Postcolonial Minorities in Britain and France: In the Hyphen of the Nation-State by Shailja Sharma

Author:Shailja Sharma [Sharma, Shailja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Emigration & Immigration, Religion; Politics & State, Religion, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, General
ISBN: 9781526108319
Google: Om-5DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30458118
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

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The nation-state’s wobbly hyphen: the backlash against multiculturalism

We are sleep-walking our way into segregation. (Trevor Phillips, Chairman, Commission for Racial Equality, 2005)

The assertion, re-imagining and negotiation of difference is central to group formation and evolution and thus to multiculturalism. (Modood, 2007)

The nation-state holds within it a deep schizophrenia. Tensions between the private space of the national, which is deeply ideological, and the public space of the state, which is impartial, can result in tensions that are hard to resolve, let alone acknowledge. Like the nation-state, national culture is a space neither wholly private nor public but one in which public and private spheres intersect in ways that can be hard to legislate. These public/private cultural spheres include religion, codes of dress, education and schooling, women’s rights, laws governing marriage and divorce, housing, and forms of institutional negative and positive discrimination. Since postwar immigration into Britain and France became recognized as permanent in the late 1970s, both countries have adopted some form of multiculturalist policies that address minority cultures, positively or negatively. These policies have tried to legislate those aspects of “culture” that span this divide between private and public worlds: housing, dress, women’s rights, ways of bringing up children, tolerance for different ways of living. This process has often been criticized or seen as “pandering” to minorities, lacking sufficient assimilative power and diluting native national culture. It has also set up an us-versus-them mentality where minorities are regarded as recalcitrant and unwilling to accept dominant national culture.

The idea of nation has consistently proved a stumbling block to state efforts at multiculturalism. Kulturnation has fought staatsnation, nationalist romanticism has struggled against modern secularism, and jus soli against jus sanguinis. Zygmunt Bauman calls it the ambivalence at the heart of modernity, while Jürgen Habermas and Dominique Schnapper hold out hope for a citizenship of praxis, where nationalism will keep its most progressive qualities while maintaining equal access to the democratic public sphere (Bauman, 1991; Habermas, 1992; Schnapper, 2002). Lately there has been a demand to discard or radically revise state multiculturalism as traditionally practised and to recognize, not just tolerate, new religious identities. This has upset the status quo accommodation of ethnic identities and changed the traditional political left/right divisions in European politics. What is being challenged here, through culture, is the historical identity of the nation itself.

Nation versus state

In Britain, multiculturalism has been officially accepted since the 1970s as a way to “deal” with the immigration “problem”. In France, although the term multiculturalism has never been used and the concept is still debated, policies around anti-discrimination have led to a de facto form of multiculturalism (lately known as “positive discrimination”) in practice, despite an insistence on integration. The British embrace of multiculturalism reached its apogee under Tony Blair’s Government, when Blair pronounced that a ‘New Britain’ had arrived and symbolically replaced the Georgian cross of British Airways with a plethora of abstract “multicultural” icons. Even as the new era of multiculturalism coexisted with egregious cases of institutional racism like the 1993 Stephen Lawrence murder, policy discourse remained in favour of diversity, unlike in France.

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