Diversity in Decline?

The Rise of the Political Right and the Fate of Multiculturalism

Arjun Tremblay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783030022983
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030022990
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Arjun Tremblay considers the future of multiculturalism, contextualised within an ideological and political shift to the right. Is there any hope that multiculturalism will survive alongside the rise of the political right across democracies? How can policy makers continue to recognize and to accommodate minorities in an increasingly inhospitable ideological environment?

Based on evidence from three case studies, Tremblay develops a hypothesis of multicultural outcomes, arguing that while the threat to multiculturalism is real, there still is hope, and that not only is the fate of minority rights in liberal democracies far from sealed, but it may still be possible to further protect the rights of immigrant and other minority groups in years to come. In order to do this, proponents of diversity politics may need to reconceptualise multiculturalism and other minority rights along instrumental lines as a means to fulfil policy objectives above and beyond the recognition and accommodation of immigrant minorities. This will be an important read for scholars interested in minority rights, multiculturalism, diversity politics, comparative politics, institutionalism, right-wing and far-right studies, and public policy.

© The Author(s) 2019

Arjun TremblayDiversity in Decline? Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02299-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Can Multiculturalism Survive the Rise of the Political Right?

Arjun Tremblay¹

(1)

University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada

Arjun Tremblay

End Abstract

This book answers three questions: (1) is there any hope that multiculturalism will survive as the ideological pendulum continues to shift to the right across democracies? (2) Are there conditions under which multiculturalism is more likely survive an ideological shift to the right in government? (3) How can multicultural policies be designed to survive in an ideological environment that continues to veer to the right?

While the term “multiculturalism” has different meanings (e.g. a demographic phenomenon, an ideology, a public discourse), this book uses it to describe aggregates of public policies that are distinct and characteristic phenomena of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or, in other words, of the most recent stage of the “age of migration”.¹ By design, these policies recognize the cultures, religions and/or languages of minorities borne out of individual and familial immigration. In most cases, these policies also require public institutions to lower barriers for members of minority communities to participate in social, political, and/or economic arenas; that is to say they require public institutions to “accommodate” minorities.

This book situates itself within an emerging and important research programme that focuses on minority recognition, minority accommodation, and immigrant integration. In recent years, contributors to this new endeavour have set out not only to assess multiculturalism’s normative value but also to evaluate and explain the fate of minority recognition and minority accommodation in liberal democracies. Although this research programme tends to focus on understanding (what has come to be known as) multiculturalism’s “retreat” it is now starting to theorize on multiculturalism’s persistence or “survival” under adverse conditions.

The Rising Threat of the Political Right

For a number of reasons, the clearest threat to multiculturalism’s survival are governments of the political right. For one, the political right (including the far-right and the centre-right) is the main source of anti-immigration rhetoric (Diamond 1996) and of a mono-national discourse (Betz and Immerfall 1998), neither of which values recognizing and accommodating diversity. There are also significant logical inconsistencies between the ideological positions of the far-right and centre-right, on the one hand, and the recognition and accommodation of diversity, on the other. Five of these logical inconsistencies are elaborated upon below:

• Firstly, the most extreme of right-wing ideological positions are both holistic and “historicist” (Popper 1945) in that they envision an idealized version of society and seek means to preserve this ideal by excluding (or exterminating) difference. Consequently, these extremist ideological positions are a priori inconsistent with a political project that is based on the assumption that societies should be open to immigration and also mutable in their conception of nationhood and belonging;
• Secondly, classical conservatism is biased in favour of maintaining the status quo (Sweet 1996) and is therefore more likely to be incompatible with the implementation of a policy project—such as multiculturalism—that must entail a radical shift away from past practices of cultural assimilation and cultural exclusion and towards the recognition and accommodation of diversity;
• Thirdly, classical liberalism and its emphasis on “negative freedom” is also inconsistent with multiculturalism. From a classical liberal perspective, freedom is defined as “freedom from state interference” (Tremblay et al. 2003, 82). By contrast, multiculturalism, particularly when it takes the form of employment equality policies, is distinctly rooted in the notion of “positive freedom,” a reform liberal ideal that requires state intervention to remedy socio-economic disparities (82–83);
• Fourthly, neo-conservatism’s hyper-individualistic conception of society (ibid., 87) stands in clear contradistinction to the multicultural conception of society that views the individual as belonging to a particular group with a distinct “societal culture” (Kymlicka 1996);
• And, fifthly, the conservative ideal of “small government” (see Rudolph and Evans 2005, 662, footnote 1) is inconsistent with multiculturalism given that the recognition and accommodation of diversity often requires government spending in areas such as cultural activities and programs, minority language assistance programs, and bilingual or mother-tongue instruction programs.

In addition to these logical inconsistencies and incompatibilities, there is very little historical precedent of the political right implementing a shift towards multiculturalism. In fact, the first experiments with multiculturalism were undertaken in long-standing liberal democracies during the latter half of the twentieth century and, more specifically, at a time when voters put their support squarely behind parties of the political left. The initial variants of “official multiculturalism” policies adopted in Canada, Australia , New Zealand , Sweden and the Netherlands were designed and implemented by centre-left governments. The only real exception to this pattern took place in Canada during the late 1980s when the Mulroney Conservative government implemented the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988; but even this was 17 years after the left-leaning Trudeau Liberals interpreted the findings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism 1963–1971 (i.e. the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission or the “Bi and Bi” Commission) to mean that Canada’s federal government should implement a policy of “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework.”

Although the “master narrative” of multiculturalism holds that some former leftists have recently decried the recognition and accommodation of cultural minorities (Kymlicka 2010, 46), opposition to multiculturalism has come and continues to come primarily from the right-hand side of the ideological spectrum.² In Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006), an in-depth look into conditions surrounding the “backlash” against immigrant minorities in the Netherlands and the populist outcry against the Dutch “multicultural tragedy”, author Ian Buruma succinctly describes the political left’s embrace of multiculturalism as well as an ideological dichotomy between support of and opposition to the recognition and accommodation of minorities:

The Left was on the side of universalism, scientific socialism, and the like, while the Right believed in culture, in the sense of “our culture,” “our traditions.” During the multicultural age of the 1970s and 1980s, this debate began to shift. It was now the Left that stood for culture and tradition, especially “their” cultures and traditions, that is, those of the immigrants, while the Right argued for the universal values of the Enlightenment. (Buruma 2006, 30)

Just as multiculturalism was compatible with the policy agendas of the left in the late stages of the twentieth century, the recognition and accommodation of cultural minorities remains, to this day, a project that is inherently consistent with the social democratic and reform liberal ideals of left-wing and centre-left political parties. This should come as little surprise given that the decision to lower barriers for ethnocultural participation in educational, economic and/or political realms strongly resonates with the reform liberal ideal of ensuring equality of opportunity along class lines (Tremblay et al. 2003, 82–83). Additionally, multiculturalism is compatible with social democratic conceptions of the social order and the process of change. Given their belief that one of the main objectives of government is to ensure equality (ibid., 101) social democrats should be infinitely more receptive than their counterparts on the right to a governmental approach that, in seeking to integrate ethnocultural minorities, acknowledges that an imbalance in power exists between the national majority and ethnocultural minorities. Furthermore, social democrats are open to radical change through democratic means and direct governmental intervention (ibid.,); therefore, they should logically be receptive to designing and implementing public policies, such as multicultural public policies, intended to enhance the citizenship rights or “citizenization” (Kymlicka 2010) of immigrant minorities in order to fulfil the true promise of liberal democracy.

If governments of the political left of the 1970s and 1980s still governed today, the issue of multiculturalism’s survival would probably be moot. However, times have changed. Since the early 1980s, there has been a proliferation of far-right parties across Eastern and Western Europe, several of which (e.g. the Freedom Party of Austria , France ’s Front National , the Danish People’s Party, Greece’s Golden Dawn , the Netherlands ’ Party for Freedom , and the Sweden Democrats) have recently increased their share of the popular vote and made unprecedented inroads into mainstream politics. For example, in Greece, the Golden Dawn , an extremist right-wing party that uses Nazi iconography in its logo, rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to capture 21 seats in the Hellenic parliament at the 2012 elections. In 2014, the Front National had mayoral candidates elected in 12 French municipalities, obtained nearly 5 million votes in the 2014 European Parliament election and, in 2015, placed first in 6 of 13 regions during the first round of French regional elections. In Britain, the ultranationalist British National Party made inroads into mainstream politics in the early 2000s when it had several representatives elected at the municipal level as well as in the late 2000s when Nick Griffin was elected as the European Parliament representative for North West England. And, as but another example of the success of an anti-diversity discourse, the far-right Danish People’s Party has consistently increased its share of the popular vote in Denmark during the last two decades with a policy platform that promises decreases in immigration and the aggressive cultural assimilation of newcomers.

Concomitantly, observers point to the precipitous decline of European centre-left and social democratic parties (see Spiegel Online, September 22, 2017; Berman, The New York Times, October 2, 2017; Lloyd, Reuters, November 17, 2017; O’Sullivan, The National Review, March 15, 2018) and to evidence of a “contagion from the right” (see Young 1995; Goodwin 2011; Engelhart, Maclean’s, November 30, 2013) which has seen centrist political factions normally amenable to immigrants and minorities move closer to the far-right in taking hostile positions towards migration and the politics of diversity. A clear example of this is Mark Rutte ’s open letter to Dutch voters in the run-up to the 2017 general election in the Netherlands wherein he delivered the message that immigrants should “[act] normal or go away.” This message was viewed in the press (e.g. Taylor, The Washington Post, January 23, 2017; Walker, The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2017; Henley, The Guardian, January 23, 2017) as a last-ditch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Can Multiculturalism Survive the Rise of the Political Right?
• 2. The Multiculturalism Research Programme: Established and Emerging Concerns
• 3. Developing a Hypothesis of Multicultural Outcomes: Theory, Case Selection, Methodology and Clarifications
• 4. Canadian Multiculturalism During the Harper Governments (2006–2015): Diachronic Variance and the Importance of Electoral Outcomes
• 5. British Multiculturalism During the Cameron and May Majority Governments (2010–2017): Retreat, Survival and the Effects of Policy Design
• 6. American Multiculturalism During a Majority Republican Congress and a Unified Republican Government (1995–2007): Unprotected Policies and the Actions of Critical Veto Players
• 7. Conclusion: Scholarly Contributions and Potential Application to Theory-Building and Multicultural Policy Design
• Back Matter