KISHWER FALKNER
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
Home | Bio | Parliament | Public Speaking | Journalism | Contact "A Liberal Looks at Multiculturalism"
Speech given at Brandeis University, 6 February 2007
(a shorter version was delivered at St Antony's College, Oxford, 23 January 2007, under the title "Does Multiculturalism Work?")
Let me start with a few assumptions and define the parameters of this talk:
About myself: I take a Liberal view on the question of multiculturalism, and lest you subscribe to the perspective that a Liberal is someone who can’t take his own side in an argument, I will demonstrate that in this instance even Liberals can take sides… the stakes are such that we have to…
The other assumptions that I would ask you to bear in mind is that my view is one borne of an English perspective on this debate, as that is what I am most familiar with although I believe that issues are, in good liberal tradition – universal.
The final assumption has to do with the topic in hand: Among liberals in western democracies there has been a long-standing view that ethnic and religious pluralism is ‘manageable’ as long as we come up with the right political and legal structures to accommodate multiple identities. This view is well-founded historically as we have seen waves of migrants across Europe’s borders become undistinguishable from the mainstream – take Huguenots in the more distant past or Jewish people in today’s societies. So too, in my view, will we see the integration of Poles, Lithuanians and ‘new’ old Europeans into what used to be Western Europe.
This assumption has stood the test of time because the migrants in question were not physically distinguishable from the majority population in quite the same way as today’s newly arrived – so while religion was a factor in the past, race combined with religion is a potent new element in the Europe of today.
And now the parameters: the first is that we are talking about liberal democratic western societies, and the second is that we are talking about individuals rather than groups in terms of rights – so for the purposes of this talk I will ask you to accept the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s thesis that democracy is possible only where two core principles are accepted: the foundational principle of human rights where every life is of intrinsic and equal value; and his parallel principle that each person has an inalienable personal responsibility for realising value in his or her life.
Now on to the question in hand: Multiculturalism as public policy … as a means of managing diversity and pluralism in an increasing globalising world:
Let me say from the outset that there is no dispute in my mind that the fact of multiculturalism has been with us for a very long time indeed. Most contemporary nation-states are products of the fusion of different ethnic, national, linguistic and increasingly now – religious and racial groups. I also recognise that the coming togther of these different groups within the ambit of the modern national state was not without pain. Whether one looks at the British historian Linda Colley’s work on how British national identity was formed in that island, or looks at post-reformation Europe, one thing is clear: that forging the new identities into a sense of common nationhood and shared values took a prolonged period of time to cement. The point is that they may have been artificial – pace Benedict Andersons ‘immagined communities’ – but they were not accidental. There was a conscious institutional effort on the part of the state and elite to construct a national identity, through mechanisms which favoured certain arrangements of integration. Not least among these were property rights, later followed by employment rights and the creation of ‘citizens’ who could call on the exercise of certain rights vis a vis their interaction with the state.
So we find ourselves in the modern state, itself a product of multiculturalism, and now, the argument goes, … we deride those very arrangements which have given us the richness and innovation that diversity brings. That make us today what we are…
But are we questioning the value of pluralism? Or are we, in questioning whether multiculturalism works, being rather more pragmatic? To use a rather more pedestrian New Labour term, are we simply asking if it is ‘Fit for Purpose’? Is this policy any longer a valid public policy response to diversity in today’s British or European framework?
In 1960s and 70s Britain, multiculturalism was an approach that saw an ethnically plural society in which all cultures would be regarded as equally valid. Where social cohesion would be rather laisez faire and where communities could choose pretty much from an a la carte menu in terms of what they wished to pick up from the majority culture. It was a celebration of diversity following on from the perspective of value pluralism emerging in left, and liberal circles.
It was a fine theoretical approach but what did it mean in practice? If you look at the actual reality of new migration to the UK you see a picture where over the last 50 years, immigration has comprised of inward flows by visible minorities who are extremely culturally diverse and clearly manifest difference in terms of their race, religion and cultural practices. The myriad of competing and conflicting priorities to be addressed in modern Britain today creates a profound set of new dilemmas for society as well as individuals.
Some of these dilemmas relate to the very arrangements of how pluralism is supposed to work in liberal democracies. In a constitutional framework, pluralism is dealt with through the sphere of individual rights and responsibilities where inclusion is on equal, or near equal terms for all citizens… yet increasingly, debates about equality and non-discrimination can take the form of group claims for differential treatment. Hence two weeks ago we had the Catholic Church asking for further exemptions from equality law, and within days they were followed by the Muslim Council of Britain arguing for the same exemptions.
This raises the question about the legitimacy of group rights: who do the groups speak for, who do they exclude, and which among their group excludes himself or herself? One interesting issue raised by the MCB siding with the Catholic church is that while one might accept the legitimacy of a group such as the Catholic church in England and Wales as the voice of the hierarchy of the Catholic family of believers, is the MCB, which is an NGO, to be given the same status in terms of being the ‘voice’ of Muslims’ in the UK. Speaking as one from the latter community, I can say unequivocally that on this issue, it is not speaking for me.
But the issue of groups being the voice of the so called ‘community’ and therefore claiming the right to be heard in public policy formulation has other pitfalls as well. Irrespective of whether the group is self-appointed or set up by the state – a tendency we are seeing across Europe as governments strive to find partners in what are deemed to be problematic communities - it has the problem of legitimacy. I will point to what I call the MCB dilemma: one which at this point of time is common to most Muslim organisations in Europe. If you claim to be the representative of a community, then should you not exercise leverage within that particular group? The dilemma is, as the MCB has uncomfortably found, most evident where the organisation has been impotent to deal with Muslim extremism. While it has sought access to Downing Street as the voice of Muslims, when Downing Street has subsequently told it to reduce extremism among young Muslims, it has had to admit that it doesn’t have a handle on that one – it can’t do anything about it! In these cases the moral is that you can either be in bed with your client, the government, or with your base, the community you purport to speak for. The demands of legitimacy, on both sides, call for fidelity not polygamy!
A further dilemma is a more fundamental one: that of moral and cultural relativism: In his book on the implications of diversity, provocatively titled Liberals and Cannibals, the British sociologist Steven Lukes recounts Herodotus’s story of Darius, King of the Persians. Darius summoned the Greeks at his court and asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for all the money in the world. Later in the presence of the Greeks, he asked some Indians (the tribe called Callatiae) who he knew did indeed eat their parents' dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. Darius knew of course that the only civilised way to deal with dead ancestors was to lay them out in high places such as towers where the vultures would pick them clean.
The morals here are that the diversity of values is a very old story; that all sides know of their differences in culture; and adhere to them, irrespective, confident that their own custom is the right one.
But ‘value pluralism’ to coin Berlin’s term, founders on the two problems of conflicting values and of the incommensurability of values: that is, that some values can be in conflict with other values and that values are not capable of measurement, in the manner of being hierarchically ordered in an objective sense. ‘Value pluralism’ in today’s democratic societies cannot be seen in quite that same way as Berlin intended, as it falls prey to the accusation of moral relativism - or in plainer English - to double standards. This is evidenced in the different treatment of law towards difficult cases where cultural practices are tolerated in family courts as part of custom. Hence polygamous marriage when contracted abroad is valid in some legal arrangements’, and we have moves in several western countries to incorporate more aspects of Islamic family law into their frameworks; or to discriminate on religious grounds. This is not to mention Canada’s experience with demands for Sharia, or the debate in France on female genital mutilation, or even to raise the issue of coercion in marriage; or indeed other areas where fundamental human rights clash with cultural practice.
But moral relativism goes beyond unequal treatment. It diminishes the individual in the sense that it makes him or her incapable of fulfilling his potential as described in Dworkin’s foundational principle, which to remind us, says, in a democracy, that every person has an inalienable personal responsibility for realising value in his or her life. In order to do so, the very fact of human agency must be recognised. This cannot be the case where public policy is prepared to sacrifice your rights to group rights, when there are hard choices to be made. Concrete examples of this are where the government backs down on law against forced marriage or where it accepts discrimination in fundamental areas of employment law for certain religious groups (two current UK debates).
And moral relativism also diminishes society overall: it gives us the scenario where the group that shouts loudest seems to succeed. The shouting does not have to be supported by numerical strength, which might provide the cover of legitimacy in a democracy, it just has to be related to a value which is deemed to be beyond examination. So in the case of a religious taste, a play about Sikhs was closed down after the wanton destruction of the theatre, because the police advised that they were no longer able to uphold public order. So much for freedom of expression, you might say… I will go further – so much for the agents of the state being the neutral arbiter in disputes, upholding the law as laid down.
And when relativism takes hold of society, then you get all the unintended consequences as well. So when well meaning local authorities were prepared to facilitate segregation through housing policy in the 60s, 70s and 80s, it was inevitable that schools would be ghettoised over time with mono-ethnic compositions. And lest anyone doubt the cost of segregation to social cohesion in Britain, all they have to do is read the manifold reports published after increasingly regular urban riots in our northern cities in the last decade. The cost of segregation is even more palpable in the lost potential of young people who grow up in silos, detached from both mainstream society and their own parents whose values founded in distant places and cultures. Instead of the universalist utopia that was to be the promise of multiculturalism, we are in danger of encountering Berlin’s imaginary dystopia in some parts of backstreet urban Britain.
This brings me to the final thrust of my argument: Social capital and its relationship to building social cohesion. I will use Robert Putnam’s definition for the purposes of this talk, in that ‘social capital refers to the collective value of all social networks and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other’. He argues that social capital is a key component to building and maintaining democracy… it is a set of attitudes and mental dispositions that favour cooperation within society, and this in turn leads to building the spirit of the community.
We also know that where there are lower levels of trust we have lower levels of civic participation. These in turn reflect the lack of reciprocity. Now, why would this matter? It matters not least as trust is a vital component of community. We know that a low level of social capital leads to an excessively rigid and unresponsive political system. It can lead to higher levels of corruption. New work in this area is starting to demonstrate that there is a link between high diversity, the relative absence of trust, and low social capital. In short, there are levels of diversity which may be unhelpful to social cohesion.
David Goodhart, a British public intellectual, also argues in similar vein in a pamphlet for the think-tank Demos. He takes the position that in cases where the state offers a comprehensive welfare system as is contemporary Britain, a fundamental consensus exists as to the very commitment towards that welfare provision. This consensus is stretched when there is low social solidarity and trust – and can reach breaking point when there is extended conflict on core values between different communities. So he sees the need for ‘buy-in’ to core British values as a defining condition for the basis on which modern day Britain is ordered. I am inclined to agree.
But time is getting on and I need to address myself to what is needed to accommodate diversity in today’s globalising yet state-bound democracies. What therefore is the role of public policy?
This boils down to two significant national discussions and a shift in procedural emphasis:
So for the national discussions: The first of these would be for us in Britain to agree a framework of rights – a sort of bill of rights that enshrines non-discrimination and emphasises equality – a framework that defines the individual citizen’s relationship with the state. A framework that recognises and identifies core values that are meaningful for all of us, old and new Briton alike. I do not fall prey to the Gordon Brown conundrum of fretting about what it means to be British.
Talking about our future Prime Minister, I am clear also that this debatge needs to be about much more than mere flagpoles’ flying the Union flag on our front gardens. And I am sure that this will indeed be a contested debate: a Muslim’s view of core values will be different from a Jamaican’s, whose in turn will be different from a Chinese or indeed an Irish Catholic perspective. What is however evident to me is that there are indeed core values which are universal, and those important other ones that are contested may well have to be decided after thorough debate, and through democratic institutions, such as referendums.
The second national discussion would be to come to a long-term national consensus about immigration. How much? what kind? What costs v which benefits? Here the parameters would have to be quite clear in terms of the trade-offs between economic prosperity and social cohesion. They would have to be made explicit in terms of the soft issues such as integration and culture as well as hard issues such as the current benefits v long term costs in education, healthcare and pensions. This debate would also have to include new migrants and the protection/reduction of their existing rights of family reunion, and so on.
The shift of procedural emphasis would have to do with a greater commitment on the part of the state to behave more sensitively in the area of criminal justice. This is where there is still too much ethnic ‘profiling’, racism and ill-treatment of those who are from minorities to the extent that those who experience justice system may well be left with the impression of a state which is institutional biased against them. The state needs to invest in substantial and lasting changes to its policies to ensure that all those who encounter it in the areas of law and order are treated with dignity founded on non-discrimination. Only when it is evident that citizens are treated equally will we get buy-in to the other difficult areas I have mentioned in this talk.
And herein lies the challenge of ‘buy-in’. When we acknowledge the importance of our values we also need to exercise self-restraint - by restricting ourselves to ‘moral minimalism’ since there is no single maximalist ideology in this area. In the ‘moderate’ multiculturalism which I advocate, tolerance would have to be a by-word and the ethos may well have to that ‘less is more’. But having said that, I would not want to give the impression that the liberal perspective would prove itself to be a push-over…
Let me end here by citing a debate quoted by Steven Lukes and the late Martin Hollis, where in answer to Lukes’s question to Hollis about whether universalism is ethnocentric: Hollis responsed:
… I see no way to secure liberalism by trying to put its core values beyond any but internal or consensual reasoning. The resulting slide into relativism leaves a disastrous parallel between ‘liberalsim for the liberals!’ and ‘cannibalism for the cannibals!’
I would concur with Hollis’s view that liberalism’s values, while minimalist, must have a cutting edge – in his words “which weigh in somewhere between telling cannibals to use a knife and fork and forcing them to turn vegetarian”.
It is in this sentiment that we see an expression of the Liberal perspective.
Links