The Multicultural Riddle

Rethinking National, Ethnic and Religious Identities

Gerd Baumann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135961886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Multicultural Riddle is a comprehensive exploration of all the issues that shape our search for a multicultural society. The book examines how we can establish a state of justice and equality between and among three groups: those who believe in a unified national culture, those who trace their culture to their ethnic identity, and those who view their religion as their culture. To solve the multicultural riddle, one must rethink national identity, ethnicity and the role of religion in the modern world.

1
“I Have a Dream”— but Who Is It For?

Civil Rights, Human Rights, or Community Rights?

So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed— we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal…. I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by content of their character. I have a dream today!… I have a dream…that one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today! (King [1963] 1968, 16–17)

MARTIN LUTHER KING’S vision of a future without ethnic or cultural discrimination is rightly regarded as programmatic for the past thirty years and the next fifty. Its sentiments have been echoed in dozens of struggles across the globe to obtain equality for all, regardless of ethnic, cultural, or religious differences. Whether this meant equality in treatment, rights, recognition, life chances, or success was a moot question then. Yet in hindsight, King rallied the troops, but they did not follow his strategy. The leader of the Civil Rights Movement wanted exactly that: equal rights based on civil rights, that is, based on the premise of equal and individual citizenship. In some ways, this line of argument had been overtaken even as it was being cast into its visionary form. The struggle against ethnic or cultural discrimination took on an entirely different logic within a few years of King’s murder: The Civil Rights Movement lost its combative edge to the Black Consciousness Movement, and this and its many successors put forth a different argument altogether—discrimination, and for that matter emancipation, was not a question of individual civil rights, but of collective rights, that is, rights assigned to groups, be they real or imagined. There were two transformations in this process.

The first transformation was to translate present-day civil rights, that is, the rights of citizens regardless of color, religion, or parents’ culture, into ethnic rights.¹ The most outspoken of these ethnic translations was the Black Power Movement, concerned not with the rights of Americans as such, but with the rights of African Americans as a community. This community had to be styled into a community of culture, as well as color, but the act of restyling failed on two counts: On the inside, there were too many people who refused to develop a specifically “black” consciousness, rather than an American one or a Christian one. From the outside, the nation as a whole was slow in coming to terms with community, as opposed to individual, rights.

The next transformation was to translate ethnic community rights into religious community rights, and this translation drew on very different symbolic resources. Its protagonists revived the memory of Noble Drew Ali in the 1910s and Elijah Muhammad in the 1930s, two of the founders of a new African American Islam in the United States. With the slow progress of both civil and ethnic rights, religious community rights took on a new significance for two reasons—again, one external and one internal. Externally, the political elites of the United States could not be seen to condone inequality on the basis of religion. Internally, religion could be advertised, not only as a reason to get collective rights but also as a means to deserve them: “In reflection on the struggle of African Americans against racism,…[Islam serves as a new] foundation that reforms the character of the individual toward traits necessary for success…. There is a [new] focus on establishing belief and the principles which will lay the foundation for education and self-sufficiency” (McCloud 1995, 88–89). From Malcolm X in the 1960s to Louis Farrakhan in the 1990s, the most audible rallying cries were thus not addressed to American citizens as such or to an ethnic group as such. Rather, they were addressed to an emergent new “nation,” the Nation of Islam, which was to lead African Americans out of the false “American” nation of white Christian oppressors.

Evidently, these three approaches do not mark three separate periods in history. The Civil Rights Movement has not suddenly stopped: Witness the campaigns for ethnic voter registration and the politics of Jesse Jackson and other Democrats. There are plenty of remnants both of the civil rights approach and of the ethnic rights approach. No one can know about their relative success in the future. What matters, however, is this: There are three kinds of rights that multiculturalists can fight for, but they are not the same kinds of rights.

The differences between them are crucial, and they lie at the heart of the multicultural riddle almost everywhere. Discrimination, as well as forced or expected assimilation, can be fought on three platforms, but each platform defines different allies and adversaries, as well as different insiders and outsiders. Discrimination can be fought on the civil rights platform because it means inequality among citizens. Alternatively, it can be fought because, and insofar as, it means inequality among ethnic groups or among religious groups. Since these groups of cocitizens, coethnics, and coreligionists have different boundaries, and since they use different arguments to fight inequality, they seek different kinds of equality. Civil rights movements exclude foreigners, ethnic rights movements exclude so-called non- or half-ethnics, and religious rights movements exclude nonbelievers.

The differences between these kinds of rights would not be so worrisome if there were some ultimate kind of right to which proponents of all three could appeal. Such a superlogic of rights does indeed seem to exist, and it is known as human rights. Let us see, therefore, whether the ideology of human rights can serve to unite the proponents of civil, ethnic, and religious rights.

To call human rights an ideology, rather than a logic, may sound cynical at first sight. Ideology, after all, is the word for a kind of self-interested and wishful (non)thinking. But there are good reasons for this, both cultural-historical and present-day legal. To show their cultural-historical specificity, one may think of the human rights debates in the United Nations. Whenever democratic states chastise police states for their violations of human rights, the answer rings loud and clear: “Human rights talk is Western cultural imperialism! It is foreign interference in another state’s internal affairs.” Admittedly, this kind of argument usually comes from privileged fat-cat diplomats, not from the victims of human rights violations. The victims, be they oppressed minorities or political prisoners, child laborers or women not treated as the equals of men, would probably want their human rights to be universally valid. Yet state elites can reject them whenever it suits them, and they do so by pointing to their cultural-historical specificity.

A more credible critique of the human rights concept can be advanced from within the Western framework itself, and it shows that human rights are neither universal, nor even rights. To dig up their cultural-historical roots, one may best consult the great Thomas Paine, the first truly international radical, who coinspired the American Constitution, the French Revolution, and other democratic movements right across the West. In his famous treatise, The Rights of Man (1791), Tom Paine argued in a deliberately multicultural way: “Every history of the creation, and every traditionary account, whether from the lettered or the unlettered world, however they may vary in their opinion or belief of certain particulars, all agree in establishing one point: THE UNITY OF MAN; by which I mean that, all men are born equal, and with equal natural right” (Conway 1967, 304; capitals in original; italics mine). This is a fine thing to believe, but all the evidence we have goes against it: From the book of Genesis to the creation myths of thousands of “unlettered,” that is, oral, cultures, we see creation imagined as a hierarchical process, be it between the genders or between ethnic groups, between believers and pagans or between nobles and commoners. Paine himself knew this perfectly well, and to get out of the fix, he had to invent a new philosophy of creation that even denied the relevance of having sex.² Given such difficulties in arguing, or even willing, human rights, one must admire the wisdom of the American Constitution, echoed in the speech of King, which simply calls equality a “self-evident truth.” But what is self-evident in one culture may look very far-fetched in another, and while the idea of human rights may be a wonderfully fine ideology, it is an ideology none the less.

Apart from the historical and cultural reasons for calling it so, there are very hard legal reasons too. The best examination of these reasons comes from Marie-Benedicte Dembour, an anthropologist as well as a lecturer in international law. Dembour (1996) indeed uses the word “ideology” herself; as a lawyer she must admit that “human rights are first and foremost political aspirations…. [T]he effectiveness of human rights at an individual level depends on the person belonging to the “right” national state, [and even then] their practice excludes whole classes of people” (Dembour 1996, 18–19). We end up with the same sad conclusion that we faced in United Nations diplomacy, only this time on better authority: Human rights can only be enjoyed within the boundaries set by nation-states, and nation-states are even worse at protecting human rights than they are at guaranteeing civil rights. The record is bad.

Dembour gives two very poignant examples of people excluded from human rights by national laws: It is left up to every nation-state to interpret whether a migrant is classified as an “economic migrant” (usually thrown out) or a “political refugee” (sometimes let in). It is also left up to every nation-state to restrict the rules under which a recognized political refugee is granted the “universal human right” of political asylum. But more than that, matters are just as bad for those who want to, or can, stay at home. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is just that: a declaration of fine intentions, but certainly “not binding in law” (Donnelly 1989, 14; Dembour 1996, 28). The only human rights treaty that is indeed binding in law, the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), again proves the old adage of the law as an ass: The ultimate legal authorities often “disagree whether facts submitted to them [may or may not] constitute violations of human rights guaranteed by the European Convention” (Dembour 1996, 36n. 15).

Neither Dembour nor I, nor any of the commentators I know, disagree with the moral value of “thinking” human rights. Dembour makes a passionate plea to cast away our ambivalence toward the idea, and Donnelly, who calls all human rights claims “essentially extralegal” (1989, 14) even tried out a Thomas Paine-like construction of “human dignity” to find some universal, culturally neutral, common ground (Donnelly 1982). But wish as we may, and dream as we must, the superlogic of human rights remains an ideology in every way. Historically and culturally, it rests on mythical thinking, however well intentioned; legally, it remains subject to the powers of nation-state elites, however well intentioned or selfish. What human rights we may have, we can only enforce by the grace of our nation-states, and all that a government needs to renege on them is an obedient police force within, an effective immigration “service” at its borders, and a lying diplomat at the United Nations. If we had hoped that the logic of human rights might somehow render civil rights, ethnic rights, and religious liberties the same, we have bet on a lame horse. This, at least, is the lawyers’ advice. We thus keep in hand three logics of equality that differ fundamentally. One is based on individualist, but legally enforceable, civil rights; the second on ethnic identity; and the third on religious equality. Let us therefore review these three kinds of rights briefly.

Civil rights are legally enforceable claims of a citizen, that is, not a person as such, but a person with a particular passport or national status. The idea has its roots in the ancient Greek city-states and in the Roman Empire state, but civil rights were hardly distinguishable in these contexts from ethnic or religious rights. Their reinvention for modern times was one of the great achievements of critical thinkers around 1750. These thinkers, among them John Locke and Tom Paine in Britain and Charles Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, invented the idea of a basic social contract between individuals and the state. This contract was envisaged as individuals giving up certain rights to the state and receiving selected other rights in return. Give up your right to carry a gun, and you get the right to be protected by a policeman; give up your right to sleep around, and gain the right to have your marriage protected by law. To have rights was thus the result of a deal: Natural persons join a state and give up natural rights; natural persons become citizens and get civil rights in return. If civil rights fail to respect people’s natural rights, citizens have the right to overturn their government.

To us, of course, it is obvious that we are dealing with a philosophical fiction. What these thinkers confused, but confused quite deliberately to win the argument, was human society in general and the state in particular. We do, of course, surrender some of our desires to society at large: Most of us call that “civilization,” and it leads to ideas about self-control, public and private property, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts. But compromising to live in human society is, nonetheless, something different than subordinating oneself to a state. What the Enlightenment thinkers tried to do with this line of arguing was to demote the state and all its might to acting as a mere servant of the common good. They deliberately confused the nation-state with governance in general, the better to cut the state down to size. The great advantage was to reduce the state to being a partner in a social bargain. To honor that bargain, states had to render civil rights enforceable in the courts and promise all citizens equal treatment by all its powers. All citizens who enjoy civil rights must be equal before the lawmakers, or legislature; before the judges of the law, or jurisdiction; and before the executive and civil service. Despite its checkered argument, the civil rights approach is thus not to be discounted in the struggle for equality.

As a sole platform, however, it looks insufficient. There are tens of millions of illegal immigrants in the Western states, and there are tens of millions of legal immigrants who, nonetheless, are not nationals and are thus denied full civil rights. Neither of these groups will simply go back to where they originated, either because they have even fewer civil rights in their countries of birth or because Western economies make very good use of them. On top of that, there are tens of millions of full-status nationals living in their own Western countries that have been prevented from relying on the same civil rights as their neighbors. In the European states, the problem is mainly about the first and second cases: illegal migrants and legal nonnationals. In America, it is mainly about the first and the third: illegal migrants and long-resident citizens who are not treated equally. The differences in history and in law are immense, but the bottom line seems to be the same across the board. Civil rights alone are not the way to achieve equality for all. This is why, in America first and in Europe slightly later, dissatisfied citizens were forced to invent community rights.

Community rights differ from civil rights in the boundaries that they draw. It is no longer the fact of having national citizenship that matters in the struggle for equal rights. Rather, in this logic, the struggle for equality is based on a particular group identity. This identity can be based on two main criteria, ethnicity or religion. Each of these two can assume a particular political force vis-à-vis the nation-state. Both community-based calls for equal rights sound irrational at first, and they still sound irrational for many nation-state elites: What can ethnic origin or religious conviction have to do with civil equality? Yet the answer is simple, and it is underwritten also by the staunchest defenders of community-neutral civil rights (Wilson 1987). Given the long history of inequality and discrimination in every state we know, the enforcement of civil rights appears to require “affirmative action.” The term, coined in America, has been translated in Europe as “reverse discrimination,” “positive discrimination,” or “antiracist policy.” In all its variants across the West, it involves policies that require quota systems in the recruitment of employees; in the distribution of housing, schooling, and welfare services; and in the creation of promotion and career structures that put fairness in the place of past discrimination.

What affirmative action was originally expected to affirm was, quite simply, equal access to civil rights. It was to make up for the faults of history by remedial public action, taken consensually and for the common good. One could call it a logical rectification of history. What it has come to affirm, however, is not a universal faith in civil rights, but the faith of ethnic and religious communities in their right to determine their own destiny. This dialectic twist is not as surprising as it sounds: If initiatives are aimed at one or another community, that community will also be organized, mobilized, and come to be thought of as a social body with its own particular rights. In this way, affirmative action comes to affirm precisely that which civil rights were supposed to overcome: boundaries between, and a strengthened sense of identity within, ethnic or religious communities. This does not mean that one has to be against affirmative action. What it shows, however, is that the logic of civil rights and the logic of community rights, including affirmative action, are two different logics. There is no way of solving the multicultural riddle if we fudge the differences and treat one sort of rights as “bascially the same” as the other two. This conflation however, is a very fashionable fallacy. Spokespersons for the rights of religious communities appeal to their believers’ faith in civil rights, spokespersons for ethnic rights translate their message into religious rights, and those who speak for a civil rights approach sell civil rights as the way toward ethnic or religious community rights. Time and again, it appears politically convenient, both for majorities and among minorities, to vacillate between the different logics. There are good reasons for this, for it makes everyone’s arguments more elastic and renders compromises more flexible. At the same time, however, it can lead to the most paradoxical and counterproductive results.

The clearest examples of such a strategy of confusion are found in Europe, rather than in America, for two contradictory reasons. To start with, European states have a much longer history of ethnic or religious discrimination despite formal declarations of legal equality. Racism and communalism went on long after the formal recognition of equal civil rights for all. In America, by contrast, civil equality was denied even in principle to African Americans until 1862 (and in effect, much longer) and denied to Native Americans until 1911 (in effect, again, much longer). In most of Europe, such systematic exclusions from civil rights turned more and more unpractical in a climate of competitive industrialization. In fact, some states that oppressed their minorities lost their best entrepreneurial elites to more liberal states. One may think of the French Huguenot refugees who were outlawed for the second time in 1685, proceded to emigrate in large numbers, and soon contributed enormously to the economies of Holland and Prussia, as well as America. Conversely, however, and this is the second reason, present-day European states cannot solve their current problems of inequality by simply reinforcing civil rights because most of their ethnic and religious minorities today are recent arrivals, and thus not citizens at all.

Virtually all European states, with the main exception of Great Britain, replicate this constellation of disadvantaged minorities that do not hold national citizenship and thus civil rights. The unification of the European Community has alleviated some of these problems by encouraging member-states to treat each other’s nationals like their own, regardless of the member-state from which they come. Yet these multinational legal agreements remain limited, and at any rate they do not affect the far more disadvantaged minorities that hail from beyond the European Community—Eastern Europe and the Balkans, North Africa and Turkey, Indochina and South Asia. To remedy systematic inequalities is thus again a matter of addressing and targeting these ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Zones of Religion
• About This Book
• 1 “I Have a Dream”— But Who is it For?
• 2 From Dreaming to Meaning: The Multicultural Triangle
• 3 The Nation-State, I: Postethnic or Pseudotribe?
• 4 The Nation-State, II: Business or Temple?
• 5 Ethnicity: Blood or Wine?
• 6 Religion: Baggage or Sextant?
• 7 Culture: Having, Making, or Both?
• 8 Multicultural Theory, I: The Sales Talk and the Small Print
• 9 Multicultural Theory, II: The Values and the Valid
• 10 Multicultural Praxis: The Banal and the Best
• 11 From Dreaming to Meaning: A Summary
• 12 From Meaning to Practice: What Students Can Do
• References