Minority Group and Multiculturalism Essay Example for Free

Minority Group and Multiculturalism EssayThis research was commissioned by the transatlantic Council on Migration, an initiative of the Migration indemnity Institute (MPI), for its seventh plenary meeting, held November 2011 in Berlin. The meetings theme was National Identity, Immigration, and Social Cohesion (Re)building Community in an Ever-Globalizing World and this paper was one of the reports that informed the Councils discussions. The Council, an MPI initiative undertaken in cooperation with its constitution partner the Bertelsmann Stiftung, is a unique deliberative body that examinesvital policy issues and informs migration policymaking processes in North America and Europe. The Councils work is generously supported by the following foundations and political sympathiess Carnegie Corporation of New York, Open Society Foundations, Bertelsmann Stiftung, the Barrow Cadbury depone (UK Policy Partner), the Luso-Ameri send packing Development Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenk ian Foundation, and the governments of Germany, the Netherlands, Nor management, and Sweden. For more on the Transatlantic Council on Migration, please visit www. migrationpolicy. org/transatlantic. 2012 Migration Policy Institute.All Rights Reserved. No part of this usualation may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without authorization from the Migration Policy Institute. A full-text PDF of this document is available for free download from www. migrationpolicy. org. Permission for reproducing excerpts from this report should be directed to Permissions Department, Migration Policy Institute, 1400 16th Street, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20036, or by contacting emailprotectedorg. Suggested citation Kymlicka, Will. 2012. Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future. Washington, DC Migration Policy Institute. Table of Contents Executive Summary. 1 I. Introducti on.. 2 The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism.3 . II. What Is Multiculturalism?.. 4 A. Misleading Model. 4 . B. Multiculturalism in Context 5 . C. The Evolution of Multiculturalism Policies.. 7 III.Multiculturalism in Practice. 10 A. The Canadian Success Story 10 B. The European Experience. 13 . IV. The Retreat from Multiculturalism.. 14 A. Rhetoric versus Reality ..14 B. Proliferation of Civic Integration Policies. 15 . V. ConclusionThe Future of Multicultural Citizenship. 21 Appendices 26 Works Cited28 About the Author.. 32 MIGRATION constitution INSTITUTE Executive Summary Ideas about the legal and policy-making accommodation of heathen renewing commonly termed multiculturalism emerged in the West as a vehicle for replacing centenarianer forms of heathen and racial hierarchy with new traffic of democratic citizenship. Despite substantial evidence that these policies are making fortify toward that goal, a chorus of semipolitical leaders has declared them a failure and he ralded the death of multiculturalism.This popular master news report is problematic because it mischaracterizes the nature of the experiments in multiculturalism that keep back been undertaken, exaggerates the extent to which they nurture been abandoned, and misidentifies not only the genuine difficulties and limitations they have encountered solely the extracts for addressing these problems. Talk about the seclude from multiculturalism has obscured the fact that a form of multicultural integration remains a live option for occidental democracies. This report challenges four powerful myths about multiculturalism. First, it disputes the caricature of multiculturalism as the uncritical celebration of diversity at the expense of addressing grave societal problems such(prenominal) as unemployment and social isolation. Instead it offers an account of multiculturalism as the pursuit of new relations of democratic citizenship, stimulate and constrained by human-rights estimationls . Second, it contests the idea that multiculturalism has been in wholesale retreat, and offers instead evidence that multiculturalism policies (MCPs) have persisted, and have even grown stronger, over the outgoing ten years. Third, it challenges the idea that multiculturalism has failed, and offers instead evidence that MCPs have had positive effects. Fourth, it disputes the idea that the spread of civic integration policies has displaced multiculturalism or rendered it obsolete. The report instead offers evidence that MCPs are fully coherent with certain forms of civic integration policies, and that indeed the combination of multiculturalism with an enabling form of civic integration is both normatively desirable and empirically effective in at least some cases. To help address these issues, this paper draws upon the Multiculturalism Policy Index.This index 1) identifies eight concrete policy areas where liberal-democratic deposits faced with a choice decided to break off m ore multicultural forms of citizenship in relation to immigrant assemblages and 2) measures the extent to which countries have espoused some or all of these policies over time. While there have been some high-profile cases of retreat from MCPs, such as the Netherlands, the general pattern from 1980 to 2010 has been one of modest strengthening. Ironically, some countries that have been vociferous about multiculturalisms failure (e. g. , Germany) have not really practiced an active multicultural strategy.Talk about the retreat from multiculturalism has obscured the fact that a form of multicultural integration remains a live option for Western democracies. However, not all attempts to adopt new manakins of multicultural citizenship have taken root or succeeded in achieving their intended effects. There are several(prenominal) factors that can either facilitate or impede the successful implementation of multiculturalism Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future 1 MIGRATION P OLICY INSTITUTE Desecuritization of ethnic relations. Multiculturalism works best if relations between thestate and minorities are fall uponn as an issue of social policy, not as an issue of state security. If the state perceives immigrants to be a security little terror (such as Arabs and Muslims after 9/11), support for multiculturalism go outside drop and the space for minorities to even voice multicultural claims will diminish. Human rights. Support for multiculturalism rests on the effrontery that there is a shared commitment to human rights across ethnic and religious lines. If states perceive certain groups as unable or unwilling to abide by human-rights norms, they are unlikely to accord them multicultural rights or resources.Much of the shrink against multiculturalism is fundamentally driven by anxieties about Muslims, in particular, and their perceived unwillingness to extort liberal-democratic norms. Border control. Multiculturalism is more controversial when ci tizens fear they lack control over their borders for instance when countries are faced with large numbers (or unexpected surges) of unauthorized immigrants or asylum seekers than when citizens feel the borders are secure. Diversity of immigrant groups. Multiculturalism works best when it is genuinelymulticultural that is, when immigrants come from many source countries rather than coming overwhelmingly from average one (which is more likely to lead to polarized relations with the majority). Economic contributions. Support for multiculturalism depends on the perception that immigrants are holding up their end of the bargain and making a good-faith effort to contribute to society particularly economically. When these facilitating conditions are present, multiculturalism can be seen as a low-risk option, and indeed seems to have worked well in such cases.Multiculturalism tends to lose support in high-risk situations where immigrants are seen as predominantly illegal, as potentia l carriers of narrow-minded practices or movements, or as sack up burdens on the welfare state. However, one could argue that rejecting immigrant multiculturalism under these circumstances is in fact the higher-risk move. It is precisely when immigrants are perceived as illegitimate, illiberal, and burdensome that multiculturalism may be about needed. I. Introduction Ideas about the legal and political accommodation of ethnic diversity have been in a state of flux around the macrocosm for the past 40 years.One hears much about the trick up and fall of multiculturalism. Indeed, this has become a kind of master narrative, widely invoked by scholars, journalists, and policymakers alike to explain the disclosement of contemporary debates about diversity. Although people disagree about what comes after multiculturalism, there is a surprising consensus that we are in a post-multicultural era. This report contends that this master narrative obscures as much as it reveals, and that we need an alternative framework for thinking about the choices we face.Multiculturalisms successes and failures, as well as its level of public acceptance, have depended on the nature of the issues at stake and the countries involved, and we need to understand these variations if we are to identify a more sustainable model for accommodating diversity. This paper will argue that the master narrative 1) mischaracterizes the nature of the experiments in multiculturalism that have been undertaken, 2) exaggerates the extent to which they have been abandoned, and 3) misidentifies the genuine difficulties and limitations they have encountered and the options for addressing these problems.2 Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE to begin with we can decide whether to celebrate or lament the fall of multiculturalism, we need send-off to make sure we know what multiculturalism has meant both in theory and in practice, where it has succeeded or failed t o meet its objectives, and under what conditions it is likely to thrive in the future. The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism The master narrative of the advancement and fall of multiculturalism helpfully captures important features of our up-to-the-minute debates.Yet in some respects it is misleading, and may obscure the real challenges and opportunities we face. In its simplest form, the master narrative goes like this1 Since the mid-1990s we have seen a backlash and retreat from multiculturalism. From the 1970s to mid-1990s, there was a clear trend across Western democracies toward the increased recognition and accommodation of diversity through a double of multiculturalism policies (MCPs) and minority rights.These policies were endorsed both at the domestic level in some states and by inter bailiwick organizations, and involved a rejection of earlier ideas of unitary and homogeneous nationhood. Since the mid-1990s, however, we have seen a backlash and retreat from multicultur alism, and a reassertion of ideas of nation building, common values and identity, and unitary citizenship even a call for the re crease of assimilation. This retreat is partly driven by fears among the majority group that the accommodation of diversity has gone too far and is threatening their way of life.This fear often expresses itself in the rise of nativist and populist right-wing political movements, such as the Danish Peoples Party, defending old ideas of Denmark for the Danish. But the retreat also reflects a belief among the center-left that multiculturalism has failed to help the intended beneficiaries namely, minorities themselves because it has failed to address the underlying sources of their social, economic, and political exclusion and may have unintentionally contributed to their social isolation.As a result, even the center-left political movements that initially championed multiculturalism, such as the social democratic parties in Europe, have backed 1 For inf luential academic statements of this rise and fall narrative, claiming that it applies across the Western democracies, see Rogers Brubaker, The Return of Assimilation? Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 4 (2001) 53148 and Christian Joppke, The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State Theory and Policy, British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (2004) 23757.There are also many accounts of the decline, retreat, or crisis of multiculturalism in particular countries. For the Netherlands, see Han Entzinger, The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism in the Netherlands, in Toward Assimilation and Citizenship Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States, eds. Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska (London Palgrave, 2003) and Ruud Koopmans, Trade-Offs between Equality and Difference The Crisis of Dutch Multiculturalism in Cross-National Perspective (Brief, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, December 2006).For Britain, see Randall Hansen, Diversity, Integration and the Turn from Multi culturalism in the linked Kingdom, in Belonging? Diversity, scholarship and Shared Citizenship in Canada, eds. Keith G. Banting, Thomas J. Courchene, and F. Leslie Seidle (Montreal Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2007) Les Back, Michael Keith, Azra Khan, Kalbir Shukra, and prat Solomos, New Labours White Heart Politics, Multiculturalism and the Return of Assimilation, Political Quarterly 73, No. 4 (2002) 44554 Steven Vertovec, Towards post-multiculturalism?Changing communities, conditions and contexts of diversity, International Social lore Journal 61 (2010) 8395. For Australia, see Ien Ang and John Stratton, Multiculturalism in Crisis The New Politics of Race and National Identity in Australia, in On not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West, ed. I. Ang (London Routledge, 2001). For Canada, see Lloyd Wong, Joseph Garcea, and Anna Kirova, An Analysis of the Anti- and Post-Multiculturalism Discourses The Fragmentation Position (Alberta Prairie Centre for Exce llence in Research on Immigration and Integration, 2005), http//pmc.metropolis. net/Virtual%20Library/FinalReports/Post-multi%20FINAL%20REPORT%20for%20PCERII%20_2_. pdf. For a good overview of the backlash discourse in various countries, see Steven Vertovec and Susan Wessendorf, eds. , The Multiculturalism Backlash European Discourses, Policies and Practices (London Routledge, 2010). Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future 3 MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE away from it and shifted to a discourse that emphasizes civic integration, social cohesion, common values, and shared citizenship.2 The social-democratic discourse of civic integration differs from the radical-right discourse in emphasizing the need to develop a more inclusive national identity and to fight racism and discrimination, but it nonetheless distances itself from the rhetoric and policies of multiculturalism. The term postmulticulturalism has often been invoked to signal this new approach, which seeks to overtake the limits of a naive or misguided multiculturalism while avoiding the oppressive reassertion of homogenizing nationalist ideologies.3 II. What Is Multiculturalism? A. Misleading Model In much of the post-multiculturalist literature, multiculturalism is characterized as a feel-good celebration of ethnocultural diversity, encouraging citizens to acknowledge and embrace the panoply of customs, traditions, music, and cuisine that exist in a multiethnic society. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown calls this the 3S model of multiculturalism in Britain saris, samosas, and steeldrums. 4Multiculturalism takes these familiar cultural markers of ethnic groups clothing, cuisine, and music and treats them as authentic practices to be preserved by their members and safely consumed by others. Under the banner of multiculturalism they are taught in school, performed in festivals, displayed in media and museums, and so on. This celebratory model of multiculturalism has been the focus of many critiques, includ ing the following It ignores issues of economic and political inequality.Even if all Britons come to enjoy Jamaican steeldrum music or Indian samosas, this would do nothing to address the real problems facing Caribbean and South Asian communities in Britain problems of unemployment, poor educational outcomes, residential segregation, poor English speech skills, and political marginalization. These economic and political issues cannot be solved simply by celebrating cultural differences. Even with respect to the (legitimate) goal of promoting greater understanding of culturaldifferences, the focus on celebrating authentic cultural practices that are unique to each group is potentially dangerous. First, not all customs that may be traditionally practiced inwardly a particular group are worthy of being celebrated, or even of being legally tolerated, such as forced marriage. To avoid aspiration up controversy, theres a tendency to choose as the focus of multicultural celebrations safely inoffensive practices such as cuisine or music that can be enjoyably consumed by members of the large society. But this runs the opposite risk 2For an overview of the attitudes of European social democratic parties to these issues, see Rene Cuperus, Karl Duffek, and Johannes Kandel, eds. , The quarrel of Diversity European Social Democracy Facing Migration, Integration and Multiculturalism (Innsbruck Studien Verlag, 2003). For references to post-multiculturalism by progressive intellectuals, who branch it from the radical rights antimulticulturalism, see, regarding the United Kingdom, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, After Multiculturalism (London unlike Policy Centre, 2000), and Beyond Multiculturalism, Canadian Diversity/Diversite Canadienne 3, no.2 (2004) 514 regarding Australia, James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera The Story of Australian Immigration, 2nd edition (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2007) and regarding the United States, Desmond King, The Liberty of Strangers Making the American Nation (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2004), and David A. Hollinger, Post-ethnic America Beyond Multiculturalism, revised edition (New York Basic Books, 2006).Alibhai-Brown, After Multiculturalism. 3 4 4 Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE of the trivialization or Disneyfication of cultural differences,5 ignoring the real challenges that differences in cultural and religious values can raise. Third, the 3S model of multiculturalism can encourage a conception of groups as hermetically sealed and static, each reproducing its own distinct practices.Multiculturalism may be intended to encourage people to share their customs, but the surmise that each group has its own classifiable customs ignores processes of cultural adaptation, mixing, and melange, as well as emerging cultural commonalities, thereby potentially reinforcing perceptions of minorities as eternally other. This in turn can lead to the strengthening of prejudice and stereotyping, and more generally to the polarization of ethnic relations. Fourth, this model can end up reinforcing power inequalities and cultural restrictions deep downminority groups. In deciding which traditions are authentic, and how to interpret and display them, the state generally consults the traditional elites within the group typically older males while ignoring the way these traditional practices (and traditional elites) are often challenged by internal reformers, who have different views about how, say, a good Muslim should act. It can therefore remit people in cultural scripts that they are not allowed to question or dispute.According to post-multiculturalists, the growing recognition of these flaws underlies the retreat from multiculturalism and signals the search for new models of citizenship that emphasize 1) political participation and economic opportunities over the symbolic politics of cultural recognition, 2) human rights and individual fr eedom over respect for cultural traditions, 3) the building of inclusive national identities over the recognition of ancestral cultural identities, and 4) cultural change and cultural mixing over the reification of static cultural differences.This narrative about the rise and fall of 3S multiculturalism will no doubt be familiar to many readers. In my view, however, it is inaccurate. Not only is it a caricature of the reality of multiculturalism as it has true over the past 40 years in the Western democracies, but it is a distraction from the real issues that we need to face.The 3S model captures something important about raw(a) human tendencies to simplify ethnic differences, and about the logic of global capitalism to sell cosmopolitan cultural products, but it does not capture the nature of post-1960s government MCPs, which have had more complex historical sources and political goals. B. Multiculturalism in Context It is important to put multiculturalism in its historical conte xt. In one sense, it is as old as humanity different cultures have always found ways of coexisting, and respect for diversity was a familiar feature of many historic empires, such as the Ottoman Empire.But the sort of multiculturalism that is said to have had a rise and fall is a more specific historic phenomenon, emerging first in the Western democracies in the late 1960s. This timing is important, for it helps us situate multiculturalism in relation to larger social transformations of the postwar era. More specifically, multiculturalism is part of a larger human-rights diversity involving ethnic and racial diversity.Prior to World War II, ethnocultural and religious diversity in the West was characterized by a range of illiberal and undemocratic relationships of hierarchy,6 justified by racialist ideologies that explicitly propounded the superiority of some peoples and cultures and their right to rule over others. These ideologies were widely accepted throughout the Western kno wledge domain and underpinned both domestic laws (e. g. , racially biased immigration and citizenship policies) and foreign policies (e. g. , in relation to overseas colonies). 5 6 Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada(Toronto Penguin, 1994). Including relations of conqueror and conquered, colonizer and colonized, master and slave, settler and indigenous, racialized and unmarked, normalized and deviant, orthodox and heretic, civilized and primitive, and ally and enemy. Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future 5 MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE After World War II, however, the world recoiled against Hitlers fanatical and murderous use of such ideologies, and the United Nations decisively repudiated them in favor of a new ideology of the equality of races and peoples.And this new assumption of human equality generated a series of political movements designed to contest the lingering presence or enduring effects of older hierarchies. We can disti nguish three waves of such movements 1) the struggle for decolonization, concentrated in the period 194865 2) the struggle against racial segregation and discrimination, initiated and exemplified by the AfricanAmerican civil-rights movement from 1955 to 1965 and 3) the struggle for multiculturalism and minority rights, which emerged in the late 1960s.Multiculturalism is part of a larger human-rights revolution involving ethnic and racial diversity. Each of these movements draws upon the human-rights revolution, and its foundational ideology of the equality of races and peoples, to challenge the legacies of earlier ethnic and racial hierarchies. Indeed, the human-rights revolution plays a double role here, not just as the inspiration for a struggle, but also as a constraint on the tolerable goals and means of that struggle.Insofar as historically excluded or stigmatized groups struggle against earlier hierarchies in the name of equality, they too have to renounce their own tradition s of exclusion or oppression in the treatment of, say, women, gays, people of mixed race, religious dissenters, and so on. Human rights, and liberal-democratic constitutionalism more generally, provide the overarching framework within which these struggles are debated and addressed.Each of these movements, therefore, can be seen as contributing to a process of democratic citizenization that is, turning the earlier catalog of hierarchical relations into relationships of liberaldemocratic citizenship. This entails transforming both the vertical relationships between minorities and the state and the horizontal relationships among the members of different groups. In the past, it was often assumed that the only way to engage in this process of citizenization was to impose a single undifferentiated model of citizenship on all individuals.But the ideas and policies of multiculturalism that emerged from the 1960s start from the assumption that this complex history inevitably and appropriat ely generates group-differentiated ethnopolitical claims. The key to citizenization is not to suppress these differential claims but to filter them through and frame them within the language of human rights, civil liberties, and democratic accountability. And this is what multiculturalist movements have aimed to do.The precise character of the resulting multicultural reforms varies from group to group, as befits the distinctive history that each has faced. They all start from the antidiscrimination principle that underpinned the second wave but go beyond it to challenge other forms of exclusion or stigmatization. In most Western countries, explicit state-sponsored discrimination against ethnic, racial, or religious minorities had largely ceased by the 1960s and 1970s, under the influence of the second wave of humanrights struggles.Yet ethnic and racial hierarchies persist in many societies, whether measured in terms of economic inequalities, political underrepresentation, social sti gmatization, or cultural invisibility. Various forms of multiculturalism have been unquestionable to help overcome these lingering inequalities. The focus in this report is on multiculturalism as it pertains to (permanently settled) immigrant groups,7 7 There was briefly in some European countries a form of multiculturalism that was not aimed at the inclusion of permanent immigrants, but rather at ensuring that temporary migrants would return to their country of origin.For example, mothertongue education in Germany was not initially introduced as a minority right but in order to enable guest worker children to reintegrate in their countries of origin (Karen Schonwalder, Germany Integration Policy and Pluralism in a Self-Conscious Country of Immigration, in The Multiculturalism Backlash European Discourses, Policies and Practices, eds. Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf London Routledge, 2010, 160).Needless to say, this sort of returnist multiculturalism premised on the idea th at migrants are foreigners who should return to their real basis has nothing to do with multiculturalism policies (MCPs) premised on the idea that immigrants belong in their host countries, and which aim to make immigrants 6 Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE but it is worth noting that struggles for multicultural citizenship have also emerged in relation to historic minorities and indigenous peoples. 8 C. The Evolution of Multiculturalism PoliciesThe case of immigrant multiculturalism is just one aspect of a larger ethnic revival across the Western democracies,9 in which different types of minorities have struggled for new forms of multicultural citizenship that combine both antidiscrimination measures and positive forms of recognition and accommodation. Multicultural citizenship for immigrant groups clearly does not involve the same types of claims as for indigenous peoples or national minorities immigrant groups do not typically seek l and rights, territorial autonomy, or appointed language status.What then is the substance of multicultural citizenship in relation to immigrant groups? The Multiculturalism Policy Index is one attempt to measure the evolution of MCPs in a alike(p) format that enables comparative research. 10 The index takes the following eight policies as the most common or emblematic forms of immigrant MCPs11 Constitutional, legislative, or parliamentary proof of multiculturalism, at the central and/ or regional and municipal levels The adoption of multiculturalism in school curricula The inclusion of ethnic representation/sensitivity in the mandate of public media or media licensing Exemptions from dress codes, either by statute or by court cases Allowing of dual citizenship The financing of ethnic group organizations to support cultural activities The funding of bilingual education or mother-tongue instruction Affirmative action for disadvantaged immigrant groups12 feel more at home wh ere they are.The focus of this paper is on the last mentioned type of multiculturalism, which is centrally concerned with constructing new relations of citizenship. 8 In relation to indigenous peoples, for example such as the Maori in New Zealand, primordial peoples in Canada and Australia, American Indians, the Sami in Scandinavia, and the Inuit of Greenland new models of multicultural citizenship have emerged since the late 1960s that include policies such as land rights, self-government rights, recognition of habitual laws, and guarantees of political consultation.And in relation to substate national groups such as the Basques and Catalans in Spain, Flemish and Walloons in Belgium, Scots and Welsh in Britain, Quebecois in Canada, Germans in South Tyrol, Swedish in Finland we see new models of multicultural citizenship that include policies such as federal or quasi-federal territorial autonomy official language status, either in the region or nationally and guarantees of re presentation in the central government or on constitutional courts. 9 Anthony Smith, The Ethnic revival in the Modern World (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1981).10 Keith Banting and I developed this index, first published in Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka, eds. , Multiculturalism and the Welfare State Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2006). Many of the ideas discussed in this paper are the result of our collaboration. 11 As with all cross-national indices, there is a trade-off between normalization and sensitivity to local nuances. There is no universally accepted definition of multiculturalism policies and no hard and fast line that would sharply distinguish MCPs from closely link policy fields, such as antidis