Minority Group and Multiculturalism Essay

Ideas round the legal and semipolitical accommodation of heathenal vicissitude commonly termed multi socialalism emerged in the West as a vehicle for successor older nisuss of ethnical and racial hierarchy with red-hot relations of representative citizenship. Despite substantial evidence that these policies ar making progress toward that goal, a chorus of political leaders has decl ard them a failure and herald the death of multiculturalism.This popular master narrative is problematic because it mischaracterizes the spirit of the experiments in multiculturalism that hold up been undertaken, exaggerates the extent to which they pitch been aband unitaryd, and misidentifies not only the genuine difficulties and limitations they charter encountered entirely the options for addressing these problems. Talk about the retreat from multiculturalism has obscured the point that a form of multicultural consolidation trunk a live option for western sandwich democracies. Thi s invoice challenges four powerful myths about multiculturalism. First, it disputes the caricature of multiculturalism as the noncritical celebration of diversity at the expense of addressing grave societal problems such(prenominal)(prenominal) as unemployment and social isolation. Instead it offers an account of multiculturalism as the pursuit of new relations of elective citizenship, inspired and constrained by human- in good orders ideals. Second, it contests the idea that multiculturalism has been in wholesale retreat, and offers instead evidence that multiculturalism policies (MCPs) hasten persisted, and prepare plain openhanded stronger, all over the past ten years. Third, it challenges the idea that multiculturalism has failed, and offers instead evidence that MCPs have had positive effects. Fourth, it disputes the idea that the spread of civic integration policies has displaced multiculturalism or rendered it obsolete. The report instead offers evidence that MCPs are fully consistent with certain forms of civic integration policies, and that indeed the combination of multiculturalism with an enabling form of civic integration is two normatively desirable and empirically effective in at to the lowest degree slightly cases. To help address these unloosens, this paper draws upon the Multiculturalism Policy Index.This index 1) identifies octet concrete policy areas where liberal-democratic says faced with a choice decided to separate to a greater extent than multicultural forms of citizenship in relation to immigrant groups and 2) measures the extent to which countries have espoused few or all of these policies over time. While there have been some high-profile cases of retreat from MCPs, such as the Netherlands, the general pattern from 1980 to 2010 has been one of meek strengthening. Ironically, some countries that have been vociferous about multiculturalisms failure (e. g. , Germany) have not actually practiced an active multicu ltural strategy.Talk about the retreat from multiculturalism has obscured the fact that a form of multicultural integration remains a live option for Western democracies. However, not all attempts to meet new models of multicultural citizenship have taken root or succeeded in achieving their intended effects. There are several factors that arse either assuage or impede the successful implementation of multiculturalism Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the forthcoming 1 MIGRATION insurance INSTITUTE Desecuritization of ethnic relations.Multiculturalism works best if relations between the commonwealth and minorities are put one acrossn as an issue of social policy, not as an issue of state security. If the state perceives immigrants to be a security threat (such as Arabs and Muslims after 9/11), support for multiculturalism provide drop and the space for minorities to even voice multicultural claims will diminish. Human rectifys. Support for multiculturalism rests on th e assumption that there is a shared commitment to human rights across ethnic and ghostlike lines. If states perceive certain groups as unable or involuntary to complaisance human-rights norms, they are un seeming to accord them multicultural rights or re obtains. untold of the ricochet against multiculturalism is fundamentally dictated by anxieties about Muslims, in cross, and their sensed unwillingness to embrace liberal-democratic norms. Border control. Multiculturalism is more controversial when citizens fear they endure control over their borders for instance when countries are faced with large meter (or unexpected surges) of unauthorized immigrants or asylum seekers than when citizens feel the borders are secure. miscellanea of immigrant groups.Multiculturalism works best when it is genuinely multicultural that is, when immigrants come from many source countries rather than coming overwhelmingly from just one (which is more likely to lead to polarized relations with the majority). Economic contributions. Support for multiculturalism depends on the perception that immigrants are holding up their end of the bargain and making a good-faith endeavor to contribute to society finickyly economically. When these facilitating conditions are present, multiculturalism stinkpot be seen as a low-risk option, and indeed seems to have worked well in such cases.Multiculturalism tends to lose support in high-risk situations where immigrants are seen as predominantly illegal, as potential carriers of illiberal practices or movements, or as net burdens on the welfare state. However, one could present that rejecting immigrant multiculturalism under these circumstances is in fact the higher-risk move. It is precisely when immigrants are perceived as illegitimate, illiberal, and burdensome that multiculturalism may be most affected. I. Introduction Ideas about the legal and political accommodation of ethnic diversity have been in a state of flux aroun d the gentlemans gentleman for the past 40 years.One hears much about the draw near and fall of multiculturalism. Indeed, this has become a kind of master narrative, widely invoked by scholars, journalists, and policy exoneraters alike to explain the evolution of contemporary debates about diversity. Although muckle resist about what comes after multiculturalism, there is a surprising consensus that we are in a post-multicultural era. This report contends that this master narrative obscures as much as it reveals, and that we need an alternative framework for thinking about the choices we face.Multiculturalisms successes and failures, as well as its level of public acceptance, have depended on the constitution of the issues at stake and the countries problematic, and we need to understand these variations if we are to identify a more sustainable model for accommodating diversity. This paper will argue that the master narrative 1) mischaracterizes the nature of the experiments in multiculturalism that have been undertaken, 2) exaggerates the extent to which they have been abandoned, and 3) misidentifies the genuine difficulties and limitations they have encountered and the options for addressing these problems.2 Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE forrader we clear decide whether to celebrate or lament the fall of multiculturalism, we need first to make sure we know what multiculturalism has meant both in guess and in practice, where it has succeeded or failed to meet its objectives, and under what conditions it is likely to thrive in the future. The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism The master narrative of the swot and fall of multiculturalism helpfully captures important characteristics of our current debates. only in some respects it is misleading, and may obscure the significant challenges and opportunities we face. In its simplest form, the master narrative goes like this1 Since the mid-1990s we have see n a go on and retreat from multiculturalism. From the 1970s to mid-1990s, there was a clear trend across Western democracies toward the increased recognition and accommodation of diversity done a range of multiculturalism policies (MCPs) and minority rights.These policies were endorsed both at the domestic level in some states and by international organizations, and involved a rejection of primitively ideas of unitary and homogeneous nationhood. Since the mid-1990s, however, we have seen a backlash and retreat from multiculturalism, and a reassertion of ideas of nation building, common values and identity, and unitary citizenship even a call for the return of assimilation. This retreat is destinyly driven by fears among the majority group that the accommodation of diversity has gone in any case far and is threatening their way of life.This fear practically expresses itself in the put on of nativist and populist right-wing political movements, such as the Danish Peoples Pa rty, defending old ideas of Denmark for the Danish. still the retreat alike reflects a belief among the center-left that multiculturalism has failed to help the intended beneficiaries namely, minorities themselves because it has failed to address the underlying sources of their social, economic, and political exclusion and may have unintentionally contributed to their social isolation.As a result, even the center-left political movements that initially championed multiculturalism, such as the social democratic parties in Europe, have backed 1 For influential academic statements of this rise and fall narrative, claiming that it applies across the Western democracies, see Rogers Brubaker, The Return of Assimilation? ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 4 (2001) 53148 and Christian Joppke, The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State Theory and Policy, British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (2004) 23757.There are also many accounts of the decline, retreat, or crisis of mul ticulturalism in particular countries. For the Netherlands, see Han Entzinger, The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism in the Netherlands, in Toward Assimilation and Citizenship Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States, eds. Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska (London Palgrave, 2003) and Ruud Koopmans, Trade-Offs between Equality and Difference The Crisis of Dutch Multiculturalism in Cross-National Perspective (Brief, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, December 2006).For Britain, see Randall Hansen, Diversity, integrating and the Turn from Multiculturalism in the United Kingdom, in Belonging? Diversity, Recognition and shared out Citizenship in Canada, eds. Keith G. Banting, Thomas J. Courchene, and F. Leslie Seidle (Montreal Institute for explore on Public Policy, 2007) Les Back, Michael Keith, Azra Khan, Kalbir Shukra, and posterior Solomos, New Labours White Heart Politics, Multiculturalism and the Return of Assimilation, governmental Quarterly 73, No. 4 (2002) 4 4554 Steven Vertovec, Towards post-multiculturalism?Changing communities, conditions and contexts of diversity, International sociable Science Journal 61 (2010) 8395. For Australia, see Ien Ang and John Stratton, Multiculturalism in Crisis The New Politics of Race and National Identity in Australia, in On non Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West, ed. I. Ang (London Routledge, 2001). For Canada, see Lloyd Wong, Joseph Garcea, and Anna Kirova, An Analysis of the Anti- and Post-Multiculturalism DiscoursesThe Fragmentation Position (Alberta Prairie Centre for Excellence in Re attend on Immigration and Integration, 2005), http//pmc.metropolis. net/Virtual%20Library/FinalReports/Post-multi%20FINAL%20REPORT%20for%20PCERII%20_2_. pdf.For a good overview of the backlash discourse in various countries, see Steven Vertovec and Susan Wessendorf, eds. , The Multiculturalism Backlash European Discourses, Policies and Practices (London Routledge, 2010). Multiculturalism Success, Fail ure, and the Future 3 MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE away from it and shifted to a discourse that emphasizes civic integration, social cohesion, common values, and shared citizenship.2 The social-democratic discourse of civic integration differs from the radical-right discourse in emphasizing the need to develop a more inclusive national identity and to fight racism and discrimination, but it until now distances itself from the rhetoric and policies of multiculturalism. The term postmulticulturalism has often been invoked to signal this new approach, which seeks to overcome the limits of a naive or misguided multiculturalism small-arm avoiding the oppressive reassertion of homogenizing national ideologies.3 II. What Is Multiculturalism? A. Misleading Model In much of the post-multiculturalist literature, multiculturalism is characterized as a feel-good celebration of ethnocultural diversity, encouraging citizens to acknowledge and embrace the panoply of impost, traditions, melody, and cuisine that exist in a multiethnic society. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown calls this the 3S model of multiculturalism in Britain saris, samosas, and steeldrums. 4.Multiculturalism takes these familiar cultural markers of ethnic groups clothing, cuisine, and music and treats them as authentic practices to be preserved by their members and safely consumed by others. Under the banner of multiculturalism they are taught in school, performed in festivals, displayed in media and museums, and so on. This celebratory model of multiculturalism has been the concentre of many critiques, including the following It ignores issues of economic and political inequality.Even if all Britons come to enjoy Jamaican steeldrum music or Indian samosas, this would do nothing to address the real problems veneer Caribbean and South Asian communities in Britain problems of unemployment, poor teachingal outcomes, residential sequestration, poor English language skills, and political marginalization. These economic and political issues cannot be solved simply by celebrating cultural differences. Even with respect to the (legitimate) goal of promoting greater understanding of cultural differences, the focus on celebrating authentic cultural practices that are unique to each(prenominal) group is potentially dangerous. First, not all customs that may be traditionally practiced at bottom a particular group are worthy of being celebrated, or even of being legally tolerated, such as forced marriage. To avoid stirring up controversy, theres a tendency to choose as the focus of multicultural celebrations safely inoffensive practices such as cuisine or music that can be enjoyably consumed by members of the large society. scarcely this runs the opposite risk 2.For an overview of the attitudes of European social democratic parties to these issues, see Rene Cuperus, Karl Duffek, and Johannes Kandel, eds. , The take exception of Diversity European Social Democracy Facing Migration, Integr ation and Multiculturalism (Innsbruck Studien Verlag, 2003). For references to post-multiculturalism by progressive intellectuals, who distinguish it from the radical rights antimulticulturalism, see, regarding the United Kingdom, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, subsequently Multiculturalism (London Foreign Policy Centre, 2000), and Beyond Multiculturalism, Canadian Diversity/Diversite Canadienne 3, no.2 (2004) 514 regarding Australia, James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera The Story of Australian Immigration, second edition (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2007) and regarding the United States, Desmond King, The Liberty of Strangers Making the the Statesn Nation (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2004), and David A. Hollinger, Post-ethnic America Beyond Multiculturalism, revised edition (New York Basic Books, 2006).Alibhai-Brown, After Multiculturalism. 3 4 4 Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE of the trivialization or Disneyfication of cult ural differences,5 ignoring the real challenges that differences in cultural and religious values can raise. Third, the 3S model of multiculturalism can encourage a conception of groups as hermetically sealed and static, each reproducing its own distinct practices.Multiculturalism may be intended to encourage people to share their customs, but the assumption that each group has its own typical customs ignores transitiones of cultural adaptation, mixing, and melange, as well as emerging cultural commonalities, thereby potentially reinforcing perceptions of minorities as eternally other. This in turn can lead to the strengthening of prejudice and stereotyping, and more generally to the polarization of ethnic relations. Fourth, this model can end up reinforcing power inequalities and cultural restrictions within minority groups. In deciding which traditions are authentic, and how to interpret and display them, the state generally consults the traditional elites within the group ty pically older males while ignoring the way these traditional practices (and traditional elites) are often challenged by internecine reformers, who have different views about how, say, a good Muslim should act. It can therefore imprison people in cultural scripts that they are not allowed to question or dispute.According to post-multiculturalists, the growing recognition of these flaws underlies the retreat from multiculturalism and signals the search for new models of citizenship that emphasize 1) political participation and economic opportunities over the symbolic politics of cultural recognition, 2) human rights and individual freedom over respect for cultural traditions, 3) the building of inclusive national identities over the recognition of genetic cultural identities, and 4) cultural change and cultural mixing over the depersonalization disorder of static cultural differences.This narrative about the rise and fall of 3S multiculturalism will no doubt be familiar to many r eaders. In my view, however, it is inaccurate. Not only is it a caricature of the reality of multiculturalism as it has developed over the past 40 years in the Western democracies, but it is a distraction from the real issues that we need to face.The 3S model captures something important about immanent human tendencies to simplify ethnic differences, and about the logic of global capitalism to sell cosmopolitan cultural products, but it does not capture the nature of post-1960s government MCPs, which have had more complex historical sources and political goals. B. Multiculturalism in Context It is important to put multiculturalism in its historical context. In one sense, it is as old as humanity different cultures have ever found ways of coexisting, and respect for diversity was a familiar feature of many historic empires, such as the Ottoman Empire.But the relegate of multiculturalism that is said to have had a rise and fall is a more specific historic phenomenon, emerging fir st in the Western democracies in the late 1960s. This timing is important, for it helps us situate multiculturalism in relation to larger social transformations of the postwar era. More specifically, multiculturalism is part of a larger human-rights whirling involving ethnic and racial diversity.Prior to cosmea War II, ethnocultural and religious diversity in the West was characterized by a range of illiberal and monarchical relationships of hierarchy,6 justified by racialist ideologies that explicitly propounded the superiority of some peoples and cultures and their right to rule over others. These ideologies were widely accepted throughout the Western world and underpinned both domestic laws (e. g. , racially biased immigration and citizenship policies) and foreign policies (e. g. , in relation to overseas colonies). 5 6 Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada.(Toronto Penguin, 1994). Including relations of conqueror and conquered, colonizer a nd colonized, master and slave, settler and indigenous, racialized and unmarked, normalized and deviant, orthodox and heretic, polish and primitive, and ally and enemy. Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future 5 MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE After World War II, however, the world recoiled against Hitlers fanatical and murderous use of such ideologies, and the United Nations decisively repudiated them in favor of a new political orientation of the equality of races and peoples.And this new assumption of human equality generated a serial of political movements designed to contest the lingering presence or perpetual effects of older hierarchies. We can distinguish three waves of such movements 1) the debate for decolonization, concentrated in the period 194865 2) the struggle against racial segregation and discrimination, initiated and exemplified by the AfricanAmerican civil-rights movement from 1955 to 1965 and 3) the struggle for multiculturalism and minority rights, whic h emerged in the late 1960s.Multiculturalism is part of a larger human-rights revolution involving ethnic and racial diversity. Each of these movements draws upon the human-rights revolution, and its foundational ideology of the equality of races and peoples, to challenge the legacies of earlier ethnic and racial hierarchies. Indeed, the human-rights revolution plays a double role here, not just as the inspiration for a struggle, but also as a constraint on the tolerable goals and means of that struggle.Insofar as historically excluded or stigmatized groups struggle against earlier hierarchies in the name of equality, they too have to renounce their own traditions of exclusion or oppression in the treatment of, say, women, gays, people of mixed race, religious dissenters, and so on. Human rights, and liberal-democratic constitutionalism more generally, provide the overarching framework within which these struggles are debated and addressed.Each of these movements, therefore, can be seen as contributing to a process of democratic citizenization that is, turning the earlier catalog of hierarchical relations into relationships of liberaldemocratic citizenship. This entails transforming both the vertical relationships between minorities and the state and the horizontal relationships among the members of different groups. In the past, it was often assumed that the only way to engage in this process of citizenization was to chat a single undifferentiated model of citizenship on all individuals.But the ideas and policies of multiculturalism that emerged from the 1960s start from the assumption that this complex write up inevitably and befittingly generates group-differentiated ethnopolitical claims. The key to citizenization is not to suppress these differential claims but to filter them through and frame them within the language of human rights, civil liberties, and democratic accountability. And this is what multiculturalist movements have aimed to do.The prec ise character of the resulting multicultural reforms varies from group to group, as befits the distinctive history that each has faced. They all start from the antidiscrimination principle that underpinned the second wave but go beyond it to challenge other forms of exclusion or stigmatization. In most Western countries, explicit state-sponsored discrimination against ethnic, racial, or religious minorities had largely ceased by the 1960s and 1970s, under the influence of the second wave of humanrights struggles.Yet ethnic and racial hierarchies persist in many societies, whether measured in terms of economic inequalities, political underrepresentation, social stigmatization, or cultural invisibility. confused forms of multiculturalism have been developed to help overcome these lingering inequalities. The focus in this report is on multiculturalism as it pertains to (permanent wavely settled) immigrant groups,7 7.There was briefly in some European countries a form of multicultural ism that was not aimed at the inclusion of permanent immigrants, but rather at ensuring that temporary migrants would return to their country of origin. For example, mothertongue education in Germany was not initially introduced as a minority right but in order to enable guest worker children to reintegrate in their countries of origin (Karen Schonwalder, Germany Integration Policy and Pluralism in a conscious Country of Immigration, in The Multiculturalism Backlash European Discourses, Policies and Practices, eds.Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf London Routledge, 2010, 160). Needless to say, this sort of returnist multiculturalism premised on the idea that migrants are foreigners who should return to their real home has nothing to do with multiculturalism policies (MCPs) premised on the idea that immigrants belong in their host countries, and which aim to make immigrants 6.