The national identities of the ‘death of multiculturalism’ discourse in Western Europe

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, multiculturalism is discussed, in newspapers more than in scientific discourses, as a public policy failure in West European nations. The Netherlands was one of the first to have declared multiculturalism ‘dead’. In the UK, the death of multiculturalism followed mainly from the 2005 London bombings. In Germany, the story of the failure of multiculturalism became popularized with the publication of Thilo Sarrazin's bestseller Germany is Abolishing Itself [Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab] in 2010. This article seeks to highlight key rhetorical expressions of the climactic period of 1 June 2010–1 March 2011. The twofold argument is that (1) the death of multiculturalism discourse in the Dutch, German and British newspapers manifests an attempt to reinforce particular monoculturalist visions of a national identity through the sociocultural construction of the other, the Muslims; and (2) in the different national newspapers, the death of multiculturalism discourse, with the corresponding media stereotyping of Muslims (as expressed in slogans, metaphors, neologisms, and so forth), varies according to the rhetorical usages of national legacies. In what follows now, three issues that recurrently appear in the death of multiculturalism discourse are discussed, namely, un-enlightenment, cultural imperialism and totalitarianism.

Keywords:

• ethnocentrism
• Islamophobia
• Leitkultur
• moral disorder
• multiculturalism
• muscular liberalism

Notes on contributor

Marinus Ossewaarde is an associate professor in sociology of governance at the University of Twente, Netherlands. He is the author of Tocqueville's Moral and Political Thought: New Liberalism (London: Routledge, 2004) and Theorizing European Societies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He has published a variety of articles on topics like Europe, cultural movements, sovereignty, subsidiarity, cosmopolitanism, publics, dialectic, and self-responsibility in journals like Current Sociology, Critical Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory, European Societies, Sociology, and The European Legacy.