Multiculturalism

Welcome everyone on behalf of The Muslim Debate and MUSLIM Institute to our fifth online debate: “Multiculturalism in the West has reached its limits?” I would also like to formally welcome and thank our distinguished debaters and guests, without whom this timely debate would not have been possible. 

Before I talk about the topic of the debate itself, I would like to explain a bit about how the debate works for those of you who are new to The Muslim Debate.

Just like oxford-style, the debate has an opening, rebuttal and closing sessions where both of our debaters, Professor Arshin Adib-Moghaddam of SOAS and Professor Handel Wright of UBC, will have the opportunity to counter each other’s arguments. Unlike the oxford-style debate however, the audience from around the world will have the opportunity to vote and comment from Day 1 and can change their vote at any time up until the conclusion of the debate on Sunday 14th of May.

Each session is separated by a seven-day interval which gives everyone ample amount of time to read the statements and join in the discussion through their questions and comments. In between opening and rebuttal, Professor Virginie Guiraudon of Sciences Po and Professor Tahir Abbas of RUSI will weigh in through their valuable remarks. Likewise, Professor Natasha Warikoo of Harvard University and Professor Colleen Ward of Victoria University will share their thoughts during the rebuttal session. The debate will then enter into the closing phase and will remain online for another three days, after which the voting will close and the debate will conclude.

The topic of this debate is a very broad and complex one. Therefore I am very delighted that we have an excellent and diverse panel of experts who have sheer experience and expertise in the subject matter of Multiculturalism. The concept and idea of Multiculturalism has been in the spotlight, especially here in the ‘West’, perhaps more so recently than ever. Yet not everyone knows all the intricacies of it, or whether it has a positive or negative impact on the society. Some might say its merely cultural diversity, yet some might refer to how that diversity is managed by the state. It is a reality that often seems to be the subject of debate during political campaigns, whether it be the US presidential elections, Brexit campaign in the UK, or the ongoing presidential elections in France. Any dialogue on matters like poverty, unemployment, racism, xenophobia, refugee crisis, migration and terrorism, touches one way or the other upon the existence of multiple cultural traditions existing within a single society or a country. As opposed to cultural assimilation, multiculturalism provides an alternative of maintaining different identities and values coexisting in the same society. Being a reality, nonetheless, this idea is often subject to debate when it comes to questions like: Is multiculturalism durable? Does multiculturalism promote intolerance? Is there an alternative to it? How does nationalism and multiculturalism relate to one another? And as this debate asks, has multiculturalism reached its limits in the West?

Answers to these questions are surely not that simplistic, as I mentioned earlier, there are many complexities involved when talking about multiculturalism and a multicultural society. This is why I believe it is an extremely important and necessary debate to have, considering the relevance of this topic to the ongoing political and socio-economic environment that we are surrounded by. I am hopeful that this debate and our honourable experts will be able to shed some light on this complex yet important subject matter which will help us understand it a bit more and answer our questions relating to it. Therefore, I urge everyone who is visiting the debate to read through all the statements and weigh in their opinion through votes and comments.

Like it or not, multiculturalism is a reality. There is no national community in the world without the presence and interaction between different “cultures”, invented and continuously engineered as they are. To wish multiculturalism away is comparable to challenging the existence of states, armies or MacDonald’s. There is no such thing as a mono-cultural society, and even the fascists movements of the early to mid, 20th century failed to bring about such dubious homogenisation in Europe and beyond.

In the second place, living out one’s culture without impinging on the freedom of others is a hard won democratic right of progressive nation-states. Of course, I am not in favour of creating parallel societies and minimising a dialectical engagement between communities. My idea of multiculturalism does not correspond to the phobia expressed by Angela Merkel that we should accept living “side by side” without a sense of community. She is right about that and she is certainly not the type of politician who would use a patronising right-wing formula such as Geert Wilders in Belgium, UKIP in Britain and Marine Le Pen in France to gain votes. But the question is what kind of community are we talking about? It is only natural that national leaders, such as Chancellors, Presidents and Prime Ministers tend to plead in favour of nationalised communities. As leaders of the state, this aggregation of “us” into a “nation” allows them to claim and exert sovereignty as our “national” leaders. In this way, the modern nation-state carries an intense nationalist complex – I have called this psycho-nationalism in my new book. Without psycho-nationalism there is no locus of state power, without a nationalised culture, there is less “sovereignty traction”. Hence, states are less capable to control, discipline and mould us into one. In our battle against such ideational “gulagisation”, we emerge as individuals who can live “freer” lives.

To my mind, the nation and the state are merely administrative units. This brings me to my third point: Why does the nation-state have to be a source of a coherent and unitary “identity”? What does being Canadian, German or Iranian really tell us about our existence? Isn’t being homeless, a widower, factory worker or Oligarch more consequential for our day to day affairs and our so called “identity”? This approach in search of “cleanliness” is retroactive and populist and it has been a recipe for disaster in the past and present. It routinely stokes up the evils of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and discrimination against sexual minorities. We shouldn’t forget that the language of cultural homogeneity is too often caught up in a machoistic and patriarchal discourse that marginalises those on the fringes of society even further. Ultimately, in “east” and “west” calls for coherent identities, whether in the name of a national community or a religious one, have too often led to xenophobia, discrimination and oppression.

If we are interested in living a freer life beyond the constant control of the state, “scattered” cultural communities within a functioning administrative unit called the “nation-state” are not only a reality that emerged from the intense cultural intermingling of human beings throughout the centuries of civilizational existence, multiculturalism is a prophylaxis against the politics of fear and ignorance in the name of national myths. The nation is an invention, this much we know. Any pressure to squeeze communities into a mythical whole is likely to produce forms of resistance that are equally violent. Where there is power, there is always going to be resistance. Where there is cultural hierarchisation, there is likely to be counter-cultural defiance. All of this is a part of a healthy exchange in pluralistic, democratic societies. We just have to make sure that the right-wing doesn’t monopolise the argument against pluralism.

Manifold manifestations of culture should be celebrated as the great mosaic of life that contemporary migration patterns have created. Difference should be celebrated and embraced as an opportunity, rather than a threat. It is only within a context where cultures are not superimposed on us that we can retain our individuality as human beings in the face of psycho-nationalist agitation. I vote for tolerance and inclusion, multiple identities, mosaic existences, the freedom of choice and the freedom to be relieved from the corset of identity. To my mind, this is as far as “culture” needs to go.

In the most direct interpretation, the motion “Multiculturalism in the West has reached its limits?” questions whether multiculturalism as guiding principle and/or official policy for addressing sociocultural diversity in Western countries has not come up against times and events which render it a failure- whether because it is now obsolete, ineffective or in fact a contributory factor to or principal reason for “problems” in Western societies. I use the word “problems” here as a comprehensive term that covers everything from minor interpersonal linguistic and cultural misunderstandings to increasing prejudice and xenophobia to actual racist and terrorist attacks. It is these problems, in Western countries that either have official multiculturalism or are guided by it, that apparently make for the argument that multiculturalism has reached its limit. To get right to the heart of the matter and fully recognize the elephant in the room, Islam and Muslims are supposedly the biggest problem. They have become fetishized as the repository of almost all that is wrong with sociocultural difference in Western countries. Muslims and Islam are a compounded problem in that have provoked a backlash that is a noxious combination of xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia (itself a relatively new coinage) that we might call religious xenoracism. Muslims are the unassimilable other, the threat to social cohesion, and Islam in the West a principal reason for the failure of an otherwise quite workable multiculturalism, the reason we are at the limit of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is supposedly not only unable to deal with the complexity of the diversity of contemporary Western society in general and the specific problem of the unassimilable Muslim and Islamophobia in particular but is a big part of the problem. It is seen as having led to an overconfidence in accommodating difference, created ethnoracial silos, promoted fragmentation over unity and minority cultures at the expense of the national culture.

The suggestion that multiculturalism may have reached its limit implies that it was successful at one point. That premise is not one we can take for granted since some who now would support the idea that multiculturalism has reached its limits were in fact part of the argument against its very existence, often in the name of a more homogenous and harmonious society (that never was). Sociocultural difference is an established, irreversible characteristic of Western nation-states and in today’s globalized world the astonishing pace, complexity and degree of diversity is resulting in major cities like London, New York, and Toronto being characterized by what Steven Vertocec has usefully named super-diversity. Nostalgia for a homogenous past and attempts to control let alone reverse the process of diversification (Fortress Europe comes to mind) are in the end simply futile. If we take up multiculturalism as the fact of socioculturally diverse communities and societies (which I prefer to refer to as multiculturality), then far from having reached its limits, multiculturalism/multiculturality is displaying the potential to increase exponentially in pace, type and numbers.

Clearly there is a need to engage sociocultural diversity, whether to conservatively accommodate and manage it to maintain the status quo; to liberally celebrate it as proof of adequate tolerance or at best to critically work with it for representation and social justice ends and multiculturalism in its various political iterations, from conservative through liberal to left liberal to critical/revolutionary offers this range of possibilities. In Canada official multiculturalism policy has shifted its focus over the decades from 1970s ethnicity and celebrating differences, through 1980s equity and managing diversity to 1990s civic multiculturalism and constructive engagement to 2000s emphasis on integration and inclusive citizenship. It is important to note that multiculturalism spans the political spectrum and that even as policy it can and has shifted over time in response to changes in society and pressures from the left and the right because all too often multiculturalism is critiqued, including as having reached its limit, based on the premise that it is fixed and therefore succeeds or fails as is. Multicultural education (albeit dominated by the liberal, celebratory conception) has been the dominant approach through which students in schools and colleges have engaged diversity and tolerance variously in Australia, Canada and the United States. Canada’s very image text of a very diverse, tolerant, relatively harmonious society is inextricably linked with and some would argue produced via multiculturalism.

Communities, institutions and nation-states that develop and/or implement models are in a much better position to engage sociocultural diversity than those that do not see no difference. Multiculturalism is probably the most well-known of such models and while it may once have been hegemonic (as Nathan Glazer declared wearily and warily in 1997 “we are all multiculturalists now”), it certainly is not the only model. The alternatives include anti-racism, cosmopolitanism and interculturalism. Of these it is interculturalism that has been taken up in various forms as the preferred alternative diversity policy, including in Western Europe. The preference for interculturalism is based in part on the argument that it is an improvement on multiculturalism (e.g. its emphasis on dialogue is much vaunted in the European Union’s designation of 2008 as the Year of Intercultural Dialogue). However, with the problems around sociocultural difference much more prominent in the EU than in countries that have adopted official multiculturalism such as Australia and Canada, it is rather difficult to sustain the argument that interculturalism is a more robust discourse and policy and easier to make the equally problematic case that it is interculturalism that has already, prematurely reached its limits.

Even if indeed multiculturalism is presently not succeeding (something I would dispute), rather than see it as having reached its limit, the fact of its pliancy and multiple interpretations should be taken as reason to articulate and implement a more robust and appropriate model. Such a heavily tweaked multiculturalism would, for example, stress a history of immigration in Western countries which had many other ethnic and religious groups considered unassimilable (from white Australia policy to banning of Hutterites from Canada) which are now essential parts of the nation’s make-up and further that the more nuanced current approach is not one of assimilation anyway, but integration, elements that would render the fetishization of Muslims and Islam decidedly problematic, undemocratic and unpatriotic.

Debaters, guests and users’ statements and comments are their independent thoughts, opinions, beliefs, viewpoints, and are not necessarily that of MUSLIM Institute's.