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.