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Multiculturalism is an utter failure and ethnically diverse groups do not enjoy living side by side. At least that’s the assessment of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, expressed in a speech to the youth wing of her own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) earlier this month. Merkel argued that when Germany encouraged foreign workers into the country to tackle labour shortages in the early 1960s, it was assumed that, ‘… they won’t stay and that they will have disappeared again one day. That’s not the reality’. Without giving specific reasons why multiculturalism is deemed to have failed, Merkel’s comments are just the latest in a wider European backlash against multicultural ideals. 

In August, Bundesbank executive Thilo Sarrazin’s book, Germany is Digging its Own Grave, told us that foreigners were breeding rapidly and turning Germans into strangers in their own country; that Muslim migrants were closely linked to criminal activity and dependency on welfare; that many Arabs and Turkish people ‘have no productive function other than in the fruit and vegetable trade’; and that Turkish and Kurdish migrants have a high level of ‘congenital disabilities’ which leads to failure in the state school system. His disparaging views were denounced by many, including Angela Merkel herself. In a recent opinion poll, some 30% of Germans also thought that the country was overrun with foreigners who should be sent home if unemployment was rising. Such criticisms of immigration and multiculturalism are not restricted to Germany.

In July, French MPs voted to ban the wearing of the burka or niqab in public places, following a passionate and divisive public debate about foreign cultures and French political ideals. Immigration was also a key issue in the May 2010 British General Election, with then Prime Minister Gordon Brown becoming embroiled in a row after describing a voter who merely raised the issue of immigration as ‘a bigoted woman’. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom won 9 seats in 2006 but 24 in 2010 on a larger share of the vote than the main party in the previous coalition government, the Christian Democrats. Wilders declared: ‘More security, less crime, less immigration, less Islam – this is what Holland chose.’ Wilders is currently on trial for inciting racial hatred.

But what is meant by multiculturalism that provokes such strong reactions? The answer is not at all clear. In sociology, multiculturalism is generally taken to mean that minority cultures should not be expected to exist in private whilst the majority culture is taken as the public norm, but that the majority and minorities should participate on equal terms. Not to do so risks damaging the self-esteem of those from minorities and making peaceful coexistence less likely. Bhikhu Parekh (2000) argues that we all benefit from multiculturalism as it brings cultures into dialogue with each other, expanding the horizons of us all. In this sense multiculturalism is not simply cultural pluralism – the existence of numerous different cultures within a society. Cultural pluralism describes most societies around the world over a very long time period. However, multiculturalism is, in reality, a political issue of state policy. Should states encourage and promote multiculturalism as the best way to achieve social solidarity? [For UK views on the meaning of multiculturalism, see this article.]

Angela Merkel’s comments were targeted at Turkish migrant workers who were invited to Germany on the basis of a ‘guestworker’ model of immigration. This model granted certain limited rights for migrants which fell short of full citizenship, and it is this model that created the expectation of short-term residency. But of course, when people move across national boundaries to find work, they have to create lives for themselves, make new friends, have children and settle into and contribute to their new communities. Merkel is aware of the positive contribution of migration. In the speech she noted that migrants have brought necessary skills and knowledge that have been beneficial and that they shouldn’t be blamed for not immediately speaking German. But she also said that, ‘… the demand for integration is one of our key tasks for the times to come’. If the demand for integration means assimilation of minorities into a dominant German culture, then it would mark a move away from multiculturalism.

Our globalizing world is producing an age of migration (Castles and Miller 2003) in which national boundaries have become more permeable and many more people move around the world for work, leisure and business. But one unsettling issue arising is how to marry the diversity of cultures with a universal commitment to a single set of national laws and rules. From the examples above it is clear that, in Europe at least, the debate on multiculturalism has become dominated by the discourse of ‘Islam vs The West’, which can be found in theories of an inevitable ‘civilizational conflict’ centring on people’s identification with their own cultures.

In this guise, resistance to the supposed ‘Islamification’ of Europe has settled at the heart of our multicultural debate and the main reason for this is a growing Islamophobia – the prejudice against and exaggerated fear of Muslims and Islam. In turn, this owes much to the terrorist acts committed in the name of Islam by al-Qaeda and associated groups in Europe, the USA and elsewhere over the last 15 years or so, as well as the restrictions on civil liberties introduced to curtail them. But unless the debate on multiculturalism can be lifted out of this very narrow focus, into broader discussions of how best an inevitable cultural pluralism can be successfully managed to the benefit of all, then older and very simplistic notions of integration and assimilation are likely to continue gaining ground.

Chapter 15 on ‘Race, Ethnicity and Migration’ covers a lot of ground on multiculturalism and migration. There is a discussion of migration and ‘the underclass’ on pp. 457-8, and for Islam see pp. 685-6 and pp. 713-6. For a brief outline of al-Qaeida see Box 23.4 on p. 1060. A long-term perspective on migration and population movements is useful and this can be found in Chapter 4, Part One, ‘Types of Society’.

For more in-depth discussions of multiculturalism, legislation against the veil, and questions of immigrant citizenship, you might be interested in the following short book: Multiculturalism, Tariq Modood; Veil: Mirror of Identity, Christian Joppke; and Citizenship and Immigration, Christian Joppke.

                   

References

Castles, S and Miller, M. J. (2009) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 4^th Edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Web materials here: http://www.age-of-migration.com/uk/index.asp

Parekh, B. (2000) Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

Philip W. Sutton

In the first ‘ask an expert’ session of 2010, Steve Fenton (Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol) writes about national identity in Britain. Is it endangered? Does it matter? And how can we address the controversy it has given rise to?

The growth of supra-national organizations, of which the European Union is a key example, is said to have undermined nation-states and national identity. Similarly, multi-national corporations act on a global stage, not a national one, and the days when large companies had distinctive national images are mostly gone. Furthermore, as most capitalist societies continue to reduce state welfare and privatize state functions (such as now, in Britain, is proposed for the Royal Mail), the idea that people viewed the state as “for them” and for their security has lost power. All these things, and the continued migration of workers, are believed to weaken national identity. Hence many European states appear to be suffering crises of national identity. How much this is happening in Britain is disputed¹; but assuming it is happening in some measure there is another question to ask: does it matter?

The evidence of political voices on the right in the case of Britain certainly suggests that it does². Try typing “national identity” into a search box on the Daily Mail online and you will see what I mean. There is a portion of the population that is outraged at the erosion of national identity and angry about the European Union intruding on British prerogatives. They believe that what they call “mass immigration” has endangered a sense of nationhood that has been nurtured over centuries. Newspapers frequently give reports of assaults on Britishness or Englishness, for example “political correctness” about Christmas, multicultural teaching in schools, or the failure to celebrate St. George’s day. As a rough speculative assessment, I would think that some 30-40% of the population in Britain share some or all of these views. In opinion polls the percentages saying that we should do more to control immigration and even repatriate immigrants are pretty high. One possibility is that if a celebrated and taken-for-granted national identity has been lost, it has been replaced in England by a rather resentful and narrow perspective. This is not so in Scotland or Wales where new national projects express progressive national identities, in search of a new politics. But in England is the resentful version all we have to expect?

There are alternatives of which we might consider two: the first is a multicultural inclusiveness which at the same time leaves space for traditional Britishness (or Englishness); the second is an individualistic acceptance that national identity is no longer really important and, indeed, is an impediment to broader universalistic values. If I were to express a preference it would be for a combination of these two: a moderate multiculturalism linked to an acknowledgement that many of our best aspirations as peoples and states go beyond nations and national identities. There is a danger though: neither of these latter two more universalistic versions of national identity is remotely possible unless we understand – and deal with – the anxieties and anger associated with resentful Englishness and Britishness.

¹ See Anthony Heath et al (2008) ‘Are traditional identities in decline?’ http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/esrcinfocentre/viewawardpage.aspx?awardnumber=RES-148-25-0031

² Chapter 8 of my book deals with right-wing neo-nationalist movements in Europe. Chapters 4 and 5 address how we understand ethnic and national identities as sources of action.

Lauren asks: Do you think that in countries where there is greater awareness of national identity, like Wales and Scotland, that this encourages people to be more open to people from other cultures, or more concerned to protect their own national identity?

This question is sensible in avoiding suggesting that national identities are stronger in Wales and Scotland than in England: in those two countries national identities are clearer rather than simply being stronger. This is partly because in Wales and Scotland people, on the whole, are clearer about distinguishing themselves from the English as well as from, increasingly, the British. Many people in England notoriously fail to distinguish English from British, and their national identity is more ‘obscure’ and confused with British national identity. Furthermore, as Krishan Kumar has argued, the English have suppressed English nationalism since, in view of their dominance within Britain, Englishness would have been impolite and impolitic. However, these are all tendencies rather than unmistakable social facts, and the tendencies can change and are changing. The tendency for Englishness to be ‘silent’ is diminishing and is reappearing as a new nationalism – which is often resentful and opposed to multiculturalism. On the whole, there appears to be a greater prospect that Scotland and Wales will be able to foster a progressive form of nationalism. (Neo-nationalisms, especially those of a ‘populist’ kind, are discussed in chapter eight of my book, Ethnicity.) 

Scottish nationalism in particular has made claims to be a civic and multicultural nationalism – i.e. not based on Scottish ethnicity, defined either as ancestry or culture. But strong strands of Islamophobia can still be found in Scotland as well as England, though to a greater degree in England. One of the best research sources is the work of Hussain and Miller (see http://www.devolution.ac.uk/pdfdata/Briefing%2024%20-%20Hussain-Miller.pdf and their recent book). Interestingly they show that, in England, Islamophobia is linked to a strong English identity; in Scotland it is not linked to a strong Scottish identity. But a strong Scottish identity is linked to Anglophobia, and a quarter of English people in Scotland (and half of Pakistanis) are reported as having experienced racial harassment. It is important to remember that sociology tells us identities are accentuated when there is some cause for them to be accentuated, not because of the degree of ‘cultural distinctiveness’.

Steve’s  new edition of his concise and accessible introduction to the concept and history of ethnicity is published this Friday, and looks at what ethnic identity means in today’s world.