The Multiculturalism Backlash

European Discourses, Policies and Practices

Steven Vertovec, Susanne Wessendorf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415556484
• eBook ISBN: 9781135270704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Politik

In a relatively short time, many European governments have been purposefully dropping the notion 'multicultural' or other references to cultural diversity in their policy vocabularies. More and more politicians and public intellectuals have criticized a perceived shift towards 'too much diversity'. This volume goes beyond the conventional approaches to the topic offering a careful examination of not only the social conditions and political questions surrounding multiculturalism but also the recent emergence of a 'backlash' against multicultural initiatives, programmes and infrastructures.

Featuring case-study based contributions from leading experts throughout Europe and North America, this multidisciplinary work seeks to assess some of these key questions with reference to recent and current trends concerning multiculturalism, cultural diversity and integration in their respective countries, evaluating questions such as

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• Is there is a common 'sceptical turn' against cultural diversity or a 'backlash against difference' sweeping Europe?
• How have public discourses impacted upon national and local diversity management and migration policies?
• Are the discourses and policy shifts actually reflected in everyday practices within culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse settings?

The Multiculturalism Backlash provides new insights, informed reflections and comparative analyses concerning these significant processes surrounding politics, policy, public debates and the place of migrants and ethnic minorities within European societies today. Focusing on the practice and policy of multiculturalism from a comparative perspective this work will be of interest to scholars from a wide range of disciplines including migration, anthropology and sociology.

1
Introduction

Assessing the backlash against multiculturalism in Europe

Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf

‘Multiculturalism is dead.’ This was a headline in Britain’s Daily Mail on 7 July 2006 – the first anniversary of the London bombings. Such a pronouncement followed a long course of public criticism – indeed, over several preceding years – suggesting that a particular liberal ideology had dominated politics since the 1970s, had failed miserably, and moreover had produced a dangerous social condition in which Islamic terrorism could flourish. This growing scepticism, culminating in a verbal backlash against multiculturalism, had reached such a point that The Economist’s (2007) columnist Bagehot commented:

Once it connoted curry and the Notting Hill carnival; these days, when applied to British politicians or their policies, ‘multiculturalism’ is almost as derogatory a term as ‘socialist’ or ‘neocon’. Even more than they agree about most other things, the main political parties are united in their convictions that multiculturalism is a perniciously naïve idea whose time has gone, or ought never to have come at all.

The backlash, moreover, was certainly not confined to Britain. Since the early 2000s across Europe, the rise, ubiquity, simultaneity and convergence of arguments condemning multiculturalism have been striking. How and why have such seemingly similar public debates unfolded across such varied social and political situations?

This volume addresses this question through studies examining public policies and debates concerning multiculturalism (inherently combined with issues of immigration and immigrant integration) in seven European contexts. It also benefits from broader reflections on these issues by two prominent Canadian observers. Together the chapters provide a comparative look at public and political processes concerning multiculturalism – or more accurately, what multiculturalism is often purported to be. While a number of shared processes are identifiable across nation-states (part of the task of this Introduction), the contributing chapters underscore the importance of examining specific, or nationally contextualized, debates and local developments surrounding the seemingly widespread turn against multiculturalism.

Multiple modes of multiculturalism

Despite the ‘-ism’ suggesting a distinctive ideological canon, multiculturalism is actually rather hard to pin down. Numerous philosophies, institutional frameworks and political interventions have been referred to under a collective rubric of multiculturalism. Yet social scientists have identified a wide variety of types of multiculturalism. (Here we are focusing on multiculturalism by way of specific policies and public institutions; that is, in this volume we are less concerned with debates over multiculturalism in political philosophy, as represented for instance by Charles Taylor (1992), Will Kymlicka (1995), Bhikhu Parekh (2000), Brian Barry (2001), Tariq Modood (2007) and Anne Phillips (2007).) A divergent set of civic programmes might be labelled as ‘radical multiculturalism’ or ‘polycentric multiculturalism’ (Shohat and Stam 1994), ‘insurgent multiculturalism’ (Giroux 1994), ‘public space multiculturalism’ (Vertovec 1996), ‘difference multiculturalism’ (Turner 1993), ‘critical multiculturalism’ (Chicago Cultural Studies Group 1994), ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ multiculturalism (Grillo 2005). Indeed, Steven Vertovec (1998) has pointed to at least eight different kinds of multiculturalism while Garard Delanty (2003) suggests another list with nine types of multiculturalism.

When attempting to bracket together an array of public measures as ‘multiculturalism’, the task is further complicated if undertaken comparatively across countries most known for the implementation of policies deemed, officially or not, multicultural: Australia, Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands. These countries – and different cities within them – have not undertaken the same approach, introduced the same measures nor set up the same institutions (cf. Martiniello 1998, Bennett 1998, Rogers and Tillie 2001). Even within a single country, policies relevant to an overall multicultural agenda have not taken the same perspectives, aims and course of development. Hence, as Stuart Hall (2001: 3) observes, ‘Over the years the term ‘multiculturalism’ has come to reference a diffuse, indeed maddeningly spongy and imprecise, discursive field: a train of false trails and misleading universals. Its references are a wild variety of political strategies.’ That it is difficult to formulate a specific corpus of tenets or practices around multiculturalism should come as no surprise. Gary Freeman importantly points out that practically everywhere governments have dealt with immigrant and ethnic minority incorporation through a rather disordered closet full of measures. ‘No state possesses a truly coherent incorporation regime’, Freeman ((2004): 946) notes. ‘Instead, one finds ramshackle, multifaceted, loosely connected sets of regulatory rules, institutions and practices in various domains of society that together make up the frameworks within which migrants and natives work out their differences.’ Such a patchwork of policies indeed characterizes numerous domains of public governance. Rather than a singular set of well-integrated policies and institutions, most often we find ‘subsystem frameworks that are weakly, if at all, coordinated’ (ibid.).

Moreover, Freeman observes, ‘immigrants are mostly managed via institutions created for other purposes’ (ibid.: 948). That is, immigrants and ethnic minorities engage, and are incorporated through, a range of public institutions including: various levels of administration from neighbourhood associations and municipal councils to regional and national government departments; schools and universities; libraries; hospitals and health clinics; law courts and the police; social services; youth clubs; employment agencies; sports and leisure facilities; and various forms of print, radio, television and internet media.

Within and cutting across such varied institutions, the rubric multiculturalism has entailed diverse measures such as:

• Public ‘recognition’: support for ethnic minority organizations, facilities and activities; public consultative bodies incorporating such organizations.

• Education: consideration for dress codes, gender-specific practices and other issues sensitive to the values of specific ethnic and religious minorities; creation of curricula reflecting the backgrounds of ethnic minority pupils (intended to teach non-ethnic minority children about the background of their peers, and to bolster the self-images of ethnic minority pupils); mother tongue teaching and language support; the establishment of minority groups’ own schools (usually religious, publically financed or not).

• Social Services: information, restructuring and retraining for delivering culturally sensitive practices among public employees, social workers, healthcare providers, police and courts.

• Public materials: state-sponsored information (such as health promotion campaigns) provided in multiple languages.

• Law: cultural exceptions to laws (such as Sikhs being allowed to wear turbans instead of motorcycle helmets); oaths on sacred books other than the Bible (e.g. Qur’an, Bhagavad Gita); recognition of other marriage, divorce and inheritance traditions; protection from discrimination or incitement to hatred.

• Religious accommodation: permission and support for the establishment of places of worship, cemeteries and funerary rites; allowance of time off work for worship.

• Food: allowance of ritual slaughter; provision of proscribed foods (halal, kosher, vegetarian) in public institutions.

• Broadcasting and media: monitoring of group images to ensure non-discrimination or to avoid stereotypes; provision of own media facilities for minority groups.

A singular principle does not equally infuse all these domains. That is not to say, however, that within and across these domains, and within a number of countries since the 1960s, a range of institutional initiatives have not had some broad, complementary objectives. Foremost among these we can identify tenets aiming to: reduce discrimination; promote equality of opportunity and overcome barriers to full participation in society; allow unconstrained access to public services; recognize cultural identities (as opposed to assimilation) and open up public spaces for their representation; and foster acceptance of ethnic pluralism and cultural understanding across all groups. These are dissimilar objectives requiring different public measures, but obviously they sit well together. In this way, multiculturalism can at best be described as a broad set of mutually reinforcing approaches or methodologies concerning the incorporation and participation of immigrants and ethnic minorities and their modes of cultural/religious difference.

The slow death of multiculturalism?

Since the 1970s when multicultural policies were increasingly operationalized in various nation-states, criticism has never been lacking. For instance in Britain, the Swann Report, Honeyford affair and Rushdie (Satanic Verses) affair represented a few of the issues that prompted considerable public debate about multicultural initiatives and frameworks throughout the 1980s (see respectively Verma 1989, Halstead 1988, Lewis 2002). From the beginning of the 1990s in the Netherlands, there have also been political attacks on dominant Dutch policies meant to assist ethnic minorities (see Prins and Saharso, this volume). In Canada during the 1990s, some representatives of ethnic minorities themselves increasingly expressed criticism against multiculturalism, emphasizing concerns of marginalization and the reproduction of cultural difference (see Ley, this volume). Indeed, several chapters in this volume point to longstanding and diverse national controversies surrounding multiculturalism.

Yet beginning around the turn of the millennium, sporadic critical voices seemingly became harmonized into a chorus. (To push the metaphor, however, as described below it is questionable as to whether the critics have been singing from the same hymn sheet.) Perhaps the main reasons for this – as with most political processes – are events. Since 2000 one occurrence or prominent public statement after another sparked a flurry of debates in government assemblies, newspapers and journals, TV talk shows and radio phone-in programs. Immigrants, Muslims and multiculturalism were at the heart of these. By no means exhaustive and mostly drawing on cases in Britain (the context known best to the authors of this Introduction), some key incidents are listed below. These and further examples are also described in chapters throughout this volume.

January 2000. In the Netherlands, journalist Paul Scheffer (2000) publishes an article entitled ‘The multicultural drama’, in which he points out that ethnic minorities are overrepresented in statistics concerning unemployment, poverty, criminal activity and school drop-outs. In what purports to be the first outspoken criticism from the Left, Scheffer claims multicultural policy has made politicians blind to these facts.

May 2001. Riots, largely pitting British Bangladeshi and Pakistani youths against White youths, break out in three northern British cities. An official report into the disturbances (known as the Cantle Report) suggests that:

Separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives. These lives often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges.

(Home Office 2001: 9)

September 2001. 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in the USA make the threat of Islamic terrorism in the West an uppermost public concern.

2001 to May 2002. Rise (and death) of Pim Fortyn, outspoken Dutch politician who openly castigated Muslim immigration and Muslims’ inherent unassimilability.

February 2003. Results of 2001 UK Census published, showing extremely poor socio-economic conditions among some groups (especially Bangladeshis and Pakistanis). Public debates ask whether multicultural policies are to blame, or migrants (and their Muslim cultures) themselves.

February 2004. Prospect magazine editor David Goodhart (2004) publishes ‘Too Diverse?’ It is an article, again from left-of-centre, which controversially suggests that collective attitudes toward welfare are threatened by ethnic diversity. Also in this month, the French parliament votes in favour of a new law to ban the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools. Throughout Europe commentators weigh up the issue in their own societies.

March 2004. Madrid train bombing prompts further fears of Muslim terrorists-among-us in Europe.

April 2004. In yet another critique from the Left, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, proclaims that ‘multiculturalism’ should be ditched, as it suggests separatism when there is an increased ne...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The rise and fall of multiculturalism?
• 3 British and others
• 4 From toleration to repression
• 5 “We’re not all multiculturalists yet”
• 6 Denmark versus multiculturalism1
• 7 Switzerland
• 8 Germany
• 9 Dynamics of diversity in Spain
• 10 Multiculturalism
• Index