Multiculturalism

Alana Lentin

The first decade of the 21st century in the West has been marked by a
profound re-evaluation of multiculturalism as a prescription for living
together in complex, postcolonial, multiethnic societies. Paradoxically,
globalization – the spread of the neoliberal economic doctrine around
the world – while certainly resulting in increased cultural diversity, has
often been met with a retreat into a narrow, ethnoracial nationalism
that eschews the inevitability of hybridisation. In Europe, since 2004 in
particular, states such as the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark, once
advocates of multicultural policy, have declared multiculturalism to be
‘in crisis’. They now espouse the integration of ‘national values’ to
replace what is seen to be the permissiveness of multiculturalism past
which, according to Trevor Phillips,1 resulted in societies ‘sleepwalking
into segregation.’

However, the multiculturalism today deemed beset by crisis relates not

so much to the policies put in place by various governments in
recognition of cultural, ethnic and religious pluralism in their societies,
but to the fact of diversity itself. As David Goodhart wrote in his
controversial 2004 article, ‘too much diversity’ discourages social
solidarity in a welfare state: the more different someone is to oneself,
the less likely an individual is to want to share resources with her. The
notion that western societies risk disintegration from an excess of
diversity reveals the problematic definition of multiculturalism itself,
which this article addresses.

David Goldberg (2004) distinguishes between descriptive and

normative multiculturalism. The former describes the ethnic, cultural,

1
Director of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission.

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religious and national plurality of western, postcolonial, urban spaces
resulting from increased global migration since the end of the Second
World War. The second is a prescriptive outlook which actively
celebrates the proliferation of diversity, even insisting on the relative
value of different cultures to each other, thus resisting the hegemony
of national(ist) culture. As Goldberg notes, “‘The multicultural’ has
been caught in an oscillation between these two understandings:
description and prescription.” In reality, the often begrudging
recognition of the former resulted in a variety of policy arrangements
that sought to appease ‘minority communities’ in the interests of
maintaining social harmony in the face of ‘racial’ unrest and without
revoking a commitment to a narrative of the homogeneous nation.

Multicultural policy is portrayed as a response to the realisation that

the ‘melting pot does not melt’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992). US-
American strategies of assimilation assumed that the linguistic,
cultural and ethnic differences of immigrants from across the globe
would fade once incorporated into the great American ‘melting pot’.
Effectively this meant less desirable racialised minorities denying their
heritage and assimilating the values of white America. The
multicultural response of the 1960s conceded the impossibility of
complete assimilation. Hence, the melting pot metaphor is replaced
with that of a ‘salad bowl’ of distinct cultural groups, each finding their
place within the ‘mosaic’ of society.

The move from assimilation to multiculturalism, however, is not due to

a straightforward recognition of the failure of the melting pot to bring
about an end to the supremacist status of white Europeans and the
ongoing discrimination of blacks and other racialised minorities. Calls
from civil rights and anti-racist activists, in the US and the UK most
notably, did not focus on cultural recognition but on equality of rights,

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and more radically, an end to racist oppression. To understand why
multiculturalism is posited as a solution to racial discord, for example
following the 1958 anti-black Notting Hill ‘race riots’ in London,
attention should be paid to the roots of culturalisation.

The origins of contemporary multiculturalist policies can be found in

the post–1945 anti–racism of international institutions, specifically in
the emphasis placed by organisations such as Unesco on the principle
of cultural relativism as a means of combating racism.

This stance formed the background for the elite response to racism
among many western governments, and played an important role in
elevating the discourse of culture to its current status. The group of
anthropologists and anti–racist scientists who drafted the Unesco
‘Statement on the nature of race differences’ (1951) set out both to
disprove race as a scientific theory and to propose an alternative
concept for understanding human difference. This alternative concept
was culture. In accepting that race as a categorisation of humanity was
scientifically false, the Unesco scientists nevertheless understood that
human diversity – especially in an era of immigration – needed
explaining.

Culture was seen as a means of capturing the differences between

human groups. No superiority or inferiority was inferred; rather, the
uneven spread of ‘progress’ created a coexistence of equal–but–
different groups, each bringing to the world its own competencies.
Unesco promoted the idea of intercultural knowledge as a means of
combining cross–cultural understanding and cultural diversity with the
slogan: “reconciling fidelity to oneself with openness to others.”

For the Unesco approach, the continuing realities of racism were

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 Fall
08
attributed to individual prejudice; the historic role of the European
nation–state in utilising the category of race in its political projects was
ignored. Thus, by replacing race with culture, the Unesco project failed
to engage with the realities of imperialism, slavery, class inequalities
or tight migration controls. In this, Unesco permitted European states
to deny the centrality of the idea of race to their formation – an
evasion that persists, in the post-racial vision popularised today.

Multicultural policies were set in motion by governments eager to by-

pass the conflictual terrain of racial injustice. These policies, rather
than diversity itself, have indeed sown the seeds of segregation
(Kundnani 2007) by relying on a reified view of ‘ethnic minority
communities’ that refuses to see the extent of their internal diversity.
Policies drawn up in collusion between governments and, often
traditional and patriarchal, community leaders encouraged a unilinear
view of minority culture as distinctly unmodern. The current focus on
the incompatibility of Muslims with western ‘culture’ exemplifies the
lack of attention paid within a mainstream multiculturalist vision to
identity formation within all groups in ‘super-diverse’ (Vertovec 2007)
societies. Insistence on integration into national values reveals less of
a return to universalism, but the favouring of a distinctly national
particularism over the recognition of the extent to which migration and
globalisation lead to an ‘expansion of identity’ (Badiou 2008) in us all.

References
Anthias, Floya and Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1992. Racialized Boundaries:
Race, nation, gender, colour and class and the anti-racist
struggle. London and New York: Routledge.
Badiou, Alain. 2008. ‘The Communist Hypothesis,’ New Left Review 49,
[Company Address]

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 January-February: 29-42.
Goldberg, David. 2002. The Racial State. Malden, Mass. and Oxford:
Blackwell.
———. 2004. ‘The space of multiculturalism’, OpenDemocracy 16
September 2004. http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-
multiculturalism/article_2097.jsp
Goodhart, David. 2004. ‘Too Diverse?’, Prospect 95, February.
Kundnani, Arun. 2007. The End of Tolerance: Racism in Twenty-First
Century Britain. London: Pluto Press.
Vertovec, Steven. 2007. 'Super-diversity and its implications', Ethnic
and Racial Studies 30(6).