by Tariq Modood *
Britain’s multicultural model is held responsible for the London bombs of July 2005. Rather, says Tariq Modood, it needs to be extended to a “politics of equal respect” that includes Britain’s Muslims in a new, shared sense of national belonging.
In spring 2005, I published a book – Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain, which argued that by making progress towards the goal of multicultural equality and acceptance, and embracing plural ways of belonging to Britain, we in Britain were developing a “multicultural Britishness”.
The flyer for the American edition claimed:
“If an Islam-West divide is to be avoided in our time, Modood suggests, then Britain, with its relatively successful ethnic pluralism and its easygoing attitude toward religion, will provide a particularly revealing case and promising site for understanding.”
Such optimism would have struck some people as foolish at any time, but after the London bombings of 7 July and the abortive bombings of 21 July, it must strike many more as completely misguided. In particular, the fact that most of the individuals involved were born and/or brought up in Britain – a country that had given them or their parents a refuge from persecution, fear or poverty and a guarantee of freedom of worship – has led many analysts, observers, intellectuals and opinion-formers to conclude that multiculturalism has failed; even worse, that it can be blamed for the bombings.
To take just four examples from a waterfall of commentary over the last ten-to-twelve weeks:
- William Pfaff states that “these British bombers are a consequence of a misguided and catastrophic pursuit of multiculturalism” (“A monster of our own making”, Observer, 21 August 2005)
- Gilles Kepel observes that the bombers “were the children of Britain’s own multicultural society” and that the bombings have "smashed" the implicit social consensus that produced multiculturalism “to smithereens” (“Europe’s answer to Londonistan”, openDemocracy, 24 August 2005)
- Martin Wolf concludes that multiculturalism’s departure from the core political values that must underpin Britain’s community “is dangerous because it destroys political community … (and) demeaning because it devalues citizenship. In this sense, at least, multiculturalism must be discarded as nonsense” (“When multiculturalism is a nonsense”, Financial Times, 31 August 2005)
- Trevor Phillips questions, in the context of a speech concerned with “a society … becoming more divided by race and religion”, an “‘anything goes’ multiculturalism … which leads to deeper division and inequality … In recent years we’ve focused far too much on the ‘multi’ and not enough on the common culture.” (“After 7/7: Sleepwalking to segregation”, Commission for Racial Equality, 22 September 2005)
Even those who don’t directly regard multiculturalism as the cause of the bombings tend to believe that we need to review the concept, often concluding that it needs to be replaced by “integration”. Indeed, this current of thinking predates 7/7 (and, for that matter, 9/11); it became prominent with David Blunkett’s arrival at Britain’s Home Office in June 2001 and his response to the riots in some northern English cities in the early summer that year.
The argument against multiculturalism and for integration has, needless to say, an even longer lineage in critiques from both left and right in the 1970s. But its post-2001 manifestation was new in a crucial respect: it came from the pluralistic centre-left, and was articulated by people who previously rejected polarising models of race and class and were sympathetic to the “rainbow”, coalitional politics of identity and the realignment and redefinition of progressive forces that it implied.
By 2004, it was common to read or hear that the cultural separatism and self-segregation of Muslim migrants represented a challenge to Britishness, and that a “politically-correct” multiculturalism had fostered fragmentation rather than integration. Trevor Phillips, then as now chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), declared that multiculturalism had once been useful but is now outof-date, for it made a fetish of difference instead of encouraging minorities to be truly British (see Tom Baldwin, “I want an integrated society with a difference”, Times, 3 April 2004).
Throughout 2004, a swathe of civil-society forums, journals and institutions of the centre-left or liberal-left – , the Observer, theGuardian, the CRE itself, Channel 4, the British Council, openDemocracy – held seminars or produced special publications with titles like “Is Multiculturalism Dead?”, “Is Multiculturalism Over?”, and “Beyond Multiculturalism”.
This line of argument has acquired even more vigour and force after the events of July 2005. But despite all that’s happened in the last few months and the gathering chorus of belief to the contrary, I continue to think that multiculturalism is still an attractive and worthwhile political project; and that indeed we need more of it rather than less.
This, however, does not mean that those calling for integration do not have a point; multiculturalism and integration are complementary ideas. What it does mean is that integration should take a multicultural rather than an assimilative form. At the same time, we in Britain do probably need to work harder to develop a national identity, and forms of belonging to each other, that can win the imaginations and hearts of minorities and majorities alike.
Assimilation, integration, multiculturalism
It is widely said by its critics that “multiculturalism” is a vague, confused concept whose different meanings to different people rendersible debate and policy orientation difficult. There is some truth in this, but the same is true of its rival ideas or models, “assimilation” and “integration”.
Thus, a useful debate and reasoned action requires first some conceptual ground-clearing. The meanings I offer below are not, I believe, arbitrary; rather, they arise out of the public discourses in which these terms are used, and pitted against each other. The way I define them and establish their inter-relationship are however my own, and I am aware that others may prefer to work with other meanings (see Bhikhu Parekh, “British Commitments”, Prospect, September 2005).
Examples of alternative use of these words include “assimilation” in American sociology (as in the “segmented assimilation” proposed by Alejandro Portes & Min Zhou), which is similar to what is meant by integration in Britain.
In general, European ethnic groups in the United States are seen as an exemplar for sociological theories and models of assimilation (see Peter Kivisto, Incorporating Diversity: Rethinking Assimilation in a Multicultural Age, Paradigm Publishers 2005). Thus, Jews are taken to be a successfully assimilated group but the use of this term includes awareness that they have also changed the American society and culture they have become part of. When politicians in Britain and especially continental Europe speak of integration, the meaning they have in mind is what I define below as assimilation.
The principal social dimensions that relevant analysis and policy on these ideas needs to engage with are threefold:
• socio-economic opportunities and outcomes
• socio-cultural mixing
• civic participation and belonging
A brief consideration of how these three dimensions might differently operate can help to define and distinguish between assimilation, integration and multiculturalism.
Assimilation is where the processes affecting the relationship between social groups are seen as one-way, and where the desired outcome for society as a whole is seen as involving least change in the ways of doing things of the majority of the country and its institutional policies. This may not necessarily be a laissez-faire approach – for the state can play an active role in bringing about the desired outcome, as in early 20th-century “Americanisation” policies towards European migrants in the United States – but the
preferred result is one where the newcomers do little to disturb the society they are settling in and become as much like their new compatriots as possible.
Integration is where processes of social interaction are seen as two-way, and where members of the majority community as well as immigrants and ethnic minorities are required to do something; so the latter cannot alone be blamed for “failing to or not trying to integrate”. The established society is the site of institutions – including employers, civil society and the government – in which integration has to take place, and they accordingly must take the lead.
Multiculturalism is where processes of integration are seen both as two-way and as working differently for different groups. In this understanding, each group is distinctive, and thus integration cannot consist of a single template (hence the “multi”). The “culturalism” – by no means a happy term either in relation to “culture” or “ism” – refers to the understanding that the groups in question are likely to not just be marked by newness or phenotype or socio-economic location but by certain forms of group identities.
The latter point indeed suggests that a better, though longer, term might be “pluralistic integration”.
In the perspective of multiculturalism, the social requirement to treat these group identities with respect leads to a redefinition of the concept of equality.
Let us take these two points, multiplicity and equality, in turn.
Multiplicity
Multicultural accommodation of minorities is different from integration because it recognises the social reality of groups (not just of individuals and organisations). This reality can be of different kinds; for example, a sense of solidarity with people of similar origins or faith or mother tongue, including those in a country of origin or a diaspora. Such feelings might be an act of imagination but may also be rooted in lived experience and embodied in formal organisations dedicated to fostering group identity and keeping it alive.
This form of accommodation would also allow group-based cultural and religious practices to be fitted into existing, majoritarian ways of doing things. These identities and practices would not be regarded as immutable, but neither would there be pressure either to change them (unless a major issue of principle, legality or security was at
stake) or to confine them to a limited community or private space.
Multicultural accommodation works simultaneously on two levels: creating new forms of belonging to citizenship and country, and helping sustain origins and diaspora. The result – without which multiculturalism would not be a form of integration – is the formation of “hyphenated” identities such as Jewish-American or British Muslim (even if the hyphenated nature of the latter is still evolving and contested). These hyphenated identities are in this understanding a legitimate basis for political mobilisation and
lobbying, not attacked as divisive or disloyal.
The groups in Britain for whom questions of integration arise – those formed out of the “new Commonwealth” immigration from the post-1945 generations – are multiple; their different identities combine elements based on origins, colour, culture, ethnicity, and religion. They are not just a plurality but differ in kind. Moreover, they have diverse socio-economic positions and trajectories, and experience both advantage and disadvantage in British society – some of these groups have incomes above the
national average.
The “multi” aspect of multiculturalism must apply to the analysis of racism also. There is not a singular racism but multiple racisms that include colour/phenotype forms but also cultural forms building on “colour”, or on a set of antagonistic or demeaning stereotypes based on alleged or real cultural traits. The most important such form of cultural racism today is anti-Muslim racism, sometimes called Islamophobia.
Equality: of dignity, and of respect
The concept of equality has therefore to be applied to groups and not just individuals (see Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, Harvard University Press, 2005). Different theorists have offered slightly different formulations on this question; Charles Taylor, for example, distinguishes between equal dignity and equal respect (see his essay in Amy Gutman, ed., Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, Princeton University Press, 1994). Equal dignity
applies to all members of a group in a relatively uniform way.
A good example is Martin Luther King Jr’s civil-rights movement. He said black Americans want to make a claim upon the American dream, to achieve American citizenship in the way that the constitution theoretically is supposed to give to everybody. But Taylor also posits the idea of equal respect, which I would argue is the key idea of multiculturalism – or, in Taylor’s formulation, of the politics of “recognition”, which consists of giving group identities a public status.
The American feminist scholar Iris Marion Young has explained why this is necessary: any public space, policy or society is structured around certain kinds of understandings and practices which prioritise some cultural values and behaviours over others; no public space is culturally neutral (see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, 1990).
In so far as subordinate, oppressed or marginal groups claim equality, what they are claiming is that they should not be marginal, subordinate or excluded; that they too – their values, norms, and voice – should be part of the structuring of the public space. Why, they ask, should we have our identities privatised, while the dominant group has its identity universalised in the public space? The issue, then, is about the public/private distinction and what is “normal” in a society, and to lessen any group feeling abnormal or different.
For example, many gay people have – especially since the 1960s – argued that they do not want to be tolerated merely by being told that homosexuality is no longer illegal and acts between consenting adults done in private are fine. They want people to know that they are gay and to accept them as gay; and for public discussion about
gayness to have the same place as discussions about heterosexuality.
The consequence is that when public policy is made – for instance on widows’ benefits or pensions – we should not assume an exclusively heterosexual model of society. This argument for equal respect is central to multiculturalism.
* This article of Tariq Modood initiated a lively controversial debate in Great Britain. Read some of the reactions to this article published by openDemocracy.
This article was originally published on OpenDemocracy in September 2005.
Download the article [pdf 42 kb, 10 p.]
Tariq Modood is professor of sociology, politics and public policy and the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. His latest book: "Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea" (published in 2007).
RESPONSES
Multiculturalism and 7/7: neither problem nor solution
The real challenge is to create a genuinely inclusive and liberal public space, says Paul Kelly. (weiter)
Muslims: made in Europe?
The idea that a Muslim community is a European neo-colonial invention is a myth; rather, the emergence of this community represents a rebuke to European claims to universalism, argue Cemalettin Hasimi & Shehla Khan (weiter)
The “Muslim community”: a European invention
Europeans’ tendency to view immigrants from Algeria and Turkey, Pakistan and Iraq as belonging to a single, homogeneous “Muslim community” reflects an essentialist, neo-colonial view of the “other”, argue Hazem Saghieh & Saleh Bechir (weiter)
Tariq Modood’s multicultural project
The complexity and diversity of British Muslims resists the multicultural model that scholars like Tariq Modood seek to impose on them, write Neville Adams, Stephan Feuchtwang & Kazim Khan. (weiter)