ABSTRACT
’Multiculturalism’ has become an increasingly influential framework for the conceptualization of the contingencies of global migration and ethnic relations. After having in the beginning of the 1970s developed into an explicit political strategy in Canada, the idea of multiculturalism spread, to the United States (US), Australia and to Western Europe. Centring on what has become known as ‘identity politics’, a new radical multiculturalism in the US of the 1970s and 1980s broke with the affiliation to the American universalism which had informed the integrationist civil rights movement in the 1960s. In the US, multiculturalism became a powerful policy issue during the 1980s. American multiculturalism could, however, according to its leftist critics, recognize its own universalist roots and build a more inclusive universalism. A new social compact for full rights of citizenship built on a syncretic and transethnic universalism and aligned across racially and culturally defined divides, could offer a verified and transethnic movement a common purpose and horizon.
