European Multiculturalism: Is it Really Dead? (original) (raw)

Has multiculturalism in Britain retreated

If properly understood, multiculturalism continues to flourish in Britain. S cholars who are critical and supportive of multiculturalism note how it is in 'retreat' or in question in different countries as leading politicians are rejecting it. 1 Britain is often cited as a place in which this retreat or questioning occurs. 2 Certainly British politicians and commentators criticise multiculturalism, but it is often unclear what precisely is being criticised. 3 Even when critics say that what they are discussing is 'state multiculturalism', nothing is said about what this is, or how it differs from 'multiculturalism', and neither is self-explanatory. 4 We therefore begin by specifying three interrelated ways in which multiculturalism can be understood, before going on to show why it is questionable to claim that leading British politicians are distancing themselves from any of them. We then identify the superficial nature of what it is that these leading politicians are actually rejecting, and the benefit, even for critics, of adopting our understandings of multiculturalism.

Changing Perceptions of Multiculturalism in the British Public Sphere

2017

This paper is devoted to the examination of the evolution of the uses of the term multiculturalism in a corpus of selected speeches by prominent British politicians, officials and diplomats in the United Kingdom within the decade 2001–2011. Britain is considered to be one of Europe’s most multicultural countries and there was a time when its government took pride in its pro-integration policies. That is why within the elite discourses of the Labour governments of the late 1990s, multiculturalism had overwhelmingly positive connotations: it was associated with new opportunities, strength, enrichment, social progress and economic success. However, over the course of the 2000s there was much debate over the alleged failure of multiculturalism as a state policy, as a project for social cohesion and as a human value in itself. There have been calls for restrictions of immigration and asylum, increased demands on immigrants to assimilate and a focus on shared British national identity. In...

The Crisis of Multiculturalism in the UK: Has it Failed?

The idea of multiculturalism has been hotly debated across the UK in recent years. This article addresses the question of whether multiculturalism has failed in Great Britain based on an assessment of both sides of the debate. Considerable arguments against multiculturalism have been submitted by both academics and political figures, stating its devastating impact on social cohesion, causing social segregation, and its incompatibility with the principles of liberal democracy. This essay argues the opposite: the primary argument in this essay is that what has failed is not multiculturalism itself, but rather the understanding of it, due to the powerful negative discourse around the term embedded in multicultural policies (MCPs). The article argues that there is an urgent need for the contextual development of multiculturalism, which can lead to a variety of views. It concludes that the arguments against multiculturalism lack empirical evidence, and those arguments have been strongly influenced by the negative discourse around the idea of multiculturalism, rather than its everyday realities.

Workshop Proceedings: Debating Multiculturalism-2

2012

Since the Second World War, European societies have increasingly experienced ‘multiculturalism’ in the sense of people of diverse cultural backgrounds living side by side. The ‘state multiculturalism’ publicly criticised last year in David Cameron’s Munich Speech was a UK example of European government policies embodying a concern to ensure acceptance and respect for the cultural and religious identities of minorities. Cameron is one of a number of prominent voices in the European political mainstream, including also German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who claim that multiculturalism has failed to counteract fragmentation and extremism. Meanwhile, proponents of multiculturalism continue to stress its achievements in terms of reduced discrimination and progress towards inclusive, sustainable national identities. They urge that to abandon multiculturalism would be to abandon an achievable future of genuine equality, mutual respect and creative intercultural symbiosis. Whether multiculturalism should be jettisoned as a failure or defended as the path to a flourishing diversity is a crucial and pressing question for our time.

Multiculturalism and the Extreme Right Challenge in Contemporary Britain

Multicultural Challenges and Sustainable Democracy in Europe and East Asia, 2014

Riots in several localities in Northern England in 2001 (Oldham, Burnley and Bradford) involving South Asian youth of Muslim origin represented a defining moment in the history of British multiculturalism. The previous year, the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain had published a major report (the so-called Parekh report) which offered a vision of Britain as an outward-looking community at ease with multicultural diversity. 1 In the wake of the riots, however, British multiculturalism stood accused of fostering ethnic conflict. Through a process of neighbourhood self-segregation, multicultural practice in Britain had supposedly encouraged ethnic minorities and South Asian Muslims in particular, to lead 'parallel lives'. According to Commission for Racial Equality Chair, Trevor Phillips, multicultural Britain had been 'sleepwalking into segregation' (Phillips, 2005). Significantly, at the local level, amongst deprived white neighbourhoods, the failure to engage the white working-class in the multicultural project fed a toxic narrative. This narrative portrayed whites as the victims, losing out to Muslim communities who were supposedly the beneficiaries of preferential treatment. Resentment from 'white-have-nots', dubbed 'white backlash' by sociologist Roger Hewitt (2005), which was targeted above all at South Asian Muslims, was further exacerbated by post 9/11 and 7/7 evaluations of Muslims as either apologists for terror or potential terrorists. The growing receptiveness of British society to the idea that multiculturalism had 'failed', when tied