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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Multiculturalism is one of the most controversial ideas in contemporary politics. In this new book George Crowder examines some of the leading responses to multiculturalism, both supportive and critical, found in the work of recent political theorists.
The book provides a clear and accessible introduction to a diverse array of thinkers who have engaged with multiculturalism. These include Will Kymlicka, whose account of cultural rights is seminal, liberal critics of multiculturalism such as Brian Barry and Susan Okin, and multiculturalist critics of liberalism including Charles Taylor, Iris Marion Young, James Tully, and Bhikhu Parekh. In addition the discussion covers a wide range of other perspectives on multiculturalism - libertarian, feminist, democratic, nationalist, cosmopolitan - and rival accounts of Islamic and Confucian political culture.
While offering a balanced assessment of these theories, Crowder also argues the case for a distinctive liberal-pluralist approach to multiculturalism, combining a liberal framework that emphasises the importance of personal autonomy with the value pluralism of thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin.
This clear and comprehensive account will be an indispensable textbook for students in politics, sociology and political and social theory.
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Seitenzahl: 484
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Preface
Introduction
The Debate
Defining Multiculturalism
Plan of the Book
1: Universalism, Relativism and Culture
Universalism
Relativism
Problems with Relativism
Universalism Revised: Nussbaum and Sen
Summary
2: Liberal Rights to Culture: Kymlicka's Theory
Liberalism, Toleration and Neutrality
Kymlicka's Case for Cultural Rights
Two Qualifications
Critical Issues
Summary
3: Liberal Critics of Cultural Rights
Equal Treatment: Barry
Recognition vs Redistribution?
Feminist Concerns: Okin
Cultural Options: Shachar
Summary
4: Nationalists and Cosmopolitans
Nationalism and Cultural Diversity
Cosmopolitanism
Strong Cosmopolitanism: Kant and Waldron
Narrative and Reason in Cosmopolitanism: Appiah and Sen
Summary
5: Beyond Liberalism?
Does Liberalism Neglect Community? Taylor
Is Liberalism Imperialist? Tully
Is Liberalism Ethnocentric? Parekh
Summary
6: Democrats
Group Representation: Young
Intercultural Dialogue: Parekh
Deliberative Democracy: Benhabib
Deliberative Democracy Expanded: Young
Summary
7: Value Pluralists
Pluralist Critics of Liberalism: Gray and Parekh
Liberal Pluralists: Galston and Raz
Summary
8: Global Cultures
The West Imperilled? Huntington
The West and Islam: Scruton, Said and An-Na’im
Asian Values: Bell
Summary
9: A Liberal–Pluralist Approach
Value Pluralism, Cultural Pluralism and Liberalism
The Centrality of Personal Autonomy
Public Recognition or Hands Off?
Nationalism, Democracy and Global Cultures
A Final Word
References
Index
Copyright © George Crowder 2013
The right of George Crowder 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 2013 by Polity Press
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Preface
This book is intended to serve three functions. First, I hope to provide an accessible introduction to the issues and debates in the political-theory literature on multiculturalism. That literature began in earnest in the late 1980s, and since that time an immense number of books and articles have appeared on the subject, representing a wide array of rival positions. The time is ripe, I think, for a book-length survey of the territory that will help to guide students and non-specialists through a complex terrain.
I have chosen to tackle multiculturalism by thinker rather than theme in order to highlight and to try to do justice to the different perspectives that have emerged. In addition, I group the leading thinkers together in rough ‘schools’ or tendencies, each chapter concentrating on an identifiable pattern of this kind, to help to bring out persistent themes and preoccupations. Inevitably I have had to be selective in deciding which writers to discuss, and no selection will please everyone. I myself regret some omissions and truncations due to lack of space. However, I have tried to focus on those writers and tendencies that seem to me to have been the most influential and stimulating in the field.
The second purpose of the book is to defend certain responses to the main points in dispute. I have tried to be as just to all the various multiculturalists and their critics as possible but I cannot, of course, agree with them all, if only because they disagree so strongly with each other. I do have views and reach conclusions of my own, and it is only fair to warn readers of these in advance.
To begin with, I argue in favour of a broadly universalist approach to ethics in contrast with various species of relativism, although the kind of universalism that I adopt leaves plenty of room for legitimate ethical divergence among cultures. The limits of that legitimate divergence, I believe, are marked out by the boundaries of liberal politics, in particular by the modern doctrine of human rights. Consequently, I conclude against non-liberal forms of multiculturalism.
Within liberalism, moreover, I align myself with that stream of liberal thought that emphasizes the value of personal autonomy, or the capacity to choose one's own way of life through critical reflection, rather than the kind of liberalism that stresses toleration, which is often interpreted to mean toleration of practices that constrict personal autonomy – the withholding of education from women, for example. I do not see my position in this respect as distinctively or ethnocentrically ‘Western’ or European for reasons I shall come to in due course.
However, whether one should accept what I call ‘multiculturalism proper’ – that is, the active state recognition and promotion of minority cultures within a society – or whether it would be better to take a more ‘hands-off’ approach to cultures, perhaps encouraging mutual toleration or respect but going no further, is a more difficult question to answer. On this matter I recommend a contextual or case-by-case approach.
So far, what I wish to argue is controversial but not especially original. The book's third purpose, however, is to give some indication of how such a view might be argued in a way that is not so familiar – namely, on the basis of the notion of ‘value pluralism’ associated with Isaiah Berlin, the idea that fundamental human values are universal but also irreducibly plural, conflicting and incommensurable. This is not to say that no one has previously approached the issues of multiculturalism by way of value pluralism – in Chapter 7 I examine several theories of this kind. But I believe that I can claim some degree of originality, for good or ill, in the way I combine the pluralist outlook with the particular conclusions I reach.
This project has taken much longer than I thought it would, in part because the literature has kept expanding as I have gone along. At times it has felt as if I were trying to catch a bus that kept pulling away just as I was reaching it. At any rate, I wish to acknowledge the help I have received from several sources along the way.
First, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my former student, Ian Haddock, whose work on his PhD thesis, ‘Liberal Multiculturalism: Liberalism, Cultural Equality, and Individual Rights’ (Flinders University, 2004) encouraged me to embark on this project. Ian helped with some of the initial research and drafting of the book, and his engagement with the ideas stimulated my own.
I am also grateful to Polity's two anonymous readers for their shrewd comments and generous judgements on the whole manuscript. Further comments on particular parts of the work were kindly provided by Daniel A. Bell, Rick DeAngelis, Lina Eriksson, Martin Griffiths, Chandran Kukathas, Geoffrey Brahm Levey, David Miller, Lionel Orchard and Jane Robbins. I also appreciate the questions and comments of audiences at various seminars and conference events over the years, especially those at successive annual conferences of the Australasian Political Studies Association where I first tried out many of these explanations and arguments. None of these generous souls is responsible for the flaws that no doubt remain. At Polity, John Thompson has been an enthusiastic supporter of the project from the beginning, Jennifer Jahn remained patient with its glacial progress for several years, and Elliott Karstadt shepherded it through its final stages.
Parts of Chapters 5, 6 and 7 were first published in my chapter, ‘Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Value Pluralism’, in Peter Balint and Sophie de Latour, eds, Liberal Multiculturalism and the Fair Terms of Integration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and I thank the publisher for permission to reproduce that material.
As always, my greatest debt is to my partner, Sue.
Introduction
Multiculturalism is one of the most controversial ideas in contemporary public affairs.1 For some people it has highly positive connotations: an attractive diversity of ways of life, mutual respect among citizens from different backgrounds, free expression and creativity, colourful dances, exotic customs, culinary variety. For others it suggests social fragmentation, a stultifying political correctness, inegalitarian privileges for certain groups, the abandonment or denigration of the core ethical standards and achievements of Western civilization and even of science and reason.
Is multiculturalism a triumph or a disaster, or something in between? In this book my primary purpose is to introduce and evaluate some of the answers given to this question by leading moral and political theorists.
I shall also argue for my own conclusions. Briefly put, these begin with the principle that the accommodation of multiple cultures within a single society is a laudable ideal, but only if qualified by the principles of liberal democracy. In particular, I emphasize the importance of personal autonomy, the capacity of individuals to choose their own way of life and to take a critically reflective view of their own culture. It is a further question whether cultural accommodation should take the form of what I shall call ‘multiculturalism proper’, the public recognition of minority cultures, or whether it would be better to take a more non-interventionist approach with cultures. On this issue I argue that different responses may be appropriate in different contexts.
These may seem unsurprising and unadventurous conclusions, but they run counter to some of the most influential thinking on the subject in the academy. In addition, I reach my conclusions by ‘a road less traveled’, namely that of ‘value pluralism’, in contrast with more familiar forms of ethical argument in this field.
The Debate
Many societies have been multicultural in the sense that they have in fact contained people from diverse cultural backgrounds, but multiculturalism ‘is a normative response to that fact’ (Parekh 2006: 6). Multiculturalists not only observe but also approve of the presence of multiple cultures within a single society and accord public recognition and support to those cultures. Policies along these lines date from the 1970s, emerging in liberal democracies including Canada, Australia, the United States and parts of Western Europe, notably the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The best-known political theories of multiculturalism have been formulated in response to those policies.
Multiculturalism has always had its supporters and detractors, the weight of influence appearing to fall now on one side, now on the other. Indeed, the dispute is often presented as a narrative of the rise and fall of multiculturalism, or at least its advance and retreat. This pattern has been detected in all of the countries mentioned, with the possible exception of Canada, where multiculturalism has always been at its strongest.2
To begin with the ‘rise’ of multiculturalism, multiculturalist policies were first formulated in the wake of increased migration from developing countries to the developed societies of North America, Western Europe and Australasia, an increase that began after the Second World War and gathered pace in the 1960s and 1970s. Along with the new migration came a change of attitude in the host countries, where the traditional policies of assimilation – the insistence that immigrants adopt the majority culture – came to be seen as neither necessary nor desirable. Unlike previous waves of immigrants, the new arrivals were thought to be too ‘different’ to be easily assimilated. While for some policy makers this was immediately a major problem, for others it was something to be welcomed. As the British Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, expressed it in 1966:
I do not think we need in this country a ‘melting pot’, which will turn everyone out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone's misplaced vision of the stereotyped Englishman … I define integration, therefore, not as a flattening process of uniformity, but cultural diversity, coupled with equality of opportunity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. (Jenkins 1970: 267)
The valuing of cultural diversity in balance with equality of opportunity and mutual tolerance – here, immediately, are some of the central themes of multiculturalism.
In pursuit of these goals new policies were instituted, first in Canada and Australia in the early 1970s, and in many other liberal democracies soon after. In different degrees in different places these included some or all of the following:3
One should add to this list various provisions recognizing the special status and claims of indigenous peoples (Ivison, Patton and Sanders 2000).
Multiculturalism has always had critics, and these have become more numerous and vocal over the years. In part the critics have been alarmed by a number of sensational cases in which multiculturalism has been implicated by popular or media opinion: for example, the threats against the novelist Salman Rushdie, the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, the ‘Danish cartoons’ controversy and the London bombings of 7 July 2005. Such events have often been said to demonstrate a ‘failure of multiculturalism’. In fact, however, it is questionable whether any of these occurrences had much to do with multiculturalism, since none of them was endorsed or directly encouraged by multiculturalist policies. In each case the anti-multiculturalist outcry was really directed at the sheer presence in the host country of groups with divergent beliefs, but that alone is not equivalent to multiculturalism, as I shall explain shortly.
Less dramatic but more pervasive factors in generating opposition to multiculturalism are the broad social, economic and political patterns that have influenced popular thinking on the subject, whether rightly or wrongly. Multiculturalist policies have in general been created by policy elites rather than by popular demand. Ordinary people have often seen such programmes as elitist impositions that have made their lives more difficult in times that are difficult already. As Ali Rattansi argues, the advent of multiculturalism has coincided with a period of ‘triple transition’: widespread questioning of nation-states and national identities, a shift in developed countries away from manufacturing towards a ‘post-industrial’ economy, and the ‘restructuring’ – some would say decimation – of the welfare state (Rattansi 2011: 143–7). It is easy to see how the dislocations and anxieties caused by these changes have been turned against policies of increased immigration, hence against the multiculturalism that seems to justify and encourage this.
The critics bring several charges against multiculturalism. Perhaps the most common is that the multiculturalist emphasis on cultural diversity and distinct identities undermines the cohesion and shared identity that any society needs. In Australia, for example, multiculturalism has been accused of being ‘used to hollow out what it means to be and to become an Australian citizen, depriving citizenship of its cultural base in a distinctive Australian nationality’ (Galligan and Roberts 2004: 80). The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has even linked what he sees as the ‘weakening of our collective identity’ that he attributes to multiculturalism with the rise in the UK of Islamist extremism (Cameron 2011).
Other complaints include a sense that multiculturalist provisions privilege some communities at the expense of others and that they depart from liberal-democratic commitments to the equal treatment of all citizens and to individual rights and liberties (Barry 2001). There is often a concern about accommodation of illiberal cultural traditions that set a low value on the rights of women in particular (Okin 1999). Some commentators have seen in multiculturalism a betrayal not only of liberal democracy but also of Western civilization (Bloom 1987; Huntington 1996; Sandall 2001). Finally, there is a perception that multiculturalism is part of a contemporary movement towards ethical and cognitive relativism that is itself a form of unthinking prejudice (Bloom 1987).
Under the weight of this intellectual and popular opposition, multiculturalism is now, according to many observers, in decline or even finished altogether. Christian Joppke sees ‘a seismic shift’ in several European societies from multiculturalism to ‘civic integration’, which emphasizes the uniform entitlements of individuals rather than the differentiated claims of groups, and which is consequently more assertive of overarching liberal principles (Joppke 2004: 248–52). Similarly, Hans Entzinger writes of the Netherlands as adopting ‘a renewed emphasis on citizenship and shared values’, and Anne Phillips refers to a reaction against multiculturalism in university curricula and admissions policy in the United States in favour of ‘the supposedly core values of freedom, democracy, and a Christian God’ (Entzinger 2003: 59; Phillips 2007: 3–4). In Australia multiculturalism has been declared by some to be ‘effectively gutted as a national policy’ (Galligan and Roberts 2004: 94).
Yet an equally frequent assessment is that reports of the demise of multiculturalism have been exaggerated. In some cases the rhetoric may have changed but this has made little difference to policy. Australia, for example, dropped the word ‘multiculturalism’ from the title of the Immigration Department in 2007 but retained most of the associated policies and practices. Geoffrey Levey concludes that ‘if we are witnessing a retreat from “multiculturalism”, it appears to be a measured one’ (Levey 2008: 19). Rogers Brubaker describes a turn away from strong ‘differentialism’ but adds that this ‘does not amount to a return to the bad old days of arrogant assimilationism’ (Brubaker 2003: 51). For Ali Rattansi, multiculturalism is both under fire and also to some degree ‘embedded’ (Rattansi 2011: 148). Even among those who want to see multiculturalism amended, there is still widespread support for Nathan Glazer's famous remark that in general ‘we are all multiculturalists now’ (Glazer 1997). Perhaps the safest conclusion is that the debate over multiculturalism is far from settled.
Defining Multiculturalism
Might it be that at least some of the prevalent disagreement over multiculturalism stems from confusion over what the concept means? The debate in the popular media and even the academic literature often gives the impression that the multiculturalism that the critics attack is not the same as the multiculturalism that its supporters defend.
The problem is that what multiculturalism is or should be is part of what is in dispute. First, is multiculturalism a moderate or a radical idea? There are claims and counter-claims as to whether there is now consensus on the basic multiculturalist principles or whether these remain controversial or idealistic. On the one hand, the leading multiculturalist Will Kymlicka believes that he is merely justifying what is already to a large extent existing practice in liberal democracies, and furthermore that the kind of justifications he offers are a subset or natural development of mainstream liberal-democratic thought (Kymlicka 1998b; 2001: 3–4). On the other hand, the well-known critic of multiculturalism, Brian Barry, sees all multiculturalists, including Kymlicka, as betraying the norms of liberalism and egalitarianism and returning to the pre-Enlightenment moral world of irrational distinctions and privileges (Barry 2001). I shall discuss Kymlicka and Barry in detail in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively.
A second point of disagreement, closely related to the first, is whether multiculturalism is really more about integration or about separation. Roughly speaking, moderate multiculturalists are drawn more towards the integration of cultures within a society, while advocates at the more radical end of the multiculturalist spectrum tend to emphasize the distinctness of cultures. This is speaking only roughly because there is no sharp dividing line between these views: all multiculturalists share both of them to some extent. For example, Kymlicka is more integrationist in his prescriptions for immigrant groups but more separatist when it comes to ‘national’ or indigenous minorities (see Chapter 2).
At any rate, the integrationist and separatist faces of multiculturalism seem to show themselves by turns. Even the most integrationist form of multiculturalism involves an insistence that the distinctness of cultural identities be respected, indeed valued. In 1966 Roy Jenkins had in mind improved policies for the integration of new immigrants. But the central requirement, he believed, was the replacement of assimilation by the retention, to some extent, of existing cultural identities. The more cultural distinctness is emphasized, the more it seems to pull away from integration. This is especially so in those countries, Canada and Australia in particular, where multiculturalism is advanced not merely as an instrument for settling newcomers within an overarching national identity but as itself a central feature of that identity. In the Australian case this has given rise to the objection that, while multiculturalism was initially ‘a humane policy for accommodating migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds’, the expanded vision of multiculturalism as a centerpiece of national identity is an empty conception that ‘includes everyone but engages no one’ (Galligan and Roberts 2004: 75, 80).
A third level of dispute concerns justification: is multiculturalism underpinned by universalist or by relativist ethics? Again this is related to the previous points at issue. The more moderate, integrationist approaches to multiculturalism (like Kymlicka's) are usually justified by arguments based on the standard rights and liberties of liberal-democratic citizenship backed by the idea of human rights. That is, moderate multiculturalists usually appeal to universalist arguments. In their liberal version, such arguments make the well-being of the human individual primary. Cultures may be instrumentally valuable to the extent that they contribute to individual well-being – to the liberty or equality or fair treatment of individuals – but cultural practices may also be criticized by the same standard. Hence, on this view, the legitimate claims of cultures are limited by liberal political principles (see Chapters 2, 3 and 9).
By contrast, the more radical, ‘separatist’ kinds of multiculturalism tend to rest on the notion that cultures are valuable not merely instrumentally but intrinsically – valuable for their own sake. From this it seems to follow that they are equally valuable, so that all cultures must be equally respected. Views of this kind are usually based on cultural relativism, the theory that moral rules are never universal in application or authority, but only relatively valid from some particular cultural perspective. On this view each culture is its own moral authority, so all must be equals. Such an approach implies a strong or unqualified form of multiculturalism that regards liberal democracy as only one cultural form among others (see Chapter 5).4
I cannot resolve all these disputes immediately. Distinguishing and evaluating the many different approaches to multiculturalism will occupy the rest of the book. However, it is possible to sketch a working definition of multiculturalism that will frame the subsequent discussion. This needs to be both specific enough to make the investigation relevant and manageable, and wide enough to include at least most of those political theories commonly referred to under the heading of multiculturalism.
I propose the following three-part definition.
The combination of (1) and (2) is enough for multiculturalism at its broadest, the idea that the presence of several different cultures within a single society is desirable. However, it is only with the addition of (3) that we arrive at the more specific idea of ‘multiculturalism proper’, and it is this latter idea that I shall usually be referring to as ‘multiculturalism’ in the remainder of the book.
It is also worth noting what my definition excludes and what it leaves open. It excludes from theories of fully fledged multiculturalism purely descriptive theories of contemporary diversity, the mere celebration of that diversity and the advocacy of toleration and other public responses that fall short of positive recognition. It leaves undecided the precise focus and limits of public recognition, and the manner in which, and the extent to which, recognition is justified. These are matters that I shall examine in due course.
Culture
Let me now briefly expand on aspects of the three elements in my definition. First, multiculturalists accept that under contemporary conditions any single political society is likely in fact to contain more than one culture. But what is a ‘culture’? This concept is itself a major crux of debate, and I shall have more to say about competing views of culture, and the implications of those competing views, in the chapters to follow.
However, some working definition is again in order, and for this purpose I propose the following: a culture is a set of beliefs and values that is held in common by a group and that identify it as a group.5 By extension a culture may also be a group that identifies itself in this way. For a culture to exist, there must be, as Ronald Dworkin puts it, ‘a shared vocabulary of tradition and convention’ (Dworkin 1985: 231). Conventions are accepted ways of doing things, and traditions are conventions transmitted across generations. Such conventions and traditions are likely to differ from one group to the next, so the shared vocabulary is one through which a group identifies itself as a particular group distinct from others.
Some people would want to go further and specify that the relevant beliefs and values must generate an ‘encompassing’ or ‘comprehensive’ identity. The initial thought is that everything said about cultures so far could be said of families, or of micro-cultures – clubs or businesses, for example – but the literature of multiculturalism is concerned with beliefs and norms that guide a person's conduct not just in one area, such as sport or business, but throughout life more generally.
But critics would argue that in the modern world there are hardly any comprehensive identities. A central theme of the ‘cosmopolitan’ thinkers in particular (Chapter 4) is that people identify themselves in many different ways – as parents, children, spouses, students, workers, nationals and citizens – and each of these identities may have various and multiple cultural sources. No single culture is likely to define the entire identity of a modern individual. Some cultures may seek to be more encompassing than others, and some individuals may prefer a more encompassing identity, but on the whole it may be safer to say not that cultures are comprehensive but that they contribute to personal and collective identity to some significant extent.
A connected point concerns the relation between cultural identity on the one hand and ethnic, religious and national identities on the other. Briefly put, these overlap but are not identical. Two groups may, for example, be ethnically identical yet culturally divergent, as in the case of pre-war Australia and Britain. A single national culture can be shared by different religious groups, as in the United States, and co-religionists can be divided by culture, as borne out by a comparison between Muslims in Iran and Indonesia. People with the same ethnicity and culture may still come into violent conflict on the level of nationalism, as shown by the Serbs and Croats during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Nevertheless, while it is important to be aware of different dimensions of identity, it would be idle to pretend that they did not interconnect.6 Culture is not equivalent to religion but cultures are often deeply influenced by religious beliefs and values. While, strictly speaking, Islam is a religion and not a culture, there is clearly a family resemblance among Muslim cultures.
Another issue concerning the definition of culture intersects with the question of multiculturalist justification raised earlier. Understandings of culture, it may be said, vary along a continuum between two extremes. At one extreme are the ‘universalists’, who emphasize the commonalities of human nature, conduct and evaluation, and regard cultures as at best secondary phenomena, transient and even ephemeral patterns of life with little or no moral weight compared with the ethical rules that bind all humanity. The other pole is occupied by the ‘culturalists’ or ‘cultural relativists’, who see cultures as complete, self-contained, bounded and even incommensurable, each generating its own locally authoritative ethical point of view.
As noted before, this division is highly significant for the politics of multiculturalism. On more universalist views the claims of culture are more qualified; on views tending towards the relativist end of the spectrum they are correspondingly assertive. I shall return to this dispute in Chapter 1.
The Fact of Cultural Diversity
Given my preliminary understanding of culture, the next step is to observe that, for the multiculturalist, nearly all modern societies contain multiple cultures as a matter of fact. Indeed, the fact is unavoidable. In the socio-economic realm, cultural diversity within Western societies has been increased or intensified by immigration and globalization. Levels of migration to the Western liberal democracies have in general increased enormously since the Second World War – although in the case of the United States the acceleration of immigration dates to the nineteenth century. The major causes of this movement of populations includes displacement brought about by the war, economic migration in the aftermath of decolonization and to some extent the freer movement of people under economic and technological globalization. The upshot has been the creation of very substantial minority communities within liberal-democratic societies.7
Nor is this change a matter of numbers alone. Many of those migrating have moved from developing nations and belong to cultures and religions with traditions and values very different from those of the majority in their new homes – Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists, for example. It might be argued that liberal states should take this in their stride because liberal democracy is dedicated to the toleration of different religious views and diverse ways of life. The reality, however, is that until recent times Western states had to deal only with religious diversity among rival Christian denominations, and even that proved hard enough to accommodate. Jewish communities were tolerated, on and off, over the centuries, but their presence was accepted only grudgingly by the Christian majority and was frequently rejected in the most violent terms. The new post-war diversity has introduced cultural differences in Western societies very much greater than those between rival Christians, and between Christians and Jews. Indeed, the new situation has a new term to describe it: ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec 2007).
Moreover, the new migrant minorities have started to assert their identities more strongly and to agitate for special rights to ensure that their culture is recognized and its integrity protected.8 They have been joined in this by indigenous communities, now better educated, often justly resentful of past mistreatment, and aware of the United Nations Covenants in regard to the right of self-determination of ‘peoples’.
The effect of globalization on cultural diversity has also been significant, although complex and disputed. The principal dimensions of globalization are informational, technological and economic. The increasingly rapid flow of information around the world has led to an accelerated spread of technology and the creation of global markets unconstrained by distance, borders or state authority (Waters 2000). Some observers see this as culturally homogenizing, tending to the global diffusion of the values of capitalism and liberal democracy: materialism, consumerism, individual liberty and human rights (Fukuyama 1992; Tomlinson 1995). Others see globalization as a force for greater diversity, generating new, ‘hybrid’ forms of culture as novel ideas and outlooks are introduced into previously insular societies (Scholte 2000: 23–4). There is some degree of truth in both views but rather more in the latter. Even if globalization is homogenizing to a degree, that in itself tends to provoke culturalist reactions (Barber 1995; Huntington 1996).
Much the same point has been made in the political sphere in relation to culturalist reactions against the nation-state. It may be that the supposed cultural homogeneity of Western societies before the post-war age of migration was always an invention, even an illusion, created by the nation building of the nineteenth century (Gellner 1983; Anderson 2006; Hobsbawm 2012). At any rate, the dominant nation-states began to be more loudly questioned in the latter part of the twentieth century by native minorities such as the Scots, Welsh, Basques and Bretons in Europe, and indigenous groups in North America, Australia and New Zealand. Many of the new immigrant groups have also lent their voices to this chorus to argue for public recognition of their identity and to reject the old norm of assimilation. This process received added impetus from the ending of the Cold War. For forty years the polarization of the world between rival capitalist and communist blocs had overshadowed and led to the suppression of other differences. With the fall of communism at the end of the 1980s, waves of nationalist and ethnic feeling were suddenly released, most dramatically in the dismantling of Yugoslavia.
Responses to Diversity
Contemporary political societies, then, can hardly avoid being multicultural. But multiculturalism requires the second step mentioned earlier, from fact to approval. Many societies have been ‘multicultural’ in the sense that they have, as a matter of fact, contained multiple cultures – the Roman and Ottoman empires are often given as examples. But a multicultural society is not necessarily a society animated by multiculturalism. It all depends on how far the society, especially through its political norms and institutions, responds positively to the fact of diversity.
Historically, the great majority of responses to cultural diversity within a society have fallen short of approval. The presence of cultural minorities has sometimes met with violent opposition, as in the case of the Nazis or of those societies that have practised ‘ethnic cleansing’ in more recent times. Even where cultural difference has not provoked outright violence, many societies have pursued policies and practices of more or less forcible assimilation, the coercive subsuming of minority groups into a dominant national identity. This is not to say that all assimilation is coercive, since sometimes it is very much desired by those assimilated – by immigrants, for example (Kukathas 2003: 154). But where assimilation is a goal of public policy, or even where it is backed informally by public sentiment, an element of coercion is often present.
Another possibility, often overlapping assimilation, is ‘toleration’.9 Here minority cultures are not approved, but not actively discouraged or assimilated either: the policy is basically one of non-interference. Examples include the toleration of minority religious and cultural groups within the Roman and Islamic worlds. At this point we are getting closer to multiculturalism, but we are not there yet. Crucially, toleration requires no element of approval or even respect for the beliefs or practices tolerated. Indeed, toleration implies non-interference despite disapproval: ‘I don't care for the way you live, but I won't interfere with it either.’
The same is true of a further step towards multiculturalism, namely the policy typical of liberal states that the law should prevent unfair discrimination among citizens on the basis of race, religion, gender or culture in fields such as employment and education. This kind of policy takes us beyond toleration, since it demands more of the state. Nor, however, does it yet amount to genuine multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism proper requires the addition of the third element on my list. Beyond the idea of cultural diversity as a fact to be registered, or a situation to be tolerated, beyond even the celebration of cultural diversity as in general a good thing, multiculturalism requires that multiple cultures within the same polity be given positive recognition at an official or public level. There have been many societies in which minority cultures are widely admired but receive no official support from the state – indeed, that was the liberal-democratic norm until recently. Such a society is more accurately described as multicultural rather than truly multiculturalist. Multiculturalism requires that the value of cultural diversity be recognized in public policy, the political voice of the society as a whole.
Public recognition of the value of cultural diversity may take various forms. At its weakest, recognition may be purely rhetorical or inspirational. This may involve no more than an assertion that the presence of minority cultures in the society is desirable or that certain minorities, usually indigenous, have a special place in a country's history and identity. Such declarations can be quite powerful, however, especially when they enter into the institutional symbolism of the society – its ‘official emblems, anthems, flags, public holidays, and the like’ (Levey 2008: 16) – or when they take the form of special one-off government announcements. An example of the latter is the Australian government's official apology for past injustice to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples made by the Prime Minister in parliament in 2008.
Public recognition of minority cultures may also involve adjustments to the law. One common form of cultural recognition is exemption from legal obligation: members of a group may be exempt from a law that applies to everyone else. In this connection a favourite example in the literature is that of Sikh men who are exempt from compliance with British law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, on the ground that their religion requires them to wear a turban.10
A stronger form of minority recognition is the provision by the state of various kinds of special opportunity not available to other citizens. These special rights are typically justified not as superior privileges but as compensation for certain kinds of disadvantage. For example, in Australia people from indigenous backgrounds are entitled to special university scholarships (‘Abstudy’) not open to others, on the ground that indigenous people have historically received fewer such opportunities than other Australian citizens.
Finally, the strongest form of special minority accommodation is group self-determination. In some countries, certain minority groups, usually indigenous peoples, are recognized as having the right to govern themselves, in accordance with their traditional norms, within some designated jurisdiction. Self-determination itself can take several forms, ranging from (at the weaker end) advisory institutions such as the Australian Indigenous Council, to semi-sovereign polities like the Canadian Inuit and Native American nations. Beyond ‘accommodation’ altogether there is the possibility of complete secession, where the self-determining group forms a state of its own.
Plan of the Book
Is multiculturalism desirable? If so, in what form? These are my basic questions. More specifically still, I shall be asking how far, and in what form, multiculturalism can be defended in relation to liberal democracy, the dominant ideology of our time and the political form within which multiculturalist policies have so far arisen. These issues have provoked many different responses, in turn raising further questions. To organize and discuss these, I proceed as follows.
Chapter 1 introduces some of the basic ethical orientations for the theories to follow, focusing on the debate between universalism and relativism. Multiculturalism is for many people associated with cultural relativism, which arose in reaction against the dominant universalism of Western ethical thought. Among the various weaknesses of traditional universalism, culturalists typically emphasize its ethnocentrism – it tended to project as universal norms that in reality were specific to a particular culture or society. Consequently, universalism has been superseded, for some thinkers, by cultural relativism, which holds that each culture has its own legitimate morality. However, cultural relativism too has its problems, since cultures have often endorsed practices – slavery, sexism, racism, xenophobia – that are ethically questionable and contrary to the spirit of multiculturalism or respect for cultural diversity. I go on to look at a contemporary middle way between universalism and relativism, the ‘human capabilities’ theory of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. This in turn raises the issue of value pluralism, to which I return in Chapter 7.
The first explicitly multiculturalist theory I examine is Will Kymlicka's seminal account of cultural rights, discussed in Chapter 2. I start with Kymlicka because he is such a dominant figure in the field, occupying a position akin to John Rawls's in current thinking on justice: a central agenda-setter whose work has inspired or provoked much of the writing in the field. In fact Kymlicka's work is to some extent an extension of Rawls's, since he presents it as a consistent working out of the basic egalitarian-liberal principles associated with Rawls and others. Consequently, I begin by setting out the liberal background to Kymlicka's view, distinguishing the traditional liberal toleration-based or ‘privatization’ approach to culture from the multiculturalist recognition that Kymlicka advocates. I then set out Kymlicka's case, which advocates special rights for cultural minorities within a liberal framework, based on the conditions for autonomy, equal treatment and an emphasis on ‘national’ minorities. The final section presents a preliminary critical discussion of Kymlicka, focusing on two issues: first, the role of personal autonomy in his theory, which is disputed by the supporters of Rawlsian ‘political’ liberalism; second, his willingness to use the state to liberalize illiberal cultures, which is opposed by the libertarian or classical liberal Chandran Kukathas.
Further criticism of Kymlicka emerges in Chapter 3, which deals primarily with the work of two liberal critics of multiculturalism, Brian Barry and Susan Okin. Barry approaches the matter from an egalitarian-liberal perspective, rejecting special cultural rights on the basis of equal treatment and a concern for state-sponsored social justice. Okin is a liberal feminist who sees multiculturalist recognition as protecting and preserving traditions that are fundamentally patriarchal. Barry's and Okin's views are in turn criticized by fellow-liberals and others who believe they have gone too far. In this respect I briefly examine the views of Nancy Fraser as a counterweight to Barry's, and those of Ayelet Shachar as a response to Okin.
Another issue raised by Kymlicka's work is that of the relation between multiculturalism and nationalism. For Kymlicka, it is ‘national’ groups that have the strongest minority rights, but some critics see this as discriminating unfairly against other kinds of cultural identity, such as those of immigrants. In general, nationalists and multiculturalists both endorse the value of cultural belonging, but there are tensions between them as well. Must national belonging override other identities? To what extent is nationalism consistent with cultural diversity? In Chapter 4 I discuss the varying responses to these questions given by John Stuart Mill and the recent ‘liberal nationalists’, David Miller and Yael Tamir. I then go on to consider the criticisms and alternatives offered by the nationalists’ ‘cosmopolitan’ rivals, including Jeremy Waldron, Anthony Appiah and Amartya Sen.
Up to this point I have presented the debate over multiculturalism as largely a family disagreement among liberal thinkers. In Chapter 5 the discussion broadens to include writers who, in varying degrees, question the liberal framework itself. Charles Taylor, James Tully and Bhikhu Parekh all tend to see liberalism as the political expression of one cultural outlook among others, with no legitimate claim to moral superiority and no convincing title to being regarded as an adequate political container for human cultural diversity. Liberals respond that these anti-liberal or ‘difference’ versions of multiculturalism rely either on untenable forms of relativism or on implicit liberal assumptions after all.
Increasingly, theorists of multiculturalism, whether liberal or anti-liberal, argue that cultural minorities will be adequately recognized only when they are in some strong sense democratically self-determining. Accordingly, in Chapter 6 I discuss several theories stressing the role of democratic values and processes in multiculturalism. These include Iris Marion Young's advocacy of group representation, Parekh's account of ‘intercultural dialogue’ and Seyla Benhabib's argument for deliberative democracy. The chapter closes with Young's proposed revisions of the deliberative model.
In Chapter 7 I return to the concept of value pluralism, introduced briefly at the end of Chapter 1. Pluralism in this sense is the idea that there are many distinct human goods, and that different combinations of these generate a multiplicity of genuinely valuable ways of life. Consequently, one would expect that multiculturalism and value pluralism would be mutually sympathetic points of view, the major point of overlap being an emphasis on the value of cultural diversity. I examine this claim in the work of Isaiah Berlin, John Gray, Parekh (again), William Galston and Joseph Raz, finding that there is little agreement among these writers either on the relation between pluralism and multiculturalism or on that between pluralism and liberal democracy. The discussion does, however, suggest some salient points that I pick up in Chapter 9.
Chapter 8 deals with issues of multiculturalism at a global level. In particular, I focus on influential accounts of the relation between ‘Western’ and other ‘global’ cultures, starting with Samuel Huntington's claim that the central and permanent pattern here is a ‘clash of civilizations’. I test out this claim with especial reference to liberal democracy on the one hand, and to Islamic and Confucian norms on the other. On the whole I argue that Huntington's thesis should not be accepted. While it is true that there are considerable gaps between liberal-democratic values and those of Islam and Confucianism in their currently dominant forms, Huntington's thesis that this points to a permanent clash of civilizations presupposes an essentialist view of global cultures that has been rightly discredited.
Chapter 9 draws together the central issues that have emerged from the previous chapters and outlines the value-pluralist answer I endorse. I argue that the best response to cultural diversity will begin with a modified universalism that emphasizes the incommensurability of basic values. The general political stance that fits best with a pluralist outlook is that of liberalism, in particular a liberalism that stresses the value of personal autonomy. Further, the idea of pluralism implies that all cultures embody genuine human values to some degree and so are to that extent worthy not merely of toleration but positive evaluation. However, to endorse multiculturalism proper, involving public recognition of multiple cultures, is to address a complex balancing of benefit and cost that will have to proceed contextually. The balance sought will also take into account the claims of national identity, democracy and ‘civilizational’ heritage, although all of these will be strongly qualified by liberal-pluralist considerations.
Notes
1 Concise treatments of multiculturalism in general can be found in Kivisto (2002); Modood (2007); and Rattansi (2011). The political-theory literature on the subject is surveyed by Kymlicka (2002: ch. 8); Kukathas (2004); and Murphy (2012). Significant collections of essays on multiculturalism by political theorists include Horton (1993); Joppke and Lukes (1999); Laden and Owen (2007).
2 On the alleged retreat of multiculturalism in the UK and the Netherlands see Entzinger (2003); Joppke (2004). France, Germany and the US are discussed by Brubaker (2003). On the Canadian experience see Kymlicka (1998a). On Australia see Levey (2008).
3 This list is based on that set out in Banting and Kymlicka (2006: 56–7).
4 See in this connection the ‘curriculum’ multiculturalism, especially prominent in the United States, which opposes the traditional dominance of ‘Western civilization’: Bloom (1987); D'Souza (1992); Schlesinger (1992); Hughes (1993); Friedman and Narveson (1995).
5 For further examination of the concept of culture see White and Dillingham (1973); Carrithers (1992); Scott (2003); Jenks (2004); Lawson (2006).
6 For a useful survey both of the distinct dimensions of identity and of the links among these see Preece (2005).
7 According to Stephen Castles and Mark Miller, between 1945 and 1975 the minority population of France increased in millions from 2.1 to 4.1, that of Germany from 0.5 to 4.0 and that of the UK from 1.5 to 4.1. By 2005 the foreign-born population of France was 4.9 million, that of Germany 10.6 and that of the UK 5.8. See Castles and Miller (2009: Tables 5.1 and 5.3).
8 The United Nations adopted a Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities in 1993. See the discussion by Kymlicka (2001: 120–32).
9 The following distinction between toleration, non-discrimination and multiculturalism is indebted to Raz (1995: 172–3).
10 For opposing views on this example see Kymlicka (1995a: 97) and Barry (2001: 44–5). I return to it in Chapters 2 and 3.
1
Universalism, Relativism and Culture
‘Multicultural thinking’, writes Paul Scheffer, ‘represents a continuation of cultural relativism by other means’ (Scheffer 2011: 197). It is easy to see why someone might believe this. Cultural relativism is the idea that truth or morality is relative to culture, that each culture has its own unique standards of truth or moral rightness, and that consequently all cultures are equal in moral and intellectual status. If that is so then it seems to follow that all cultures should be accorded equal respect. Where multiple cultures are present in the same society none is more authoritative than any other and all should be recognized equally.
However, Scheffer's comment is seriously misleading. It is true that some forms of multiculturalism rest on something like the reasoning just sketched out. This applies to what may be called the ‘strong’ or perhaps ‘popular’ multiculturalism of the kind found in the curriculum wars in American schools and universities in the 1980s and 1990s. But a great deal of multiculturalist thought does not take this form. Indeed, not one of the leading multiculturalist thinkers I shall discuss is an outright relativist, although some flirt with relativism from time to time. That is because cultural relativism suffers from a number of difficulties that make it problematic in general and that undermine it as a basis for multiculturalism in particular.
These difficulties are well known. Nevertheless, the popular understanding of multiculturalism is so influential, among both supporters and detractors, that it is important to begin this inquiry by examining the notion of cultural relativism. I hope thereby to challenge immediately certain assumptions that some readers may bring to this investigation. The first step is to consider what relativists react against, namely ethical universalism, before looking in more detail at relativism: its core claims, varieties (including postmodernism) and problems. In the final section I set out a view that could be said to occupy a middle ground between traditional universalism and relativism – namely, the theory of human capabilities advanced by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. The critical discussion of capabilities theory will briefly introduce the idea of value pluralism that I shall return to in Chapter 7.
Universalism
Ethical universalism is the view that there are certain moral rules that are binding on all human beings in all places at all times. Such universal rules override the norms of particular cultures, which can be judged as more or less acceptable by the criterion of universal morality. Universal accounts of morality have been dominant in Western thought, at least until recently. They have, by and large, been dominant in other world philosophies too, but I shall be focusing on Western thought, since this is, perhaps ironically, the context for explicit theories of multiculturalism. I say ‘ironically’ because multiculturalist theories so often condemn Western thought for its ‘ethnocentrism’. This condemnation is itself a distinctive expression of certain strands of Western thought. Throughout the history of Western philosophy, ethical universalism has frequently been challenged, these challenges amounting to a sceptical and relativist counterpoint that is as old as universalism itself. But it is universalism that has struck the dominant chord.
The most prominent contemporary expression of ethical universalism is the concept of human rights, the idea that all persons have fundamental entitlements simply by virtue of their humanity.1 This notion can be traced to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century idea of natural rights advocated by thinkers such as John Locke, Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson. The idea of natural rights, in turn, has its origin in the concept of natural law, developed most systematically by St Thomas Aquinas from roots in the ancient Greek philosophers. The basic notion of natural law is that universal rules of conduct can be identified by studying human nature (d’Entrèves 1951). Thus, Aquinas argues that we can deduce universal rules of conduct by using our reason to identify the natural ‘inclinations’ of human beings and to decide how those inclinations should be facilitated and regulated (Aquinas 1959: 123).
According to Locke's late seventeenth-century interpretation, the natural law generates a doctrine of natural rights. Under the natural law, fundamental obligations, such as the duty to preserve human life, imply fundamental rights, notably individuals’ rights to their ‘life, health, liberty, or possessions’ (Locke 1689 [1970]: section 6). These are basic entitlements that trump public opinion, the policies of particular governments and the local norms of particular cultures. Lockean rights became the basis for justifying the great political revolutions of the modern era, beginning with the Glorious Revolution (1688) that established the supremacy of Parliament over the Crown in England. They reappeared among the ‘self-evident truths’ of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1776), and were restated by Paine and the French revolutionaries as ‘the rights of Man’ – the ancestors of the ‘human rights’ listed in the United Nations Declaration of 1948.
The idea of a universal morality implicit in human nature is thus one of the most powerful streams in Western thought, and foundational for modern politics, especially liberal democracy. Locke's assertion of respect for natural rights as the test of legitimate government marks something like the birth of the liberal tradition that I shall have more to say about in the next chapter.
From the beginning, however, ethical universalism provoked the obvious question, what exactly are the rules that are said to be universal? Moreover, in the case of the central natural-law tradition, what exactly are the features of human nature that imply the universal rules, and how do they do so? Over the centuries these questions have received many conflicting answers. For example, Aristotle's view that slavery was ethically permissible, indeed justified by natural differences among human beings, was flatly contradicted by the moral egalitarianism of Christian readings of the natural law, culminating in the natural rights advocated by Locke and his successors. Again, Locke's interpretation of human nature is distinctly more optimistic, and consequently the task of government in his view is distinctly more limited, than that of Thomas Hobbes, who pictures human nature as fundamentally selfish, aggressive and in need of strict political control in order to avoid continual conflict.
Such disagreements have been endemic in the history of ethical universalism. Moreover, they have been exacerbated by a series of developments in the history of modern Western ideas that have tended to undermine confidence in a single moral truth and to promote various kinds of moral scepticism and relativism. These developments began with the Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which saw the break-up of Western Christianity into rival Roman Catholic and Protestant factions, each asserting and attempting to enforce equally dogmatic claims to the possession of God's truth. The whole notion of divine authority was in turn eroded by the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its secular explanations of the natural world, and subsequently by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, some streams of which attempted to apply modern scientific method to the explanation and improvement of the social world. The gradual disappointment of Enlightenment hopes for a natural science of morality only added to doubts about the possibility of identifying a single, coherent body of moral knowledge to rival the achievements of the natural sciences, despite efforts to model such a science on disciplines such as mathematics and evolutionary biology.2
Marxism, too, was in part a sceptical or relativizing influence, to the extent that it regarded morality as a secondary, ‘superstructural’ phenomenon, determined by the more fundamental processes of the economic ‘base’ (Cohen 1978; Lukes 1985). On a Marxist view, Locke's natural rights merely express the ‘bourgeois’ morality of capitalist society; non-capitalist societies generate quite different moralities. This is not to say that Marxism departs entirely from mainstream Western universalism. At a deeper level Marx's account of historical progress is underwritten by a vision of human nature as fundamentally distinguished by a capacity for spontaneous and collective creative activity, partly developed by capitalism, partly obstructed by it, and destined to be fully realized only in a post-capitalist future. Still, Marxism remains a key source for recent ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘postmodernist’ understandings of morality as relative to interests or power.3
In these various ways, then, modernity has been characterized by a retreat from the moral certainties of the premodern world. This is not to deny that there was moral scepticism in ancient and medieval times, still less that ethical universalism has been wholly abandoned – indeed, the modern concept of human rights probably commands a more widespread international consensus than any previous form of universalism. But the sceptical and relativist counterpoint is also more insistent now, and certainly more reputable in the academic world, than ever before. The Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and Marxism have all had a hand in this development. But perhaps the most important factor of all has been the increased proximity and interaction, in modern times, of different cultures, and the subsequent emergence of the idea of cultural relativism.
Relativism
At its broadest, relativism is the idea that judgements of value or truth are not universal or objective, but valid only from some particular perspective (Wong
