as being largely theoretical and aloof of concrete policy concerns;

and as showing itself unprepared for compromising its radical and purist agenda.

One understands that particularly moderate and liberal defenders of multiculturalism (others are hardly around anymore) are not amused, rejecting the intercultural critique as “a misrepresentation, even caricature, of multiculturalism theories and approaches” (Kymlicka, 2016 , p. 158) (see also Modood, 2017 , p. 2).

Mutual (mis) perceptions

A closer look reveals the intercultural critique of multiculturalism and the multicultural meta-critique, as well as the suggested affinities and oppositions from both parties’ point of view, to be more variegated and less categorical than first meets the eye. Let us look at two prominent examples on each side, beginning with the interculturalists. Perhaps the most strident of them is Cantle, a British community organizer who became famous for launching the British policy turn, after a wave of race riots in several northern English towns in the summer of 2001, from multiculturalism to ‘community cohesion’. He sees little in common with an opposed multiculturalism, promoting interculturalism as “a completely different concept which reflects the new realities of diversity” (Cantle, 2016 , p. 472). Apart from faulting multiculturalism for having fueled “parallel lives” and group segregation (which is interculturalism’s standard charge that has never been backed by solid evidence), he finds it guilty of having prioritized “race (and class)” (a very British combination, alluding to the radical journal under that name) over other forms of diversity, many of which are more on the voluntary than strictly ascribed pole, like “mixed race”, “sexual orientation”, or “faith differences”, and which he sees growing in the contemporary period. He cites the example of a “Glaswegian, Pakistani teenager of Muslim descent who supports Glasgow Rangers in a Catholic School” (Cantle, 2016 , p. 476), who is not well served by a “tick-box classification which homogenizes communities under the single aspect of their identities” (Cantle, 2016 , p. 477). However, even if this youngster may hold “a different identity at home compared to that at school”, Cantle’s assumption that “she might have a different identity next week” (Cantle, 2016 , p. 477) may go a bit far. Modood ( 2016 , p. 487) rightly retorts that some identities are more painfully experienced and disadvantaging than others, and that it is these that are targeted by multiculturalism: “We cannot require all minorities to wear their identities lightly, flexibly and contextually.” One does not have to endorse Modood’s “groupist” multiculturalism to question interculturalism’s extreme multiplication of identities, which also militates against the policy relevance that interculturalists otherwise pride themselves for.

A less combative note is struck by a second prominent defender of interculturalism, Zapata-Barrero ( 2017 ), who depicts interculturalism not as substitutive of but “complementary” to multiculturalism. He even argues that a fully developed “recognition of rights” (which he attributes to multiculturalism) is necessary for interculturalism’s “contact”-orientation to take off (p. 6). In Zapata-Barrero’s view, interculturalism arises in a “post-multicultural” moment of anti-multiculturalist backlash, financial crisis (favoring low-cost, “mainstreaming” policy solutions to diversity), and “superdiversity” with its multiple identity and post-race issues, where diversity is even eroding the notion of a homogeneous “majority”. More concretely, interculturalism figures for him as “mediator” between, on the one side, an increasingly discarded multiculturalism and, on the other side, duty-focused civic integration policies, whose impulse of limits to tolerance and of finding a common ground is taken on board by his (and all other versions of) interculturalism. For Zapata-Barrero, the joint problem of both alternatives, multiculturalism and civic integration, which he sees locked in a vicious circle, is to locate diversity only on the part of minorities, whereby diversity becomes “the other” of the majority, while the need of the day is “placing diversity within the mainstream” (p. 6) (this is also the meaning of Cantle’s plea to “live in diversity” (Cantle, 2016 )). While this sounds plausible as a sociological fact, the implications for policy are again a lot less clear, or rather: frustratingly broad and fungible. Because, if diversity is everywhere it is also nowhere in particular, becoming an empty slogan deployable in almost any direction one likes, by business, for instance (see below).

In the multiculturalist meta-critique, interculturalism is at best “a version of multiculturalism rather than…an alternative paradigm” (Modood, 2017 , p. 1). For Modood, interculturalism helps multiculturalism to correct some of its weaknesses, making it more true to itself in the process, as non-essentialist and dialogue-oriented as its presumed opponent and itself a center-building rather than center-fleeing “multicultural nationalism”. In sum, interculturalism and multiculturalism are “critical friends”, not “alternatives” (Modood, 2016 , p. 487). Less ground is conceded by Kymlicka ( 2016 ), for whom interculturalism serves merely “rhetorical functions”, namely, to continue multiculturalism`s progressive agenda under the mantle of repudiating it in name. But as the price for it is sacking multiculturalism, this risks legitimizing the nationalist populism that has given a bad name to multiculturalism in the first.

This leaves us with a contradictory medley of multiculturalism-interculturalism linkages, from mutually exclusive and substitutive to closely linked if not near-identical.

Not one but two: majoritarian v. post-majoritarian interculturalism

Much as there is no agreement about what multiculturalism is, it should not surprise that interculturalism, as it has come into existence only by way of a critique of multiculturalism (see Grillo, 2017 , chapter 2), shares the problem of its criticized other to be notoriously elusive and difficult to define. But if there are several variants of multiculturalism (see Joppke, 2017 , chapter 2), on the part of interculturalism it comes down to just two, which still rest on (or yield) diametrically opposed visions of what multiculturalism is. Let’s call one “majoritarian” interculturalism, which entails the curious vision of multiculturalism as footloose, cosmopolitan diversity, and let’s call the other “post-majoritarian”, for which multiculturalism, on the opposite, is caught in an anachronistic majority-minority dualism.

Majoritarian interculturalism has its roots in francophone Québec and the province’s nationalist-cum-secessionist leanings within Anglophone Canada. Interculturalism is Québec’s answer to Canadian multiculturalism, which it has always rejected for watering-down its nationalist ambition. In Bouchard’s ( 2011 ) formulation, interculturalism is a code word for “majority precedence”, that is, the respect for and acceptance of the francophone majority culture by immigrants. This includes acceptance of French as public language (including the controversial obligation on immigrants to have their children schooled in French), “predominance to the majority narrative in national memory and history courses” (“je me souviens” is Québec’s official motto, adorning the province’s car license plates), the privileging of Christianity in the school curriculum, the burial of heads of State in Catholic churches, to keep the Christian cross on the Québec flag, Christmas decoration in public squares and buildings, and the sounding bells of Catholic churches (Bouchard, 2011 , p. 459). Bouchard calls this majority precedence “ad hoc” or “contextual”, distinguishing it from the “formal” precedence that, for instance, France imposes on its immigrants in terms of Republicanism. Indeed, what is striking in Bouchard’s catalogue is the predominance of linguistic and religious entries and, conversely, the complete absence of universalist and more political values or principles, such as freedom or equality, which are central to most other country’s pluralism-containing core commitments. This peculiarity is due to the fact that universalist-political values can’t distinguish Québec from the rest of Canada. Quebecois particularism flies because “the francophone majority is itself a precarious minority that needs protection in order to ensure its survival” (Bouchard, 2011 , p. 441).

This raises the interesting question whether “majority precedence” as the defining feature of majoritarian interculturalism is limited to the specific situation of Québec - a minority nation within a multinational state - or is generalizable to all nation-states in which there is a majority not wishing to be weakened or even extinguished by immigration. We shall see that every form of interculturalism will stress the importance of core values and principles that it does not want to see compromised by immigrant diversity. However, outside Québec this common core is strictly universalist and limited to the exigencies of liberal democracy itself (including a more functional approach to language as medium of communication rather than badge of identity).

What is “multiculturalism” according to an interculturalism that is primarily protective of “majority culture” (Bouchard, 2011 , p. 438)? First, it denies any communality between the two (though in effect, there may be little difference between them, as argues Taylor, 2012 ), and as a matter of fact all Québec governments have rejected Canadian multiculturalism ever since it was introduced in 1971. More controversially, Canadian multiculturalism, and with it all other forms of multiculturalism in Australia, Sweden, the United States, or India, are seen by Bouchard ( 2011 p. 441) as beholden to a “diversity” paradigm, in which there is “no recognition of a majority culture.” This is as if Patten’s ( 2014 ) plea for a neutrality-based multiculturalism of states without a Favoritvolk had come true. This may make sense for Canada or Australia, whose historical majority culture was an ancestral Britishness that had strongly racial connotations, excluding through their immigration and citizenship policies all Asians or Africans well into the 1960s, and even longer in Australia. However, Bouchard’s equation of multiculturalism with a symmetric diversity policy that does not recognize a majority culture greatly conflates different nation-state amalgams and resulting multiculturalism forms; above all, it denies the possibility, stressed by some of its theorists from Modood to Kymlicka, that multiculturalism itself could become a defining mark of majority culture if not of nationhood, which seems to be the case precisely for post-racist settler states like Canada and Australia (but not the United States, which separated from Britain early and disposes of a strong own founding myth).

One might think that majoritarian interculturalism, which operates with a majority-minority dualism, would provide a model for Europe, with its ethnic nation-state legacies (this is the assumption by Taylor, 2012 ). In reality, a different, post-majoritarian form of interculturalism has emerged in Europe. Its central document is the Council of Europe’s White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue, entitled “Living Together as Equals in Dignity” (Council of Europe, 2008 ). Espousing the interculturalism that is recognizable in the pages of Cantle or Zapata-Barrero, the White Paper advocates “intercultural dialogue” as alternative to a multiculturalism that “had been found inadequate” in this respect, on the one hand, and to an anyway long-denigrated “assimilation”, on the other hand. Both are found guilty of “the same, schematic conception of society set in opposition of majority and minority, differing only in endorsing separation of the minority from the majority…(or) assimilation to it” (Council of Europe, 2008 , p. 18). Whereas in Québec-style majoritarian interculturalism “diversity” is lodged on the opposite side of a majority-denying, cosmopolitan multiculturalism, here the starting assumption is the fact of “unprecedented and ever-growing” diversity (p. 9) this side of the divide, rendering anachronistic “old approaches”, multiculturalism included. Obviously, the new approach wanes diversity on its side, as argument to go beyond the groupist majority-minority binary that multiculturalism is said to be caught in while fueling “communal segregation” and “mutual incomprehension” (p. 19).

While the “multiculturalism” appearing through the majoritarian interculturalism lens barely matched any real-world multiculturalism, in fact transformed it into cosmopolitanism, post-majoritarian interculturalism suffers from the reverse problem of reduplicating the grossest stereotypes about multiculturalism, as separatist and “undermining the rights of individuals”, women in particular (Council of Europe, 2008 , p. 19). Therefore there is the same emphasis on fleshing out a common core as in majoritarian interculturalism, only that in the post-majoritarian variant the common core is not particularist but universalist, consisting of the core principles of liberal democracy. The “common identity”, which multiculturalism is accused of to have slighted or even violated, is dubbed “equality of human dignity”, “an ethos of respect for the equal dignity of every individual and hospitality towards the wider world” (p. 14). Furthermore, “intrinsic to such an ethos is dialogue and interaction with others” (p. 14). Distinguishing itself from multiculturalism and assimilation alike, interculturalism thus understood “incorporates the best of both. It takes from assimilation the focus on the individual; it takes from multiculturalism the recognition of cultural diversity. And it adds the new element, critical to integration and social cohesion, of dialogue and the basis of equal dignity and shared values” (p. 19).

Alas, which multiculturalist would deny the “equality of human dignity”, which in Taylor’s multicultural Programmschrift (Taylor, 1994 ) is exactly the starting-point for the modern “politics of equal recognition”, of which multiculturalism is only the difference-emphasizing variant? Which multiculturalist, in turn, would advance a total relativism of values and cultures, including honor killings, genital mutilation and other extreme practices, as seems to be the charge of the interculturalists? Moreover, when it comes to concrete policy proposals, the Council of Europe White Paper ( 2008 ) offers little beyond the standard fare long known from the liberal multiculturalism agenda: “positive action” (p. 39), “clear legislation and policies against discrimination” (p. 37), and local voting rights for immigrants (p. 42). Moreover, if “every form of stigmatization of persons belonging to minority and disadvantaged groups in public discourse needs to be ruled out” (p. 42), interculturalism even seems to endorse the restrictions on free speech and imposition of behavioural etiquettes that multiculturalists like Tariq Modood and Bhikhu Parekh, controversially (see the debate edited by Hansen, 2006 ), have demanded during the perennial Islam conflicts, from Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to the Danish Cartoons.

Multiculturalism in a liberal register

The pros and cons of multiculturalism have been extensively debated, so there is no need to repeat this here. Suffice it to say that, in my view (Joppke, 2017 ), the legal-constitutional resources of liberal states are more capacious than even the most convincing liberal theories of multiculturalism, those by Kymlicka ( 1995 ) and Patten ( 2014 ), have realized. So there is less need for explicitly “multicultural” policy commitments than commonly believed. Take again the case of Germany, which is an interesting case for its political hostility to but legal embracing of multiculturalism. In the recent jurisdiction of its higher courts, one can register an interesting equilibrium between multicultural and more centrist, civic commitments, and one could not even say where one ends and the other begins. For instance, for the sake of being socialized into a pluralistic society with many diverse lifestyles, Muslim school girls must stomach the view of boys in “tightly cut swimwear”, so that there is no exemption for them from co-educational swimming lessons in public schools. Footnote 1 However, the same endorsement of pluralism implies, in turn, that non-Muslim pupils must endure the sight of a headscarf-wearing school teacher, who is only exercising the constitutional right to practice her religion. Footnote 2 While both judgments yielded opposite outcomes - the refusal of a religious exemption request and the validation of an Islamic headscarf claim, respectively - they both affirm cultural pluralism, perhaps a preferable term to the spent “multiculturalism”. There is no alternative to pluralism and diversity, protected by the law, in a liberal society. This becomes especially clear when it is challenged, which is no rare event in the current climate of nationalist populism. Take German Interior Minister Thomas de Mazières recent foray for a “German Leitkultur ”, strangely entitled “We Are Not Burka”. Footnote 3 He cites the example of shaking hands as part of the German way of life. This is an informal practice that, of course, is not prescribed by law, and thus it goes beyond mere “constitutional patriotism” as the minimal integration requirement of a liberal society. Instead, the handshake points to something that keeps together German society “ im Innersten ” (in the innermost), and that “defines us and distinguishes us from others”, hence, the Germans’ Leitkultur . Habermas ( 2017 ) quickly responded that as informal cultural practice the handshake could not be made a legal obligation—then the “high five”, popular not only among youngsters, would have to be prohibited. Habermas overlooked that the Interior Minster saw that himself: “The word leiten (leading) means something else than to prescribe ( vorschreiben ) or to oblige ( verpflichten )”, one can read in his pamphlet. His plea for a German Leitkultur does not entail the renunciation of pluralism. Multiculturalism is not dead but very much alive in Germany, despite Chancellor Merkel’s famous diction that it has “utterly failed”.

Vacuity of the local

Multiculturalism is actually a much better, because nicely ambiguous and multivocal term for the pluralism that is inevitable in a liberal society than the neologism “interculturalism”. The drawback of the latter is to immediately point to a program or policy under its name. But which? From the city context, the true home ground of interculturalism, one knows that the “inter” refers to mayoral support for “projects” rather than “groups” (Uitermark, Rossi, & Van Houtum, 2005 ). But is there anything more to say than what this or that city does in the name of the “inter”, which might just as well go under the label “multi”, or under no particular label at all, as in “keeping things together”, which is Amsterdam charismatic mayor Job Cohen`s description of his pragmatic approach? In Zapata-Barrero’s ( 2017 , p. 141) appraisal of local and policy-savvy interculturalism, we learn that the main “concern” is “over how to manage contact in public spaces”. He lists the following “spaces” where “contact” is to occur: “community gardens, libraries, public amenities, festivals and neighbourhood spaces” (ibid.). What should one make of this? Communication in such settings is the kind of thing that city or district administrations have always and by definition been concerned about, what else are public places for? These places are nothing if not used by people, and what else should the latter do in them but talk or listen or read or gaze, all of which are communicative acts of sorts, even if the listening is to the whales (inside)? What are the specifically “intercultural” elements to this, except that an ethnic line is crossed, which is a trivia because shared humanity must always be at work?

One should mention here that a measure that, of course, is not of the intercultural tool box, the recent burka laws of France, Belgium, or Austria, which prohibit to cover one’s face in all public spaces, are exactly meant to facilitate communication and “dialogue” across ethnic group boundaries. In the French justification of the law before the European Court of Human Rights, the burka interrupts the “reciprocity” and the availability for communication that is said to be the life-blood of “civil society”. Footnote 4 Weirdly, the French government construed it to be the “right of others” that any person, including the pious Muslim woman, be always available for communication at any one time one pleases. As this “right” entails the obligation to always be available for communication, it naturally cannot be found in the European Convention of Human Rights. Of course, no interculturalist endorses forced “contact” of this sort. Because the point about “contact” is that it cannot be forced, at least not in a liberal society worth the name. But then you cannot say more about it than “nice” when it happens (and all goes well in its course), and just register a fact beyond your control, except perhaps trying to establish a “choice architecture” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008 ) that may facilitate talk and walk across group lines - say, placing a playground not within but at the intersection of two ethnic neighborhoods. The local as site of integration, though proverbially the site of integration, is entirely vacuous for the purposes of theory and better left to those who live and act it out at their discretion - too much state and policy there can only do harm, as in the notorious burka laws.

In fact, the burka laws, except the one in force in the Swiss canton of Ticino, are national laws, which shows the dangers of vacating the national in favor of the local. Kymlicka ( 2016 ) pointed out that “local projects of intercultural interaction (will) always be fragile in the absence of an explicit state commitment to redefining nationhood” (p. 172). His multiculturalism theory rests on the assumption that the “link between nationhood and liberal democracy creates systematic risks” for minorities (p. 168), which for the sake of liberal justice have to be compensated by multicultural minority rights. While the prospects for “multicultural nationhood”, which Kymlicka endorses much like Modood, may be somewhat hopeful for most European countries, the impulse not to leave “the nation” to the “exclusionary narrative” of the populists is a valid one (p. 174).

Problems with diversity

Interculturalists outside Québec have too lightly dismissed the majority-minority binary as anachronistic, and they have gone too far in indigenizing diversity, that is, generalizing it beyond the case of minorities and deeming the very majority category obsolete. It is not yet the case that “most so-called citizens have an immigrant background” (Zapata-Barrero, 2017 , p. 15). This does not mean that the majority category is unproblematic, quite the contrary. While interculturalists (outside Québec) dismiss the category as such, even liberals have started to debate whether majorities might need protection today. In democratic theory, majorities have always been viewed with skeptical eyes, as bent on “tyranny” if not checked by liberal constitutions that protect minorities qua individual rights. As Liav Orgad argues sharply, the “inevitable outcome of multiculturalism”, understood as scheme of minority rights, is the concept of a “distinctive cultural majority” (Orgad, 2016 , p. 3), which nevertheless remains legally uncharted. Considering recent demographic and immigration trends, with shrinking native populations and growing immigrant diasporas of ever more distant origins, respectively, perhaps the moment has come for something as paradoxical as a “liberal theory of majority rights” (Orgad, 2015 ). In a way, Orgad generalizes the Quebecois constellation of an embattled minority nation, while wisely endorsing only the European solution of “national constitutionalism” for defining the not-to-be-compromised common core. “National constitutionalism” strongly resembles “constitutional patriotism” as liberal formula of identity and unity in a diverse society. Calling this a theory of majority rights may thus be a misnomer, because all cultural particularism, except the one that supports and frames a particular instance of a liberal constitution, has been purged from it. The message is that whatever a “majority” is, it is a site of intense contestation, and interculturalism has too quickly dispensed with it in toto.

Conversely, interculturalists have too quickly embarked on the treacherous train of diversity, including its instrumentalist and business-minded variant of “diversity advantage” (Zapata-Barrero, 2017 , p. 13). Kymlicka ( 2015 , p. 21) is more on the mark when attacking “neoliberal multiculturalism” as “inclusion without solidarity”, whereby “equality” is reduced to “equal access to (or perhaps better: equal exposure to) the competitive global marketplace”. When “diversity” was created as a legal term, it was an argument against a remedial-justice oriented interpretation of American civil rights law, and it couched American society in the history-distorting colors of a “nation of minorities”, whites included (see Joppke, 2017 , pp. 57–58). From US Supreme Court Justice Powell’s invention on, “diversity” has been devoid of a justice dimension and presented as in the interest of domain-specific efficiency. No wonder that it quickly became a dominant management philosophy, led by the diction that “a more diverse workforce will…bring greater access to new segments of the marketplace” (Kelly & Dobbin, 1998 , p. 962). In the United States, diversity management replaced affirmative action programs, which became inopportune during the 1980s Reagan administration and henceforth were associated with ethnic one-upmanship. A manager in Kodak company’s Global Diversity Office puts it thus: “Diversity is not about advancing the agenda of special groups. Diversity includes everyone, and it requires the buy-in and commitment of all of our employees. It is diversity of ideas - not just race” (quoted in Joppke, 2017 , p. 59). An add by corporate investment giant Merrill Lynch performs diversity’s reductio ad absurdum: “ Be yourself . Race. Ethnicity. Religion. Nationality. Gender. Sexual orientation. In the end, there’s just one variety of human being. The individual. All six billion of us. Be bullish. Merrill Lynch ” (Joppke, 2017 , p. 57). If interculturalism buys into “diversity advantage”, as Zapata-Barrero ( 2017 ) suggests it does and should, it is cow-towing to neoliberalism.

War of words

The querelle between interculturalism and multiculturalism, picked by an interculturalism that has come into life only as a critique of multiculturalism, is in the first a war of words, despite some different accents here or there set by the interculturalists - in my view, not enough to warrant the neologism. I confer with Kymlicka and Modood’s view that interculturalists give a distorted picture of multiculturalism (particularly its liberal variant), and Kymlicka is also to the point about the mainly “rhetorical functions” and attending risks of the new speak. The great advantage of the multiculturalists is to have, at least, theories to bite one’s teeth into, while the interculturalists have little to nothing on offer in this respect. This does not mean to endorse the multicultural agenda of an explicitly group-recognizing and -protecting policy, which underrates the power of liberal constitutionalism to perform much of its tasks, short of its name. If one of the two terms is to be retained, it should be “multiculturalism”, because of its stubborn justice instincts. “Interculturalism” (outside Québec) concedes too much to the dual reign of neoliberalism and nationalist populism in our globalizing business civilization.

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How the failure of multiculturalism led to the rise of Black Lives Matter

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Since the killing of George Floyd, an African American man, during an arrest in May, 69% of people in the US report having discussed racial issues with others. Meanwhile, as the Pew research suggests , 82% say they will work with black people in their communities to resolve issues and 67% say they are supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement.

This is to be welcomed, because people’s inability to discuss race issues in a civil manner has further contributed to minority inequality and conflict. Indeed, this failure to have forthright discussions about race has led to people of different ethnic groups living parallel lives in the same cities.

This, along with the decreased life chances for non-white people in many western countries, is what the Black Lives Matter movement aims to eradicate. But it’s also important to recognise that one of the reasons Black Lives Matter came about in the first place is because the concept of multiculturalism has failed black people.

What is multiculturalism?

In essence, multiculturalism is the practice of giving importance to all cultures in a society. It rejects the idea that culture should be a “melting pot” and rather supports the notion of what sociologists refer to as the “salad bowl”, where different cultures coexist without domination; and where there is an integration and representation of cultures in various institutions, which can help to foster tolerance, cohesion and understanding.

The multiculturalism movement has gone through many different stages, influenced by historic events. But multiculturalism as many people think of it today came about as a result of the post-civil rights era. This was when multiculturalism moved away from its original focus of ethnic minority rights and became integrated with various human rights campaigns. Disadvantaged groups – such as women, people with disabilities, people of different religions, languages and social class – joined this struggle for equality against oppression.

As race issues became less important in the multicultural movement, equality for everyone became a more prominent theme. And this focus on equality and human rights for all, meant that multiculturalism failed to achieve transformation for black people in particular.

Racial inequality

Many sociological theorists have argued that multiculturalism has made little difference to black people’s lives because the majority of white people benefit from an oppressive system, so do not see a problem with the status quo. And multiculturalism, it seems, has been unable to fully challenge this oppressive system.

Historically, black people have found themselves at the bottom of the pile. This is not to say that racism directed at other groups is not significant, but racism harms black people the most .

Take, for example, the fact that schools in minority communities tend to be not as well equipped and the fact that black children in both the UK and the US are disproportionately more likely to fail in school than other ethnic groups. Research from the UK has also found that black people are more likely to be discriminated against when applying for a mortgage or when wanting to rent a house .

Studies from the US and the UK have also shown that black people are more likely to have access to poor social amenities, are more likely to be discriminated against in the job market and are paid less for the same job .

Add to this the fact that black people in the US are more likely to be killed by the police , have high rates of teenage pregnancy , but are also much more likely to lose a child in childbirth – this is also the case in the UK. As if this wasn’t enough, black people are also more likely to go to jail and have higher chances of having a chronic disease or a mental health issue.

So while black children may start off with the same dreams as children from other ethnic backgrounds, as they move through life the options open to them narrow – dreams are abandoned and hope is lost.

Systemic failures?

It’s crucial to appreciate that racism is so systemic that without people drawing attention to the deep-rooted and often invisible nature of the issue, it would be easy for many people to ignore.

This is why the Black Lives Matter movement wants to confront and shake up the system and bring the plight of black people to the global consciousness.

In her book White Fragility , author Robin DiAngelo explains that black people are the “ ultimate racial other ”. And that white people routinely become defensive and disbelieving when their ideas about race and racism are challenged. It’s maybe not surprising then that just as Black Lives Matter went global, so too did the backlash .

Research has found that those most likely to be prejudiced against Black Lives Matter are white people with conservative views. This is maybe not totally surprising but for there to be real change for black people it is vital that everyone is able to recognise the benefits of a more integrated society.

This is where teaching children a broader curriculum that includes black history would help. As would a focus on past and present campaigns for racial and social justice. Indeed, this would help students to appreciate links between global histories and those of their own communities. Because without Black Lives Matter the promise of true multiculturalism will continue to remain something of a pipe-dream.

• Multiculturalism
• Black Lives Matter
• Integration
• Black people
• Black Lives Matter UK
• Black Lives Matter protests

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10 Multiculturalism Policy in Canada: Conflicted and Resilient

• Published: July 2022
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The year 2021 represents the 50th anniversary of the adoption of multiculturalism in Canada. Clearly, multiculturalism policy has stood the test of time. However, more than sheer longevity is involved. In programmatic terms, multiculturalism has advanced the goals that animated its introduction in 1971. It has helped to change the terms of integration for immigrant communities, laying to rest ideas of assimilation, and creating space for minorities to maintain and celebrate aspects of their culture and traditions while participating in the mainstream of Canadian life. In addition, multiculturalism has been part of a broad state-led redefinition of national identity, helping to build a more inclusive sense of nationalism. Judged by these original goals, the multiculturalism program has met with considerable success. However, multiculturalism has limits. It has not eliminated racial inequality, and the commitment to diversity seems fragile at times, most recently in the case of Muslims. In addition, multiculturalism has been a conflicted political success. The policy is not embedded in a comprehensive political consensus, and potent political challenges have emerged in the name of social conservatism and Québec nationalism. Nonetheless, the policy has had sufficient political support to survive at the national level for half a century. In effect, multiculturalism is a case of conflicted political success and resilient program success. Moreover, judged by the experience of democratic countries generally, Canadian multiculturalism seems even more successful. Perhaps most importantly, the policy has arguably helped to forestall the type of anti-immigrant backlash we have seen elsewhere.

Introduction

The year 2021 represented the 50th anniversary of the adoption of multiculturalism in Canada. Clearly, multiculturalism policy has stood the test of time. However, more than sheer longevity testifies to its success. In programmatic terms, the multiculturalism approach has clearly advanced the goals that animated its introduction in 1971. The immediate goal was to change the terms of integration for immigrants, laying to rest ideas of assimilation and creating space for minorities to celebrate aspects of their traditional culture and customs while participating in the mainstream of life in the country. Inherent in this immediate goal, however, was a larger, long-term mission. Multiculturalism was also part of a broad state-led redefinition of national identity, an effort to diversify the historic conception of the country as a British/French society, and to build a more inclusive nationalism reflective of Canada’s cultural complexity.

As we shall see, multiculturalism has met with considerable success in advancing these goals. It has changed the terms of integration for immigrants, which has helped strengthen their sense of attachment to the country, their embrace of a Canadian identity, and their engagement in political life. In terms of its implicit symbolic goal, the idea of multiculturalism has become deeply embedded in Canadian culture, at least in English-speaking Canada, and has contributed to a more inclusive form of Canadian national identity. Admittedly, multiculturalism has not eliminated racial discrimination in Canada, and the commitment to diversity seems fragile at times, most recently in the case of Muslims. Nonetheless, judged against the experience of other democratic countries generally, multiculturalism policies have succeeded in enhancing the attachment of immigrants to Canada and contributed to a more inclusive sense of national identity. More speculatively, multiculturalism has arguably helped forestall the type of anti-immigrant backlash we have seen elsewhere.

Multiculturalism has had sufficient political support to survive and adapt to change for over half a century. Unlike some European countries, Canada has never rejected the multicultural approach to diversity. However, multiculturalism is not embedded in a deep and comprehensive political consensus. Political challenges have emerged from several directions, the most potent of which have been rooted in social conservatism and Québec nationalism. The multicultural approach has largely survived social conservatism at the national level, but Québec nationalism proved potent. Canadian multiculturalism now lives in a secondary position in diversity management in that province.

To advance this assessment, this chapter proceeds in four sections. We first specify more clearly the nature of multiculturalism policies as they are understood in Canada. We then examine the political drivers and the policy process, which have been deeply entwined. Next, we assess the programmatic impact of multiculturalism policies, in terms of both immigrant integration and the wider terrain of Canadian culture and identity. The final section pulls the threads of the argument together.

Multiculturalism Policy: What is it and what is it not

How should states respond to growing ethno-racial and religious diversity? During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries states engaged in nation-building projects, seeking to reinforce their status in the international political order by nurturing a robust nationalism among their populations ( Weber, 1976 ; Hobsbawm, 1992 ). This process of nation-building left little room for minorities. In their efforts to build a common culture and identity, states sought to assimilate or marginalize internal ethnic minorities, and were hostile to immigration flows that would diversify their populations. Starting in the 1960s, however, we see a shift towards a more accommodating approach to state-minority relations. The new approach was part of a broader liberalization of the normative order in the West. World War II was a watershed in attitudes towards ethnicity, race, and human rights, as manifested in decolonization, the American civil rights movement, and similar movements elsewhere. This new normative order underpinned the widespread adoption of anti-discrimination instruments to protect the individual rights of citizens. It also gave life in many countries to a multicultural approach to diversity, including a more accommodating approach to immigrants ( Triadafilopoulos, 2012 ).

Historically, Canada, like many states, had an assimilationist approach to immigration. Immigrants were encouraged and expected to assimilate to the mainstream culture, with the hope that they would become indistinguishable from the native-born population over time. Indeed, groups that were seen as incapable of this sort of cultural assimilation (e.g. Asians, Africans) were prohibited from immigrating to Canada. This assimilationist approach was slowly discredited in the post-war period, and officially repudiated in the late 1960s and early 1970s ( Kelly and Trebilcock, 2010 ). The first step was the implementation of race-neutral admissions criteria in immigration policy in 1967, after which immigrants increasingly came from non-European and non-Christian societies. The second step was the adoption of a more multicultural conception of integration, one that expects that many members of immigrant communities will wish to visibly express their ethnic identity, and that accepts an obligation on the part of public institutions to accommodate their distinctiveness. This multicultural accommodation is afforded not only to recent immigrants, but to all members of minorities that owe their presence in the country to immigration, including those born in Canada.

The concept of multiculturalism is widely debated, and there is no universally accepted definition of the concept. For our purposes here, the defining feature of multiculturalism policies is that they go beyond the protection of the basic civil and political rights guaranteed to all individuals in a liberal-democratic state, to also extend some level of recognition, accommodation, and support for minorities to express their distinct identities and practices. Multiculturalism, therefore, is not just about ensuring the non-discriminatory application of laws in a diverse context, but about changing the laws and regulations themselves to accommodate the distinctive needs and aspirations of minorities.

Conceptually, multiculturalism policies for immigrants have three basic purposes: to recognize, accommodate, and support cultural diversity ( Banting and Kymlicka, 2006 ). Recognition implies that the state acknowledges immigrant minorities as legitimate components of the wider population, that the state ‘sees’ them as they see themselves and accepts them as part of ‘us’. Accommodation involves the adjustment of existing laws and policies to facilitate the participation of immigrants in economic, social, and political life. Inevitably, immigrants make the biggest adjustments during the integration process, but the idea of accommodation implies that the host society also makes adjustments in its institutions to facilitate their inclusion. Finally, support involves the provision of concrete services or regulatory changes that enable immigrant groups to preserve their distinctiveness.

These three purposes imply a whole-of-government approach. Too often, Canadians assume that federal multiculturalism policy is the small program of grants provided to immigrant groups. In fact, it is much broader. For example:

Recognition can be seen in section 27 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which directs that the rights guaranteed by the Charter are to be ‘interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.’ Recognition can be seen at work in the educational curricula of schools that incorporate the history and contributions of immigrants to Canada. Recognition is also entrenched in the Broadcasting Act, which requires that broadcasters ‘reflect the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada’. Minorities should see themselves, and be seen on television screens.

Accommodation involves changes in laws and regulations, such as acceptance of dual citizenship and exemptions from official dress codes. Such accommodations have always been the most controversial part of multicultural strategies, and have represented flashpoints in the last decade.

Support to assist immigrant minorities to preserve their distinctive cultures can be seen in the funding of ethnic organizations and associations, public funding to support mother-tongue instruction, or the inclusion of racialized immigrant minorities in employment equity programs to assist disadvantaged minorities.

Historically, Canada was a leader among countries in adopting such policies and initiatives, as can be seen with the help of the cross-national Multiculturalism Policy Index. This Index ranks the strength of multiculturalism policies across 21 democratic countries over the four decades between 1980 and 2020 (Appendix 1 provides details of the construction of the Index. For a fuller discussion, see Banting and Kymlicka, 2013 ).

Table 10.1 presents the ranking for the full set of countries. Two conclusions stand out. First, Canada, along with Australia, was an early leader in the adoption of a multicultural approach to immigrant diversity. Second, a range of other countries increasingly adopted a measure of multiculturalism policies, which suggests a process of emulation across countries.

Political and Process Assessment: A Contested Project

The political drivers of multiculturalism policy, and the policy process through which it evolved, have been deeply entwined from the outset. In the early years, a multi-party political consensus protected the program, allowing it to evolve through a relatively deliberative process. In the 1990s and 2000s, however, the multi-party consensus weakened. Since then, policy development has been driven increasingly by party ideology and partisan electoral objectives, with very different implications for the policy process. Over time the politics of the policy has become more conflicted ( McConnell, 2010 ).

At its origins, multiculturalism was an unanticipated by-product of efforts to accommodate the rise of Québec nationalism during the 1960s. When a royal commission recommended a policy of bilingualism and biculturalism, privileging people of British and French heritage, well-established immigrant minorities, including Ukrainians, Portuguese, Italians, and others, pushed back against a dualist definition of the country that did not include them. The result was the policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework, which was announced in 1971, embedded in the constitution in 1982, codified in legislation in 1988, and confirmed after a major review in 1997. Although the multiculturalism policy was adopted in response to pressure from groups who were largely European and Christian (with the addition of the Jewish community), it became a policy template that could be rolled forward to incorporate new immigrants who were racially and religiously more distinct from traditional Canada.

The initial policy was announced in 1971 by a Liberal prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. The integrationist intent of the initiative was clear in the four goals he outlined:

to ‘assist all Canadian cultural groups that have demonstrated a desire and effort to continue to develop a capacity to grow and contribute to Canada’;

to ‘assist members of all cultural groups to overcome cultural barriers to full participation in Canadian society’;

to ‘promote creative encounters and interchange amongst all Canadian cultural groups in the interest of national unity’;

to ‘assist immigrants to acquire at least one of Canada’s official languages in order to become full participants in Canadian society’. ( Trudeau 1971 ).

The traditional brokerage style of Canadian political parties provided considerable protection for both immigration and diversity in the late stages of the twentieth century. Debates over immigration proceeded within ‘an unprecedented political and public consensus’ on a generally liberal policy, a pattern highlighted by the near-unanimous passage of the 1976 Immigration Act ( Kelley and Trebilcock, 2010 , 379). This consensus largely extended to multiculturalism as well. It was the Progressive Conservative government led by Brian Mulroney that embedded multiculturalism in legislation in 1988. Political debates in this period tended to focus on program details rather than fundamentals.

In this politically protected context, the policy process engaged a relatively small sector, operating through interactions among bureaucratic officials and leaders of ethnic organizations, with external consultants providing occasional reviews and ministers providing intermittent direction ( Pal, 1993 ). This executive-dominated system facilitated a deliberative and consultative process and an evolutionary approach to policy change. Within a year of the announcement of the program in 1971, the Multiculturalism unit had rolled out nine programs, the most important of which was the grants program. Reviews and adjustments occurred in 1975 and 1981, without significant political conflict.

In these early days, the emphasis in the grants program was on cultural celebration and retention. However, tensions soon emerged between established ethnic organizations and groups representing new arrivals from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, who ‘were less interested in celebrating their cultures than in battling discrimination and racism’ ( Pal, 1993 , 137). Over time, the focus of the program shifted from cultural retention to equality, tolerance, and antiracism, an orientation codified when the Conservatives introduced the Canadian Multiculturalism Act the following year. However, this focus was soon short-circuited. During the 1990s and 2000s, a crisis in Québec-Canada relations and the prospect of a second Québec referendum on independence shifted priorities in the multiculturalism program from anti-racism and accommodation towards a more explicit focus on integration (Griffith, 2103; Abu-Laban and Gabriel, 2002 ).

Multiparty consensus clearly facilitated a deliberative policy process. However, that process also tended to insulate the program from growing latent unease. During the 1990s, criticisms of multiculturalism emerged in intellectual circles, media commentary, and parliamentary debates ( Ryan, 2010 ). More importantly, two serious political challenges, political challenges moved to centre stage, driven by social conservatism and Québec nationalism.

Challenges (I): Social Conservatism

Anxieties about multiculturalism burst into the political domain in the election of 1993, which saw the breakthrough of the populist Reform Party. The Reform Party articulated a potent social conservatism and a highly individualist approach to diversity. The party opposed ‘special’ status for Québec, spending on Aboriginal peoples, gender equality, multiculturalism and affirmative action, all of which they saw as catering to ‘special interests’ ( Harrison, 1995 ). Reform activists occasionally criticized the levels of non-white immigration that had emerged in the previous two decades, and in 1990 the party officially criticized immigration policy for changing the ethnic makeup of Canada ( Laycock, 2012 , 90). Following their electoral breakthrough, party leaders tried to tone down anti-immigrant views in official party positions ( Flanagan, 1995 , 197–198). However, the party did not hold back on multiculturalism. The Reform Party’s 1996–97 Blue Book of policies stated that the party ‘opposes the current concept of multiculturalism and hyphenated Canadianism pursued by the Government of Canada. We would end funding of the multicultural program and support the abolition of the Department of Multiculturalism’ (as quoted in Griffiths, 2013 , 8–9). Their 1997 election manifesto was less comprehensive, but pledged to lead a campaign to repeal the multicultural section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is part of the constitution of the country ( Reform Party, 1997 ).

Although the Reform Party did not last, its views on immigration and diversity became one stream of opinion that flowed into the restructured Conservative Party in the early 2000s ( Farney, 2012 ; Thomas and Sabin, 2019 ; Wilkins-Laflamme and Reimer, 2019 ). The result was a complicated balancing act. When the Conservatives came to power in 2006, they adopted a multi-track approach. For economic reasons, the government continued to support existing levels of immigration. However, in the domain of multiculturalism and citizenship, the government struggled with two conflicting imperatives: to build long-term electoral support among immigrant groups, and to appeal to social conservatives among its electoral base. This tension between these imperatives has been dubbed the ‘populists’ dilemma’ in Canada ( Marwah et al., 2013 ).

The arrival of a Conservative government at the federal level disrupted the policy process. The new government moved the multiculturalism program from the Department of Canadian Heritage to the department responsible for immigration, implicitly indicating that multiculturalism was about newcomers and not the multiple generations within minority groups, let alone the attitudes of all Canadians. The Conservatives also reduced funding for the grants program. More importantly, ideology became the primary driver of policy direction, and the role of public servants narrowed to issues of implementation, rather than broad policy ( Griffith, 2013 ). The new government distrusted research-based approaches and relied on opinion polls and personal contacts with their supporters. As a result, the principal connection with immigrant groups shifted from bureaucratic to political channels. The government’s determination to build electoral support among immigrant voters produced energetic ministerial engagement with immigrant groups across the country, and grants represented a useful political tool to realize this goal. In the cautious words of a former official, the program was reshaped in part to find ‘ways to deliver grants and contributions funding that met Ministerial requirements’ ( Griffith, 2013 , 18; see also Tolley, 2017 ).

Policy content also shifted. The Harper government never explicitly attacked multiculturalism, relying on a more stealthy strategy to shift the balance from accommodation to integration, and to send symbolic reassurance to social conservatives ( Abu-Laban, 2014 ; Carlaw, 2021 ). Symbolically, their 2009 revisions to the citizenship guide, given to immigrants preparing for the citizenship tests, sought to rejuvenate an earlier conception of Canada by downplaying multiculturalism in favour of Canada’s military history and its legacy of British institutions and traditions ( Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2009 ). The Conservatives also questioned the loyalty of dual citizens, and toughened standards for the citizenship test, driving down the success rate, especially among immigrants with low family income, low proficiency in official languages, and low educational levels ( Hou and Picot, 2020 ). In addition, the Conservatives repeatedly targeted Muslims, the least popular minority in the country ( Triadafilopoulos and Rasheed, 2020 ). They symbolically denounced ‘barbaric cultural practices’ in the revised citizenship guide and countless ministerial speeches, and, in 2011, Jason Kenney, the then minister for citizenship, immigration, and multiculturalism, announced that those wishing to become Canadian citizens would have to uncover their face during the citizenship oath. In 2015, the government legislated on a range of its complaints in its Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act.

This complicated juggling act of appealing simultaneously to immigrant voters and to social conservatives seemed to work during the election of 2011 ( Bricker and Ibbitson, 2013 ; Kwak, 2019 ). However, the strategy fell apart during the election campaign of 2015. The pre-campaign period had been marked by the Syrian refugee crisis, and the Conservative government adopted a historically cautious policy of admitting only 10,000 refugees. This position imploded politically early in the election campaign when pictures of the lifeless body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach, flashed around the world. Conservatives pivoted quickly to an anti-Muslim trope, campaigning hard on a promise to protect Canadian values against the alleged threat posed by Muslim women wearing the niqab. In the middle of the campaign, the courts struck down their ban on the niqab during citizenship ceremonies. Rather than conceding, the Conservatives doubled-down, appealing the judgment to the Supreme Court, promising a ‘barbaric cultural practices’ tipline on which Canadians were encouraged to inform on their neighbours, and suggesting a ban on the niqab not only during the oath of citizenship but also in the civil service. These measures proved a step too far ( Kymlicka, 2021 ). Support for the Conservatives dropped in the last weeks of the campaign, and the Liberals won the election and immediately raised the target intake of Syrian refugees, with the new prime minister personally handing out winter coats to the first arrivals at the airport. Later, the former Conservative immigration minister admitted that their emphasis on ‘barbaric cultural practices’ made many immigrants, including non-Muslims, nervous. ‘It’s why we lost … we allowed ourselves to be portrayed in the last election as unwelcoming. That was a huge mistake.’ ( CTV News, 2016 ).

In time, the Liberal government also reversed a number of policies. They accepted the court’s decision on the niqab and amended the Canadian Citizenship Act to make it easier to gain citizenship and to eliminate revocation provisions introduced by the Conservatives. They modified the barbaric practices legislation, established several anti-racism initiatives, and launched a revision of the citizenship guide. In addition, they returned the multiculturalism program to the Department of Canadian Heritage and reversed the decline in funding. The most dramatic imprint of social conservatism was thus diluted. Nonetheless, while sympathetic to multiculturalism, the Liberal government also moved cautiously in the politicized environment, and it is notable that the revised citizenship guide did not emerge before the 2019 election. Indeed, it still had not appeared at the time of the 2021 election.

Challenges (II): Québec Nationalism

Meanwhile, Québec was developing its own approach to diversity, known as interculturalism, with two features that set it apart from the federal approach. First, while federal multiculturalism promotes the choice of two official languages, English and French, the Québec model defines French as the language of public life in the province. Beginning in the 1990s, Québec also developed a distinct approach to diversity, announced in a policy document entitled Let’s Build Québec Together: Policy Statement on Integration and Immigration ( Quebec, 1990 ). While federal multiculturalism assumes integration into either the English- or French-speaking language communities, it was seen as otherwise implying the equal recognition of all cultures, negating the centrality of any particular culture. In contrast, Québec’s intercultural approach defines the majority culture in the province as the central hub towards whichminority cultures are expected to move ( Gagnon and Iacovino, 2007 ; Labelle and Rocher, 2009 ).

In the early years, there was considerable debate about whether federal multiculturalism and Québec interculturalism actually differed much on the ground. In the 2000s, however, the differences were magnified by the growing salience of religion. Commentators in Québec increasingly define secularism as a central feature of Québec culture, and many Québecers fear that this commitment to laicité is undermined by the greater religiosity of some minorities, especially the Muslim and Sikh communities. The result has been a series of increasingly intense controversies around the wearing of religious symbols. In an attempt to calm the waters, the Liberal government of Jean Charest appointed a consultative commission led by two senior scholars of diversity, Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor. Their report failed to resolve the tensions ( Bouchard and Taylor, 2008 ). In 2013, a Parti Québécois government proposed a Québec Charter of Values that would restrict wearing all religious symbols in the public space, but the government was defeated in an election before their proposal passed. In 2017, a Liberal government passed milder legislation, which was quickly challenged in the courts. Finally, in 2019, the government of the Coalition Avenir Quebec succeeded in passing the Loi sur la laïcité de l’État , which prevents new employees in the public sector from wearing religious symbols, and requires members of the public to uncover their face when receiving public services. To preempt legal challenges, the government took the dramatic step of invoking the notwithstanding clause, which shields the legislation from review under the Charter of Rights for five years.

As a result, two diversity models prevail in the province of Québec, reflecting two distinct nation-building projects. The federal multicultural approach continues to apply in federal areas of jurisdiction in Québec with respect to the granting of citizenship and the conduct of citizenship ceremonies. However, Québec’s less accommodating model dominates most of the public space within which Québecers live.

Hence the assessment of multiculturalism as a conflicted political project. It has stood the test of time for half a century and has survived challenges from social conservatism that have proved potent elsewhere. But multiculturalism has had to concede ground to a different approach in Québec, home to one-quarter of the Canadian population. Although the implementation of Québec’s legislation limiting religious dress has resulted in a reduction in the overall ranking of Canada in the Multiculturalism Policy Index from 7.5 out of 8 in 2010 to 7 out of 8 in 2020, it is important not to overstate the impact of this one provincial dimension on an overall assessment of the multicultural experience. Other dimensions continue to apply across the country and, as Table 10.1 confirms, Canada remains one of the most multiculturalist members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Programmatic Assessment: Resilient Success

In assessing the programmatic success of multiculturalism, we focus on its explicit and implicit goals: adjusting the terms of immigrant integration, and building a more inclusive conception of Canadian culture and identity. The assessment draws primarily on evidence about the impact of Canadian programs. However, given the problems inherent in drawing inferences about causality from a single case, the discussion also draws on studies that compare the experience of countries that adopted multicultural strategies with countries that rejected the approach.

Immigrant Integration

As we have seen, multiculturalism policies are designed to change the terms of integration, to enable immigrant minorities to participate in Canadian life without having to fully surrender their own culture. The underlying assumption has been that easing the cultural costs of integration will encourage immigrant minorities to embrace the country more fully. Some critics have worried that such policies have the opposite effect of encouraging social segmentation, with minorities living separately in parallel societies. The evidence, however, is consistent with the view that multiculturalism policies enhance the integration of immigrants in political and social life.

We begin with immigrant identity. Immigrants tend to retain their ethnic identity in virtually all countries, but the extent to which they also embrace the national identity of their host society varies. In the Canadian case, immigrants are comfortable with multiple identities and embrace a Canadian identity, with their levels of commitment to Canada on some measures higher than those of the population as a whole ( Soroka et al., 2007 ). Recently, Bilodeau and his colleagues (2019) found that the sense of belonging among first-generation immigrants is strong. They conclude that ‘immigrants’ perception of their relationship with Canada appears overwhelmingly positive and is thus consistent with the claim that Canada represents a success story when it comes to immigrant inclusion’ ( Bilodeau, 2019 , 5; see also Hou et al., 2016 , and White et al., 2015 ).

Feelings of acceptance and attachment enhance political engagement. The rate at which immigrants become citizens remains high by international standards. In her classic study of naturalization in Canada, Bloemraad argued that multiculturalism policies in Canada help immigrants to feel accepted, increasing their interest in formally joining the country’s national community ( Bloemraad, 2006 ). Bilodeau and his colleagues also find that feelings of attachment and acceptance are strongly related to political participation, including interest in politics, turning out to vote, and confidence in legislative institutions ( Bilodeau et al., 2019 ). Immigrant voter turnout is similar to the native born population, although turnout among racial minority immigrants is lower ( Gidengil and Roy, 2016 ), a point to which we return in the next section.

Many factors undoubtedly shape these patterns, and it is difficult to disentangle the distinct role of multiculturalism policies. However, comparative analysis provides supplementary support. An obvious comparison is between Québec and the rest of Canada, since the two parts of the country have different approaches to diversity. A study based on data from the early 2000s found a lower sense of belonging among racial-minority immigrants in Québec than elsewhere in the country, especially among the second generation ( Banting and Soroka, 2012 ). Additional evidence comes from a recent study examining the impact of major changes in integration policies in Québec, the proposed Québec Charter of Values in 2014, and the banning of religious dress in 2019. These policy shifts, and the divisive politics surrounding them, further weakened immigrants’ sense of attachment to Québec generally, but this effect was especially prevalent among Muslims ( Bilodeau and Turgeon, 2021 ).

Cross-national comparative analysis also finds that immigrant identification with the host country is stronger in countries that have adopted multiculturalism policies than in countries that have shunned the approach ( Wright and Bloemraad, 2012 ; Citrin et al., 2012 ). Social psychologists have long argued that there is no automatic trade-off between attachment to minority and majority identities, and that the benefits of hyphenated or nested identities are easier to achieve in multicultural settings ( Berry, 2005 ; Nguyen and Benet-Martinez, 2013 ; Guimond et al., 2014 ). Cross-national evidence on political participation points in the same direction. There is a strong positive relationship across democratic societies between multiculturalism policies and immigrant acquisition of citizenship ( Liebig and Von Haaren, 2011 , 27–28).

This relationship may reflect easier access to citizenship in countries that have also adopted strong multicultural policies, but it also likely reflects greater symbolic support for immigrants becoming citizens in more multicultural states. In addition, an early study by Koopmans and colleagues concluded that immigrants in more multicultural settings are more likely to engage in nonviolent activities, and their activism focuses more on the host country than the country of origin ( Koopmans et al., 2005 , 128, 137). Finally, the representation of immigrants and ethnic minorities in national legislatures is higher in multicultural countries. In a detailed analysis, Alba and Foner conclude:

In Britain, Canada and the United States, state models of multiculturalism or ethnic pluralism have reinforced the effects of the electoral, political and party systems in providing scope for ethnic minority candidates…. In contrast, the ways in which France and Germany have defined immigrants and their integration into the state have hindered ethnic minorities’ ability to gain electoral office. ( Alba and Foner, 2015 , 165).

Nonetheless, there are limits to multiculturalism policies. The approach has clearly not eliminated racial economic inequality in Canada. Although there are considerable differences across racial minorities, poverty levels among some racialized communities are much higher than across the population as a whole. Among Blacks, Arabs, and West Asian communities in particular, high poverty rates persist into the second and even the third-plus generations ( Banting and Thompson, 2021 ). There is also evidence that job applicants with foreign-sounding names face discrimination in the labour market ( Oreopoulos, 2011 ). Defenders of multiculturalism might reply that, as in the case of political representation, multiculturalism policies reduce the levels of discrimination that would otherwise prevail. Support for this view comes from a comparative study of the ‘ethnic penalties’ in the labour market faced by second-generation racial-minority individuals, that is, people who were born and educated in the country and speak the local language. Although racialized minorities in all of the countries included in the study earn less than one would expect given their levels of education, the penalties were considerably smaller in Canada; indeed, the authors conclude that in comparison with ten major democratic countries, racial minority groups tend to be most successful in Canada ( Heath, 2007 , 658). While a variety of factors are undoubtedly responsible for this outcome, the multiculturalist context is undoubtedly a part of the mix.

Defenders of multiculturalism might further argue that expecting multiculturalism to fully offset racial economic inequality inflates the original promise of multiculturalism, which was about the equality of cultures more than equality of incomes. The policy tools relevant to economic inequality, including income redistribution and labour market regulation, have seldom been defined as central to the multicultural mandate. However, critical race theorists worry that by focusing attention on cultural recognition, multiculturalism serves to reassure Canadians that their country has a progressive response to diversity, deflecting attention from the realities of racial discrimination and racial economic inequality ( Thobani, 2007 ; Galabuzi, 2006 ; Bannerji, 2000 ).

The debate over the impact of multiculturalism on racial inequality echoes broader debates about ‘recognition versus redistribution’, in which the central question has been whether focusing on cultural recognition deflects concern for material inequality ( Fraser, 1995 ). One form of this debate has asked whether multiculturalism undercuts support for redistribution and weakens the coalitions sustaining the welfare state. However, the accumulated cross-national empirical evidence is now clear that countries that adopted multiculturalism policies have not had greater difficulty in sustaining redistribution. Indeed, if anything, the relationship between multiculturalism and support for redistribution is positive (for a summary of the recent evidence, see Banting et al., 2022 ). We should, therefore, not assume too quickly that Canada’s policies of multicultural recognition have weakened efforts to reduce racial inequality. The politics of inequality are not necessarily zero-sum, and societies can tackle different forms of inequality at the same time.

In the end, the failure to eradicate racial inequality does point to the limits of multiculturalism. Nonetheless, when judged against its explicit goals, multiculturalism policies have been a comparative success. They have adjusted the terms of integration, helping immigrant minorities to retain elements of their culture and traditions while joining the social and political mainstream. Measured against experience in other countries on this dimension, the Canadian record suggests that multiculturalism represents part of a successful response to diversity.

Canadian Attitudes and Culture

Inherent in the multicultural goal of changing the terms of integration for immigrant minorities has been the implicit goal of redefining Canadian identity ( Uberoi, 2008 ). Multicultural norms were expected to help to ‘normalize’ diversity, especially for younger generations, slowly reshaping embedded collective memories ( Harell, 2009 ; also Esses et al., 2006 ).

For Canadians, especially younger Canadians, multiculturalism has become a defining feature of their national identity. As Figure 10.1 indicates, almost all Canadians consider multiculturalism to be very important or somewhat important to Canadian national identity. Of course, it is unclear how Canadians conceive of multiculturalism when answering such questions, and some respondents may simply be celebrating the ethnic diversity of the population. However, the import seems to go further. Support for multiculturalism reflects a culture of acceptance of diversity, which in turn undoubtedly contributes to the sense of acceptance registered by immigrants that we saw earlier.

How Important Is Multiculturalism to Canadian Identity?

This interpretation finds support in survey evidence about public attitudes towards the different types of multiculturalism policies. Using the terms of our earlier grouping of multiculturalism policies, Canadians seem strongly committed to policies that recognize diversity as a legitimate feature of Canadian life, as Table 10.2 suggests. In contrast, Table 10.3 suggests Canadians are less enthusiastic about changing policies or providing additional services to accommodate difference. The tables also highlight the differences between respondents in Québec compared to the rest of the country (ROC), especially on accommodation issues, although it should be noted that this survey was conducted in 2014 during an intense debate over the proposed Québec Charter of Values, which may have influenced responses in Québec.

The limits of multiculturalism are also evident in other ways. Despite the public’s embrace of multiculturalism as a symbol, racial discrimination persists. Since the early 2000s, comprehensive evidence has been available on immigrants’ sense of discrimination: 35 per cent of racialized minorities reported having experienced discrimination or unfair treatment, with Blacks, South Asians, and Chinese having the highest rates ( Statistics Canada, 2003 , 18–19; also Reitz and Banerjee, 2007 ). In the contemporary period, anti-Muslim sentiments have flourished, not just in Québec; data from 2014 found that 20 per cent of Muslims had experienced discrimination during that year ( Wilkins-Laflamme, 2018 ). The contradiction between broad public support for multiculturalism and considerable Islamophobia defies easy explanation ( Donnelly 2021 ). Muslims have emerged as the least-favoured religious minority in the country, and Islam has been framed internationally as an illiberal, intolerant, and at times, a violent religion. Evidence to the contrary about Muslims in Canada—a 2016 Environics Institute survey of Canadian Muslims revealed their relatively liberal outlook ( Environics, 2016 )—does not break through such perceptions. As discourse during the 2015 election campaign demonstrated, opposition to Islam is justified as protecting a tolerant, liberal-democratic order, leading Triadafilopoulos and Rasheed to speculate that ‘in a peculiar way,… support for multiculturalism may inform opposition to Islam’ (2020, 1).

Despite the limits to Canadians’ embrace of multiculturalism, the ethos remains important. Multiculturalism has helped sustain public support for one of the largest immigration programs among democratic countries. In the words of one analyst, ‘popular multiculturalism creates a positive political environment for the development of Canada’s expansionist immigration policy and helps immigrants integrate into the economy and society’ ( Reitz, 2014 , 108; see also Gonzalez-Barrera and Connor, 2019 ). Moreover, Canadian support for immigration has remained remarkably stable throughout the turmoil of the 2000s. Canada is not immune to the tensions that exist in other countries, and about 30 per cent of Canadians worry that immigrants do not embrace Canadian values. Moreover, in recent years attitudes have become more polarized between supporters of the Conservative Party and supporters of the Liberal and New Democratic parties ( Banting and Soroka, 2020 ). Nonetheless, the stability in general support for immigration is impressive, and the pervasive multicultural identity helps sustain this distinctive feature of Canada.

The implications likely go further. Canada also stands out as a country whose politics have not been transformed by anti-immigrant backlash and authoritarian anti-system politics. Certainly, there are populist strains in Canadian politics. A radical-right party, the People’s Party of Canada, participated in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections; and in the winter of 2022 truckers’ protest conveys pararalyzed the capital city for close to a month and blocked several border crossings. Nonetheless, Canadian popualism has a distinctive hue. Analysts of populist backlash elsewhere have debated the extent to which such reactions are driven by economic factors, such as growing precarity and inequality, or cultural factors such as immigration and diversity. The consensus seems to be that both are involved, but that cultural drivers predominate ( Norris and Inglehart, 2019 ; Bonikowski, 2017 ; Sides et al., 2018 ). Along with other democratic countries, Canada has experienced a growth of inequality and precarious employment. However, potential anti-system populists cannot also tap into a deep public hostility to immigration and are thereby deprived of a major ingredient that has fuelled backlash elsewhere. As a result, recent populist mobilization has centred on anti-government attitudes and opposition to public health manadates. The People’s Party of Canada received a derisory 1.6 per cent of the vote in 2019 when it ran on an anti-immgrant platform; but it captured almost 5 percent of the vote in 2021 when it ran on opposition to public health mandates. Similarly, despite xenophobic tinges to the trucker conveys, it was opposition to public health mandates, not immigration, that fueled the protest. Undoubtedly, other factors are important in explaining the limited electoral impact of populist backlash, including the electoral system, which punishes small protest parties whose support is evenly distributed across the country ( Triadafilopoulos and Taylor, 2021 ). Nevertheless, multiculturalism undoubtedly helps reduce the impact of anti-immigrant populism in Canada.

Conclusions

The strongest evidence of the success of Canadian multiculturalism lies in a programmatic assessment. The launch of the multiculturalism strategy was a highly ambitious initiative. Governments know how to transfer income and deliver services. By contrast, efforts to transform cultures, identities, and the symbolic ordering of a society represent sensitive and potentially dangerous political terrain. Yet the evidence suggests that multiculturalism policies have succeeded in their two major goals: facilitating the social and political integration of ethnic and racial minorities and contributing to a more inclusive sense of Canadian identity and culture.

Multiculturalism has programmatic limits. It may have reduced levels of racial inequality in political and economic life, but it has not eliminated racism’s corrosive effects. Nonetheless, the benefits of multiculturalism should not be discounted. Given the demographic realities of Canada, some form of multicultural identity would seem to be the only basis on which a reasonably integrated and peaceful society could persist on the northern half of the North American continent. Yet the emergence of such an identity was not inevitable. Experience elsewhere suggests that not all countries have transitioned as successfully to an identity consistent with contemporary diversity.

Any assessment of the policy process through which multiculturalism policies are shaped must be more qualified. In the early decades, multiculturalism policies evolved in a deliberative process of bureaucratic-group relations, with occasional political interventions. That process was able to adapt the program to successive changes in the demography of minorities and the problems they faced. However, the idea of an evidence-based, consultative policy process has been undermined by the politicization of multiculturalism in recent decades. Policy has been increasingly driven by ideological conflicts, and at times multiculturalism seems becalmed, too hot to touch even by a government that in principle is sympathetic.

In political terms, multiculturalism has been conflicted. It has persisted for half a century, including in recent decades when the concept became controversial in many other countries, especially in Europe. Despite its remarkable longevity, however, the policy strategy is not sustained by a deep and comprehensive political consensus. Elements in the conservative movement in Canada are uncomfortable with the celebration of difference implicit in the concept; and Québec has rejected multiculturalism in favour of a different conception of state-minority relations.

In the end, however, multiculturalism’s greatest political contribution may be found in what has not happened. Canada stands out in the international community, not only as a distinctly multicultural country but also as a country that has avoided the anti-immigrant backlash which has reshaped the political terrain in many countries, weakening the sinews of democracy as it goes. Radical-right populism exists in Canada, but it is not energized by anti-immigrant themes. While we may debate the relative importance of multiculturalism policies in that outcome, its role cannot be easily dismissed. That alone is a singular mark of success.

Appendix A The Multiculturalism Policy Index

The eight indicators used to build the MCP Index for immigrant minorities are:

constitutional, legislative, or parliamentary affirmation of multiculturalism, at the central and/or regional and municipal levels;

the adoption of multiculturalism in the school curriculum;

the inclusion of ethnic representation/sensitivity in the mandate of public media or media licensing;

exemptions from dress-codes, either by statute or by court cases;

allowing of dual citizenship;

the funding of ethnic group organizations to support cultural activities;

the funding of bilingual education or mother-tongue instruction;

affirmative action for disadvantaged immigrant groups.

These eight indicators capture the main ways in which states express multiculturalist commitments, which we earlier described as ‘recognition’ (indicators 1–3), ‘accommodation’ (indicators 4–5), and ‘support’ (indicators 6–8). To build the index, countries are scored on each indicator as 0 (no such policy), 0.5 (partial), or 1.0 (clear policy). The component scores are then aggregated, with equal weighting for each indicator, producing a country score ranging from 0 to 8. (For the empirical evidence supporting the rankings, see Wallace et al, 2021 .)

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Essay on Multiculturalism

Students are often asked to write an essay on Multiculturalism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Multiculturalism

What is multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is when people from different places, with different ways of living and different beliefs, come together in one society. It’s like a salad bowl, where each unique ingredient adds to the flavor, making it better.

Benefits of Multiculturalism

When we live in a place with many cultures, we learn a lot. We get to try new foods, celebrate different festivals, and make friends with different backgrounds. This teaches us to be kind and open-minded.

Challenges of Multiculturalism

Sometimes, people find it hard to understand each other’s ways. This can lead to disagreements. But, talking and learning about each other’s cultures can help solve these problems.

Multiculturalism in Schools

Schools are great for multiculturalism. Kids learn about the world’s cultures and languages. This helps them become better citizens of the world, ready to work and live with all kinds of people.

250 Words Essay on Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is when many different cultures live together in one place. Imagine a school where students come from all around the world. They may speak different languages, eat different foods, and celebrate different holidays. This mix of cultures adds variety and can make life more interesting.

Living in a multicultural society is like having the world at your doorstep. You get to learn about other ways of life without traveling far. For example, you can try different types of food, listen to new music, and make friends with people who have different stories to tell. This can help us become more understanding and accepting of others.

Sometimes, when people from different backgrounds live together, they might not agree on everything. It can be hard to understand someone who is very different from you. But it’s important to talk and listen to each other. This is how we can solve problems and live together peacefully.

Learning from Each Other

In a place full of different cultures, we can learn a lot from each other. We can see that even though we might do things differently, we often have the same hopes and dreams. By sharing our cultures, we can teach each other new things and grow together.

In conclusion, multiculturalism is about different cultures living together and learning from one another. It has its ups and downs, but it makes our world a more exciting and caring place.

500 Words Essay on Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is like a big garden with many different types of flowers. Each flower has its own color, shape, and smell. This garden is more beautiful because it has so many kinds of flowers. In the same way, multiculturalism means having people from many different cultures and backgrounds living together in one place. Just like each flower adds beauty to the garden, every culture adds something special to a country or community.

When people from different cultures come together, they share their ways of life, their food, music, and stories. This sharing makes life more interesting for everyone. Imagine eating the same food every day; it would be boring. But in a multicultural place, you can try new foods, learn new dances, and hear different languages. It’s like going on a trip around the world without leaving your home.

In a multicultural school, you might have friends from different countries. You can learn from them about their holidays, how they dress, and what games they play. This is not just fun, but it also helps you understand how people see the world in different ways. By learning about other cultures, you become smarter and more understanding. It’s like each new friend is a new book full of exciting stories and lessons.

Sometimes, having many cultures together can be hard. People might not understand each other because they speak different languages or have different customs. It’s like when you play a team game, and everyone has different rules. To play well together, you need to learn the same rules. In multiculturalism, the “rules” are respect and kindness. When everyone follows these rules, it’s easier to get along.

How to Support Multiculturalism

You can support multiculturalism by being curious and open-minded. This means wanting to learn about other cultures and not being afraid of things that are different. It’s like trying a new sport; at first, it might feel strange, but you might end up loving it. You can also support multiculturalism by standing up for your friends if someone is not being nice to them because they are from a different culture.

Multiculturalism is like a colorful quilt. Each piece of fabric is different, but when sewn together, they make something warm and beautiful. Living in a multicultural world helps us learn, grow, and understand each other better. It’s important to remember that even though we might look or speak differently, inside, we all have feelings, dreams, and the need to be loved and respected. So, let’s celebrate the beauty of every culture and build a world where everyone feels like they belong.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Multicultural Diversity
• Essay on Mother Nature
• Essay on Favourite Holiday Destination

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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