Comment on Meer and Modood

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Notes

1. To state the obvious, countries that have embraced multiculturalism are not ethnic utopias, and they confront many challenges relating to the inclusion of immigrants, including social isolation, economic inequality, poor educational outcomes, prejudice and stereotyping. The question is whether these problems are any worse in countries that have adopted multiculturalism policies, as compared to those countries that have rejected multiculturalism in favour of some alternative approach. And the answer here is clear: there is no such evidence (see Kymlicka 2010b).

2. Not all defenders of ‘interculturalism’ engage in these anti-multiculturalist tropes. Many interculturalists view themselves as allies of multiculturalists (and vice versa), differing only in choice of terminology or in level of analysis. My focus here, like Meer and Modood, is only with that branch of the interculturalist literature that offers itself as categorically different from multiculturalism, and as a remedy for its failures.

3. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I was invited to write a background paper for the UNESCO report, and in that paper I argued (not unlike Meer and Modood) that there were no good arguments or social science evidence for endorsing post-multicultural interculturalism over multiculturalism – it has been published as “The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism? New Debates on Inclusion and Accommodation in Diverse Societies” (Kymlicka 2010a). I now think that my paper, while sound, was largely irrelevant to the political task that the UNESCO World Report team had taken on.

4. We can see this, for example, in the report on interculturalism produced by the Consultation Committee on Accommodation Practices Relating to Cultural Differences, created in 2007 by the government of Quebec, and co-chaired by the philosopher Charles Taylor and the sociologist Gerard Bouchard. In its main narrative, the Bouchard–Taylor Report engages in the familiar anti-multiculturalist tropes identified by Meer and Modood (for example, that it is fragmenting, relativist, etc.), and argues instead for interculturalism as a ‘counter’ to multiculturalism (see, for example, Bouchard and Taylor 2008: 120, 123, 205, 281). However, in several places, the report acknowledges in passing that these anti-multiculturalist tropes may not actually be true, and that the Committee does not have the empirical evidence to assess them (see, for example, Bouchard and Taylor 2008: 118, 192, 214). It's clear that the report hopes that readers will embrace their narrative of interculturalism as a counter to multiculturalism without inquiring too closely into the social science evidence for it. And, as with the White Paper and UNESCO reports, the Bouchard–Taylor narrative may well be an effective piece of political drama to defend diversity within Quebec.

5. For evidence that this indeed is taking place, see the articles in Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf's The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices (2010), which show that the rhetorical retreat from the word multiculturalism is not matched by any comparable retreat from actual multiculturalism policies, which are often simply re-labelled. See also the cross-national Multiculturalism Policy Index available at: www.queensu.ca/mcp/

6. Or at least in English Canada, where support for multiculturalism remains high. The situation in Quebec is more complicated (see note 4 above).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Will Kymlicka

Will Kymlicka holds the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University and is a visiting professor in the Nationalism Studies programme at the Central European University in Budapest. His works have been translated into 30 languages. He has served as President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (2004–2006)