It’s all about the D-word. The English-Speaking Union (which seems to be rather lively these days, thank goodness) is hosting a series of lectures by the heads of the diplomatic missions of Ireland, the US, Australia, and the UK. They’ll be talking about “what the four countries have in common as liberal democracies and how each in their own way embraces multiculturalism, pluralism and diversity as the core to their own national concept”.
Glen too wants a piece of the diversity action. Lovers of the Eurovision Song Contest will this year have to live without the staple postcard fare and make do instead with a video that “points out diversity and the acceptance of diversity”. Banal?
Musically, perhaps, it’s more saccharine smiles than slurs. But I don’t think the contest is irrelevant in what it says about nations and identities. At worst it’s significant in its banality, so to say.
Curious that diversity and multiculturalism should be so á la mode in Malta. The noises coming from elsewhere seem less optimistic. Last October for example, Angela Merkel said that the ‘multikulti’ concept had failed, and that immigrants needed to integrate by learning German among other things.
A few weeks ago David Cameron had equally bleak things to say about ‘state multiculturalism’. Rather than encourage different cultures to live separate lives, he said, the UK should invest in a stronger sense of national identity.
Merkel and Cameron may have made the news headings, but not thanks to their originality. In fact, the idea that multiculturalism has failed has been around for a couple of decades now. The criticism has come from at least two directions.
The usual suspects are what we might loosely call ‘far right’ groups. They typically prescribe a blokeish nationalism that does away with ‘bangles and bongos’ (to quote the locally-sourced variety) and ‘puts people in their place’ (ditto). That usually means open discrimination based on old-fashioned racist and supremacist tripe. It’s not worth our time.
The same cannot be said of the second line of criticism, which grows out of solid social-democratic concerns rather than 19th-century fluff. Multiculturalism has come under fire for pushing a ‘3S’ model of culture. 3S stands for saris, samosas and steel drums. Multiculturalist policies, the argument goes, effectively reduce diversity to clothing, cuisine, and music.
That usually happens at the expense of its more consequential aspects, things like employment and systematic discrimination and so on. To make matters worse, diversity is crammed into neat packages and sold as a product to be consumed. This has been called the ‘Disneyfication’ of cultural difference, for obvious reasons.
Both lines of attack are about bangles and bongos, it turns out. The far right thinks they’re too much, the opposite side too little. Whichleaves multiculturalism with a problem.
That’s probably why the politicians have been so vociferous, albeit hardly unchallenged (both Merkel’s and Cameron’s speeches raised an almighty ruck). It’s also why scholars and policymakers have been toying with notions like ‘post-multiculturalism’ and ‘super-diversity’.
Post-multiculturalism is a kind of ‘third way’ approach that promises to steer clear of both multiculturalism and a barnacled nationalism. The trick, it seems, is to develop national identities that are more inclusive of cultural differences. Super-diversity on its part talks of urban contexts in which the cocktail is too complicated and cross-cutting to be boiled down to straightforward ethnic and/or religious differences.
So, are multiculturalism and diversity dead then? Have they really ‘failed’? Diversity for one certainly isn’t. In any case, diversity is a condition of society which cannot really ‘fail’ or ‘succeed’. It is not a plan or a policy. One scarcely knows what to do with it, which is why we decide to ‘celebrate’ it from time to time.
Multiculturalism is an altogether more complicated animal. In managerial babble we would probably say it’s ‘goal-oriented’, that goal being diversity or rather equality-in-diversity. It usually means a political position and actual policies. Canada, for example, runs an active Multiculturalism Programme, itself based on the Canadian Multiculturalism Act.
That’s the easy bit. Multiculturalism is, in fact, very hard to define. At best it’s an umbrella term for a large and fairly disparate arsenal of policies and political beliefs. It could mean anything from state support of cultural organisations, encouragement of religious diversity, and the sanctioning of ritual slaughter (halal, kosher, and such). It certainly is not just about bangles and bongos, or saris, samosas and steel drums. As Will Kymlicka – a leading scholar in the field – puts it, that’s what a caricature of multiculturalism would have us believe.
For Kymlicka, multiculturalism is more about citizenship than about the celebration of diversity. He locates it broadly within what he calls a ‘human rights revolution’ which saw a number of countries position themselves against pre-WW2 colonialist and/or racist assumptions. Loosely defined, multiculturalism is simply a model of citizenship that attempts to accommodate diversity horizontally.
The implication is interesting. Not only has this model not ‘failed’ in Britain, Germany and elsewhere, it actually continues to pattern the ways in which politics deals with diversity. We shouldn’t take Cameron and Merkel too seriously. It’s very convenient to say that multiculturalism is dead, simply because it dovetails with popular anxieties about irregular migration and such. Beyond the rhetoric, however, Glen is in good company. The consensus in British and German politics remains very much for diversity, accommodated horizontally.
For now at least, multiculturalism seems to have a bright future. Only it’ll have to get used to reading its own obituary from time to time.
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