Is Multiculturalism Dead? E-Book

Christian Joppke

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 444

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Multiculturalism is controversial in the liberal state and has frequently been declared dead, even in countries that have never had a policy under that name. This authoritative book reviews the different meanings multiculturalism has acquired across theories, countries, and domains to evaluate the extent of its demise and the ways in which it lives on. Christian Joppke intriguingly argues that, beyond the ebb and flow of policy, liberal constitutionalism itself bears out a multiculturalism of the individual that is not only alive but necessary in a liberal society. Through a provocative comparison of gay rights in the United States and the accommodation of Islam in Europe, he shows that liberal constitutionalism constrains majority power, requiring the state to be neutral about people s values and ethical commitment. It cannot but give rise to multiple ways of life or cultures, as people are endowed with the freedom to embrace them. Accordingly, impulses toward multiculturalism persist, despite its political crisis, but with a new accent on the individual, rather than group, as the unit of integration. Tightly argued and clearly written, this book provides a judicious assessment of multiculturalism in the West and will be of interest to a broad readership across the social sciences and legal studies.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

1: What is Dead and What is Alive

Overview

Note

2: Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism Theories: Communitarian, Radical, Liberal, and Other

Multicultural Markers and Their Logics: Sexual Orientation, Language, Religion, Race

New and Old World Multiculturalisms

Conclusion

Notes

3: Retreat of Multiculturalism and Civic Integration

Muslims and the Ambivalent Retreat: A Closer Look at Britain

Old Wine in New Bottles? Interculturalism and Diversity

Civic Integration as Diaspora Absorption

Local Multiculturalism

Conclusion

Notes

4: Why Multiculturalism is Necessary

Gay Rights in America and the Thinning of Public Morality

Muslims in Liberal Europe

Conclusion

Notes

5: Multiculturalism v. Antidiscrimination

Antidiscrimination in America

Antidiscrimination in Europe

Conclusion

Notes

6: What Remains

The German Chancellor in Bern

The New Equal Protection

Global Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism of the Individual

Notes

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

Preface

CHAPTER 1

Index

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Series page

Other Polity books by Christian Joppke:

Veil: Mirror of Identity

(2009)

Citizenship and Immigration

(2010)

The Secular State Under Siege: Religion and Politics in Europe and America

(2015)

Copyright page

Copyright © Christian Joppke 2017

The right of Christian Joppke to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2017 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9211-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9212-8 (pb)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Joppke, Christian, author.

Title: Is multiculturalism dead? : crisis and persistence in the constitutional state / Christian Joppke.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016015421 | ISBN 9780745692111 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745692128 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745692159 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745692142 (Mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Multiculturalism. | State, The.

Classification: LCC HM1271 .J657 2016 | DDC 305.8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015421

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Preface

I have frequently thought and occasionally written about multiculturalism, mostly on the critical side. In 2012, on two occasions, in Berlin and Seoul, I shared the podium with Will Kymlicka, arguably the most important writer on the topic. It was obvious that I was supposed to be “against.” That was no easy task, because a greater admirer of his imposingly clear prose and safe liberal instincts is difficult to find. However, as I enjoy a good contest, there was no problem. After the Seoul encounter, I approached him with the idea of writing a short and punchy “debate” book together. I even had a picture of us, done by a photographer in Seoul, perfect for the book jacket, I thought – my moment of megalomania. Kymlicka did not say “no”; he merely “postponed.” It amounted to the same. He left me with a note to consider the strong national grounding of multiculturalism in Canada, and the complete absence thereof in Europe, as a starter to the conversation that didn't happen. In the end, I went ahead without him. Despite the change of plan, this book is still a critical but appreciative dialogue with his “liberal multiculturalism,” which remains the benchmark work in the field.

The value added, I hope, is to locate liberal multiculturalism more completely in the established institutions of liberal democracies, especially liberal constitutionalism, than previous works have done. Previous, empirically minded accounts of liberal multiculturalism, by Will Kymlicka himself (2007a), but also by Anne Phillips (2007), have mainly grounded multiculturalism in the liberal value of equality. So did, most recently, Alan Patten, in his immediately acclaimed Equal Recognition (2014). A philosophically correct restatement of Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship (1995), its one difference is to tie liberal multiculturalism to the idea of neutrality, which is otherwise shunned by multiculturalists, and which he understands as the liberal state’s mandate to recognize all cultures equally, without privileging a Favoritvolk. Patten thus abandons Kymlicka’s tandem of liberal multiculturalism and liberal nationalism. This move, however, may make this theory less practicable in the real world, because how could the democratic state, even one that is also pristinely liberal, not favor majority society?

In contrast to these equality-centered accounts, I propose a thinner, mainly liberty-focused account that is even further removed from conventional calls for culture or identity preservation and public recognition. The centerpiece in this respect is a provocative comparison of gays and Muslims, which demonstrates liberal law's inherent capacity to accommodate diversity. Many will doubt that the “multiculturalism of the individual” advocated in these pages is “multiculturalism” at all, because any groupist element is purged from it. But I would still insist on calling it thus to fend off a contemporary tendency of liberalism to be hostile to difference and to thicken into a substantive ethic or “fighting creed,” as Charles Taylor (1994) put it memorably. This risk is apparent in Europe's Islam struggles and the current security and antiterrorism mania, which is more dangerous to liberalism than any external attack on it.

This is the last of four small books on big topics written for Polity over the past eight years. I thank its editors, Emma Longstaff (who in the meantime has left the press) and Jonathan Skerrett, for soliciting them and for being persistent. Now that it's done, I step into the void.

Bern, May 2016

1What is Dead and What is Alive

Long before the age of religious terror, multiculturalism had been declared dead. In the 1990s, “too many Asians” was the battle-cry against Australian multiculturalism (see Joppke 2005: 80–90). It did not amount to much, and a kind of nationalist multiculturalism, which Australia shares with Canada, persisted. The more recent death-notices are Western European, like those pronounced in rapid succession by the political leaders of Germany, Britain, and France, in late 2010 and early 2011. There was immediately a lively debate about whether this was merely symbolic or indicative of a real change of law and policy. The answer depends on one's definition of multiculturalism. This is notoriously difficult. If even countries that never had an explicit multiculturalism policy as Canada or Australia know it announce the death of multiculturalism, what exactly is being declared dead? Certainly not gay marriage and the liberalization of homosexuality, which are marching on at the very moment that a retreat of multiculturalism has been diagnosed for Europe. And, of course, there is no questioning of the self-government rights of indigenous people, like the First Nations (in Canadian parlance), or of national minorities, like Scots, Basques, Catalans, and so on, which long predate the age of multiculturalism. This suggests that it is not cultural pluralism in general that is put in question, but mostly the ethnic or religious variant that stems from international migration. Here a closer look reveals that not any migration, but particularly Muslim migration, is central to the crisis of European multiculturalism – each of the three mentioned death-notices by German Chancellor Merkel, British Prime Minister Cameron, and French President Sarkozy, was a commentary on specific difficulties, perceived or real, surrounding Muslim and Islamic integration in their respective societies. But, to repeat the above question, what is it that is being declared dead if it cannot be a law or policy that never was?

The answer is that a non-policy of not intervening or laissez-faire in what is perceived as immigration-caused, ethnic fragmentation of society, more specifically the rise of an unassimilable counterculture of Islam, is no longer deemed sufficient. Instead, the new, post-multicultural dictum is that if there is policy on part of the state, it should not reinforce the centrifugal tilt of multi-ethnic immigrant societies (as multiculturalism is suspected of doing). On the contrary, policy should contain this tilt through centrist policy that binds newcomers and their offspring into mainstream institutions and values. In Paul Collier's (2013) concise formula, the task of the day is diaspora absorption. This policy turn is registered under the rubric of civic integration, which has become the main approach in Western Europe toward immigrant integration. Civic integration constitutes the one policy that signals a real (not only rhetorical) departure from a “multicultural” past (even one that never was).

However, it would be mistaken to conclude from civic integration that multiculturalism is “dead.” The nature of the new policy is disputed, partially reflecting its different appearance in different countries. From a Canadian perspective, civic integration is no alternative to but complementary to multiculturalism. This is because Canadian multiculturalism itself has a nationalist hue, having become part of Canadian self-definition. In Europe, the constellation is different. Nowhere in Europe has multiculturalism become part of national self-definition. On the contrary, it is everywhere perceived as the property, or privilege, of immigrants and ethnic minorities, and this is why it has come under fire here. For Europe, there are two alternative views on civic integration. In one view, it is a convergent policy of post-multiculturalism, which expects liberal norms and values to be accepted, if not even liberal identities to be adopted by newcomers as the price for admission (Joppke 2007a). Indeed, in its emphasis on instilling liberal values and principles, the new policy would not be comprehensible unless brought against a putative “illiberal” minority, which Muslims are suspected to be. In an alternative view, civic integration is a way of “fortifying” nationally distinct citizenship regimes and traditions (Goodman 2012, 2014); or it is even seen as a “cultural defense of nations” (Orgad 2015), in which majorities besieged by predominantly non-Western (and thus extra-alienating) immigration reclaim the right to an identity that in a multicultural past was the privilege of minorities. Despite their different nuances, both views are not that far apart. That civic integration, with its centrist touch, differs from, or is even opposed to, multiculturalism seems incontrovertible, even to Canadian eyes (which, after all, are capable of distinguishing between civic integration and multiculturalism). In any case, the vexed relationship between multiculturalism and civic integration is to be centrally addressed in this book.

But the main argument is that, underneath the ebb and flow of (civic) integration policy, multiculturalism is necessary in a liberal society. While the term may have fallen into disrepute, the fact that there are other terms to do much of its work, such as “interculturalism” or “diversity,” signals that there is a persistent reality that will not go away, despite a change of fashion. That persistent reality is one of multiple ways of life (or “cultures,” as a shorthand) that cannot and should not be contained by a state that is to be neutral about people's ultimate values and ethical commitments, unless third parties or social peace are harmed or put in danger. The test case for this is the liberalization of homosexuality, which – I shall argue – should be considered a multicultural issue, and which is advancing unabated despite the loud retreat from multiculturalism in the immigrant domain. One may object that these policies relate to different groups and issues (ethnic v. ethical) and thus cannot be meaningfully paired. But the liberalization of homosexuality gives an insight into a deeper transformation (or, rather, maturing) of the “liberal” state, which has lost the capacity to impose a thick public morality over all members of society. There still is a public morality, an ethic, in the liberal state. But it is becoming tantamount to the protection of the individual and her or his rights. The individual is the true motor of multicultural claims-making, even if it is couched in the groupist hue of “gays” or “Muslims” or others. Hence what I shall advocate in this book is a “multiculturalism of the individual”. This may appear absurd, a contradiction in terms or yet another vacuous exercise in name-branding. But it is derived from observation of what is happening on the ground.

Multiculturalism is necessary in a liberal society, and its main source (apart from markets that satisfy and amplify the needs of pluralized lifestyles and groups) is constitutional law. I thus come to a rather opposite conclusion from James Tully (1995: 58), who had influentially denounced “modern constitutionalism” as imposing an “empire of conformity…designed to exclude or assimilate cultural diversity.” Far from it: constitutionalism protects structural minorities from democratic majorities. Since John Hart Ely (1980), this has been the dominant understanding of modern constitutionalism, and it corresponds closely to actual state practice, not only in America, but in Europe also. As long as constitutionalism is in place, we live in societies that are set to become more and more multicultural. A case in point is the emancipation of gays in America and of Muslims in Europe, which is an unusual but effective pairing in this respect. Gays have become a part of America, I concede, above all through cultural change preceding legal change – there has been an astounding shift among younger people toward accepting unconventional sexuality and family forms (see Rosenfeld 2007). But in the end the American Constitution's freedom (“due process”) clause, aided by its equality (“equal protection”) clause, were instrumental. Unaided by popular sympathies, to put it mildly, Muslims have become a part of Europe in a much more direct way through state constitutions and a regional human rights convention that all protect religious freedoms. Importantly, there was no need for a multiculturalism policy in much of Europe because the individual rights clauses in liberal state constitutions and in the European Convention of Human Rights, as well as a general principle in the secular state to treat all religions equally, have done most of the necessary work.

So this book will argue that, while multiculturalism may be under attack at the level of policy, with centrist policies of civic integration as intended moving away from a (most often imagined) “multicultural” past, at the level of liberal-constitutional law there is no alternative to multiculturalism. Will Kymlicka (1995) has got it right: liberalism requires multiculturalism. But he unnecessarily pairs normative justification (liberal justice as requiring “multicultural citizenship”) with explicit policy under the heading of “multiculturalism.” He thus ignores or downplays the legal-constitutional infrastructure of individual rights, particularly rights to freedom, which propels multiculturalism even when it falls short of that name.

The story is more complicated in the context of antidiscrimination law and policy, which revolves around a second key liberal value, equality. There is no multiculturalism theory or policy that would not claim to fend off discrimination against minorities. However, the relationship between antidiscrimination and multiculturalism is not straightforward. Antidiscrimination is about eliminating difference, to the degree that it causes disadvantage; multiculturalism is about protecting and perpetuating difference, understood as a matter of identity. So there is tension between the two. However, there is an opening from within the logic of antidiscrimination to move toward multiculturalism. This is because antidiscrimination may be either formal or substantive, protecting every­one or only specific groups (“minorities”) that have been victimized in the past and continue to be so in the present. So, antidiscrimination may (to be effective, perhaps even should) go multicultural, as an inherently group-focused project to bring about substantive equality for disadvantaged minorities. Note that in the context of equality law, multiculturalism is in a much stronger sense “groupist” than in the constitutional law of liberty. However, “multicultural” is not the way in which antidiscrimination is currently understood and practiced, either in America or in Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, a formalistic and individualistic approach to antidiscrimination predominates, with a fight in the United States, and quite without one in Europe.

Overview

Chapter 2, “Multiculturalism: Not One but Many Things,” points to the instability and changeability of the concept of multiculturalism, which notoriously impairs its analytical value. At the level of theory, different approaches have given different meanings to it: a “communitarian” defense of group over individual claims, with an ambiguous relationship to liberalism (Taylor 1994); a “radical” critique of the false universalism of individual rights and citizenship that masks particularistic group power (Young 1990); and, most persuasively, a “liberal” complementing of individual rights with minority rights (Kymlicka 1995). Even if one agrees on a minimal definition of multiculturalism, as a politics of identity, the latter plays out differently across its typical markers: sexual orientation, language, religion, and race. Finally, multiculturalism means different things in different parts of the world, from a nation-building device in Canada and Australia to an increasingly contested, if not repudiated, migrant policy in Western Europe.

Chapter 3, “Retreat of Multiculturalism and Civic Integration,” tackles head-on the question what in the most recent “retreat” of multiculturalism in Western Europe is real and what is more in the realm of rhetoric. Undoubtedly, problems of Muslim and Islamic integration are central to multiculturalism's sinking star. However, to varying degrees, the impulse of accommodating difference lives on in the substitutes of “interculturalism” and “diversity,” though with a new accent on the individual as the unit of integration. The clearest instance of real policy change is civic integration for immigrants, which I conceive of as a liberal policy of diaspora absorption (following Collier 2013). While civic integration is national-level policy, at the local level, particularly in heavily immigrant-populated cities, multiculturalism tends to persist, in a pragmatic key, and often under a different name.

Chapter 4, “Why Multiculturalism is Necessary: Liberal Law and the Empowerment of Gays and Muslims,” presents the central argument of this book, which is that liberal constitutionalism naturally generates multiculturalism. The pairing of gays and Muslims in this respect is unusual, because the real world has seen both groups in conflict with one another. But the dynamic of their respective emancipation is similar. Constitutions constrain majority power, protecting in turn structural minorities that have lesser chances to use the political process in their favor. However, apart from the national minority problematic (which is outside the scope of this book1), constitutions mostly do so not through group protections but through individual rights (especially freedom) clauses. At least, it has been so in our two cases. Again, the individual is posited as the unit of integration. This is not to deny that liberal law is more complexly involved in the Muslim case, where it may also function as a constraint on certain “illiberal” claims; there is interestingly no equivalent to this on the gay side.

Chapter 5, “Multiculturalism v. Antidiscrimination,” is about the ambiguous relationship between multiculturalism and antidiscrimination, with a comparative look at the United States and Europe. Antidiscrimination builds on the principle of equality (not freedom), which naturally tilts in a group-recognizing direction. The groupist impulse has been especially strong in America, where racial discrimination against black Americans is the source of its civil rights laws. America's singular race problem, grounded in the legacy of slavery, has pushed its antidiscrimination in an asymmetric, remedial direction, called “affirmative action,” which overlaps closely with a multicultural agenda. However, under a conservative Supreme Court, the groupist impulse has been largely suppressed in favor of a symmetric and formalistic understanding of antidiscrimination. Short of a race problem, European antidiscrimination has taken this direction from the start. It is unlikely, as I speculated earlier (Joppke 2010c), that through the recognition of indirect discrimination a groupist, traditionally multiculturalist agenda will be furthered on the antidiscrimination front.

In the concluding chapter, “What Remains: A Multiculturalism of the Individual,” I argue that what remains is a multiculturalism of the individual, while an unreconstructed multiculturalism of groups has few supporters today. The multiculturalism of the individual shares many elements of Will Kymlicka's liberal multiculturalism, but it is distinguished by a less clear-cut boundary between liberal constitutionalism and explicit “multiculturalism.” We still should retain the word “multiculturalism,” to ward off the threat of illiberal liberalism which has grown in the age of Islamist terrorism and is the main threat to liberty in the West today.

Note

1

    This book mainly deals with multiculturalism in the context of immigration. This is where the crisis of multiculturalism is situated, and where it should be assessed.

2MulticulturalismNot One but Many Things

The best way to start thinking about multiculturalism is to acknowledge that it is incoherent but necessary. Philosophically speaking, multiculturalism is an incoherent position. But it is also a demographic reality that expresses itself in conflicts and claims that call for a response and that states, in fact, have already attended to. In this respect, to be for or against multiculturalism is as pointless as “saying yes or no to history” (Fish 1997a: 385). In fact, no one has expressed multiculturalism's double face of principled incoherence and empirical necessity with more acumen than Stanley Fish. At the level of theory, he distinguishes between “boutique” and “strong” multiculturalism, both of which he reveals to be impossible stances. The boutique multiculturalist will approve of other cultures only to the point that the “canons of civilized decency” (p. 378) are not compromised, as a matter of cherishing exotic lifestyles that enrich but do no harm. The strong multiculturalist takes difference and the tolerance of it as a general principle so seriously that she cannot endorse any particular culture (other than her own) all the way through, as this would “inevitably involve the suppression of difference” and of the tolerance that is her starting-point (p. 384). Only the “really strong” multiculturalist abandons difference and tolerance as a general principle to side with one particular culture at all costs – but then she turns out to be not a multiculturalist but a monoculturalist! The boutique multiculturalist's starting-point is “rationality,” the belief in a common core of humanity. But this cancels out the possibility of deep, irreconcilable difference, and she accepts difference only to the degree that it does not disturb the complacency of liberal universalism. The strong multiculturalist founders on the rock of “tolerance,” which is undermined and possibly destroyed when tolerating the intolerant – and intolerant the deeply different are by definition. Whatever line one takes, liberal or radical, “no one could possibly be a multiculturalist in any interesting and coherent sense” (p. 384).

At the same time, what may be logically incoherent is still a “demographic fact” that real-world societies need to respond to, for the sake of the “defusing of potential crises” (Fish 1997a: 385). But these responses, Fish intriguingly adds, are more by society's decentered subsystems, such as markets or public education, than by grand political design. “It follows then,” concludes Fish, “that definitions of multiculturalism will be beside the point, for multiculturalism will not be one thing, but many things” (p. 386). Multiculturalism, as processed in the real world, is not an option one might be for or against but a “baseline condition” (p. 387) that has to be reckoned with.

Multiculturalism Theories: Communitarian, Radical, Liberal, and Other

A variety of philosophical formulations of multiculturalism nevertheless exist. They are of interest here primarily for what they convey (or fail to convey) about the real-world phenomenon.

Communitarian

Charles Taylor (1994) famously depicted multiculturalism as a “politics of recognition.” At one level, there is nothing new about this, because the need to be recognized is part of the “dialogical” nature of human life, spelled out from Hegel to Mead. What is new is that recognition can fail, which is the moment that “identity” enters the picture, as a specifically “modern preoccupation” (pp. 26f.). Previously, one's place in society was determined by hierarchy. There was no escape from one's birth-assigned station, so that recognition was no issue for the ordinary traditionalist; only the privileged few had “honor,” which was firmly tied up with formally assigned inequality between society's ranks. “Honor,” indeed, is “an aristocratic concept…associated with a hierarchical order of society,” noted sociologist Peter Berger (1970: 340). With the collapse of social hierarchy, brought by the modern democratic revolutions and the new idea of equality, recognition becomes a society-wide and chronic problem, no longer to be resolved (or, rather, muted) by the fixity of birth-assigned rank.

“Dignity” is the new quality that not just the privileged few but every individual is equally endowed with and expects to see recognized by others. Although a treacherous concept that may take on many meanings (see Rosen 2012: ch. 1), dignity is in “close connection” with the idea of human rights (p. 2). Dignity's most widely endorsed articulation is the Kantian notion that human beings should always be treated “as ends” and “never as means only” (p. 10). However, to have mere humanity recognized in oneself is also vacuous because devoid of distinctiveness – it provides no answer to the question of who I am in contrast to the others, which is what colloquially we call “identity.” This is where the Romantic ideal of “authenticity” kicks in, formulated by Herder as “jeder Mensch hat ein eigenes Mass” (every person has her own measure). Authenticity, argues Taylor (1994: 30), is the second offshoot of the decline of hierarchical society, next to dignity, and its focus on difference is the point of entry for “multiculturalism.”

What results from the rubble of the old order is the modern “politics of equal recognition,” which is torn between the poles of a Kantian “politics of universalism” and the Herderian “politics of difference.” Taylor's multicultural Programmschrift contains two insights. The first is to point to the contradictory relationship between both politics: the multicultural politics of difference presupposing and at the same time denouncing the politics of universalism. But before elaborating on this tension, the irony to be noted is that the stress on difference seems to be a “retreat” to an earlier era of honor and inequality, when difference was formally inscribed in the social structure (Mautner 2008: 633). The one difference, of course, which often goes unacknowledged, is that multiculturalism feeds on the universalistic impulse that it notionally denounces: “The politics of difference is full of denunciations of discrimination and refusals of second-class citizenship.…The universal demand powers an acknowledgment of specificity” (Taylor 1994: 39). Everyone should be recognized for her unique identity. In Fish's (2007a) terms, in every multiculturalist, even the “strong,” there dwells a trace of the “boutique.” Those who would argue that multiculturalism is entirely compatible with liberalism have always pointed to its modern, egalitarian pedigree, seeing it, not implausibly, as “part of a larger human rights revolution” (Kymlicka 2010: 100). The only question is whether it is a “legitimate or bastard child” (Levey 2009: 76). This is because, as Taylor (1994: 44) hastens to add, the politics of difference also tends to cut off the branch on which it sits, in denouncing the difference-blindness of universalism as “a particularism masquerading as the universal.” In the standard multicultural formulation, universalism “negates identity by forcing people into a mold that is untrue to them” (p. 43).

When inaugurated by Herder, the politics of difference was a symmetric nationalism, giving to the distinct color of each Volk equal pride of place in the bountiful variety of human expression. Between Herder's Romantic vision and today's multiculturalism lies one game-changing event: colonialism and the antiracist opposition to it. Taylor's second key insight, next to pointing to a tension between universalism and particularism in the “politics of recognition,” is to stress the importance of colonialism and of race – colloquially speaking: the oppression of the Rest by the West – for understanding the psychology of multiculturalism. If Herder's nationalism was symmetric, colonialism and its “anti” are fundamentally asymmetric. As Taylor puts it, colonialism's “imposition of some cultures on others,” and the assumed superiority that powers this imposition, is multiculturalism's point of departure. Taylor's well-chosen protagonist is Frantz Fanon. The Martinique-born Afro-French psychiatrist and intellectual had demanded that liberation be cultural, the colonized natives “mock[ing],” “insult[ing],” and “vomit[ing]” the “white man's values” that had condemned them to inferior status and servitude (Fanon 1963: 43). There is more violence, eulogized as a “cleansing force” (p. 94), than recognition in Fanon's story. But implicit in it, and agenda-setting for multiculturalism, is the demand to see the supremacy of “Western values” rectified on the part of those who had wrongfully imposed them on others and to have the Westerners concede the “equal worth” of the cultures of the colonized (Taylor 1994: 68).

The anticolonial impulse of race, ironically, has been most strongly articulated by the oppressed in the one Western country that has been anticolonial itself, the United States. In the language of its single greatest sociologist, Erving Goffman (1956), one could argue that a group-level concern about ceremony and “deference and demeanor,” and a demand for a change of the “rules of conduct” through public education, the canon, and the curriculum, has never been far from the multiculturalist's core agenda. This is despite the fact that, to repeat the essential point, the anticolonial impulse is not for inclusion but for separation. Strictly speaking, and paradoxically, the anticolonial and thus separatist impulse posits multiculturalism outside of the ambit of recognition, which requires two parties and not just one.

Taylor's liberal instincts made him reject “radical” multiculturalism's demand for “actual judgments” of equal worth, conceding at best a “presumption” of equal worth (1994: 68). But he showed himself less willing to compromise Quebec's “distinct society” project, controversially placing the “importance of cultural survival” (p. 62) for the French-speaking province in the Anglo-dominated Canadian federation above immigrants’ (and all Francophone Quebecois’) mundane interest to have their children educated in the English language. This is sanctioned in Quebec's infamous Bill 101, which Taylor endorses. Surely, at face value, the relationship between Quebec's survivance and multiculturalism is strenuous – note that Quebec's straightforward nationalism, though mellowed by “interculturalism,” has always been antagonistic to Canada's official multiculturalism policy, which was introduced under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau precisely as an antidote to (and not in support of) the French province's separatist leanings in the early 1970s. But nationalism is akin to multiculturalism (at least in Taylor's conception) in positing the concerns of the group above those of the individual.1 This makes Taylor's defense of Bill 101 nationalist and multiculturalist in tandem.2

Taylor's account of multiculturalism is an uneasy blend of liberal and radical elements (which tends to be dodged by the label “communitarian” that is commonly attached to it). It is no wonder that other authors have sought to resolve this tension in either direction, radical or liberal.

Radical

An unambiguously radical variant has been proposed by Iris Marion Young (1989, 1990). Drawing more on the arsenal of feminism than of anticolonialism, her starting-point is still the same: “oppression,” which is at its most insidious when (white male) group power “parade[s] as universal” (1990: 10). While there are many types of oppression according to Young, the one central to her account is “cultural imperialism.” She defines it as “universalization of a dominant group's experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm” (p. 59). That this type of oppression is central (and not other types of oppression, as listed: “exploitation,” “marginalization,” “powerlessness,” and “violence”) shows in Young's definition of “social groups” who are subject to oppression and to be helped out by a “politics of difference”: social groups are distinguished from other groups through “cultural forms, practices, or way of life” (p. 43, emphasis added). Such groups are prior to the individual. They are “never founded,” and one is a member not by choice but by existential “thrownness,” as Young puts it after German philosopher Heidegger (p. 46). The members of social groups, in Young's graphic metaphor (p. 123), are marked by the “epidermalizing of their world.” They are stigmatized as “bodies” that stand apart from “reason,” in discourses of “racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ableism” (p. 130). Similar to Fanon, the way out of this conundrum is through “cultural revolution”: “confronting the cultural imperialist that has denigrated or silenced [the oppressed group's] specific…experience” (pp. 153–4).

Importantly, the politics of difference in which this is to occur is marked by a fundamental ambivalence. It must reject “inclusion,” because “universal citizenship” is seen as barely camouflaged group power (Young 1989). Young's model is Black Power and the other-colored power movements that followed in its wake (Young 1990: ch. 6). The “whole group” has to move, in “separate organizations,” in order to eliminate debilitating “double consciousness,” which was memorably depicted by Du Bois as “measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (quoted on p. 60). But then, what shall be the direction of this collective movement? Young advocates “differentiated citizenship” and “group representation.” However, their thrust, as indicated in the notions of “citizenship” and “representation,” cannot but be inclusive. Young even expressly concedes that the whole point of differentiated citizenship is to make “participation and inclusion possible” (1989: 273). This flatly contradicts her radical critique of universal citizenship and is distinctly un-Fanonian. Only, what alternative is there? While the American Black Power movement curiously pondered the possibility of secession from the United States at one point, this is not an option for gays, women, the disabled, and other “social groups”3 that may have bodies but not territories. Young's theory is noteworthy for expressing more clearly than most other multiculturalism theories the Fanonian, radical-separatist impulse of many social movements that self-identify in multiculturalist terms. But it also shows the paradox of a radical critique that is more into debunking than salvaging “universal citizenship.” Her “groupist” picture of society does not leave much room for a group-transcending logic of institutions, such as that of citizenship. One wonders: if neutrality and universalism are not possible and no idiom or site exists that stands above or apart from groups and their interests, why should oppression stop when the Others are in charge?

Liberal

This objection could not be made against Will Kymlicka's “liberal” theory of multiculturalism (1995). If Young articulated the radical impulse of movements, Kymlicka is much closer to how states have accommodated multicultural claims, not in deviation from but in application of liberal principles. Kymlicka's approach makes at least three important departures from Young's. First, this theory complements but does not seek to substitute universal citizenship. It thus spares itself the spasms of notionally rejecting but still having to give in to inclusion, which marred the radical theory. The theory is not utopian but commensurate with the ways the (liberal) world works. As Kymlicka puts it pointedly, “Really-existing multiculturalism in the West is liberal multiculturalism” (2007a: 108). Secondly, this is a theory that places the claims of the individual above the claims of the group – therefore the adjective “liberal” that is attached to this multiculturalism theory. But it also threatens to dilute the “multicultural” element to the point of non-cognizance – his guns down, and only half tongue-in-cheek, Kymlicka suggests at one point dropping the annoying label “multicultural” if it arouses so much antagonism (2012: 21 fn. 69). Thirdly, Kymlicka acutely specifies and narrows the groups whose members are entitled to differentiated kinds of minority rights. Overall, only ethnic and national groups, that is, immigrants and national minorities, both defined by the possibility of intergenerational reproduction, qualify.4 All other groups, which lack the criterion of “institutional complete[ness]” (1995: 18), are out. Women, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and so on: they all have no claim in this theory. More specifically, Kymlicka realistically concedes that the claims of national minorities (not to mention of indigenous people), who have seen the borders of states move above their heads (or seen themselves colonized and decimated, respectively), are much stronger than the claims of immigrants, who have “waived” the right to their culture by voluntarily having left their homeland. While minority rights for national minorities aim at their “self-government,” with the risk of secession always looming large, minority rights for immigrants are for their “integration,” to which there is no alternative. The model for the latter is the turbaned Sikh in the Canadian Royal Mounted Police, which signals the integrationist blending of difference with conventional national identity. At least with respect to immigrants, there is no room in this theory for separation and parallel societies – common targets of attack on multiculturalism.

While sanely realistic, Kymlicka's liberal multiculturalism theory also raises the question whether there are any minority “rights” for immigrants at all, dubbed by him “polyethnic rights.” Aren't many of the measures that serve their integration better conceived of as prudent and pragmatic “policies” than “rights”? Note that under international law the granting of minority rights is contingent on the citizenship status of the respective group. This formally omits immigrants, who are always under the radar of states’ discretionary immigration powers. Kymlicka's cautiousness with respect to immigrants, whom he dispossesses of a “societal culture,” the protection of which, as we shall see below, is the point of his multiculturalism theory (1995: 101), is commensurate with this legal practice.

Kymlicka (1995) straightforwardly justifies multicultural minority rights through liberalism's two core principles: freedom and equality. With respect to “freedom,” his point is that meaningful choices rest on certain cultural conditions, the existence of a “societal culture” that “provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities” (p. 76). A societal culture is an “intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete,” and it is marked by a shared territory, language, and history (p. 18). As shorthand, societal cultures “tend to be national cultures” (p. 80). This is why women or gays and lesbians and other lifestyle groups do not appear in this scheme – their cultures are not “national”; colloquially phrased, these groups couldn't make it on their own. But even immigrants, as mentioned, do not have a societal culture, as they are dispersed and without alternative to “integration,” which includes adopting the language of the host society: “[N]ational minorities have societal cultures and immigrant groups do not” (p. 101). This is plausible and realistic because, indeed, “immigrant groups are not ‘nations,’ and do not occupy homelands” (p. 14). But then, why should they be owed any “right” to have their culture accommodated (in terms of exemptions, special benefits, and targeted protections)? On the opposite end, national minorities are not that well served by Kymlicka either, although they are due much stronger “self-government rights,” which always entail the risk of state break-up. For them, the disadvantage is that the “multi” in “multiculturalism” dilutes their monocultural, nationalistic ambition. Accordingly, the Quebecois have always favored “interculturalism” (which, in this context, is mostly a camouflaged form of granting special consideration to the needs of the majority group) over “multiculturalism.”

And then there are groups that do not quite fit the “ethnic group” v. “national minority” distinction. One example is religious groups, which share neither territory nor language. But “Muslims,” clearly a religious signifier, are Europe's dominant immigrant group. Another ill-fitting group, as Kymlicka himself concedes (1995: 24–5), is racial. African-Americans, who happen to be the progenitors of American multiculturalism (Glazer 1997), also fall outside Kymlicka's scheme in being neither “ethnic” nor “national.” They trace their origin to slavery and thus were explicitly denied the option of integration into the majority group, and, some argue, continue to be so until the present day; but they also lack the territorial concentration and cultural homogeneity that would warrant self-government or secession.

Despite these difficulties, Kymlicka's important move is to conceive of culture as a “context of choice” (1989: 166). This squarely places the concern of the individual over that of the group. Kymlicka thus escapes the caustic charge of “species conservation” that was raised by liberal Jürgen Habermas against the communitarian theory of Charles Taylor (Habermas 1994: 130), and which has haunted multiculturalism in general.

With respect to liberalism's second main principle, “equality,” Kymlicka argues that even the liberal state, try as it might, cannot quite dissociate itself from majority culture. This is evidenced in the unavoidable choice of an official language, of public holidays, or of public symbolism, all of which usually follow closely the preferences of the majority: “The state unavoidably promotes certain cultural identities and thereby disadvantages others” (1995: 108). The protection of majority culture isn't per se a problem, because an intact “societal culture” is required for people to be free. “Liberal states exist,” says Kymlicka, “also to protect people's cultural membership” (p. 125). But justice commands that the same privileges are granted to the minorities. Kymlicka evidently is simultaneously a liberal nationalist and a multiculturalist. “The orthodox liberal view about the right of states to determine who has citizenship,” he argues, “rests on the same principles which justify group-differentiated citizenship within states” (p. 124). Differently formulated, if “citizenship is an inherently group-differentiated thing,” then liberal justice requires acknowledging this groupness further down the line.

One might still argue that any societal culture will do as a context of choice, in a kind of one-size-fits-all, thus obliterating the necessity to secure the societal culture of the minorities. “No,” says Kymlicka, it has to be one's “own” culture. He deems this an anthropological fact, “deep in the human condition” (1995: 90). This distinguishes his implicitly “nationalist” multiculturalism from the “cosmopolitan alternative” (proposed by Waldron 1992), which holds that any culture (or combination of cultures) would do as a context for meaningful choices. However, to limit voluntarism with respect to culture creates problems for his liberal theory, which “defines national membership in terms of integration into a cultural community, rather than descent” (Kymlicka 1995: 23). Accordingly, he stresses that “national minorities,” the strongest claimant in this multiculturalism theory, are “cultural groups” not “descent groups.” But if the culture claimed by a minority has to be its “own” and not any culture encountered or acquired later in life, descent and a sense of being born into it can never be far away.

Kymlicka's intriguing move in his “equality” defense of multiculturalism is to reject “benign neglect,” which has been the liberal state's classic stance toward cultural difference. Benign neglect may have been possible for religion, but it is not an option with respect to ethnicity (as another word for majority culture). “The state can (and should) replace religious oaths in courts with secular oaths, but it cannot replace the use of English in courts with no language” (1995: 111). This is a powerful argument that seems to wipe out with one move the possibility for liberal state neutrality to obliterate the necessity for multiculturalism.

This move may still be criticized in two diametrically opposed directions. One is to suggest that one should not be too hopeful about a cut-and-dried separation between state and religion if one concedes the obvious difficulties of separating the state and majority culture. In this mode, Tariq Modood has raised the question: “If neutrality is incoherent, how can we apply it to religious groups?” (2007: 25). Kymlicka's neglect of religious groups betrays a “secularist bias,” says Modood (p. 27), which, in particular, pushes European Muslims “outside multiculturalism as a civic or political idea” (p. 30). To this one could reply that, through their immigrant origins, Muslims and other minority religious groups can readily be assimilated into Kymlicka's category of “ethnic groups” – remember his reference to the turbaned Sikh. However, the latter, like all immigrants, cannot expect much anyway within this scheme. Moreover, one must reply to Modood that the “religious” factor of religious groups is taken care of by way of protections of religious liberty, which enjoy prime status in all Western state constitutions and international human rights conventions, and which apply to both majority and minority. It also bears to be reminded that European societies are thoroughly secularized, reducing public majority religion to mostly cere­monial functions. The real friction in Europe is not between majority and minority religion but between a non-religious majority and the more intensely felt religiosity of the Muslim minority. This is hardly something that calls for multicultural redress, at least not in Kymlicka's terms (where minority rights are compensation for legitimate majority nationalism – but in this case there would be no religious equivalent for “majority nationalism,” just a secular void). Accordingly, Modood's charge of “secular bias” is plausible at first but much less so at second sight.

A second way of critiquing the stipulated impossibility of “benign neglect” in matters of culture takes the opposite direction, of questioning the degree to which contemporary states are still strongly nationalist and nation-building, at least in the West (see Joppke 2001: 436–7). Remember that minority rights are a concession to the nationalism of the majority (or rather to a Gellnerian nation-building as cultural homogenization, which Kymlicka sees still running at full throttle [1995: 76f.]). Without nation-building and nationalism, the “equality” case for minority rights disappears. In fact, it must be noted that with respect to immigrants, Western European states in particular have long abandoned the goal of “assimilation.” The new approach is “integration,” which explicitly abdicates the necessity for immigrants to change their cultural identities. Not even the new era of “civic integration” has changed much in this respect (for more on this, see chapter 3). Of course, assimilation, in the sense of rendering immigrants invisible as immigrants, cannot but be the endpoint of successful immigrant incorporation. But contemporary liberal states have few and fewer possibilities to enforce it directly (for the important distinction between “transitive” and “intransitive” assimilation, see Brubaker 2000). With respect to citizenship, it is an anachronism to call it an “inherently group-differentiated notion” (Kymlicka 1995: 124). In Europe, citizenship has become distinctly less nationalistic in the past decades. This is a combined result of ongoing Europeanization (and the rise of a supranational European Union citizenship) and of a liberalization of access to citizenship (including conditional jus soli, the toleration of dual citizenship, and lowered thresholds for naturalization, which is now less exceptional and discretionary than previously) (for an overview of these trends, see Joppke 2010a: ch. 2). A good additional compass for the lesser nation-building capacities of contemporary liberal states is the general retreat of morality laws, by means of which states once tried to impose a uniform, most often expressly “Christian,” way of life on all members of society (see Frank et al. 2010). The current victory of same-sex marriage in country after country, lately even the United States, shows an increasing acknowledgment of lifestyle individualism and pluralism in law and public policy. If the nation is an increasingly multiplex thing, with less possibility for the state to enforce homogeneity, the equality rationale for minority rights in Kymlicka's theory loses traction. This does not mean that multiculturalism disappears – quite the contrary – but it appears in guises not foreseen by Kymlicka. More than being an explicit claim on the part of minorities, multiculturalism is a legal-constitutional necessity (see chapter 4).

While obviously not without problems, Kymlicka's liberal theory of multiculturalism has been enormously influential, making its author not just a star in the academy but a much sought-after policy consultant around the world: commenting on his usually informal attire, the Wall Street Journal called him a “global guru” in “red sneakers” (quoted in Barry 2001: 365–6 fn.13). Part of Kymlicka's success is the extraordinary clarity of his prose, making even the more arcane bits of academic philosophy that feature in it appear light and accessible. But above all, this theory has been so successful because of its deep grounding in real-world developments – it is an authentic mirror of actual minority integration in the past half-century, in a liberal key.

Other

Still, a persistent point of criticism has been Kymlicka's treatment of “culture,” which rests on a reification. Joseph Carens finds that it mirrors the “old logic of the nation-state” (2000: 66) in being monolithic and sharply bounded, like the colored cubes in a Paul Klee painting. Isn't it inauthentic, “like living in Disneyland,” asks Jeremy Waldron (1992: 763), to deliberately confine people and groups to just one culture in a complex world where everything mixes? Surely, people need culture for meaningful choices, but they “do not need cultural integrity” (p. 786). Waldron's “cosmopolitan alternative” is best illustrated by Salman Rushdie's celebration of postcolonial hybridity: “Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and that is how newness enters the world” (quoted on p. 786). This is multiculturalism too, although not one that lends itself to political organization and not one expounded in the pages of Kymlicka (or in those of Taylor or Young, against whom the charge of reifying culture and “groups” would have to be made in an even stronger way).

So why not try “multiculturalism without culture” (Phillips 2007)? The reference to “culture” should be avoided, warns Anne Phillips, to the degree that this is a “falsely homogenizing reification” (p. 14) that “denies human agency” (p. 9). The concept of culture could only be retained as something “not bounded,” “not homogeneous,” and “produced by people” (p. 45). She rightly presents the “impetus” for multiculturalism as “the need to challenge dismissive and disparaging stereotypes of people from minority cultural groups” (p. 31) – hers is a distinctly equality- and antidiscrimination-driven variant of liberal multiculturalism. “Culture” is, as it were, primarily an affront by the majority, so it should be mobilized with caution by the minority, if at all (as suggested in the title of her book). Phillips thus advocates a “simpler humanism that stresses the basic similarities in the ways people behave” (p. 51), and a “multiculturalism…grounded in the rights of individuals rather than those of groups” (p. 162). Hers is an admirably nuanced and reasonable view, but is it still “multiculturalism”? At most, it seems to be an instance of Fish's “boutique multiculturalism,” in which difference is accepted only as long as it stays liberal. But I throw no stones at her, because the multiculturalism of the individual advocated in this book, though more derived from the value of liberty than equality, is very similar in thrust.