Conclusion

Multicultural “crises” will continue to come and go, and as they do the popularity of multicultural policies will continue to wax and wane in the public imagination. Yet as students of political philosophy, and as responsible citizens, it is our duty to take a more measured view, and to see that ill-informed and intemperate analysis is countered with fact and sound argument. It is therefore worth repeating a few of the core messages that emerged from this study. The first is that multiculturalism is a term that looks increasingly unequal to the task of describing a field of political philosophy that is becoming ever more rich and internally differentiated. Indeed, the term itself is at least partly responsible for the confusion that continues to impede progressive debate on the difficult question of accommodating ethnocultural and ethnonational diversity. As I suggested in Chapters 1 and 2, it nourishes the misleading impression that in every culturally diverse democracy around the world policy makers are engaged in the same multicultural experiment, that every philosophical champion of multiculturalism seeks to defend the same kinds of cultural minorities and the same kinds of cultural rights, and that the preservation of cultural differences is the one and only objective of a politics of multicultural accommodation. Perhaps the most obvious solution to this problem is to avoid a generic term like multiculturalism altogether, and as I argued in the second chapter there is much to be said in favor of this option. Another approach—the one taken in this book—is to continue using the term while making a systematic effort to sort through its many complexities and shades of meaning. ¹ Indeed, one of my objectives was to demonstrate that many multiculturalists themselves have taken great care to distinguish between the different kinds of cultural minorities and their distinctive demands (both cultural and non-cultural); the different kinds of multicultural policies that might be used to satisfy these demands (some of which relate to the preservation of cultural differences, others which do not); the different ways in which these policies can be justified (in both moral and more pragmatic terms); and the different challenges these policies pose for human rights protection and social cohesion. Granted, this makes for a much more complicated story, but as I argued in Chapters 1 and 9, to understand contemporary multicultural political philosophy one must examine it in all of its depth and diversity.