Contemporary Political Philosophy and Religion by Ungureanu Camil

Author:Ungureanu, Camil
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351391740
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2017-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

6 MULTICULTURALISM AND ITS CRITICS

From rise to fall?

Introduction

With the new wave of populism and nationalism, multicultural political theory has fallen on hard times, and is currently subject to heavy attack from both politicians and academics. Yet the wind was blowing in the opposite direction until recently. Starting with the 1970s and 1980s, the multicultural discourse and policies became widely popular and were adopted in a variety of states such as the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and the United States.1 International and supranational organizations, including the UN, the EU, the World Bank, and the International Labour Organization, gradually encouraged the adoption of policies that recognized and protected ethno-cultural minorities and indigenous groups (Kymlicka 2007: Chapter 7; Phillips 2007; Eisenberg 2014). These political-legal developments were accompanied and supported by the crystallization of multiculturalism centred on the questions: why is cultural difference relevant for political philosophy? What are the nature, the forms, and the limits of recognition of cultural particularities in a constitutional democracy?

Depending on the answers to these questions, multiculturalism has developed into “strong” and “thin” versions aiming to correct the blindness to difference of traditional political theorizing focused either on neutral rules or on the common good; to this end, different versions of multiculturalism have justified the adoption of legal regulations and policies corresponding to the aspect of culture in question and the nature of the claim (Kymlicka 1989, 1995a; Parekh 2000; Modood 2007).2 Nevertheless, from the late 1990s on, increasing worries about socio-economic integration and terrorism, in addition to the problems related to the recent refugee crisis and the upsurge of populism, have turned multiculturalism from an emancipatory tool into a perceived threat. Religion (in particular Islam) has been identified as the most problematic aspect of cultural diversity and the prevailing source of conflict and disintegration. Multiculturalism has rapidly become the culprit and the scapegoat for a broad array of socio-political evils, a supposedly misguided approach to cultural-religious diversity that allows men to beat their wives, communities to collapse into racial violence, and the West to fall into the hands of Islamists. The backlash against multiculturalism is now common currency in Western democracies; in this overcharged atmosphere, prominent leaders such as Angela Merkel went as far as to proclaim “the death of multiculturalism” (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010; Phillips 2007).

This public rhetoric is largely built on a simplified image of multiculturalism and pays lip service to the rise of xenophobic populism and right-wing nationalism: “speaking and writing about multiculturalism (including academic writing in a philosophical and normative vein) is often based on an imagined (strong) multiculturalism rather than its reality” (Grillo 2007: 993). A strong version of multiculturalism is indeed problematic since it portrays society as a collection of relatively homogenous cultural groups, downplays the problems of domination within groups as well as the importance of the participative integration in the democratic society. But multiculturalism is far from being a single doctrine; it is a family of different views and policies that give a relevant role to the public recognition and accommodation of cultural-religious identity.

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