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Abstract
Following the upheavals of 2001 in the northern England mill towns, there has been a renewed effort in policy circles to reconceptualise the terms of civic engagement between Britain's ethnic communities. Labelled ‘community cohesion’, the official agenda has drawn extensively from scholarly observations on social capital and, more recently, on an ‘ethics of hospitality’, to recommend a doctrine of social integration at a local scale. This paper suggests the ideals and ethos behind the development of such cohesion policies are incomplete and bear a productive contradiction, which promises an ethical reflection on the values at the intellectual core of New Labour's race relation policy.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Michael Keith, Robert Rogerson, Fayyaz Vellani and the two anonymous referees for their encouragement and constructive comments on the manuscript, and Caroline Nagel and Peter Hopkins for providing helpful and meticulous editorial guidance throughout the writing process. The usual disclaimers apply.
Notes
The events in Burnley and Oldham were classified as civil disturbances, while in Bradford they were classified as a riot.
The Commission on Integration and Cohesion was established by Ruth Kelly, then Secretary of State at the Department of Communities and Local Government, in August 2006. While the Commission had its ‘roots’ in the initial response to on-going security concerns in the wake of the 7/7 London bombing (Commission on Integration and Cohesion, Citation2007a, p. 15; also see Keith, Citation2007; McGhee, Citation2008), it was primarily tasked with developing practical solutions to building cohesion at a local level. The recommendations of the Commission have since informed the Cohesion Development Framework (Communities and Local Government, Citation2008).
For instance, where once Putnam Citation(1993) was keen to acknowledge the usefulness of ‘close-knit ethnic enclaves’ as a requisite for entrepreneurial development, he has since moved on to express reservations about such ethnic bonds as they are said to hinder the full potential of these businesses in ‘the broader world’ (Putnam, Citation2000). In addition, Putnam has forwarded different factors for the erosion of social capital in the US throughout his work on Bowling Alone (see Putnam, Citation1995, Citation2000).
