ABSTRACT
The wide-ranging chapters in this book have shown the complexity not only of immigrant reception policies in Western Europe, but also the diversity between national understandings of multiculturalism itself. Non-Europeans might have limited knowledge of the less familiar models of French republicanism (see Simon and Sala Pala’s chapter in this volume) contrasted with the German tradition of ethno-specific citizenship (see Schönwälder’s chapter in this volume), but when they come to the multiculturalism enunciated for some time by countries such as Britain, the Netherlands or Sweden, a Canadian or Australian, with their own multicultural history, might expect to find some common ground. But what is clear is that multiculturalism bends with local political cultures. The Dutch version is shaped by the separate spheres model of pillarization, the long-established convention of institutional and cultural separation between dominant religious groups and the secular state (see Prins and Saharso’s chapter in this volume), while the British variation, influenced by its own church-state relationships, has permitted the development of separate religious schools and their institutional offspring (see Grillo’s chapter in this volume). A first and necessary realization, then, is that multiculturalism means different things in different places, including of course nations like Switzerland that are demographically multicultural but have no official multicultural policy (see D’Amato’s chapter in this volume). The semantic breadth of the term has allowed, as I shall suggest later, its inflation to a size where is has become an easy target for critics lamenting the failure of settlement and integration policy. Indeed, overriding national variations in the meaning and practice of mul-
ticulturalism in Europe is a unifying sense of unease, and periodic crisis, in assessing the failure of immigrant and refugee inclusion. Integration policy has become very unstable terrain, with significant policy turbulence accompanying the swings of public opinion, the oscillations of electoral behavior, and knee-jerk and sometimes opportunistic political responses. Former lowlevel anxieties accompanying the slow pace of cultural, economic, political and social integration are punctuated by unpredictable but increasingly common shocks creating national hypertension: the assassination of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, severe rioting in France and Britain, the
cartoons crisis in Denmark, numbing terrorist attacks in Spain and Britain, and the existence of impulsive terrorist sleeper cells in Germany and elsewhere. The co-existence of the visible and publicized social exclusion of immigrant groups, the prospect of random violence and the rapidity of cultural change have, understandably, generated a fundamental sense of dislocation, casting long-established patterns of identity, affiliation and security into doubt. These are propitious conditions for backlash, with further polarization and deterioration of inter-group relations. In this troubled context, a comparative perspective from the new world
may be useful, not because the three largest immigrant-receiving countries of Australia, Canada and the United States are without integration challenges of their own – far from it – but because as settler societies they have had a longer experience with an intentional strategy of planning and managing cultural diversity, of nation-building within which immigration is a fundamental corner stone. The earlier inter-racial history of all three countries is in fact one of desperate, indeed atrocious failure, and includes aboriginal genocide and near genocide and entrenched racism solidified by institutionalized social exclusion, directed initially against those from outside north-western Europe, and later against non-Europeans. But the last third of the twentieth century has seen substantial cultural and institutional re-positioning, and in this more hopeful period, multiculturalism has played an important role, notably in Canada and Australia and to a much lesser degree in the United States. In light of the pessimism about multiculturalism in theory and practice in Europe, a Canadian perspective in particular may be helpful.
