Thinking About the Politics of Multiculturalism
Citizenship and Multiculturalism in Western Liberal Democracies. David Edward Tabachnick and Leah Bradshaw, eds., Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.
Multiculturalism is among the ambivalences of our time. The word refers to the fact of ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity in political communities. In this sense, it is a sociological category. What types of diversity are embraced in this factual account is debatable. Shall we include difference types of sexual minorities in the multicultural list? If so, why? In what respect(s) do they share characteristics with the others? We know the list is not open-ended because multiculturalism does not embrace those with particular soft drink preferences. Some diversities are consumer preferences; others rise to multicultural status. So who is among the multicultural and who is not?
Second, multiculturalism is a normative idea which stands for the view that political communities must somehow acknowledge and embrace multicultural diversity, that assimilation is harmful or in some other way wrong. Third, and closely following the normative account, multiculturalism refers to policies and official statements defining its legal and constitutional status. The United states is multicultural in the first sense, not in the third; and the degree to which Americans endorse multicultural diversity is a matter of some controversy. Canada, on the contrary, ticks all three boxes.
Almost every country now participates in some degree in the multicultural reality. Globalization implies not just the movement of capital and information but also labour, and at any moment tens of millions of people in the world are on the move. The ethnically homogeneous nation-state is a complete chimera. Countries that aspire to a strong sense of unity must 1) fabricate a myth of homogeneity and use it to belittle and badger and ultimately expel those from outside the ethnos; 2) build walls to keep out the aliens; or 3) fashion a civic national identity that commands the assent of all citizens regardless of particular background. Historically, the United States pursued the latter with some success, notwithstanding the second-class status accorded African Americans. Contemporary “Build-the-Wall” rumblings suggest increasing support for a more fulsome ethnic nationalist resurgence, in the US and elsewhere. The strength of these rumblings is hard to gauge.
Canada, living next door to the United States and sharing many of its ideals, has made the case for a civic nationalism harder to make. What would a rallying cry sound like – “Canada is great because it is almost alike the USA!”? In addition, Canada was internally divided from the start. French-speaking Catholics in Canada East—formerly called Lower Canada, and before that New France – insisted on retaining their particular cultural and religious distinctness and would not join the Canadian Confederation project without constitutional guarantees of this particularity. Add to this that the Canadian project involved a massive immigration initiative to populate and develop the western portion of the continent north of the 49th Parallel. The first wave came from the British Isles and Europe. Subsequent waves came from practically everywhere. Toronto, once a British bastion, is now perhaps the most multicultural city on the planet; hundreds of languages are spoken in a diverse metropolitan cacophony that actually seems to work.
Altogether, the conditions for contemporary multiculturalism were propitious. Canadians now say with varying degrees of enthusiasm that multiculturalism is the Canadian identity. Certainly, it is more than a socio-demographic reality: it is official policy first enunciated in the House of Commons in 1971, later enshrined in law, and then entrenched in s. 27 of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In a way, multiculturalism is the Canadian political equivalent of the purse made from the sow’s ear. Lacking other narratives to knit together a diverse collection of particular ethno-religious-linguistic identities, the Canadians have made a virtue of necessity, as if to say: “We are a post-national political community of communities, sharing little in common but more or less getting along. Let’s celebrate our diversity – I guess.”
The practical political roots of multiculturalism policy are traceable to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, father of the current prime minister, whose adult life was dedicated to the containment of what he thought was a retrograde, despotic Quebec nationalism. Quebec nationalists moved from an insular Catholic phase to an aggressive, secular, socialistic one in the 1960s and when separatist sentiment was beginning to capture the imagination of younger Quebeckers. Trudeau, by now a philosophical liberal, believed that only individuals were real; collectivities were entirely derivative and usually the enemies of individual personhood and freedom. Yet francophone Quebeckers had a heritage going back centuries and were the majority in the province of Quebec. They had a good case for distinctness.
Trudeau’s strategy was to diminish the force of the nationalist argument. He would make Canada officially bilingual and therefore francophone Quebeckers could get good government jobs outside of Quebec or at least with the federal government. He encouraged youngsters to travel across the country. And he declared Canada multicultural, in so doing saying to Quebec that Canada is wrongly framed as a relationship between the French and the English, between Quebec and the Rest of Canada. Rather, Canada was home to many cultures, Quebec’s among them. He hoped multiculturalism would undermine a key premise in the Quebec nationalist argument – that Quebec was special in its cultural distinctness.[1]
Trudeau’s argument succeeded – in the Rest of Canada, but not in Quebec. English-speaking Canadians go about their business and express varying degrees of support for multiculturalism most of the time not quite knowing what the policy means or entails, but recognizing all the same that Canada is home to a host of diverse peoples.
How is multiculturalism faring in the Western liberal democracies? This is the question posed in a set of recent essays edited by David Tabachnick and Leah Bradshaw, two Canadians with a clear-eyed appreciation of multiculturalism’s merits and problems. Citizenship and Multiculturalism in Western Liberal Democracies contains ten essays, a few engaging the philosophical themes of cultural diversity and others the public policy of multicultural citizenship. There are no strident critiques of multiculturalism here; most essays are committed to the ideal while some raise difficult, sober questions about a worthy project. Despite some missteps in editing, most of the essays are brisk, readable, and informative.
Canada is the poster child of multiculturalism – the place where it works. Even so, there are some bumps. The first point is that multiculturalism enjoys uneven support in Canada. Different groups weight their place in the multicultural constellation differently. Liberal nationalists seek to diminish the status of the province of Quebec as a sub-state nation by classifying the French-speaking population of Canada as a multicultural group. Quebec nationalists of all shades object strongly; such language actually stokes separatist flames in some quarters. Quebec nationalists insist that Quebec is a nation present at the creation of the country and thus not reducible to ethno-linguistic groups like Pakistani-Canadians or Filipino-Canadians. They have substantial historical and constitutional reasons for saying so.[2]
Quebec nationalists have other reasons to question multiculturalism. Quebec nationalism has in recent decades moved haltingly in the direction of a civic-based national identity focusing on the French language as a key marker of Quebec identity. This civic identity is replacing the older ethnic nationalism stressing Catholic faith and descent from les habitants. It has become a much more secular society. It has increasingly depended on large numbers of immigrants to sustain its population as its birth rate began to plummet in the 1960s. But immigration poses challenges to sub-state nations, and this is as true for other cultural entities as it is for Quebec.[3] Immigrants settling in a part of a country in which the minority language is dominant usually want to learn the dominant language of the country rather than the minority language of the sub-state nation. Facility in the majority language gives them more options for education and work, and opportunity and prosperity is why they migrate in the first instance. For its part, the region needs the immigrants but cannot afford to let them learn the country’s dominant language; otherwise the immigrants dissolve the regional culture over time or just leave for better prospects elsewhere, thereby allowing the region’s population decline to continue.
Quebec governments have insisted upon policies requiring immigrants to know French. And it makes its job easier by selecting immigrants disproportionately from French-speaking countries. As a result, Quebec now is home to large numbers of visible-minorities, including those of the Muslim faith. This has not been easy for many Quebeckers to accept. Older ideas of ethnic identity have reared up. Complicating matters further is the appearance of the Quebecois variant of France’s principle of laicïté or secularism.[4] For over ten years Quebec politicians have agonized over the adoption of a charter of secular values that would make illegal the wearing of symbols of one’s faith while obtaining public services or delivering them. Different versions of such a charter attempt to be even-handed in the prohibition of symbols but most observers are convinced that the real targets of such initiatives are Muslim immigrants who are francophones still resistant to assimilation to the culture and to liberal ideas like sexual equality.
Now, some practical thinking on this would probably yield a policy result averse to the thrust of these charters. If the goal is assimilation of an ethno-religious minority into the mainstream, then it would seem important to increase the ability of such immigrants to get out into the public world of commerce and work as much as possible, where they would be exposed to new ideas and social pressures to conform. If so, the policy should be to allow women to wear their niqabs in public. (Few Muslim women wear the niqab; the issue is primarily symbolic). The prohibition of the public wearing of the niqab keeps observant Muslim women at home, away from the seductions of bourgeois life, and stokes resentment among the minority community. The fact that Quebec’s policy leanings are in the prohibition direction suggests some degree of anti-Muslim animus, rather than clever political thinking, among Quebec nationalists and those who live outside the Montreal urban area.
Putative anti-Muslim attitudes in Quebec aside, the larger political question is what multiculturalism means for the dominant culture in liberal democracies. If Quebec as a sub-state national community has rightful claims for the protection of its particularity in Canada, do minorities in Quebec have rightful claims against the Quebec national majority culture? More broadly, if a liberal democracy has a dominant culture, does that culture have a right to protect itself against the potentially corrosive effects of immigration and multicultural diversity? Quebec is a minority in Canada and demands recognition as a frail minority. But as the dominant culture in the province of Quebec, nationalists feel threatened by invasive immigrants, while the immigrants chafe at majoritarian tyranny. Federalism recapitulates majoritarian problems; it does not solve them. Several essays engage this. In his analysis of multicultural versus “inter-cultural” accommodation theory, Tariq Modood notes that liberal democracies establish themselves in political communities with dominant cultures and that these are not to be dissolved in order to accommodate multicultural concerns. But majority cultures are not entitled to crush minority cultures: “The fact that a polity cannot be culturally contentless or neutral between all cultures does not mean that the concept of equality becomes secondary or majority precedence.” (95-96) Majority dominance does not need extra legal protection in addition to its very dominance. It needs merely to recognize that culture is properly open to influence: “A living national identity is a work in progress, a conversation between where we are coming from and where we are going. The past is central to the sense of nationhood today, we have to be able to see it as our past, but equally we must appreciate the country we are becoming.” (99)[5]
Other contributors see nothing in national majority culture to be defended. Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos disputes the commonly held notion that national cohesion is necessary for liberal democratic governance and that this is provided by affective attachments at the national level. He cites in this regard Charles Taylor’s view that some sort of affective sense creates the necessary belonging in diverse polities and that a state lacking such emotional attractions is but a “service station”. Triadafilopolous disagrees, arguing that emotional attachments are for private objects, and that the state as service station is itself a powerful source of cohesion. He prefers to dispense with any trace of cultural attachment at the national level: he would remove oaths of citizenship, dispense with pledges of allegiance to national values, and generally reduce citizenship ceremonies to administrative exercises. For him, an emotionally empty national public square is an entirely appropriate component of multicultural citizenship. For a multicultural polity far away from the world’s military hot spots, this is perhaps viable. Instrumental attachments to the regime are fine when no one has to defend it. Other polities located in tougher neighbourhoods may not be able to afford such a cavalier view of citizenship, and of multiculturalism generally.
Leah Bradshaw also sees something concerning in Triadafilopoulos’s positon and in multiculturalism policy. Her essay draws attention to one of the ideals of citizenship, namely that it involves a common deliberation on the fate of the polity. Noting that the Greeks presumed an ethnic homogeneity as a foundation for citizenship, she suggests that “active citizenship is harder in a pluralistic context.” (30) There may be lots of talking among citizens in liberal democracies, but it lacks a shared understanding of citizenship or the polity. Diversity erodes the commonality on which deliberation depends, she argues. While Ed Andrew is broadly supportive of Canadian multiculturalism, he notes that new immigrants to the country are cool to claims for recognition by Quebec and First Nations, which means lack of agreement even on the diversities to be publicly recognized. He also cites empirical evidence to the effect that regimes with open borders are less hospitable to the redistribution of incomes and other policies of the welfare state. The broader point here is that a rhetorical emphasis on what separates us provides infertile grounds for policies requiring people to share their resources with others who, they are told, are very different from them.
A final theme threading through this volume concerns the post-9/11 security environment and the status of Muslims. In Europe and elsewhere, this is the flashpoint for multiculturalism. Muslims are often portrayed as an unassimilable other, a basically illiberal group inclined against the liberal countries to which they immigrate. Yasmeen Abu-Laban refers to Muslims from the Arab Middle East the “global Other.” Interestingly, Canadian electoral politics betrays the ambivalence of Canadian attitudes regarding Canada’s Muslim population. On the one hand, the federal Conservatives since 2006 found multicultural immigrant communities relatively responsive to electoral prospecting, since many such communities are socially conservative and business-oriented. But the Tories considered the Muslim community as an exception. In the 2015 federal election campaign Prime Minister Harper insisted that citizenship ceremonies should require women to remove their niqabs and that “barbaric practices” traceable to immigrants were contrary to Canadian values. The Conservative hoped to exploit anti-Muslim sentiment in Quebec. Harper also supported security vetting of Syrian refugee applicants before entry. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, with a sunny tone and slightly different emphases, discredited Harper’s apparent meanness.[6]
As the editors of this volume write in their introduction, these are confusing times for liberal democracies. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in many ways is the man for these times. For him, multiculturalism is basically harmony and good will. He says nothing deep and refers only to the vaguest and most saccharine of principles. He dons the garb of different ethnic communities with alacrity and proclaims his affection for different traditions as easily as he invokes progressive pieties regarding sexual identity and same-sex marriage, even though the latter are inconsistent with the moral principles of the former. For the man who wears so many ideas so lightly, multiculturalism can be nothing other than a generous embrace of others. There is much in this volume to affirm Trudeau in his sunny views. But, fortunately, several essays draw our attention to deeper issues and unresolved problems.
Notes
[1] The elder Trudeau pushed through official bilingualism, but this was not sop to Quebec; it actually strengthened the hand of the English inside Quebec and francophones in the rest of Canada. In any case, Trudeau’s bilingualism in the context of official multiculturalism was based on the flawed idea that language has nothing to with culture.
[2] By the same token, general conceptions of multiculturalism embrace indigenous peoples as markers of diversity within a liberal democratic policy, but in Canada, Aboriginal Peoples have historic and constitutional claims that extend far beyond whatever political status is afforded multicultural groups. Significantly, the collection of essays under review contains no significant analysis of indigenous peoples and how their circumstances connect to broader discussions of multiculturalism.
[3] See the essay by Sanjoy Jeram on Spain’s Basque country in the collection under review.
[4] Ronald Beiner does not address Quebec’s case in his essay but he does argue for secularism as a common civic good, a position he asserts with some passion given his own evident secularist sympathies.
[5] In his adaptation of Aristotelian ideas to contemporary circumstances, Lee Trepanier likewise thinks that the diversities incubated in “households” can mesh with political friendship at the civic level.
[6] Another feature of multicultural politics that escapes the attention of the contributors to this volume is what we might call diaspora politics, the influence multicultural immigrant communities have on electioneering and foreign policy priorities. One recent example has to do with federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s apparent associations with the Indian Sikh separatist community. Even Prime Minister Trudeau has not avoided this: functionaries arranged for a terrorist sympathizer to attend a party the Canadian government held in India in early 2018, much to the prime minister’s embarrassment.
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