Intercultural Citizenship in the Post-Multicultural Era

Ricard Zapata-Barrero

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526498472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the intercultural policy paradigm emerging within diversity and migration studies. Drawing on empirical studies of cultural diversity and placing a focus on the current crises of identity in Europe, Zapata-Barrero argues for an intercultural model of citizenship that prioritises contact between diverse people. In looking forward to a post-multicultural era, his analysis suggests how we can better manage the challenges presented by our increasingly complex, multifaceted societies. This thoughtful text will appeal to students and scholars across politics, sociology, anthropology and social psychology, as well as policy makers and social entrepreneurs around the world grappling with issues around migration, diversity and citizenship. Ricard Zapata-Barrero is a Full Professor of Political and Social Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra(Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain). He is also Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Immigration at UPF, and Master in Migration Studies. He is member of the Board of Directors for IMISCOE and Chair of the ExternalAffairs Committee. For information about publications, go to his webpage: www.upf.edu/web/ricard-zapata

Part I Post-Multicultural Context and The Need of a Pragmatic Turn in Diversity Policy Debates

1 The policy narrative context of diversity dynamics today

Introduction: Setting the debate on the intercultural citizenship paradigm

Diversity management is lacking reference points after a backlash against multiculturalism (Vertovec and Wessendorf, 2010) and the increasing support for xenophobic political parties, most of which are also Eurosceptic (Chopin, 2015). The financial crisis has also forced many European governments and administrations to cut back on budgets originally destined for immigration policies. Most of them are even claiming they must produce policies at zero cost (Scholten et al., 2016), withdrawing or diverting initial specific policies regarding mainstreaming policies. This, together with the associated increases in competition for resources between host and migrant communities, is reducing solidarity (Kymlicka, 2016a). The new context of superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007) and the fact that multiple identities and transnational practices are becoming the norm are evidence that we are entering a post-ethnic period where factors such as birth-origin and nationality do not necessarily drive diversity policies; other factors such as social class, gender, age, current legal situation and working conditions also come into play. The fact that the securitization framework has penetrated most diversity-management thinking, preventing more open, cosmopolitan and humanistic policies towards newcomers and those who have already been living in reception societies for some time, and the fact that in recent years strong trends have emerged showing that second-generation migrants are embracing radical outlooks, are signs of a very extreme situation for the core project of multicultural Europe (Modood et al., 2006). Brexit and the end of free movement for European Union (EU) workers also poses serious difficulties in maintaining one of the markers of European identity, namely, European citizenship (Zapata-Barrero, 2016a), and it certainly contributes to the need to reframe the European project. In such times of turmoil and in this context of a crisis of ideas, intercultural citizenship may help light the way, enjoying as it does some traction in policy and political spheres, and some support from experts and in academic circles, indispensable conditions for being considered a policy paradigm (Hall, 1993; Hogan and Howlett, 2015).

Seen through a European lens, the current process by which the re-nationalization of policies, xenophobia, racism and intolerance are becoming a new ‘political ideology’ is framing public opinion and political discourses, and legitimizing policies (Triandafyllidou et al., 2011; Zapata-Barrero and Triandafyllidou, 2012). Scholarly work highlights that while this originates in cultural anxiety, it also emerges from approaches to welfare chauvinism, entrenched inequalities and emerging insecurity, all of which are also nurtured by the inconsistencies arising from the management of diversity and complex issues such as access to European territory.

Populism and neo-conservatism are the main forms that this new ideology takes. Most of the public debate around migration and diversity is essentially focused either on the explanatory level, seeking to identify the main factors provoking such an emergence, or on the strategies seeking to invade political power and governments, but much less so on the political and policy instruments we have for preventing and reducing the conditions that make it possible. It is here where the intercultural citizenship paradigm can play a prominent role.

The pressing situation today is clear: the loss of support for multiculturalism has dragged a lack of support for diversity management in the current post-multicultural (post-M) atmosphere. The latest European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) report, for instance, signals a growing anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobia as being among the key trends in 2015 (ECRI, 2016). The recent Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, Copenhagen, Nice, Berlin and Barcelona further add to the Islamophobic sentiment being misused by populist political parties to stir up prejudice and hatred against Muslims in general. Likewise, the decision taken in June 2016 by the UK to leave the European Union (Brexit) is also connected to anti-immigrant sentiments. The supremacists’ attacks in America, Europe and Oceania are also negative waves of this against-diversity ideology. Key questions arise today that cannot be answered with former policy paradigms: Can the multicultural citizenship paradigm counter the extremist and/or the re-nationalist narratives? Can the multicultural citizenship paradigm today be a marker of European identity without creating more political cleavages at the national level?

This scenario illustrates that we cannot understand the emergence of the intercultural citizenship paradigm from a static perspective. It must be seen as being the result of a historical process and a multi-factorial outcome that today reframes the migration-related diversity policy debate. The best way to focus this discussion is in terms of continuities and changes, and to approach it in terms of policy paradigm change and formation (Zapata-Barrero, 2017d).

In this context, intercultural citizenship fundamentally proposes a change of focus in managing diversity: the policy lens moves from a static, centrepoint approach (based on an individual or group agent) to a much more dynamic and network approach, one that results from interpersonal contact and multiple diversity-based relations. Interculturalists agree on the backlash of multiculturalism literature (Vertovec and Wessendorf, 2010), which has been charged with causing self-segregation and with engendering more inequality and separation among people of different cultures. This ‘multicultural question’, however, is not new. From the beginning, the link between multiculturalism and equality has been disputed, in terms of the social consequences of policies recognizing cultural differences. The most seminal normative argumentation still remains Barry’s (2001) egalitarian criticism of the politics of multiculturalism. We can also quote Hall (2000: 235), who aptly summarizes:

How then can the particular and the universal, the claims of both difference and equality, be recognised? This is the dilemma, the conundrum – the multicultural question – at the heart of the multicultural’s transruptive and reconfigurative impact.

The normative discussion of the multicultural literature always attempts to rectify the consequences of increasing marginalization that emerge from social and political structures. It focuses on the principle of equality, understood as redistribution of wealth and recognition of cultural rights (Frazer and Honneth, 2003). Surely, within this criticism of social egalitarianism, the Cantle report (2001) stands as one of the great efforts in dealing with conflictive empirical evidence, at a time when the UK suggested that it was the lack of social cohesion that led to northern city tensions in 2001, paving the way for less multicultural policies, while increasing uneasiness regarding the supposed segregation of minority communities.

As an approach to diversity management, intercultural citizenship also seeks to break the congealed view of identity and belonging. It endorses this detachment from any attempt to align culture with genetics, as though it were hereditary like skin colour (Bloomfield and Bianchini, 2001: 104). We can also include here Phillips’ (2007) Multiculturalism without Culture argument, in which she claims that it is time to elaborate a version of multiculturalism that dispenses with reified notions of culture, in favour of a version that engages more ruthlessly with cultural stereotypes.

Individual preferences and practices, rather than national origin adscriptions, prevail as a policy framework. Let me give an example: to be of Moroccan origin does not entail being Muslim and following Islamic beliefs. It would be the same if I refused to be ascribed as Christian in Morocco, but was nonetheless subjected to certain multicultural policies because of this institutional pre-categorization. In a nutshell, what interculturalists claim is that we must let people decide their cultural practices, their religions and their languages, independent of the national circumstances into which they were born. Interculturalism is about first asking how people recognize their identities, and it then respects their self-identification. This also includes a respect for the diversity of identities within the same national-cultural category. I am thinking, for instance, that even if Morocco does not officially recognize cultural diversity among their own nationals (for instance, Amazigh or Berber culture), multiculturalism contributes to this homogenization of Moroccan culture by being too nationality-dependent in ascribing the cultural identities of people of Moroccan origin.

The main purpose of this first chapter is to place intercultural citizenship within this diversity debate. I will follow three main lines of argumentation. First, I will review the continuities and changes of the multicultural narrative. This will allow me, second, to place the debate within the present-day process of a post-M period. The role played by the emerging national civic citizenship paradigm (a renovated version of assimilation), prioritizing duties before rights, is also considered crucial to better contextualize intercultural citizenship. Third, and as a consequence, I will try to elucidate what the main policy implications are, namely that intercultural citizenship notifies a pragmatic turn in diversity debates.

1. Continuities and changes in the post-M era: revisiting boundless multiculturalism

The multicultural citizenship paradigm has dominated recent decades, holding a monopoly over the narrative on how to reconcile Unity and Diversity, and essentially following the equality and human rights principles on diversity management, with a normative conception of justice in the background. We know that there are different perspectives of how each scholar focuses on diversity, equality and human rights interface (Crowder, 2013; Laden and Owen, 2007; Mansouri and Ebanda de B’beri, 2014; Triandafyllidou et al., 2011; Wise and Velayutham, 2009). To summarize multicultural citizenship’s nuclear core, its main project is the inclusion of immigrants in the mainstream by respecting their differences and recognizing their distinctive cultural practices, religions and languages. Economic distribution and political participation are also two of the main building blocks (Kymlicka, 2010). Recently some scholars have focused on the multicultural citizenship paradigm in terms of indicators rather than principles (Banting and Kymlicka, 2013; Bloemraad and Wright, 2014; Levy, 2000; 125–60; Murphy, 2012; and even Vertovec, 2010), providing additional specific evidence-based structural and legal arrangements to ensure the non-alienation of specific groups. In such empirical studies multiculturalism has deployed most of its tools for the protection of rights, for the containment of exceptional cases within the mainstream public policy system, and legitimating specific policies basically in terms of funding, recognition and affirmative action. And a certain group-based approach has been dominant in the application of the principles, without incorporating a more critical view of what kind of cultures deserve recognition and under what terms.

Sharing this evidence-based approach, and fully aware that times have changed, Kymlicka highlights some contextual factors that today challenge the multicultural citizenship paradigm. He illustrates, for instance, that:

existing theories of liberal multiculturalism presuppose, implicitly or explicitly, that state-minority relations are ‘desecuritized’ – that is, the governance of state-minority relations is seen as an issue of social policy to be addressed through the normal democratic process of claims-making, consultation, and debate, not as an issue of state security that trumps normal democratic processes. (2015: 241)

He also signals that some of the conditions of multiculturalism are eroding:

Liberal multiculturalism, I would argue, was theorized for situations in which immigrants were seen as legally authorized, permanently settled, and presumptively loyal. In an age of securitization and super-diversity, these assumptions are put into question. Early theories of multiculturalism now seem at best incomplete, and at worst out-dated, resting on assumptions and preconditions that may no longer apply. (2015: 244)

As Kymlicka (2010) foresaw, the new historical phase that we are presently in is characterized by the fact that most of the multicultural criticism comes not from a far-right, anti-immigrant and nationalist discourse, but from inside multiculturalism. I consider myself within this trend. What Kymlicka was claiming is the need to reframe multiculturalism within a new context, something we can label, for want of a better term, as the ‘post-M era’. It is within this new phase that I would like to place the current emergence of the intercultural citizenship paradigm.

I am aware that the term ‘post-M’ could contribute to confusion rather than clarification if conceptually it is not well defined (Bradley, 2013; Gozdecka et al., 2014; Ley, 2005). Primarily it involves a need to merge the Unity/Diversity dimensions that have featured throughout the diversity policy debates of recent decades, incorporating the contextual factors framing the new times of turmoil that were described herein at the outset. This basically means that today, where a plurality of identities and transnational minds has become the norm, where diversity is seeking to enter mainstream policies, to argue about how to deal with diversity-related socio-economic and power relations in terms of we-unity and them-diversity is to condemn the new reality to distortion, fuelling the arguments of its detractors. It also implies that we are in a process of policy paradigm change, where most of the main pillars of the multicultural citizenship paradigm remain, but with a rising awareness that the acceptance of differences following the equality principle cannot be defended without requiring a justification. And legitimate proof cannot come from liberal and democratic principles (the initial project of multicultural citizenship) alone, but need to be formulated essentially in terms of a new common public culture, a culture of diversity, as I will defend through these pages.

Also belonging to this trend is the growing conviction that in settings of complex diversity, tolerance needs to be limited (Dobbernack and Modood, 2013; Zapata-Barrero and Triandafyllidou, 2012). This debate certainly comes in a context where the multicultural citizenship paradigm is at one of its lowest moments (Lewis, 2014), under suspicion of having promoted segregation rather than union, of giving rise to ethnic conflicts rather than a common culture, of struggling to offer grounds for community cohesion and social capital (Cantle, 2008), and even of legitimating affirmative actions. Today, there is a growing awareness that multicultural policies have fuelled far-right xenophobic political parties. In Germany in October 2010 and in the UK in February 2011, political leaders also promoted this argument of state multicultural failure, a backlash against – or even the ‘death’ of – the multicultural paradigm, provoking deep public discussion across Europe (Daily Mail Reporter, 2011).

This growing concern in Europe over the rise of populist anti-immigrant parties and anti-Islamification narratives cannot be disconnected from the disenchantment with multiculturalism. What is new today is the electoral support that some of these political parties have gained in some countries, significantly providing real alternatives for power, and provoking a contagion effect to mainstream political parties. The recent general elections in most of the European countries also demonstrated that these parties, after an initial period of conquest, seem to have established themselves in the mainstream political system, and have even reached political power. This has even meant that governments have changed their courses of action, incorporating anti-immigration measures into their strategies for managing diversity (Yılmaz, 2012), a situation that has been aggravated by contradictions within the immigration politics of the liberal states forced by these contextual restraints (Hampshire, 2013). What is specific to the debate on growing radicalism against diversity is that it uses most of the basic normative premises that legitimate the multicultural citizenship paradigm, and in this sense, it is a scholarly forum that must be taken seriously by strong defenders of liberal democratic principles and human rights. It would be lacking in historical insight and academically irresponsible to misinterpret the elite discourses that have framed most of the public debate in Europe in recent years. The ‘muscular’ defence of liberal democratic principles, to borrow the words of former British Prime Minister Cameron, has provoked an array of criticisms; however, there is a clear purpose for addressing the multicultural question in terms of limits:

Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values. (Cameron, 5 February 2011)

This means that immigrants must, at minimum, acquire the language of the host country, and learn about its history, norms and institutions. And it entails the introduction of written citizenship tests and loyalty oaths. Implicitly if not explicitly, civic integration is presented as the only tool to limit what we may call a boundless multiculturalism.

The backlash against multiculturalism does not express a problem with culture, but rather with its excess, including in its most extreme form the recognition of illiberal values and a lack of human rights’ protection. For instance, Banting and Kymlicka (2006: 54) already warned that ‘it is very difficult to get public support for multicultural policies if the groups that are the main beneficiaries of these policies are perceived to be carriers of illiberal cultural practices’. Of course, this zero-sum way of seeing multiculturalism and its limits, as it was first articulated by, among others, Joppke (2004, 2008), has to be relativized. The new context is such that, as Vertovec (2010: 92) has notably stressed, ‘No politician wants to be associated with the M-word’. To be post-M then does not mean being anti-M, but rather incorporating within the multicultural project the awareness that not everything coming from other cultures can be accepted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction: Citizenship and diversity nexus revisted – The intercultural citizenship focus
• Part I Post-Multicultural Context and The Need of a Pragmatic Turn in Diversity Policy Debates
• 1 The policy narrative context of diversity dynamics today
• 2 Avenues of origin of intercultural citizenship: The European local turn in diversity policies
• 3 Intercultural turn in Europe: In a diverse Europe, what does ‘Europeanness’ mean today?
• 4 The business card of intercultural citizenship: Distinctive features
• Part II Foundations of Intercultural Citizenship
• 5 Conceptualizing intercultural citizenship’s diversity-linkage theory
• 6 Normative policy drivers of intercultural citizenship: a comprehensive view
• 7 Republicanism, public space and intercultural citizenship
• 8 The social benefits of intercultural citizenship: Diversity as a public good
• Concluding roadmap: Summarizing what the reader has found in this book
• References
• Index