Race Relations in Britain

A Developing Agenda

Tessa Blackstone, Bhikhu Parekh, Peter Sanders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134749102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Bringing together distinguished experts in the field of race relations this book addresses questions which are increasingly relevant in the current socio-political context of Great Britain. The kind of visions of multicultural Britain which are currently being canvassed and the problems which ethnic minorities continue to face are addressed, together with an examination of the new policy initiatives which are needed to tackle these problems. Race Relations in Britain falls into three parts which:
* analyse contemporary trends, articulating a vision of multicultural Britain and exploring important theoretical controversies
* identify the obstacles that stand in the way of a racism-free Britain, looking at current policy in areas such as immigration, employment, education, the criminal justice system as well as the role of the media
* offer a vision of a multi-cultural Britain, advancing new policies based on current research.

1 Integrating minorities

Bhikhu Parekh

A multicultural society, that is, a society which includes several distinct cultural, ethnic and religious communities, needs to find ways of reconciling two equally legitimate and sometimes conflicting demands. Its minority communities generally cherish and wish to preserve and transmit their ways of life. A society, however, cannot last long without some degree of cohesion and a sense of common belonging. It also has its own way of life which it is equally anxious to preserve. This raises the question as to how it should integrate its minorities and organise its collective life so that it satisfies their legitimate aspirations without losing its unity and continuity. In this chapter I do two things. First, I outline and assess the adequacy of the various models of integration canvassed in the literature on the subject, and second, I use my theoretical analysis of these models to elucidate the manner in which Britain has sought to integrate its ethnic minorities.

I

Broadly speaking a political community can integrate its minorities in one of five ways. Although these modes or models overlap, they are distinct enough to be distinguished for analytical purposes.

First, one might argue that in a culturally diverse society the state should be culturally neutral as otherwise it would end up preferring and enforcing one culture or way of life, thereby both treating other cultures unequally and subjecting them to an unacceptable degree of moral coercion. The state should be a purely formal institution pursuing no substantive goals of its own and requiring no more of its citizens than that they accept the established structure of authority and obey the law. Such a state gives its citizens, including the minorities, the maximum possible freedom to live the way they like and also ensures unity and cohesion. The minorities are free to embrace the majority way of life, or to do so only partially, or to evolve a synthetic way of life, or to lead totally isolated and self-contained lives, provided that they discharge their basic legal obligations to the state. This view was first articulated by Hobbes, and for convenience I shall call it a proceduralist view of the state.

Second, it might be argued that no polity can be stable and cohesive unless all its members share a common national culture, including common values, ideals of excellence, moral beliefs, social practices, and so forth. By sharing a common culture, they develop mutual attachments, affections and loyalties, and build up the necessary bonds of solidarity and a common sense of belonging. The state is a custodian of the society's ways of life, and has both a right and a duty to ensure that its cultural minorities assimilate or merge into the prevailing national culture. The choice before the minorities is simple. If they wish to become part of and be treated like the rest of the community, they should think and live like the latter; if instead they insist on retaining their separate cultures, they should not complain if they are treated differently. For convenience I shall call this an assimilationist model of integration. Rousseau, Herder and nationalist writers are its most eloquent spokesmen.

Assimilation can take several forms. One might argue that minorities should adopt the majority way of life and live, think, speak and behave like the rest. One might go further and demand that they should also intermarry with and become socially and biologically assimilated into the majority community. One might go yet further and insist that they should ‘love’ and show unconditional ‘loyalty’ to the community, accept its history as ‘their’ history, ‘identify’ with its people, and so forth. This last form of assimilation, which claims the soul of the minorities and seeks their total identification, goes far beyond the ordinary forms of cultural and even biological assimilation and is best called nationalist assimilation.

Third, one might take a half-way position between proceduralism and assimilationism, and advocate partial assimilation. One might argue that proceduralism is too formal and empty to hold a society together, and that assimilationism is unnecessary, undesirable, or both. All that is necessary for the unity of a polity is that its citizens should share a common political culture, including a common body of political values, practices and institutions, collective self-understanding and a broad view of national identity. Without such a common political culture and the implied uniformity of political beliefs and practices, public debate is impossible, political disagreements cannot be resolved, and collective action is paralysed. Minorities should therefore accept, and become assimilated into, the political culture of the community and, subject to that, remain free to live the way they like. In this view of integration, the private-public distinction plays a crucial role. The unity of the society is sought and located in the public realm, whereas diversity belongs to the private realm which includes not just the family but also neighbourhood and communal associations. It is difficult to think of an appropriate name for this model. In much of the British, American and even French literature, it is called integration and distinguished from assimilation as sketched earlier. However, this is both linguistically arbitrary and obscures the fact that it involves at least partial assimilation and differs from the latter only in degree. It might be better called a bifurcationist or, since it has found most favour among liberals, a liberal mode of integration. In one form or another it finds support in the writings of John Locke, the founding fathers of the American republic, and John Rawls – especially his Political Liberalism. Habermas's ‘constitutional patriotism’ is another modern version of it.

The fourth model of integration shares several features in common with the third, but it is also quite different. According to it the bifurcationist mode of integration has two basic disadvantages. It places the community's political culture beyond negotiation and revision, and expects minorities to become assimilated into it. Since the political culture does not reflect the presence and values of minorities, they would not be able to identify with it and offer it their whole-hearted support. Furthermore, in a society dominated by a specific culture, minority cultures suffer from obvious structural disadvantages and need more than mere tolerance to flourish or even survive in the private realm.

Advocates of the fourth approach therefore argue that, rather than assimilate minorities into the political culture of the community, the latter should be pluralised to acknowledge their presence and to embody their values and aspirations. The prevailing political values, practices, symbols, myths, ceremonies, collective self-understanding and view of national identity should be suitably revised to reflect its multicultural character. ‘We’ cannot obviously integrate ‘them’ so long as ‘we’ remain ‘we’; ‘we’ must be loosened up to create a new common space in which ‘they’ can become part of a newly constituted ‘we’. So far as the private realm is concerned, the state should not follow a policy of cultural indifference or laissez-faire as that would work in favour of the dominant culture. If the otherwise disadvantaged minorities are to survive and flourish, they need public recognition, encouragement and material support not in order to protect them from change but to create conditions in which they enjoy the security, self-confidence and broad equality necessary to make uncoerced choices. For convenience I shall call this a pluralist mode of integration. It is difficult to think of any classical writer who offers a coherent philosophical defence of this view. Among our contemporaries Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka and Rainer Bauböck have proposed various versions of it.¹

Finally, one might argue that individuals are above all cultural beings and embedded in specific communities, the ultimate source of what gives meaning to people's lives. All that deeply matters to them – their customs, practices, values, sense of identity and historical continuity, norms of behaviour, patterns of family life, and so forth – are derived from their cultures. The state has no moral status, and its sole raison d’être is to uphold and nurture its constituent cultural communities. It is not a community of communities, for that implies that it has an independent moral basis and its own distinct goals, but rather a union of communities, a bare framework within which they should be free to pursue their traditional ways of life and engage in necessary social, political and economic interactions.

Although this model of integration resembles the proceduralist view mentioned earlier in viewing the state as a largely formal institution with no substantive purposes of its own, it differs from it in requiring the state to maintain the existing communities. The state is expected not only to refrain from interfering with their internal affairs but also to recognise and institutionalise their autonomy. It should respect their internal structure of government, enforce their diverse customs and practices, fund their educational and cultural institutions, and so on. So far as the unity of the state is concerned, it is grounded in the willing support of the constituent communities for the common framework that both protects their autonomy and regulates their mutual relations. Members of the state owe their primary loyalty to their respective cultural communities and derivatively and secondarily to the state. It is difficult to think of an appropriate name for this model of integration. For convenience I shall call it the millet model of integration because of its obvious historical associations.

Four general points need to be made about the five models of minority integration mentioned above. First, I have sketched only their basic outlines, assumptions and guiding principles, and ignored the diverse forms that each of them can take. As we saw, the assimilationist model can take cultural, biological and nationalist forms, and this is equally true of the others. Second, the five models are neither mutually exclusive, for they overlap in several respects, nor collectively exhaustive for, although they represent major ways of thinking about integration, others are not inconceivable.

Third, the five models are logically distinct in the sense that they conceptualise political unity, diversity, and their relationship in very different ways. The first three privilege unity, and treat diversity as a largely residual, contingent and parasitic category confined to areas in which unity is not a central concern. The fourth model seeks to assign them equal status, while the fifth gives pre-eminence to diversity and assigns unity only an instrumental and derivative value. Again, in the proceduralist model the state transcends society and takes no notice of its cultural composition. In the assimilationist model it is deeply embedded in the culture of the community and acts as its protector. In the bifurcationist model it is partly embedded in society and partly transcends it, actively assimilating the minorities in the political life but otherwise leaving them alone. In the pluralist model the state is dialectically related to society and both shapes and is shaped by the prevailing cultural diversity. In the millet model it is neither embedded in nor transcends its constituent communities, but exists outside of them and lacks the independence required to shape them or to follow substantive purposes of its own.

The five models also entail different conceptions of citizenship. In the proceduralist model citizenship is purely formal in nature and consists of the enjoyment of certain rights and obligations. In the assimilationist model it is grounded in the national culture and requires the citizen to share it as a necessary precondition of full membership of the political community. In the bifurcationist model the citizen is committed to sharing the political culture of the community. In the pluralist model citizenship has a plural cultural basis, and citizens bring their diverse cultures to the public realm and enjoy a culturally mediated membership of the political community. The millet model privileges communal membership and has no, or only a highly attenuated, notion of citizenship.

Finally, the five models of integration are not just logical types but have all been tried out in history in one form or another and simply or in combination with others. We can therefore form some idea of how they are likely to work in practice. The proceduralist model characterised the absolute monarchies and some early medieval kingdoms in Europe. The assimilationist model has dominated France since 1789, and the bifurcationist model is favoured in Britain and the United States, though the latter also has some features of the pluralist model. Pluralism has found favour in India, Canada, Australia and other self-consciously multicultural societies, though India has several features of the millet model as well. Different forms of millet model are to be found in the Ottoman Empire, British administration of many of its colonies, traditional Muslim kingdoms, and post-independence Lebanon.²

II

In the previous section I sketched five different ways of integrating minorities into a political community Our choice between them is based on such things as whether their accounts of the nature and basis of political unity are coherent and realistic, what minority aspirations they regard as legitimate and whether they are able to satisfy these aspirations.

The proceduralist model is logically incoherent, for no political community can be culturally neutral and be based on procedural foundations alone. Every political community has at least two basic features: it has a specific structure of authority, and it makes and enforces collectively binding laws. Neither of these can be morally neutral. The structure of authority refers to the community's mode of governance and can be devised in several different ways. It might be secular, theocratic, or a mixture of the two. If secular, it might be based on universal franchise or on one limited by race, class or gender. The universal franchise might be equal or weighted in favour of the intellectual elite as J. S. Mill had argued. The system of elections might be direct or indirect, and might represent individuals as liberals advocate or corporate groups as Hegel, some pluralists and others have urged. The authority of the state might be absolute or limited by a constitutionally prescribed system of rights. The choice between these and other ways of structuring authority is based on such factors as the society's views on how human beings should be treated, the rights they should enjoy, the nature and limits of political power and the proper functions of the law; in short, on its conception of the good life. Since every structure of authority is thus embedded in and shaped by the wider society's moral beliefs, it is biased towards a specific way of life and cannot be morally neutral.

The laws and the policies of the state cannot be morally neutral either. Should it allow slavery, polygamy, polyandry, incest, public hanging, euthanasia, suicide, capital punishment, abortion, violent sports involving animals, coerced marriages, divorce on demand, unconventional sexual practices, lesbian and homosexual marriages, rights of illegitimate children to inherit ‘parental’ property, inequalities of wealth, acute poverty, racial discrimination, and so on? If it does not legislate on these matters, it indicates that it does not consider them sufficiently important to the moral well-being of the community to require a collective, uniform and compulsory mode of behaviour. If it legislates, it takes a specific stand. In either case it presupposes a specific view of the good life. A morally neutral state, making no moral demands on its citizens and equally hospitable to all cultures, is logically impossible. And since every law coerces those not sharing its underlying values, a morally non-coercive state is a fantasy. Some states can, of course, be morally less partisan and hence less coercive than others, but no state can be wholly free of a moral bias and of the concomitant coercion. Even the most liberal state imposes such values as liberty, free speech and the equality of the sexes and races, and hence coerces those totally opposed to them.

Since the structure and exercise of political authority are informed by a specific conception of the good life, the unity of a political community cannot rest on procedural foundations alone. A political community involves far more than an agreement on procedures, and the latter are never morally neutral either. This means that to ask minorities to accept the prevailing structure of authority is ipso facto to require them to accept the underlying conception of the good life. To suggest otherwise, as the proceduralist does, is to be disingenuous.

III

The assimilationist model suffers from the opposite defects. Assimila-tionism is an incoherent doctr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Integrating minorities
• 2 From legislation to integration: twenty years of the Race Relations Act
• 3 Tackling racial discrimination
• 4 Ethnic diversity and racial disadvantage in employment
• 5 The impact of immigration policy on race relations
• 6 Towards a learning society: can ethnic minorities participate fully?
• 7 The media and race relations
• 8 Race and ethnicity in housing: a diversity of experience
• 9 ‘Race’ and the criminal justice system
• 10 The participation of new minority ethnic groups in British politics
• 11 British race relations in a European context
• 12 Immigration and ethnic relations in Britain and Americal
• 13 Conclusion
• Index