Has Multi-Culturalism Had Its Day?

Writing in the latest issue of London-based Prospect (the magazine I edit), a leading German Social Democrat, Ernst Hillebrand, has this to say about multiculturalism in Europe: “The left’s answer to a significant rise in European immigration in recent decades—the concept of ‘multiculturalism’—has failed dramatically. It has led to fragmented societies and ghettos of marginalised minorities in which the mutual frustrations of both indigenous populations and immigrants have increased. This applies above all to immigrants from Islamic countries, among whom the second and third generations often have much more hostile attitudes to western society and its values than their elders. For many years the left refused to even debate this issue.”

Hillebrand may be overstating the case but this is a more or less commonplace observation these days in Europe. In Britain, the country I know best, the political class is certainly more confused about immigration and multiculturalism than it was 15 years ago. The issue now cuts across many of the usual tramlines of political thought and, by forcing us to consider the boundaries of national cultures, citizenship and belonging, it seems to challenge the universalist tendency of modern liberalism from which multiculturalism has sprung.

It used to be so much simpler, especially for people on the left. West Indian and Asian immigration into Britain in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s was economically beneficial (all those dirty, low-paid jobs that needed doing) and culturally enriching (adding a flash of colour to the staid stoicism of Anglo-Saxon culture). Moreover, it was socially just, allowing people from poorer countries—many of which had suffered under British colonial rule—to become richer at the stroke of an immigration official’s pen. Opposition to immigration or to the right of immigrants to publicly cherish their ethnic identities was seen as the product of a primitive, pre-liberal nativism or racism.

This narrative, although born on the left, emerged to become the dominant multicultural story about immigration in the 1980s and ’90s. It was reinforced by another narrative, born on the right, about free markets and globalization. Surely, if goods and capital were now flowing freely around the world, then labour must be allowed the freedom to migrate too. Meanwhile, a political world view was emerging—mainly among the educated—that was anti-national and post-socialist and rooted instead in a mix of universalist liberalism (crossborder human rights) and political relativism (there is no dominant political culture in Britain; rather, a multicultural ethnic rainbow).

Much of that story—but not all—is now in retreat. This is not because the average British citizen has become more racist (although it is true that the far right has never been as electorally successful). The principle of antidiscrimination and citizenship equality is now more widely embraced and practised than ever before in British history, thanks in part to the Labour government elected in 1997. But the political world view described above has proved far too insouciant about the nation-state and feelings of identity and belonging. Moreover it has struggled to formulate a practical response to the many challenges associated with the new mass immigration: the surge of both genuine and bogus asylum seeking in the late 1990s, the unprecedented increase in legal immigration (more than one million non-British people were given residence rights between 1998 and 2004), the unexpected arrival of around 500,000 new citizens of the European Union after May 2004 and the race riots in northern England in 2001, followed soon after by 9/11 and four years later by the 7/7 London attacks, which triggered an intense questioning of multiculturalism, especially in relation to the Muslim minority. Many Muslims, it seemed, wanted not just the right to equal citizenship but the right to diverge from several aspects of contemporary liberalism—such as free speech and women’s equality—and to impose some of those preferences on the wider society, thus testing to destruction the tension between group rights and liberalism that lies at the heart of liberal multiculturalism.

On the face of it, in Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity, Will Kymlicka disdains even to consider this “crisis of multiculturalism.” Multicultural Odysseys is mainly about the internationalization of his own, Canadian, brand of liberal multiculturalism. Yet if one reads between the lines it is also a howl of frustration at how little progress multiculturalism has made on the international scene, despite the best efforts of a generation of like-minded officials and academics working in the international institutions. Furthermore, not only has multiculturalism failed in the post-communist countries (most disastrously in the former Yugoslavia) and the post-colonial ones, but according to Kymlicka it is impossible to prove whether it has been a success or not in developed countries.

This latter point, coming from the world’s leading liberal multiculturalist, is rather extraordinary. Surely it is a far better experience to be an immigrant to Canada or a member of an indigenous group than it was 40 years ago. Why can’t multiculturalism claim at least some of the credit for that? One problem might be that it is, of course, famously slippery to define: either the word is used too generally (to mean simply being friendly to foreigners) or it is too narrow and technical, referring to the lists of national policies that academics like Kymlicka construct (on issues such as financial support for ethnic minority organizations) to show which countries are more or less multicultural. But a more plausible explanation for Kymlicka’s caution about the success of multiculturalism is that it has mutated into an ideology with a world view, priesthood and historical narrative of its own, and makes complex claims about institutions and human feelings that are simply too hard to measure. By claiming too much for itself, it ends up foregoing credit for incremental, real-world advances.

Reading some multiculturalist accounts—and Kymlicka is sometimes guilty of this—one is left with the impression that minority and human rights were invented by multiculturalists in western (probably Canadian) universities in the 1970s. The long, noble history of the struggle for both individual and “group” rights over the past 500 years in European societies seems scarcely to exist to these writers. But one perfectly respectable reading of English/British history over that period—the Whig interpretation of history—is the gradual extension of rights and full citizenship to an ever-wider group of people, from the middle class to members of minority religions (Catholics and Jews in particular), to the working class, to women and, most recently, to ethnic minorities. And what was the Dreyfus affair about in France if not the extension of full citizenship to the previously excluded? There is even a long prehistory of group representation from the Millett system in the Ottoman empire to consociational power sharing in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria.

Nonetheless, Kymlicka does have a fascinating account of what one might call the “universalist shift” of the mid 20th century in which the ancient ideal of the moral equality of all humans came to be enshrined in both national law (in the West) and international conventions, most famously the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. A combination of two world wars, the Holocaust, the anti-colonial movement and the civil rights movement in the United States undermined the rationale for ethnic and racial hierarchies, and began, for the first time, to make equal citizenship a reality at least in liberal western countries. Yet, as Kymlicka points out, as recently as 1919 when Japan had proposed that a clause on racial equality be included in the covenant of the League of Nations, it was rejected by all the major western powers including the U.S., Canada and Britain. (Kymlicka is typically ungenerous toward the dominant classes and political cultures of the West in ascribing the acceptance of this mid-century universalist shift not to the working out of the logic of political liberalism but either to the brute political force of the excluded themselves or to the propaganda needs of the Second World War and then the Cold War.)

Strong multiculturalism is, of course, about a lot more than minority or human rights and equal citizenship—that, in a sense, is the easy part. It is also about accepting the idea that minority ethnicities belong in the public sphere and that all ethnic identities should be allowed proportionate space in the national culture. There are two famous problems with this. The first problem is that Kymlicka and his fellow liberal multiculturalists want to have their cake and eat it too on group rights versus liberalism. They are not much help when liberalism clashes with the group rights of illiberal minorities such as some Muslim groups or native Canadians. The second problem is that Kymlicka ignores ethnic majorities, assuming that just because France speaks French or Britain speaks English, there is no need to recognize the existence of a majority culture—thereby creating what Canadian critic Eric Kaufmann has called “asymmetrical multiculturalism.” This greatly limits the appeal of multiculturalism worldwide too. Imagine the Fijians going for a “rainbow” nation in which they do not feature.

Although Canada is without question an impressive social model, it is not clear that multiculturalism is responsible for that success. Indeed, it is not even clear to me that Canada is more multicultural than Britain. Britain, with its tradition of laissez-faire multiculturalism is, for example, much more relaxed about faith schools than Canada, and about sharia courts too (the archbishop of Canterbury has recently given them a qualified welcome). It may be that Canada scores better on Kymlicka’s technical lists of multicultural virtue (which few citizens are aware of), but surely the significant difference between the two countries is that Canada has been far more welcoming of mass immigration than Britain, and far more discriminating about who it lets in, which has made integration and equal citizenship easier to achieve in Canada.

But if Canada remains an admirable model of minority integration, multiculturalism as a powerful intellectual and ideological current is surely on the wane. In its weak form as a lobby for minority rights, its work is now part of mainstream politics, and in its stronger form as a lobby to promote (as opposed to just allow) subnational ethnic identities, it is undesirable in modern welfare democracies.

So how, then, should both old citizens and new relate to society and the state? My own preference is through a post-ethnic ethos of national citizenship. Since the universalist shift it has become axiomatic in developed nations that all humans are morally equal and worthy of equal regard, wherever they live. This truism appears to undermine the case for favouring our own fellow citizens above those of other countries. But this does not prevent us doing so in practice—consider the fact that in Britain we spend 25 times more each year on the National Health Service than we do on development aid. It is possible, indeed desirable, to regard all humans as morally equal and yet to consider national citizens to have special obligations to each other that do not extend to all humanity—after all, we do not consider our own families to be morally superior to others, yet we would not hesitate to put our family interests above those of others. Until a couple of hundred years ago the basis of this national “specialness” would have been mainly ethnicity—shared ancestry, history, sacrifice and myths. In multi-ethnic and multi-racial societies the basis of specialness is the “thinner” fabric of citizenship itself.

To some liberal universalists the special claims of citizenship will still seem to be merely an assertion. What is the moral basis of the specialness? I believe it is ultimately a pragmatic claim relating to the efficacy of the nation-state. Most of the things that liberals desire—democratic legitimacy and accountability, equality of citizenship, economic redistribution, strong welfare states, the shared language and norms that can create the bonds of fellow-feeling—only work effectively at the level of the nation-state.

For this reason we should be glad that as the smoke clears from the great globalization explosion of the past 25 years, we can see that the nation-state is still standing, if not wholly unscathed then in reasonably good shape. It is true that as economic borders and regulations have fallen away, some of the traditional government levers for controlling the national economy have lost their power. But even in the EU, which has a more developed supranational structure than anywhere else in the world, the nation-state remains easily the most significant element in the political lives of citizens.

Multiculturalists often argue that the concept of human rights is preferable to the “narrower” idea of national citizenship—but to work properly, the idea of human rights presupposes the solidarity that Kymlicka and the liberal multiculturalists imagine that it creates. Rights that we claim are also demands that we make on each other. They presuppose a political community, and that community is not all of humanity. Contrary to the human rights ideologists, people are not born with rights and, regrettably, many of the world’s six billion people have few or none. Rights are a social construct, a product of history, of ideas, of struggles and of (mainly national) institutions. And most rights imply reciprocal demands to perform certain duties, such as abiding by the law of the land or, rather more onerously, paying more than one third of your income to the state. Rights are not a free lunch—in a democracy, asserted rights can be sustained only if a critical mass of the population accepts the corresponding obligations.

Accepting those obligations—for example, paying into a generous welfare state even if you may be a net loser—is one of the cornerstones of a good society. But if society changes too fast, if the underlying assumption that “we are all in this together” is no longer accepted, then the rights asserted by some citizens will no longer connect to an obligation felt by others.

However multiple and hybrid our identities, people still need to connect to the wider social and political entities of which they are a part. Yet the continuity and shared experience that create communities are undermined by many modern trends. As affluence, mobility and individualism weaken the group identities of class, ethnicity and religion, national citizenship remains the only over-arching vehicle for the collective commitments that the left holds dear. A progressive or liberal nationalism—comfortable, in Britain’s case, with its multi-ethnic and multi-racial character and its place in the EU—is part of the answer to the “progressive dilemma,” the tension between solidarity and diversity (see my essay “Too Diverse?” Prospect, February 2004).

This does not mean ignoring or downplaying distributional and other conflicts of interest between groups within the national society, especially when inequality has been growing so sharply in recent decades. Nor does it require an uncritical attitude to the nation or its history and symbols. The left has often, with justice, mocked excesses of national vanity and antipathy to foreigners, and should continue to do so. But equally, the hostility toward national feeling and the nation-state—reflected in the work of Kymlicka and other liberal multiculturalists—is itself, in part, an anachronistic hangover from an earlier and more brutal era. Those days are gone; national feeling can now be put to better use—in both Canada and Britain.