This book answers three questions: (1) is there any hope that multiculturalism will survive as the ideological pendulum continues to shift to the right across democracies? (2) Are there conditions under which multiculturalism is more likely survive an ideological shift to the right in government? (3) How can multicultural policies be designed to survive in an ideological environment that continues to veer to the right?
While the term āmulticulturalismā has different meanings (e.g. a demographic phenomenon, an ideology, a public discourse), this book uses it to describe aggregates of public policies that are distinct and characteristic phenomena of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or, in other words, of the most recent stage of the āage of migrationā.1 By design, these policies recognize the cultures, religions and/or languages of minorities borne out of individual and familial immigration. In most cases, these policies also require public institutions to lower barriers for members of minority communities to participate in social, political, and/or economic arenas; that is to say they require public institutions to āaccommodateā minorities.
This book situates itself within an emerging and important research programme that focuses on minority recognition, minority accommodation, and immigrant integration. In recent years, contributors to this new endeavour have set out not only to assess multiculturalismās normative value but also to evaluate and explain the fate of minority recognition and minority accommodation in liberal democracies. Although this research programme tends to focus on understanding (what has come to be known as) multiculturalismās āretreatā it is now starting to theorize on multiculturalismās persistence or āsurvivalā under adverse conditions.
The Rising Threat of the Political Right
For a number of reasons, the clearest threat to multiculturalismās survival are governments of the political right. For one, the political right (including the far-right and the centre-right) is the main source of anti-immigration rhetoric (Diamond 1996) and of a mono-national discourse (Betz and Immerfall 1998), neither of which values recognizing and accommodating diversity. There are also significant logical inconsistencies between the ideological positions of the far-right and centre-right, on the one hand, and the recognition and accommodation of diversity, on the other. Five of these logical inconsistencies are elaborated upon below:
Firstly, the most extreme of right-wing ideological positions are both holistic and āhistoricistā (Popper 1945) in that they envision an idealized version of society and seek means to preserve this ideal by excluding (or exterminating) difference. Consequently, these extremist ideological positions are a priori inconsistent with a political project that is based on the assumption that societies should be open to immigration and also mutable in their conception of nationhood and belonging;
Secondly, classical conservatism is biased in favour of maintaining the status quo (Sweet 1996) and is therefore more likely to be incompatible with the implementation of a policy projectāsuch as multiculturalismāthat must entail a radical shift away from past practices of cultural assimilation and cultural exclusion and towards the recognition and accommodation of diversity;
Thirdly, classical liberalism and its emphasis on ānegative freedomā is also inconsistent with multiculturalism. From a classical liberal perspective, freedom is defined as āfreedom from state interferenceā (Tremblay et al. 2003, 82). By contrast, multiculturalism, particularly when it takes the form of employment equality policies, is distinctly rooted in the notion of āpositive freedom,ā a reform liberal ideal that requires state intervention to remedy socio-economic disparities (82ā83);
Fourthly, neo-conservatismās hyper-individualistic conception of society (ibid., 87) stands in clear contradistinction to the multicultural conception of society that views the individual as belonging to a particular group with a distinct āsocietal cultureā (Kymlicka 1996);
And, fifthly, the conservative ideal of āsmall governmentā (see Rudolph and Evans 2005, 662, footnote 1) is inconsistent with multiculturalism given that the recognition and accommodation of diversity often requires government spending in areas such as cultural activities and programs, minority language assistance programs, and bilingual or mother-tongue instruction programs.
In addition to these logical inconsistencies and incompatibilities, there is very little historical precedent of the political right implementing a shift towards multiculturalism. In fact, the first experiments with multiculturalism were undertaken in long-standing liberal democracies during the latter half of the twentieth century and, more specifically, at a time when voters put their support squarely behind parties of the political left. The initial variants of āofficial multiculturalismā policies adopted in Canada, Australia , New Zealand , Sweden and the Netherlands were designed and implemented by centre-left governments. The only real exception to this pattern took place in Canada during the late 1980s when the Mulroney Conservative government implemented the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988; but even this was 17 years after the left-leaning Trudeau Liberals interpreted the findings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism 1963ā1971 (i.e. the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission or the āBi and Biā Commission) to mean that Canadaās federal government should implement a policy of āmulticulturalism within a bilingual framework.ā
Although the āmaster narrativeā of multiculturalism holds that some former leftists have recently decried the recognition and accommodation of cultural
minorities (Kymlicka 2010, 46), opposition to multiculturalism has come and continues to come primarily from the right-hand side of the ideological spectrum.
2 In
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (
2006), an in-depth look into conditions surrounding the ābacklashā against immigrant minorities in the
Netherlands and the populist outcry against the Dutch āmulticultural tragedyā, author Ian Buruma succinctly describes the political leftās embrace of multiculturalism as well as an ideological dichotomy between support of and opposition to the recognition and accommodation of minorities:
The Left was on the side of universalism, scientific socialism, and the like, while the Right believed in culture, in the sense of āour culture,ā āour traditions.ā During the multicultural age of the 1970s and 1980s, this debate began to shift. It was now the Left that stood for culture and tradition, especially ātheirā cultures and traditions, that is, those of the immigrants, while the Right argued for the universal values of the Enlightenment. (Buruma 2006, 30)
Just as multiculturalism was compatible with the policy agendas of the left in the late stages of the twentieth century, the recognition and accommodation of cultural minorities remains, to this day, a project that is inherently consistent with the social democratic and reform liberal ideals of left-wing and centre-left political parties. This should come as little surprise given that the decision to lower barriers for ethnocultural participation in educational, economic and/or political realms strongly resonates with the reform liberal ideal of ensuring equality of opportunity along class lines (Tremblay et al. 2003, 82ā83). Additionally, multiculturalism is compatible with social democratic conceptions of the social order and the process of change. Given their belief that one of the main objectives of government is to ensure equality (ibid., 101) social democrats should be infinitely more receptive than their counterparts on the right to a governmental approach that, in seeking to integrate ethnocultural minorities, acknowledges that an imbalance in power exists between the national majority and ethnocultural minorities. Furthermore, social democrats are open to radical change through democratic means and direct governmental intervention (ibid.,); therefore, they should logically be receptive to designing and implementing public policies, such as multicultural public policies, intended to enhance the citizenship rights or ācitizenizationā (Kymlicka 2010) of immigrant minorities in order to fulfil the true promise of liberal democracy.
If governments of the political left of the 1970s and 1980s still governed today, the issue of multiculturalismās survival would probably be moot. However, times have changed. Since the early 1980s, there has been a proliferation of far-right parties across Eastern and Western Europe, several of which (e.g. the Freedom Party of Austria , France ās Front National , the Danish Peopleās Party, Greeceās Golden Dawn , the Netherlands ā Party for Freedom , and the Sweden Democrats) have recently increased their share of the popular vote and made unprecedented inroads into mainstream politics. For example, in Greece, the Golden Dawn , an extremist right-wing party that uses Nazi iconography in its logo, rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to capture 21 seats in the Hellenic parliament at the 2012 elections. In 2014, the Front National had mayoral candidates elected in 12 French municipalities, obtained nearly 5 million votes in the 2014 European Parliament election and, in 2015, placed first in 6 of 13 regions during the first round of French regional elections. In Britain, the ultranationalist British National Party made inroads into mainstream politics in the early 2000s when it had several representatives elected at the municipal level as well as in the late 2000s when Nick Griffin was elected as the European Parliament representative for North West England. And, as but another example of the success of an anti-diversity discourse, the far-right Danish Peopleās Party has consistently increased its share of the popular vote in Denmark during the last two decades with a policy platform that promises decreases in immigration and the aggressive cultural assimilation of newcomers.
Concomitantly, observers point to the precipitous decline of European centre-left and social democratic parties (see Spiegel Online, September 22, 2017; Berman, The New York Times, October 2, 2017; Lloyd, Reuters, November 17, 2017; OāSullivan, The National Review, March 15, 2018) and to evidence of a ācontagion from the rightā (see Young 1995; Goodwin 2011; Engelhart, Macleanās, November 30, 2013) which has seen centrist political factions normally amenable to immigrants and minorities move closer to the far-right in taking hostile positions towards migration and the politics of diversity. A clear example of this is Mark Rutte ās open letter to Dutch voters in the run-up to the 2017 general election in the Netherlands wherein he delivered the message that immigrants should ā[act] normal or go away.ā This message was viewed in the press (e.g. Taylor, The Washington Post, January 23, 2017; Walker, The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2017; Henley, The Guardian, January 23, 2017) as a last-ditch...