Europe lost faith in multiculturalism
Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
This last intervention, as historian Rita Chin points out in her lucid and erudite overview of the debate, was somewhat surprising, given that “over many decades France had explicitly refused to consider multiculturalism as a guiding principle”. While referring to Islamist terrorist atrocities in Paris, Brussels and Berlin, Chin’s The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe went to press too soon to note that during the election campaign that won him the presidency this year, France’s Emmanuel Macron enraged his rightwing critics by apologising for the “crime” of colonialism in Algeria, indicating that his government would seek to “help with Muslim integration”. “Integration”, of course, may run contrary to the multicultural idea. The Nationality Commission set up by Jacques Chirac as French prime minister in 1987 sought the “national integration” of Algerian and other non-European incomers according to a historical pattern by which regional minorities such as Bretons, Corsicans or Occitans were transformed into modern citizens sharing common characteristics — as historian Eugen Weber famously put it, turning “peasants into Frenchmen”. Central to this is the idea of laïcité, a word usually translated as “secularism” but with stronger ideological connotations. As Chin notes, the French term conveys an ideal of church-state separation designed not so much to ensure the protection of an individual’s religious beliefs (as in the US) but to secure their “full allegiance to the state by counter-acting religious prejudice”. Full allegiance demands a ban on “ostentatious” symbols of religious affiliation such as large crosses, kippahs and, above all, the “Muslim” headscarf. In her survey of the complex and sometimes bizarre arguments surrounding the question of the foulard, as banned for girls in state schools, Chin shows how French commentators on both right and left tend to view the headscarf as a symbol of patriarchal oppression, while ignoring the possibility that for some wearers, at least, it may be a demonstration of self-empowerment.
Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
In contrast to France, both Britain and Germany adopted positive approaches to multiculturalism — a trend that now appears to be in retreat. Given their legal status as Commonwealth subjects, most of the ex-colonials who arrived in the UK after the second world war were formally entitled to the same rights as others, a factor that Chin suggests made “immigrants in Britain somewhat bolder in their critiques and more efficacious in their demands” than their French and German counterparts, enabling them to take a more “active role in shaping the way diversity was managed”. A turning point came with the Rushdie affair in the 1990s. The protests against The Satanic Verses — the novel in which Salman Rushdie was accused of lampooning the Prophet Mohammed — “dramatically transformed” immigration politics in Britain, shifting the focus of calls for greater integration from Afro-Caribbeans to Asian Muslims, who were “suspected of introducing religious fundamentalism and violence into a tolerant liberal polity”. Chin suggests that by re-casting the debate on immigration in terms of “liberal values”, British commentators subtly placed Rushdie’s immigrant critics outside the bounds of the British cultural consensus. Initially West Germany’s approach was different, with the guest-worker programme regarded as a win-win means of building the postwar economy while shedding the Nazi legacy. However, the new conception of “culture” by which ministers could laud “the rapprochement between persons of highly diverse backgrounds and cultures” betrayed “an underlying sense of essential, unchanging difference”. Viewed in this light, the multicultural mantra was a clever way of hiding the ethnically determined basis of German identity. But is multiculturalism really dead, or are rumours of its demise premature? Chin’s account of non-occidental immigration to leading western European countries since the second world war (focusing primarily on Britain, France and Germany, with sideways glances at Switzerland and the Netherlands) does a good job by setting out the terms in which the debate has been conducted. Her conclusion is sensible, if nuanced: “What a historical perspective makes clear . . . is that we need to uphold both liberal conceptions of individual freedom and pluralistic communitarianism”, with each acting as a check on the other.
Malise Ruthven