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Abstract
Multiculturalism as a political programme is under attack from politicians, journalists and academics. The criticisms it faces are many and varied: that it presupposes an essentialist conception of culture that treats culture as something which is static, homogeneous and bounded; that it gives unfair advantages to minority cultural and religious groups through special provisions such as exemptions from laws and policies; and that it encourages cultural communities to form separate parallel societies rather than integrate. It is the last of these criticisms that has been particularly prominent in Britain over the past 15 years. But when it is said that multicultural policies in Britain have discouraged integration, we need to be clear about what is meant by both ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘integration’. The latter is variously defined as a process of mutual adjustment, as sharing a national identity and as participation on equal terms by members of different cultural groups in the major spheres of society. Once the necessary distinctions have been drawn, it is far from clear that multiculturalism discourages integration. But doubts can also be raised about whether integration is always desirable, or whether the more integrated a society becomes, the better. Although integration has been regarded as an important goal, for various reasons that I shall explore it needs to be treated with caution.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Richard Ashcroft, Mark Bevir, Matthew Clayton, Adam Swift, Lynn Thomas, Varun Uberoi, and the journal’s anonymous referees, for their helpful written comments on an earlier draft of this article. The article was also improved as a result of being presented in a workshop on Multiculturalism in Contemporary Britain at the University of California, Berkeley, and in a seminar at the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol. I would like to thank the participants in both of these for their challenging questions.
Notes
1. For a qualified defence of multiculturalism that consciously seeks to avoid essentialism, see A. Phillips (Citation2007). I discuss the charge that multiculturalism is wedded to an essentialist view of culture in Mason (Citation2007, pp. 221–243).
2. For responses see Waldron (Citation2002) and Quong (Citation2006, pp. 53–71).
3. Tariq Modood and Varun Uberoi regard the fostering of an inclusive national identity as a multiculturalist goal and see such a project as an integral part of multiculturalism in Britain: see Uberoi and Modood (Citation2013, pp. 24–25). Goodhart’s view is that this is merely one strand of multiculturalism. It does not seem to me that multiculturalism, as part of its nature, involves a commitment to promoting an inclusive national identity, but Uberoi and Modood may nevertheless be correct that this is the characteristic form it has taken in Britain.
4. In doing so, I am building on my earlier work on these issues: see Mason (Citation2010).
5. For example, perhaps David Miller is correct that a shared national identity is required to sustain schemes of social justice that involve redistribution to those not able to provide for their own needs, but such an identity might be achievable only through a process of mutual adaptation.
6. One of the challenges for empirical work in this area is to determine whether segregation causes inequality or inequality causes segregation. See Finney and Simpson (Citation2009, p. 135) and Uslaner (Citation2012, p. 41).
7. These are not Anderson’s only reasons for thinking that integration is vital for a society. She also argues that segregation undermines democracy by impeding the formation of intergroup political coalitions, promoting a factionalised politics, and blocking the mechanisms needed to make officeholders accountable to everyone regardless of ethnicity; see Anderson (Citation2010, Chapter 5). And she argues that segregation fosters elites who lack the motivation or understanding to attend to the interests of the excluded; see Anderson (Citation2007, pp. 602–603).
8. Uslaner argues that the development of friendships across groups is also important: ‘Living in a diverse and integrated neighbourhood with close friends of different backgrounds leads to a greater likelihood of trust. Living in a segregated and less diverse neighbourhood without friends of different backgrounds makes someone less trusting’ (Uslaner, Citation2012, p. 43).
9. The Cantle Report (Home Office, Citation2001), whilst not arguing against the public funding of faith schools, saw them as a potential barrier to community cohesion. In order to overcome this barrier, it argued that all schools should offer at least 25% of places to reflect other cultures or ethnicities in the local area (Home Office, 2001, p. 33), that faith schools in particular should offer 25% of their places to other faiths or denominations (Home Office, 2001, p. 37), and that education should in general be multicultural, and should be designed to promote understanding of, and respect for, the cultures in the school and the surrounding area (Home Office, 2001, pp. 35, 49). The Report’s proposals concerning admissions were not adopted but in England since 2010 newly created Academy schools with a religious character have been required to restrict the proportion of pupils selected on religious grounds to 50%. In the academic literature, Harry Brighouse suggests that 70% of places at a faith school should be allocated by a lottery that gives no preference to those who come from families that share the faith of the school; see Brighouse (Citation2009, pp. 89–90). Others have argued that there needs to be greater support for faith-based and non-faith based school initiatives designed to promote meaningful engagement between different communities; see Parker-Jenkins and Glenn (Citation2011, pp. 1–20).
10. In October 2006 a Muslim teaching assistant was suspended in a West Yorkshire school for insisting on wearing a veil in lessons; see ‘School suspends woman’ (Citation2006).
11. In September 2013, Judge Peter Murphy ruled that a Muslim woman could stand trial wearing a full face veil but had to remove it when giving evidence, on the grounds that ‘the ability of the jury to see the defendant for the purposes of evaluating her evidence is crucial’; see ‘Muslim woman’ (Citation2013).
12. In October 2006, Jack Straw (then Leader of the House of Commons) described the veil as ‘a visible statement of separation and difference’, and whilst defending the right of Muslim women to wear it, urged them to reflect upon the implications of doing so for communication between members of different cultural and religious groups, and indeed community relations in general; see ‘In quotes’ (Citation2006).
13. In fairness to Anderson, it should be noted that she does not deny the value of some degree (and forms) of self-segregation: see Anderson (Citation2010, pp. 183–185).
14. In the Prevent strategy document published after Cameron’s speech, democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, were identified as core British values (see Home Office, Citation2011, p. 44). In June 2014, in the wake of the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ row, Cameron said: ‘I would say freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility and respect for British institutions – those are the sorts of things that I would hope would be inculcated into the curriculum in any school in Britain whether it was a private school, state school, faith-based school, free school, academy or anything else’; see ‘Trojan Horse row’ (Citation2014). In a similar vein, the Department of Education’s guidance on promoting British values in schools that was published in November 2014 identified democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, as fundamental British values; see Department of Education (Citation2014).
15. In his speech on ‘Managed migration and earned citizenship’ (Brown, Citation2008), Brown added ‘internationalism’ to his list, understood as a kind of outward lookingness.
16. Uberoi and Modood argue that in an earlier article (Mason, Citation2010) I ignore the possibility that particular institutions may be partially constituted by universal liberal-democratic values. They write
Mason suggests that the realisations of universal values can be distinctive, rather than the values themselves, but this assumes a neat separation. For example, he claims that the value of democracy is realised in Britain, inter alia, through parliament, but surely the latter is also partially constituted by this value, and democracy takes different forms in different countries. This suggests that such values can be distinguished analytically from their instantiations, but can also take a distinctive form in them, and this possibility is ignored. (Uberoi & Modood, Citation2013, p. 30)
17. Similar disagreements about the limits of freedom of expression emerged again in public debates in Britain in 2005 after the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and also in 2011 and 2012 when other cartoons depicting the prophet were published in the Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
18. Might we say that the kind of shared identification I am describing is a form that a shared national identity might take? Might those who identify with different institutions and practices, or the same institutions and practices for different reasons, be regarded as being British in different ways? This issue is partly just semantic, but it seems to me that the shared identification I am describing is a rather different phenomenon from what we ordinarily regard as sharing a national identity since the latter involves ‘a sense of belonging together’, that is, a belief amongst a group of people that there is some deep reason why they should associate together politically, a reason that does not simply reduce to the fact that they are living within the borders of a state for a whole variety of contingent reasons.
19. The issue here is not simply whether the practice being permitted by the exemption is itself unjust. There is also the question of whether exemptions of this kind are inherently unfair, or whether they are required by fairness in some cases. In this article I have tried to sidestep this issue. For important contributions to the debate over it, see Barry (Citation2001, pp. 146–193), Parekh (Citation1998, pp. 397–411), Waldron (Citation2002), and Quong (Citation2006).