Pluralist Multiculturalism

12 Key excerpts on "Pluralist Multiculturalism"

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  Multiculturalism and Interculturalism

  Debating the Dividing Lines

  • Ricard Zapata-Barrero, Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Ricard Zapata-Barrero(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  The important point to bear in mind at the outset, however, and as the subsequent chapters betray, is that neither interculturalists nor multiculturalists occupy a position of unanim-ity amongst themselves, and interculturalists and multiculturalists can and do agree. A good place to begin to understand why con-cerns the common denominator of the role and nature of plural-ism, something that has both shared and diverging implications for interculturalism and multiculturalism, and it is to this we next turn. Inter- and multicultural pluralism The fact of pluralism, to paraphrase Rawls, emerges as self-evident in a world comprising over six hundred languages, five hundred ethno-cultural groups and innumerable religions spread across nearly two hundred recognised sovereign states. By definition, therefore, pluralism is an inescapable feature of human societies, and ‘can neither be wished out of existence nor suppressed without an unacceptable degree of coercion, and often not even then’ (Parekh 2000: 196). Different kinds of polities have long strug-gled with reconciling cultural pluralism with an idea of collective membership. In one respect this is odd because the intermingling of cultural (including religious and ethnic) diversity is as old as we can record. On the other hand it may well be anticipated that unsettling established social and identity configurations creates challenges, something that is no less apparent in modern polities. The way plu-ralism is conceived obviously has implications for understanding the relationships between interculturalism and multiculturalism and other ways of reconciling unity and diversity. Minimally, we might build on the distinction Isaiah Berlin (1991: 10) put forward nasar meer, tariq modood and ricard zapata-barrero 12 between pluralism and relativism.

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  Political Concepts

  A Reader and Guide

  • Iain MacKenzie(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  But the compatibility of liberalism and multiculturalism turns upon the conceptu-alisation of pluralism. If by ‘pluralism’ we mean an irreconcilable difference over the good then allegiance to the state might simply be understood as a willingness not to impose upon others our conception of the good, and the justification for such ‘toleration’ of ‘difference’ is nothing more than social peace. If, however, we see pluralism as a natural outcome of the exercise of human freedom then the justification for tolerance of other conceptions of the good is grounded in something which is itself a good, namely, per-sonal autonomy. Once personal autonomy takes on the status of a political value, the question arises as to whether the political order depends upon the existence and sustenance of particular cultural forms to the exclusion of others. Culture The question of whether a liberal political order can be culturally inclusive must depend, at least in part, not only on how we conceptualise pluralism, but also on how we define ‘culture’. Whilst the term ‘multiculturalism’ suggests a multiplicity of cultures within a ‘social system’, it might also imply a particular attitude towards culture: one which values diversity. A difficulty which runs through the multiculturalism debate in political theory is the failure to explain what is meant by culture. Will Kymlicka, for example, in the opening lines of his book Multicultural Citizenship , makes the following claim: Most countries are culturally diverse. According to recent estimates, the world’s 184 independent states contain over 600 living language groups, and 5,000 ethnic groups. In very few countries can the citizens be said to share the same language, or belong to the same ethnona-tional group (1995: 1). 241 Political Legitimacy In a few short sentences it is implied that ‘culture’ equates to a language group, an ethnic group and an ethnonational group.

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  Democracy and Northern Ireland

  Beyond the Liberal Paradigm?

  • A. Little(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  3 Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference One of the primary accusations levelled at the kind of universalism that underpins political liberalism is that it is ‘difference-blind’. This criticism takes many different forms but is often associated with feminists (Young 1990) and leftist communitarians (Taylor 1992). 1 However, in recent years it has also been clear that many theorists within the liberal tradition like Kymlicka, Kukathas and Raz have also been concerned with the capacity of liberalism to provide the mechan- isms that allow diverse societies to cohere, whilst still remaining true to such values as freedom, equality, toleration and diversity. More recently still, the debate over liberalism and social diversity has been clarified in the literature over the political implications of multicultur- alism. The two key contributions to this debate have been the re- working of multicultural politics by Bhikhu Parekh (2000) and the refutation of these arguments from a universalist liberal perspective by Barry (2001). This chapter will examine the applicability of these theor- ies to the political situation in Northern Ireland and assess the value of multiculturalism to the rethinking of democracy there. At the outset it may be useful to ground our discussion in a working definition of multiculturalism and here the work of Matthew Festenstein is instructive. He describes the politics of multiculturalism as concerned with ‘the way in which cultural and ethnic differenti- ation may be accommodated in social, political and economic arrange- ments’ and, in particular, his focus is on ‘the sphere of evaluative or normative inquiry into how the politics of culturally plural societies ought to be conducted’ (Festenstein 2000: 70). It is clear how such a model might be seen as relevant to politics in Northern Ireland given the social divisions that prevail there and the way that discussions of those divisions are frequently presented in cultural or ethnic terms.

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  Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of Multiculturalism

  French Modernist Legacies

  • Yolande Jansen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  Introduction 29 critics, it was argued that liberal multiculturalism tends to stand in the tradition of toleration, in which ultimately majorities and the states representing them remain in a position to give special rights to minor-ities on their own terms and conditions, and thus not really producing equality at all (Brown 2006; Mookherjee 2010; Žižek 2010; Povinelli 2011). In response to the criticisms of liberal multiculturalism, Kymlicka (2002, 2010), in his latest normative definition of multiculturalism, gives it the relational form it had taken in earlier, more sociologically and social-movement-oriented understandings, reading multicultur-alism as a response to power differences in the context of processes of nation-building (see also Chapter 3 in this volume). This redefinition brought the political philosophical defence of multiculturalism more into line with the strands in the social sciences and cultural studies discussed above. However, even relational multiculturalism-as-citizenisation seems susceptible to the criticisms that were made of the earlier versions of multiculturalism. The boundaries between groups and nations in a global context have been blurred to such an extent that it may seem problematic to speak about nations, majorities and minorities at all. Or, in the baroque terms of Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2007), to charac-terise the global multiculture that we all inhabit: In these times of transnational corporations, world products, world mar-keting, global brands, planetary social and professional networks, inter-continental pen pals, mail-order brides, and astronaut families, the old accounts of a world neatly compartmentalized in civilisations, religions, nations, states, and their forms of allegiance and belonging no longer fit. We have long entered the post-cubist phase of identity (ibid.: 3).

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  Multiculturalism Rethought

  Interpretations, Dilemmas and New Directions

  • Varun Uberoi, Tariq Modood(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  The provision of this broader definition and its implications is a work in progress. It involves adapting the idea of a public sphere to the needs of a multicultural society and this has been undertaken by public intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and locations. The work of such intellectuals has generated considerable resistance, and the political implications of their arguments have been caricatured as ‘state multicultural-ism’. There is no such unified doctrine, and on close examina-tion most of the public intellectuals who are associated with multiculturalism or sympathetic to aspects of it, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, do not advocate such a doctrine. What does exist are the many and varied sources from which andrew gamble 288 multiculturalism draws. They include the Austro-Marxists such as Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, who advocated cultural autonomy for the nations of the Habsburg Empire, an early formulation of the idea of a community of communities. 17 Another source has been liberal pluralism and the respect for difference, which has become such an important facet of contemporary liberalism. 18 A commitment to pluralism undercuts the kinds of certainty purveyed by the universalist ideas that have nurtured the secular liberal state. As John Gray has argued: ‘There is no impartial or universal viewpoint from which the claims of all particular cultures can be rationally assessed. Any standpoint we adopt is that of a particular form of life and the historical practices that constitute it.’ 19 This pluralist perspective creates the space for multiculturalism, because it requires that all cultures be accorded respect and understanding as a minimum. Alongside this has been the political imperative, the need, as Tariq Modood has argued, for the political accommodation of minorities formed by immigration to Western countries from outside the prosperous West.

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  Modern Pluralism

  Anglo-American Debates since 1880

  • Mark Bevir(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  154 8 Liberalism, pluralism, multiculturalism: contemporary debates Ruth Abbey Introduction As chapters in this volume by Jacob Levy, Jan-Werner Müller, Ben Jackson, and Mark Bevir and Toby Reiner illustrate, the ability of the liberal tradition of political theory to acknowledge and incorp- orate pluralism has long been a topic of contention. This chapter considers some of the positions adopted by liberal political theorists about pluralism in the wake of the liberal/communitarian debate of the 1970s and 1980s. 1 Among the developments that contributed to the eclipse of this debate were, first, John Rawls’s amendments to his theory of justice as fairness and, second, an increased theoretical attention to multiculturalism in Western societies and the challenges this poses to liberalism’s ability to recognize and respond to cultural diversity. This chapter begins with a brief account of Rawls’s attempt to make his theory of justice as fairness more hospitable to plural- ism by adducing a purely political form of liberalism. It goes on to consider Charles Taylor’s argument about the relationship between liberalism and the politics of recognition. A form of liberalism that is not difference-blind is elaborated by Will Kymlicka in his defense of group-differentiated rights. The relationship between liberalism and multiculturalism appears through a different lens in the work of Chandran Kukathas. An argument about how liberals who value gen- der equality should scrutinize claims by minority and religious groups for rights is advanced by Susan Moller Okin. Lest this suggest that all contemporary liberals support multiculturalism in some form or other, the chapter ends by raising some of the concerns about multi- culturalism enunciated by Brian Barry. 1 For discussions of some of the protagonists and issues in this debate, see Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

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  Pluralism and Engagement in the Discipline of International Relations

  • Yong-Soo Eun(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2014 ).

  Furthermore, in discussions of visions of a better future for IR scholarship, pluralism is also regarded as what we must pursue and achieve. Friedrich Kratochwil (2003 : 126), for example, holds that pluralism is “not as the second best alternative but actually the most promising strategy for furthering research and the production of knowledge” in the Forum that the ISA put together in the hope of identifying “new directions for the field” at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Going a step further, in the same Forum, Yosef Lapid calls attention to an “engaged” form of pluralism, pointing to the importance of “dialogue,” as well as to the diversity of approaches, in the study of international relations. In his words: if “engaged pluralism … is the most feasible and deserving destination for the international relations theory enterprise in the foreseeable future, then dialogue must figure prominently on our agenda at the dawn of the twenty-first century” (Lapid 2003 : 129). In effect, the underlying assumption of the Forum, as the Editor has made clear, was that IR is badly in need of “dialogue, pluralism, and synthesis” if it is to have a better future (Hellmann 2003 : 123, 147–150). And this view continues to resonate in today’s IR. Yale Ferguson, for example, writes that IR analysts “need to be conversant with a wide range of theories … [because] viewing some subjects simultaneously from more than one theoretical perspective often enhances understanding of global politics” (Ferguson 2015 : 3). Additionally, Richard Ned Lebow claims that “[p]luralism must be valued as an end in its own right but also as an effective means of encouraging dialogue across approaches, something from which we all have something to learn” (Lebow 2011

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  British Islam and English Law

  A Classical Pluralist Perspective

  • Patrick S. Nash(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  38–41; Hasan, Multiculturalism, pp. 194–5. 27 Dorota A. Gozdecka, ‘Religious Pluralism as a Legal Pluralism’ in Russell Sandberg (ed.), Religion and Legal Pluralism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 182; Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, ‘How Does Interculturalism Contrast with Multiculturalism?’ (2011) 33(2) Journal of Intercultural Studies 175–96. 28 Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, pp. 85–6. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., pp. 86–8. 49 2 Multiculturalism persons are likely to feel deeply alienated and unjustly treated, and might reject the society that has no space for them’. 31 Liberal individualism, in other words, ignores the cultural aspirations of communities and lacks the intellectual resources to accommodate their demands for differential treatment. 32 Britain is better thought of as ‘both a community of citizens and a community of communities, both a liberal and a multicultural society, and needs to reconcile their sometimes conflicting requirements’. 33 From this oppositional stance, Parekh builds his account of multicultural morality. Relativism is said to be an ‘incoherent doctrine’ because it disregards human universals and objective moral values; moral monism is likewise rejected because it insists that the good and the truth are singular and uniform rather than culturally constituted and mediated. 34 Humans are culturally embedded beings so it would be unjust to pass judgement on them ‘without taking full account of the system of meaning, traditions, temperament and the moral and emotional resource of the people involved’. 35 Dworkin’s idea of value as an integrated whole is ‘naïve’ because different ways of life are incommensurable. 36 In reality, Parekh suggests, universal values and the entrenched moral traditions of different societies are engaged in creative interplay, ‘the latter domesticating and pluralizing the former and being in turn reinterpreted and revised in their light, thus leading to .

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  Good Governance and Development

  • Brian Smith(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Third, pluralism places great emphasis on functional representation . This is where aid to civil society becomes most pertinent. Political plural-ism can only be institutionalized by adherence to the fundamental politi-cal rights of freedom of speech and freedom of association. The law has to give protection to these rights. The two rights are closely related. They need each other. Freedom of association is meaningless if people are not free to express their views (if, for example, they are likely to be prosecuted for uttering criticisms of the current political leadership, as in Singapore or Zimbabwe). And freedom of speech is empty if the expression of views and criticisms cannot be backed by organization and mobilization. Pluralism enables the political weakness of the individual citizen in mass society to be compensated for by the right and ability of all freely to organize for political ends. Interests can be mobilized and made politi-130 Good Governance and Development cally effective by processes of functional representation. Power is diffused among groups. So while political parties aggregate interests, so that majorities can be formed and governments created, interest groups articulate political demands between elections, enabling political leaders to respond with alternative legislative proposals or adjustments to their election manifestos designed to broaden their appeal to voters. A pluralist model of functional representation is thus different from that of corporatism, under which representative producer groups are used by the state as instruments of mobilization, control and legitimation. Under corporatism, groups do not spontaneously articulate a plurality of politi-cal demands from all sections of society. The state controls the selection of groups for inclusion in, and exclusion from, the processes of policy planning.

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  After Politics

  The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy

  • Glen Newey(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Here I consider their role in political design. It is important to note that the differences in the philosophical content of positions to which the term ‘pluralism’ is commonly applied correspond to differences in the role which these positions may be thought to play in political design. Given that form of meta-ethical pluralism which subordinates evaluative to deontic considerations, for example, the claim made by value-pluralism is of secondary significance; what matters is the meta- ethical ordering itself. On another view, ‘pluralism’ simply names a sociological fact of life in modern societies, that is, that they in fact contain persons or groups professing distinct (and perhaps conflicting) conceptions of the good. Accordingly, a second conception of pluralism’s argumentative role is that it justifies liberalism by providing the only set of political principles on which the partisans of different values, or conceptions of the good, can agree; a version of this is Rawls’s ‘overlapping consensus’ idea. I take this up below; in brief, my conclusion will be that the argument relies not on pluralism, but on agreement about normative principles; and that where the political problem, which liberalism is held to solve, consists in the existence of diverse conceptions of the good, this already involves a fundamental normative commitment to the political significance of this very fact – where, usually, the commitment derives from the fact that those conceiving of the good are persons. This is not to deny the urgency of the political problem which this sort of pluralism may pose. It is however to suggest that the conditions for recognising the problem in the first place, and for solving it, are unlikely to involve a commitment to value-pluralism. 94 After Politics Most modern political philosophers accept that democracy is the only, or the most, justifiable form of political decision-making procedure.

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  Multiculturalism and Integration

  A Harmonious Relationship

  • Michael Clyne, James Jupp, Michael Clyne, James Jupp(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • ANU Press

    (Publisher)

  ‘Multiculturalism’ lacks the rhetorical resonance of the ‘melting pot’ for nation-building purposes. I stress that the difficulty, here, is more rhetorical than substantive. Multiculturalism is, indeed, concerned with integrating a diverse society based on liberal democratic notions of liberty, equality and justice. Nevertheless, it is the case that many Australians are unable to warm to the term. As the National Multicultural Advisory Council 45 reported, pollster ‘[Irving] Saulwick’s research identified a strong desire for unity in this country. He showed that the concept of multiculturalism raised in many minds an emphasis on separateness rather than togetherness’. By the mid 1990s, even one of the architects of Australian multicultural policy was calling for the term to be dropped, although he continued to support the policies for which it stands 46 . And, of course, the Howard government removed the word from official use in early 2007, a move that has largely been preserved by the Rudd government. For all these reasons, it makes more sense to construe multiculturalism as a set of principles, policies and programs in the service of an Australian national identity than as the locus of that identity itself. 42 Anderson, Benedict (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism . Verso, London. 43 Wingo, Ajume (2003). Veil Politics in Liberal Democratic States. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 126. 44 Hirst, John (2001): 31. 45 National Multicultural Advisory Council (NMAC) (1999). Op cit : 96. 46 Zubrzycki, Jerzy (1996), ‘Cynics woo the ethnic vote’. The Australian 15 October. Chapter 4: Multicultural Integration in Political Theory 81 This brings us to the intermediate position of ‘liberal nationalists’. Their ‘thin’ account of national identity acknowledges both the legitimate national interests of liberal democracies and the need to make room for cultural minorities.

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  The Social Construction of Diversity

  Recasting the Master Narrative of Industrial Nations

  • Christiane Harzig, Danielle Juteau(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  — Six — D EMOCRATIC I NSTITUTIONAL P LURALISM AND C ULTURAL D IVERSITY R Veit Bader Discussions of cultural diversity and multiculturalism have focused on questions concerning the value of culture(s) and cultural diversity. Finding justice-based arguments most convincing (Bader 2001g), I plead in this essay for an institutionalist turn and defend democratic institutional plu-ralism (DIP). Most liberal political philosophers agree that cultural diver-sity is guaranteed by classic (individual and collective) freedoms in liberal democratic constitutions. Disagreement arises regarding whether this guarantee further requires policies of multiculturalism, including speci-fied group rights. Highly contested is my more demanding claim that a jus-tice-based defense of cultural diversity may require much stronger forms of DIP. It is explicitly rejected by (neo-)republicanism, by comprehensive libertarianism and liberalism and, more tacitly and implicitly, by political liberalism (Rawlsians), discursive democracy (Habermasians), and even deliberative democracy (Bartholomew 1999; Squires 1999; Valadez 2001; Williams 1998, 2000a; Waldron 2000). Nor is it broadly and systematically defended by liberal nationalists (Tamir 1993; Kymlicka 1995), liberal com-munitarians such as Taylor and Walzer, or theorists of contextualized morality such as Carens, Bauböck, and Parekh. In this chapter, I initiate such a systematic elaboration. My general claims are the following: (i) Moral principles such as difference-blind neutrality may or may not be appropriate in ideal worlds (well-ordered states, just societies, ide-ally reasonable citizens). Yet in the actual world, they tend to stabilize existing structural (economic, social, political) and cultural or sym-bolic inequalities between majorities and minorities. Furthermore, they serve to hide this stabilization from view: presumed neutrality masks majority bias (Bader 1998a).

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