Minority Group and Multiculturalism Essay

Ideas approximately the legal and policy-making modification of ethnical diversity commonly termed multi ethnicalism emerged in the West as a fomite for replacing old forms of ethnic and racial hierarchy with modernistic transaction of popular citizenship. Despite substantial show up that these policies ar making further toward that oddment, a chorus of political leaders has declargond them a bankruptcy and heralded the death of multi paganism.This popular master narrative is problematic beca physical exercise it mischaracterizes the constitution of the experiments in multiethnicalism that suck been undertaken, exaggerates the bound to which they invite been aband singled, and misidentifies noneprenominal) only the effective difficulties and limitations they charter encountered just the excerptions for addressing these problems. sing most the crawfish from multiethnicalism has obscured the fact that a form of multicultural integration remains a live option fo r western democracies. This report ch each(a)enges four powerful myths about multiculturalism. ??First, it disputes the caricature of multiculturalism as the uncritical celebration of diversity at the expense of addressing grave societal problems much(prenominal) as unemployment and kind isolation. Instead it offers an account of multiculturalism as the interest group of new congenerics of democratic citizenship, inspired and constrained by human-rights paperls. ?? Second, it contests the idea that multiculturalism has been in wholesale pull away, and offers instead evidence that multiculturalism policies (MCPs) have persisted, and have plane gr make stronger, everyplace the past ten years. ??Third, it ch everyenges 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 civil integration policies has displaced multiculturalism or rendered it obsolete. The report instea d offers evidence that MCPs atomic number 18 fully consistent with original 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 least some(prenominal) cases. To help address these issues, this paper draws upon the Multiculturalism Policy Index.This major power 1) identifies eight concrete policy areas where liberal-democratic states faced with a choice headstrong to develop more multicultural forms of citizenship in relation to immigrant groups and 2) measures the extent to which countries have espoused some or all of these policies over time. While in that respect 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 modest strengthening. Ironically, some countries that have been vociferous about multiculturalisms ruin (e. g. , Ger more) have not actu ally practiced an active multicultural 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 adopt new determines of multicultural citizenship have taken root or succeeded in achieving their intended effects. There are several factors that can every facilitate or impede the successful implementation of multiculturalism Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future 1 MIGRATION POLICY take ?? Desecuritization of ethnic transaction.Multiculturalism works best if relations surrounded by the state and minorities are bring outn as an issue of social policy, not as an issue of state security. If the state perceives immigrants to be a security nemesis (such as Arabs and Moslems after 9/11), support for multiculturalism pass on drop and the quadriceps for minorities to dismantle voice multicultural cl mystifys will diminish. ?? Human rights . Support for multiculturalism rests on the assumption that there is a shared commitment to human rights crossways ethnic and phantasmal lines. If states perceive certain groups as unable or unwilling to respect human-rights norms, they are un correspondingly to accord them multicultural rights or resources.Much of the backlash against multiculturalism is fundamentally driven by anxieties about Muslims, in particular, and their perceived unwillingness to embrace liberal-democratic norms. ?? Border control. Multiculturalism is more controversial when citizens business organisation they lack control over their borders for instance when countries are faced with openhanded numbers (or unexpected surges) of unauthorized immigrants or asylum pay heedkers than when citizens feel the borders are secure. ?? Diversity of immigrant groups.Multiculturalism works best when it is genuinely multicultural that is, when immigrants come from many source countries rather than coming overwhelmi ngly from just one (which is more likely to lead to polarized relations with the majority). ?? Economic contri only whenions. Support for multiculturalism depends on the lore that immigrants are holding up their end of the bargain and making a good-faith effort to contribute to society particularly economically. When these facilitating conditions are present, multiculturalism can 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 preponderantly illegal, as potential carriers of intolerant practices or movements, or as internet burdens on the welfare state. However, one could argue 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 needed. I. Introduction Ideas about the legal and political accommodation of ethnic diversity have been in a state of intermingle around the world for the past 40 years.One hears much about the rise and deteriorate of multiculturalism. Indeed, this has become a kind of master narrative, widely invoked by scholars, journalists, and policymakers alike to explain the evolution of contemporary debates about diversity. Although people disagree 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 nature of the issues at stake and the countries involved, and we need to understand these variations if we are to happen upon a more sustainable model for accommodating diversity. This paper will argue that the master narrativ e 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 Before we can decide whether to celebrate or lament the refund of multiculturalism, we need first to make sure we know what multiculturalism has meant both in theory 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 rise and steady d avouch of multiculturalism helpfully experiences important features of our current debates.Yet in some reckon it is misleading, and may obscure the accepted challenges and opportunities we face. In its simplest form, the master narrat ive goes like this1 Since the mid-1990s we have seen a backlash and retreat from multiculturalism. From the 1970s to mid-1990s, there was a clear trend across Western democracies toward the increased acknowledgment and accommodation of diversity through a range of multiculturalism policies (MCPs) and minority rights.These policies were endorsed both at the domestic level in some states and by outside organizations, and involved a rejection of earlier ideas of unitary and homogeneous nationhood. Since the mid-1990s, however, we have seen a backlash and retreat from multiculturalism, and a reaffirmation of ideas of nation building, common value and identity, and unitary citizenship even a call for the re acetify of assimilation. This retreat is part driven by fears among the majority group that the accommodation of diversity has gone too far and is threatening their way of life.This fear often expresses itself in the rise of nativist and populist right-wing political movement s, such as the Danish Peoples Party, defending old ideas of Denmark for the Danish. notwithstanding the retreat also 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 implicit in(p) 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 schoolman statements of this rise and fall narrative, claiming that it applies across the Western democracies, see Rogers Brubaker, The mother of concentration? Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 4 (2001) 53148 and Christian Joppke, The fall back 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 multiculturalism in particular countries. For the Netherlands, see Han Entzinger, The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism in the Netherlands, in Toward preoccupancy and Citizenship Immigrants in Liberal state of matter-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 external Studies, Copenhagen, December 2006).For Britain, see Randall Hansen, Diversity, consolidation and the Turn from Multiculturalism in the join Kingdom, in Belonging? Diversity, wisdom and Shared Citizenship in Canada, eds. Keith G. Banting, Thomas J. Courchene, and F. Leslie Seidle (Montreal Institute for Research on customary Policy, 2007) Les Back, Michael Keith, Azra Khan, Kalbir Shukra, and tin can Solomos, New Labours White Heart Politics, Multiculturalism and the Return of Assim ilation, Political Quarterly 73, No. 4 (2002) 44554 Steven Vertovec, Towards post-multiculturalism?Changing communities, conditions and contexts of diversity, International Social 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 Not Speaking Chinese Living mingled with 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 Research 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 (Londo n Routledge, 2010). Multiculturalism Success, Failure, 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 nonetheless distances itself from the rhetoric and policies of multiculturalism. The term postmulticulturalism has often been invoked to signal this new approach, which seeks to chastise the limits of a naive or misguided multiculturalism while avoiding the oppressive reassertion of homogenizing nationalist 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 embr ace the panoply of customs, traditions, music, and culinary art that personify 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, paradeed in media and museums, and so on. This celebratory model of multiculturalism has been the strain of many critiques, including the following(a) ?? It ignores issues of economic and political inequality.Even if all Britons come to enjoy Jamaican steeldrum music or Indian samosas, this would do nada to address the real problems facing Caribbean and South Asian communities in Britain problems of unemployment, poor educational outcomes, residential segregation, poor Englis h 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 group is potentially dangerous. First, not all customs that may be traditionally practiced indoors a particular group are worthy of being celebrated, or even of being legally tolerated, such as forced marriage. To avoid brainchild 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 big society. But 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 Challenge of Diversity European Social Dem ocracy Facing Migration, Integration 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, after(prenominal) 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, 2nd edition (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2007) and regarding the United States, Desmond King, The Liberty of Strangers Making the American 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 trivializa tion or Disneyfication of cultural differences,5 ignoring the real challenges that differences in cultural and religious values can raise. ?? Third, the 3S model of multiculturalism can hike a conception of groups as hermetically crocked 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 classifiable customs ignores work outes of cultural adaptation, mixing, and melange, as well as acclivitous 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 typically older males while ignoring the way these traditional practices (and traditional elites) are often challenged by internal 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 perception 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 ancestral cultural identities, and 4) cultural change and cultural mixing over the reification of static cultural differences.This narrative about the rise and fall of 3S multiculturalism will no doubt be familiar to many readers. In my view, however, it is inaccurate. Not only is it a caricature of the reality of multiculturalism as it has unquestionable 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 natural human tendencies to simplify ethnic differences, and about the logic of globular 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 always found ways of coexisting, and respect for diversity was a familiar feature of many historic empires, such as the Ottoman Empire.But the course of multiculturalism that is said to have had a rise and fall is a more specific historic p henomenon, emerging first in the Western democracies in the advanced 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 novelty involving ethnic and racial diversity.Prior to World War II, ethnocultural and religious diversity in the West was characterized by a range of illiberal and undemocratic 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 furore of Multiculturalism in Canada.(Toronto Penguin, 1994). Including relations of conqueror and conquered, colonizer and colonized, master and slave, settler and indigenous, racialized and unmarked, normalized and deviant, Orthodox and heretic, civilized 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 ideology of the equality of races and peoples.And this new assumption of human equality generated a series of political movements designed to contest the lingering presence or enduring effects of older hierarchies. We can distinguish three thrills of such movements 1) the effort 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 minori ty rights, which emerged in the late 1960s.Multiculturalism is part of a larger human-rights revolution involving ethnic and racial diversity. apiece 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 breathing in for a struggle, but also as a constraint on the permissible 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 mingled 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 move ments, 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 impose 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 history ineluctably and appropriately generates group-differentiated ethnopolitical claims. The key to citizenization is not to suppress these differential claims but to click 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 precise 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 hustle 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 calculated in terms of economic inequalities, political underrepresentation, social stigmatization, or cultural invisibility. Various forms of multiculturalism have been developed to help overcome these lingering inequalities. The focus in this report is on multiculturalism as it pertains to (permanently settled) immigrant groups,7 7.There was briefly in some European countries a form of multiculturalism that was not aimed at the inclusion body of permanent immigrants, but rather at ensuring that temporary migrants would return to their republic of origin. For example, mothertongue education in Germany was not initially introduced as a minority right but in order to enable guest role player children to reintegrate in their countries of origin (Karen Schonwalder, Germany Integration Policy and Pluralism in a Self-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.