The Crises of Multiculturalism

Racism in a Neoliberal Age

Alana Lentin, Gavan Titley

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781780321400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Discrimination et relations raciales

Across the West, something called multiculturalism is in crisis. Regarded as the failed experiment of liberal elites, commentators and politicians compete to denounce its corrosive legacies; parallel communities threatening social cohesion, enemies within cultivated by irresponsible cultural relativism, mediaeval practices subverting national 'ways of life' and universal values. This important new book challenges this familiar narrative of the rise and fall of multiculturalism by challenging the existence of a coherent era of 'multiculturalism' in the first place. The authors argue that what we are witnessing is not so much a rejection of multiculturalism as a projection of neoliberal anxieties onto the social realities of lived multiculture. Nested in an established post-racial consensus, new forms of racism draw powerfully on liberalism and questions of 'values', and unsettle received ideas about racism and the 'far right' in Europe. In combining theory with a reading of recent controversies concerning headscarves, cartoons, minarets and burkas, Lentin and Titley trace a transnational crisis that travels and is made to travel, and where rejecting multiculturalism is central to laundering increasingly acceptable forms of racism.

ONE

Recited truths: the contours of multicultural crisis

Oh ye people of Europe/ GREAT injustice are committed upon deh land/ How long will we permit dem to carry on? Is Europe becoming a fascist place? The answer lies at your own gate/ and in the answer lies your fate. (Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Reggae fi Peach’)

Much like other irritating subjects of the times – postmodernism, globalization, terrorism, among others – the very idea of multiculturalism, the ideology, disturbs out of proportion to what in fact it may be. The reality is that the world in which many people suppose they are living is actually plural: worlds – many of them, through which we pass whenever we venture out of the doors of what homes we may have. Yet, strangely, in a time like the one prevailing since the 1990s when a growing number of people began to profess the multicultural as a way of thinking about the worlds, their professions are often greeted with dismay. (Anthony Elliot and Charles Lemert, The New Individualism [2006: 137])

The new certainties

Multiculturalism, whatever it was, has failed. Multiculturalism, wherever it was, has imploded. Multiculturalism, whenever it was, has gifted us the pathologies that gird our new certainties.

Few people – particularly those given to regarding actually existing practices of state multiculturalism as a form of liberal nationalism, or overdetermining culturalism, or micro-colonialism, or political containment – can have guessed at the depths of its transformative power. Outlining this solid object of consternation involves more guesswork: described by Stuart Hall as a ‘maddeningly spongy and imprecise discursive field’, multiculturalism, as Charles W. Mills writes, is a ‘conceptual grab bag’ of issues relating to race, culture, and identity that ‘seems to be defined simply by negation – whatever does not fit into the “traditional” political map of, say, the 1950s is stuffed in here’ (2007: 89). Maddeningly spongy, but also bracingly so: an impressive spectrum of political actors and commentators hold it fully or partially responsible for an equally impressive range of cultural cleavages, social fissures and political dilemmas. The irony of multiculturalism’s polysemy is that it has become a central site for coded debates about belonging, race, legitimacy and social futures in a globalized, neoliberal era.

It would be easy, given the tendency for the passing of multiculturalism to be measured out in stark, mediated death notices, to provide an illustrative pastiche of what is now a transnational genre. The fridge-magnet poetry of crisis is familiar, and easy to assemble: at five minutes to midnight the veil of multiculturalism was lifted to reveal the real suicide bomb living in seething ghettos, and so forth. So it is perhaps more interesting to see it officially represented. In January 2009, the Czech presidency of the EU unveiled Entropa, an art installation at the headquarters of the Council of the European Union in Brussels. Commissioned from the Czech artist Mark Czerny, it was soon swathed in the controversy it sought, as several European governments failed, as the artist put it, to show that ‘Europe can laugh at itself’. In what Perry Anderson has termed Europe’s contemporary climate of ‘apparently illimitable narcissism’ (2007), this was presumably part of the point. Yet what got obscured in the fleeting non-controversy was the political allusiveness of some of the refashioned stereotypes, and the particular dimension of narcissism they evoke. Denmark’s installation cites a transnational event widely interpreted as demanding a concerted European stand for the imperilled principle of freedom of speech. The Lego construction is presented as a palimpsest of profanity, a play on the Turin Shroud, where the face of the Prophet Muhammad may or may not be superimposed on the colourful brick topography of Jutland. Keen to dampen any allusion to the ‘Danish cartoon controversy’ of 2005/06, the Danish government denied that this was the intention of the piece, and in so doing stayed true to their particular branch of hermeneutics. Polysemy has no place in their enlightened Europe, and much as there was then one legitimate way to read the cartoons – as a self-evident act of inclusive liberal mockery – it was important not to be wrongly free in this instance either.

The installation for the Netherlands presents a waterland finally reclaimed by the North Sea. All that survives are defiant minarets poking out from the waves, maritime navigational points for a lost civilization. This lost, plastic Holland fuses historical fears of natural erosion with more contemporary fears of racial/cultural erosion, and Czerny’s creation compresses ‘Eurabian’ anxieties with an awareness of their transnational recognition and significance. For just as the American children’s story of Hans Brinker is associated with courage in the face of natural disaster, the last decade has produced a narrative of Dutch courage in the face of cultural catastrophe. Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rita Verdonk and Geert Wilders have attracted international attention for their resolve in shoring up the dykes against equally implacable waves of Islamification. The minarets – which in this multimedia installation actually issue a call to prayer – index their struggles to a wider transnational reality, not just of widespread protests against the construction of mosques and minarets, but to a collective reckoning with the unintended consequences of multiculturalism. For many in the Netherlands and beyond, these personalities mark out another terrain of reclamation: a post-multicultural landscape of liberal reassertiveness, cultural and elective homogeneity, and rehabilitative modes of national integration.

These plastic parodies reference key events and actors in the crisis of multiculturalism held to have unfolded over at least the last decade. A narrative of multicultural crisis has been pegged to a litany of transformative events conventionally dated to 11 September 2001, as evidence of a shared European and sometimes Western crisis, and as salutary lessons in a collective process of political reorientation. If the humanitarian and civilizing discourses of the war on terror are undergirded by a depoliticizing extraction of conflict ‘from the dense lattice of geopolitical and political-economic considerations to be depicted as stark morality tales’ (Seymour 2008: 215), the conventional accounting of multicultural collapse rehearses stark new certainties. Across the somewhat unsteady spectrum of left to right, through shifting and overlapping assemblages of argument and scales of evidential connection, and apropos of divergent visions of the good society traduced and the better ones to come, multiculturalism is widely regarded as a violently failed experiment. The narrative goes something like this. The ‘multicultural fantasy in Europe’ (Rieff 2005) valorized difference over commonality, cultural particularity over social cohesion, and an apologetic relativism at the expense of shared values and a commitment to liberty of expression, women’s rights and sexual freedom. Its variously left, liberal and middle-class obsessions with self-gratifying practices of respect for cultural difference have been given spatial expression in the parallel societies, problemområden, ghettos, parallelsgemeinschaften, dish cities, parallelsamfund and territoires perdus de la République in which alien, repressive and often hostile ways of life are germinated. Each man kills the thing he loves, but only multiculturalists love that which will kill them. In what would once have been read as extremist language, it is regarded as cultural surrender; in his widely publicized book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe be the same with different people in it? Christopher Caldwell cautions that multiculturalism has derogated from the ‘essence of Europe’, and ‘requires the sacrifice of liberties that natives once thought of as rights’ (2009: 11).

There are other ways of historicizing and interpreting these sacrifices and the implicit racial compass of the natives held to have made them. This book assesses the putative crisis somewhat differently. After 9/11, and after the end of multiculturalism, delineating (national) hierarchies of belonging and of legitimate ways of being are central to political action and public culture. In this narrative, the ‘failed experiment’ of multiculturalism has generated unintended consequences that now require a return to the certainties it relativized and weakened. Like disappointed parents, or worldly social workers, or rueful older lovers, European nation-states promise themselves never to make the same, innocent mistakes again. The death of multiculturalism requires the rehabilitative discipline of integration, and a return to versions of the pre-experimental certainties, confidence in our values, without apologies. The scope of politics, and social futures, are held to rest on the inculcation of these shared values; values brought into relief by the identification of those who do not possess them and must be cultivated and coerced to respect them, but who constantly fail to display the will to develop them despite the density of spectacular opportunities they are offered.

Anti-racist politics has long struggled with and against multiculturalism, but the dimensions of the current conjuncture are particularly unsettling. For racialized minorities, multiculturalism – as governance, and as a broad coagulation of public values and aspirations – has, to varying degrees, made many societies nicer and fairer places to live than their historical antecedents (Fleras 2009; Hage 1998). Yet this broad acknowledgement has always been shadowed by the criticism that incremental achievement and modest gain are taken as licence to ignore and negate continuing and shifting racism in multicultural societies. For anti-racist critiques of racialized structures and patterns of power and privilege; for ‘critical multiculturalist’ takes on the patrician Eurocentrism of relations of recognition and tolerance; for activists protesting against the depoliticizing and culturalizing of racial injustice and inequality; for feminists, LGBT activists, youth workers and the secular left protesting against the ‘micro-colonialism’ of essentialized community leaders and structures of patronage: multiculturalism has, at best, provided attenuated pathways for organization and mobilization, provided the ambivalent political capital of ‘recognition’, and directed sporadic attention to the historical and political-economic conditions of social inequality. More often it has been seen as a mode of management and control, securing the legitimacy of the status quo through a deflection of questions of power and inequality into the relatively more malleable economy of cultural recognition. As Sneja Gunew observes, ‘multiculturalism has been developed as a concept by nations and other aspirants to geopolitical cohesiveness who are trying to represent themselves as transcendentally homogenous in spite of their heterogeneity’ (2004: 16). That the patrician terms of cultural recognition and the management of difference – what Arun Kundnani, in the context of the UK, terms ‘the multicultural settlement’ (2004: 105) – have become the depoliticized grounds for legitimate aversion is perhaps the most glaring elision of crisis talk. It is in this revisionist account, and the relational distribution of culpability between the multiculturalists and their experimental subjects, that the mainstream racism of the moment is laundered. As Martin Chanock observes,

For a long time race and theories of racial difference held a central place in ‘realistic’ explanations in the West […] it is almost too easy to contextualise such thinking and its connections with empire now, but harder to come to grips accurately with the connections in the present between the way power is distributed in the world and the growing centrality of culture as an explanatory tool. (2000: 15)

It has become even harder when the very relevance of power is obscured in neoliberal societies, and where the explanatory power of culture is structured, after ‘9/11’, in a ‘culturalist regime of truth’ (Demmers and Mehendale 2010: 68). The layered ambivalence of overdetermined culturalism has long been flagged by activists, and in sociological critique (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Barker 1981). In a prescient passage in Even in Sweden, Allan Pred (2000) poses a series of questions probing the ways in which the uncritical ontological and discursive overlaps between mainstream multiculturalism and its strategic racist appropriation may serve to further produce racialized populations as subjects of problematization and regulation:

But will these terms of discourse actually contribute to the elimination of Sweden’s widespread cultural racism or serve to perpetuate it? […] will these usages, with their continued spotlighting of cultural distinctions and celebration of differences […] actually now prevent ‘culture’ from masking the structures of power associated with conjoined production of ethnic and class inequalities, actually now prevent ‘culture’ from serving as an explanation of those social inequalities […] will these current usages actually not prove counter-productive by further entrapping many of non-European and Muslim background into the language and logics of cultural difference, by more or less forcing them into forms of collective self-formation that are more than somewhat fictive, by driving them into the cul-de-sac of (racialized) identity politics […] will these current usages somewhat prevent the occurrence of ‘everyday racism’ from being treated as if the product of spontaneous combustion rather than something associated with the exercise of various forms of power and knowledge production, with the arbitrary production of categorizations, with the kinds of majority-population subjectivities produced in the context of contemporary economic restructuring? (Ibid.: 280–82)

Without subscribing to the mythology of a world changed for ever on ‘9/11’, the last decade has answered some of these questions. Multiculturalism, the failed experiment, provides a site on which the ontological parameters and political rhetorics derived from the ‘new racisms’ have been laundered. The reductive terms within which many minorities were strategically obliged to work have now become the evidence of their excess, compromised signs taken for radical wonders. The fluent mutuality of multicultural rhetoric and the confident discussion of abstract national ‘models’ have all too frequently been assumed to be the lived realities of multiculture. Now this multivalent, ongoing cultural production is rearticulated as the problematic presence of a state-sponsored pre-modernity, of intolerable cocoons of atavism from which autonomous liberal individuals must be forced to metamorphose. In a context where political agency is held to be radically diminished, the new certainties of vindicated culturalism demand further attenuations, a dance-off between universalisms freed of the hard-won burden of reflexivity, and a ‘relativism’ fashioned as the scrapyard of political solidarities, sociological complexity ...