Multiculturalism

The Minorities Intergroup of the European Parliament recently discussed multiculturalism. This text is an edited version of my contribution; it draws on the chapter on the same topic in my recently published “Politics, Illusions,Fallacies”.

Multiculturalism was regarded as one of the sacred, not to say sacralised elements of Europe’s social-cultural processes and this is still largely the case, although it has been pronounced dead by both David Cameron and Angela Merkel. But this immediately raises a much more difficult question – how do we know that multiculturalism has failed?

First of all, the success/failure criteria of multiculturalism were never properly defined, indeed a great deal about multiculturalism has never been defined and that is where the problems start. So what exactly is it, is multiculturalism a process or a state of being? Does it have an end-goal, a social product that can be identified? Has the identification of multiculturalism changed over time and does it vary from country to country? We can’t tell, for the reason stated above.

What follows is an attempt to make sense of this phenomenon. There are various options, which can overlap or be in contradiction, but that is a part of the story and, it may suggested, is the price to be paid for the initial lack of clarity.

= So, multiculturalism can be said to be a strategy to integrate non-European migrants into the European majority population.

= Then, multiculturalism is a form of cultural sharing, whereby majorities make room for immigrant minorities and “celebrate” diversity together, but then what is to be shared, what is not? What areas and forms of diversity are open to be pursued? Because these were never defined, and probably never could be defined with complete precision, notionally any cultural practice could be freely pursued, sometimes even when these collided with the law and certainly when they might be in conflict with the norms of the majority.

= Generally, multiculturalism is treated as a morally virtuous process, because it makes ethnic identity – the ethnic identity of majorities – impossible or at any rate invisible, as the minority cultures dilute those of majorities. Ethnicity is seen as evil, because it produces nationalism and nationalism causes war (as in the collapse of Jugoslavia). Note: that minority ethnicity is (somehow) virtuous. Who decided this?

= Alternatively, multiculturalism is (maybe) motivated by a dream or project of a single humanity, in which cultural differences are secondary and are bound to disappear; if so, we are looking at a really major social engineering project, and it is not clear whether those promoting it are aware of the implications of what they are doing. There is a strange similarity here to Khrushchev’s project, of the merger of the Soviet population through a threefold or three-stage process, “flourishing, coming together and fusion”, (razvitie, sblizhenie, sliyanie).

= Then, arguably, multiculturalism is actually something rather less virtuous than it appears: it is, in fact, a strategy for ensuring that European majorities do not have to accept immigrants as their cultural equals, and simultaneously denies migrants the possibility of becoming full members of the majority’s community of cultural intimacy, because they have to remain multicultural. In effect, this revives racial – not necessarily racist – differentiation via the backdoor.

However, there is a good deal more.

There is a tacit assumption in multiculturalism that immigrants arrive with only the surface aspects, the folkloric aspects of a different culture, like dress codes and cuisines, but not that every culture is structured around a deep-level code of ethics and ways of life. Furthermore, multiculturalism as practised entirely ignored the class aspects of the migrants, above all their mostly peasant status. The journey from peasant to citizen was largely completed in Europe by the 1960s and the lessons learned were not applied to the immigrants in question – the reality that immigrants brought their rural values with them, that integration was a multi-dimensional process

Nor was there any attempt to understand the role played by the extended family outside Europe. Europe is deviant here. Hence the primacy of family relationships and obligations tends to be dismissed as nepotism, cronyism and corruption.

Religion: in an alien context, this becomes a key resource for sustaining identity. Again, Europe is deviant in being substantially more secular than any other part of the world, the US included. European modernity is defined by its secularism, its anti-religious, a-religious and irreligious attitudes. This is not at all true for other parts of the world.

Equally crucial was that the terms of multiculturalism and integration were invariably defined by the majority. This meant that the majority determined which bits of the minority culture qualified for recognition as a part of multiculturalism and which did not. Transmission and reproduction of the language were definitely not a part of multiculturalism. Attempts by immigrants to transmit the language to the next generation and to sustain it are dismissed as “divisive”.

It is worth noting that the consent of the European majorities was never sought, multiculturalism was and remains an elite project; its democratic legitimacy is doubtful, though majorities mostly accept it.

Besides, immigration was sold to the public as an economic device, as a way of enlarging the labour force especially for jobs that majorities were no longer willing to do, but this not only failed to recognise immigrant cultures, but treated the immigrants as economic units and not much else, as empty vessels. This is deeply dehumanising.

Note, too, that multiculturalism never applied to intra-European migrants. Is there a whiff of racism, about this? Thus intra-European migrants, who are “white” could, should and did assimilate. Think about Italians in the UK or Croats in Germany or Poles in France.

Nor did multiculturalism apply to historic minorities, and again the question arises, why not? Notionally because it was a rather muddled strategy for dealing with non-European immigrants, but then what concept of culture are we dealing with?

Multiculturalism further raises the question of citizenship, and indeed this is a central issue in the area of integration. The normative principle is that citizenship concepts in Europe are and should be alike. Tacitly they should provide the individual with a set of rights, to regulate the relationship between the individual and the state in a more or less identical fashion. This position seriously ignores the diversity of cultures that serve as the underlying basis of citizenship even within Europe, it assumes that the functioning of the state is a culture-free zone and that policies are implemented in much the same way.

A moment’s thought will show how untenable this proposition is. The cultural assumptions of the majority will inform the quality of the state to a very large extent and infuse it with what are, in effect, ethnic norms. Not least, every state machinery has its own past, its own tradition and memory, its own norms, its own attitudes towards society; interaction with society necessarily means the adoption of the history, values, narratives of the latter, otherwise the state will be regarded as an alien power. For what it’s worth, this was, broadly, one of the problems of communism, that it was regarded as alien and operated in many respects as a colonial system.

It is simply untrue, as the assumption has it, that majorities have no ethnicity; they do and to say otherwise is nothing more than denial.  Thus thought-style theory shows that the French state is very French, the British state is English and so on. There is nothing surprising about this - the problem lies in the denial made necessary by the adoption of multiculturalism.

Hence what we have is a kind of pretence, one that also has the consequence that ethno-linguistic minorities, historic minorities, are dangerous, because they show up the ethnic quality of the majority; they make it difficult  to administer the state evenly, as the uniform distribution of authority is constantly challenged; the language issue implies a contest over the primacy of high culture within one state and raises the question of whether there can be two or more? Can there be two public spheres in the same state, cf. Belgium?

So basically there are several flaws in multiculturalism as understood and practised. The majority decides what multiculturalism actually means. At the same time, the collectivity into which immigrants are to be integrated is, to some extent, being denied its own cultural identity, so there is much less into which migrants can be integrated. A civic identity is “cold”, the bonds of cultural intimacy and solidarity do not come into being, resulting in types of exclusion.

Hence the migrants, to make sense of the world in which immigrants now find themselves, they will use whatever raw materials are available to construct and reproduce a collective identity to offer answers, these are:

(a) parallel societies and networks, to provide security;

(b) the extended family, with corresponding codes of obligation, honour, regulation and exclusion, irreconcilable with citizenship;

(c) religion: notably Islam, Hinduism, certain forms of Christianity;

(d) “racism”. Whatever negative experiences immigrants encounter can be explained by the racism of the majority; note too that reverse racism is not a part of how “racism” is defined. This process is encouraged by a section of majority elites, and some have invested heavily in the “racism” concept. Behaviour by the majority can invariably be viewed through the lens of “racism” even when it may have nothing to do with it, but in essence any differentiation by majorities made by the attribution of cultural traits is now classed as racism. Note further that this does not work in reverse, as minorities appear free to discriminate against majorities. This creates a dichotomous concept of majority and minority, and incidentally undermines the idea of sharing and celebrating diversity.

Racism as a concept, process and social construct does have two important though unintended consequences – it provides immigrants with a high level of security by significantly redefining their identity against the majority, reducing it to a single factor and thereby excluding ambiguity and doubt. Racism, in the sense used here, functions as a boundary mechanism and filter. At the same time, it potentially offers an explanation for everything that affects an individual (in contact with the majority world) and creates a simultaneous obstacle to understanding it, by making it possible to define the lifeworld in terms of racism and not much else. Ironically, of course, this means that the social role played by racism ends up severely delimiting the very diversity it is supposed to underpin and protect. Single factor explanations tend to produce outcomes of this kind.

The outcome has been the construction of a European-immigrant identity. This can probably be further broken down on a state-by-state basis, with the result that immigrants remain estranged from their host community and, at the same time, from their countries of origin.

So, what to do? Accept that the multiculturalism concept as evolved has failed. In so far as it had an otherwise undefined “integration” as its success criterion, it has not attained it. Clearly, there is a need to rethink what to do with the second and third generation of immigrants, where the estrangement is more acute than with the first.

In thinking about this, it is best to begin by defining what one wants to attain, the failure/success criteria, in other words. Start from existing sociological realities, not from ideological assumptions (like majorities being “inherently racist”). Make it clear, in the light of the failure, that the rules of the game have changed, that a new design is to be elaborated, above all that integration means just that, acceptance of the majority’s rule-making, obligations and moral codes. In exchange, immigrants must be offered full membership of the community of cultural intimacy and solidarity. Some members of the majority will certainly resist this. So will some (many?) immigrants, who have come to accept their parallel societies. These cannot be dismantled coercively, but they must accept majority regulation where appropriate.

Furthermore, it must be made very clear that certain cultural practices will not be tolerated and, if they persist, they will attract maximum penalties – honour killings, female circumcision, intolerance of gender equality all fall into this category, as repugnant to the moral codes of the majority. Such practices can be stamped out, in the way that sati, widow burning, was largely eliminated under British rule in India. Accept, too, that there will loud cries of “racism” when an immigrant community’s cultural practices are challenged, let alone subject to penalties.

Accept finally that there is no easy road to integration, no short cuts; acculturation is complex and, often enough, painful. Look back to the peasant model; this is a major and undervalued success story in Europe. Make the exit from parallel societies worthwhile through full acceptance of those who make this choice.

Sch. Gy.

Some thoughts on liberal universalism

This entry was inspired by a coincidence of two pieces of writing that were published at more or less same time, late March-early April. David Goodhart’s essay on left and right appeared in Prospect, while Frank Furedi’s two pieces were part of his regular output.

Goodhart’s argument is about what the left needs to do if it is to recover the territory it has lost to right, but what is equally interesting (in this context) is his understanding of what being leftwing means in our time. To be fair, both writers are largely embedded in an Anglo-Saxon thought-world without being particularly aware of this, so Goodhart’s model of the left is far more UK-US centred than he recognises, but this is less important than it might seem, given that what happens in the US arrives in one form or another in Europe too, though frequently it arrives in the UK first.

In sum, Goodhart’s assumption is that liberal individualism is universalist, suspicious of national loyalties – indeed, they probably elide the distinction between national and nationalist – put individual freedom above collective loyalties and are uneasy with tradition, authority and the sacred. Further, he writes, those on the left “are usually deeply concerned with social justice and unfairness and also suspicious of appeals to religion or to human nature to justify any departure from equal treatment”. His definition of liberalism is committed to fairness and justice and, similarly, to eliminating harm and suffering; these are the two principal moral intuitions that he attributes to liberalism.  Conservatism adds group loyalty, authority and respect for the sacred. Note that his understanding of the last is remote from Durkheim’s sacralisation and is defined by Goodhart as being “about the idea that humans have a nobler, more spiritual side and that life has a higher purpose than pleasure or profit”. Durkheim’s concept of the sacred, for the record, is that every human collectivity will insist that certain areas are beyond evaluation, as taboo and as dangerous, sacralising them thereby. The left does this just as much as the right, so, by way of example, it is entirely taboo to claim that men and women are hard-wired for certain abilities, as it must be if all humans have the same cognitive equipment and the rest is epiphenomenal.

Goodhart identifies “sociocentrism” as a legacy of the past, one that he believes the liberal universalists treat with disapproval, as they logically must if they believe in a single humanity in which differentiation is insignificant. The problem is that such differentiation is not insignificant at all, far from it, indeed it keeps reappearing – having been expelled with a pitchfork, yet it always returns (tamen usque recurret, to quote the original). Basically group loyalty lives and universalism has no idea what to do with it. In a historical perspective, it never could. The thought that numerous individuals, if not all, prefer to come together in groups and form collectivities as a key constitutive element of their individual identities – the collective and the individual simultaneously – is not only real, but adds up to such a powerful challenge to liberals that they have preferred to side-step it.

That, however, is not where the gravamen of Furedi’s counterargument is located. His proposition is, in reality, far more damaging to the universalist liberals than their failure to accept the wider moral intuitions of the right. No, where the blow is devastating is in his charge (my formulation, not his) that if the liberals believe that they are living in a free society, one where individuals have extensive capacity to determine their lives and are endowed with agency – then, they are wholly and utterly mistaken. Furedi has long been a (fairly) lone voice in arguing that the state has established control over areas of life that have a far-reaching impact on individual freedom, the very thing that, per Goodhart, liberal democracy has provided.

Furedi’s charge is wide-ranging. He notes, inter alia, the creeping tolerance of intolerance – paradox or not – that certain forms of tolerance, like the identification of forms “hate speech” and racism, are suppressed, remarking, “the metaphor zero tolerance also implies notions of zero-judgment and zero discretion. These are policies that are meant to be applied arbitrarily and punish without regard to circumstances.” Then, there is medicalisation and consequent therapeutic intervention in people’s lives by social, psychological and medical professionals who impose their ideas on others without appeal. The secrecy of children’s courts in Britain and their complete arbitrariness is a particularly egregious example. The tendency to pathologise human relationships, notably as between men and women, is underpinned by “modern society’s intense suspicion of the way human beings conduct themselves in their relationships”. In effect, what Furedi is arguing, and this is irrefutable, is that the modern state is not only exercising growing vigilance over society, but has established an official vigilantism, thereby seriously eroding citizenship.

The rise of the UK’s surveillance state is another illustration of the same phenomenon, one that the liberals tend to ignore. There is a fundamental dilemma at the heart of this development anyway, the impossible trade-off between security and freedom. This is as clear an illustration of Isaiah Berlin’s incommensurability of certain values as one could hope for. The liberal left looks at it, maybe utters some feeble protests, tacitly sees that there is nothing it can do about it and carries on, preferring not to deal with such a radical contradiction and threat to liberal values. The foregoing can be extended in yet another direction. Liberal universalists are notionally committed to individual freedom and agency. This ought to mean that liberalism should be entirely hostile to schemes of social engineering. The evidence indicates that contrary. In many areas the state intervenes and liberals simply accept, if not, indeed, support it. The inconsistency is passed over in silence.

In one important respect social engineering projects have been a part of the left’s thought-world since the Enlightenment. There was and is a normative quality to liberalism, or if not a quality then certainly a temptation that liberals act as moral legislators of the universe, as cogently set out in Zygmunt Bauman’s Legislators and Interpreters. Until recently a central plank in the left’s platform was the redistribution of material goods relying on the state as rational actor to secure this. This appears to have been superseded by a shift towards the redistribution of values, but again relying on the mechanism of state power and mostly without countervailing mechanisms to empower society and the individual.

Then, whereas the old left focused on class as the primary cleavage, liberal universalism tends to forget about class, indeed it is uncomfortable with such cleavages, as it must logically be – all humans are human first and foremost, not members of a class or ethnic group or anything else that could be divisive. The result that, in consequence, the (new) liberal left ignores the reality and aspirations of a sizeable section of society is neither here nor there. This abandonment of these social strata explains their positive response to the blandishments of the populist left and right, something that the liberal left can only condemn.

Furedi remarks, further, that the emergence of  “the idea that human beings are damaged, that men are innately violent”, is a proposition that is untested and unproved, and for that matter directly contradicts the assumptions of human goodness that underlie liberal universalism. On the other hand, it is extremely helpful in legitimating the constant intervention, regulation and organising undertaken by the state, despite the self-regarding narrative of a commitment to democracy and freedom.

A couple of thoughts are worth adding to this debate. The first is about contingency. Neither the liberals nor the state regulators appear capable of recognising their contingency, their own time-bound and space-bound reality, which incidentally also means culture-bound. They act as if they genuinely did have access to the philosopher’s stone (with or without the help of Harry Potter), so their sincerity is not to be doubted. Except that sincerity is an aggravating condition, because it makes the bearers and agents of these ideas particularly resistant to counterargument. Try debating with a bureaucrat about the regulation in the name of which she is about to deny you something. No, there is no contingency around, those involved are acting in the name of an absolute and refuse to recognise that it has only been defined as an absolute in a thoroughly arbitrary fashion.

There is a deep-seated irony in all this. The liberal left sees itself as the legatee of the Enlightenment and as the guarantor and bearer of rationality in the world. This may be so, but there is one little problem. In the post-Enlightenment world there are not supposed to be absolutes, those went out with religion, did they not? Out through the door, back through the window, it would seem.

The reliance on there being “innate” qualities is also interesting, not to say alarming. On the one hand, liberalism (as defined here) excoriates racism and biological factors as the basis of difference and, for that matter, extends the concept of racism to pretty much anything that it dislikes. The acceptance of the innate, however, completely undermines this excommunication of the biological and, for all practical purposes, says that, yes, well, racism is dreadful, but then there are circumstances – we say what these are – when it’s quite ok. Note too that the alleged innate violence attributed to men is tacitly a feature only of whites; attributing it to blacks would really challenge one taboo too far. And that is what shows up not only the arbitrary quality of the enterprise, but its contradictory nature and, above all, its contingency, the one that its perpetrators will never recognise. Why should they, after all it provides them with a decidedly useful addition to their discursive armoury?

Sch. Gy.

Serbia debate in the European Parliament

The European Parliament held a debate on the report on Serbia written by the rapporteur, Jelko Kacin; I was the shadow rapporteur for the EPP. This was my contribution to the debate.

 

Congratulations to Mr Kacin, this is a thorough and cogent report.

Serbia has been granted candidate status and, at the same time, elections are to be held in early May. Hence this report can serve as a guide for the next Serbian government in its stance towards Europe.

A great deal has been done to make Serbia’s accession feasible, and the country should receive due credit for these efforts. However, and the report makes this clear, this does not mean that all is done and dusted, far from it.

There are many areas where the Serbian system of government and, for that matter, governance, demand a major overhaul before they meet EU criteria. One of these areas is very serious – this is where legal provision is used, indeed abused, to eliminate competition and to stultify the market in favour of insiders. It is all the worse that this practice is undertaken in the name of the fight organised crime.

Then, there is Kosovo. All candidate countries have to come to terms with their neighbours, whatever the antecedents. This means that Serbia has to confront Kosovo’s independence and abandon illusions that somehow, one day, Kosovo will again be a part of the Serbian state. It will not.

Third, while Serbia has made a number of steps in the direction of providing equal status for its non-Serbian minorities, Serbia’s citizenship concept is not yet sufficiently inclusive to provide full rights to some non-Serbian groups, notably the Romanian-speakers of the Timok valley and the Bulgarian minority. The model developed in the Vojvodina, of minority councils, should be extended to the rest of the country.

The next government will have plenty on its plate.

Sch. Gy.