We need to look at one more form of liberalism,
and that is multiculturalism.
Now its status as an ideology is not necessarily
clear.
The term itself has been in widespread use
only since the early 1990s or thereabouts.
It is been described as an ideological space,
rather than an ideology, and that means that
it is an area in which the nature of diversity
and civic unity or civic commonality are discussed.
But multiculturalism shares a number of features
with liberalism and it does so even though
there are tensions between multiculturalism
and several major ideologies.
So, I shall highlight it here rather than
in a separate chapter; there is a substantial
literature on multiculturalism, and you may
have encountered that elsewhere and I will
draw on some of that as we proceed.
Of course, all societies today, it hardly
needs saying, are made up of different cultural
inheritances in their own ways.
That is hardly a new state of affairs, and
the expanding body of research on languages
music, art, archaeology, and other fields
shows long histories of cultural complexity
and diversity, and for example, much of the
grammatical structure of the English language
today is a composite of Saxon English, Norman
French, and other forms of French - and that
is the grammatical structure; the vocabulary
of course is taken from all over the world
and we use those words and terms and phrases
all the time in today's English.
But the earlier forms of the language are
unrecognizable when we consider them through
the English of our time, whether in vocabulary
or grammar; that has been well demonstrated
for a long time now.
This holds not only for languages but for
almost all areas of culture around the world,
and we shall see that many of the central
issues in multiculturalism raise the wider
question of what constitutes culture in the
first place.
Multiculturalism as a contemporary political
position seems to have started in the United
States, with the deepening realization among
African-Americans that the end of the United
States Civil War might have put an end to
official slavery, but that it had certainly
not put an end to severe racism and racial
discrimination against African-Americans.
In the early twentieth century, several United
States states, particularly the southern states,
had laws enforcing racial segregation and
severe racial discrimination until the federal
government passed several laws against that
in the early 1960s.
There were campaigners; Marcus Garvey, 1887-1940,
was born in Jamaica and he had earlier started
a back-to-Africa movement, but the strongest
expressions of what was then called black
consciousness came from people like Martin
Luther King, Elijah Muhammad and his fellow
leader Malcolm X. Martin Luther King led a
non violent civil rights movement, which inherited
a great deal from Gandhi’s methods of peaceful,
passive, nonviolent resistance but nevertheless
resistance.
Elijah Mohammed led the black Muslims, now
called Black Nation, for over 40 years, and
his fellow leader Malcolm X was the one who
said in some sort of meeting of an association
that he belonged to, suddenly said, ‘Enough
is enough.
What do we want?
Freedom?
When do we want it?
Now!’
And the Black Panther movement and the black
power movement got a tremendous boost from
that.
They took it out into the streets and spoke
their minds they were fed up with evasions
and euphemisms and fed up with endless committees
and procedures.
They had had enough.
Well, they had a considerable effect.
If I am not mistaken, Malcolm X, was imprisoned,
he always said on trumped up charges, and
later died in a prison riot, and you'd have
to check the details.
But the approach as taken by the Black Power
movement, and its associated Black Panther
Party rejected violence, as did the black
Muslims.
I beg your pardon, I have to correct that.
Like the Black Power movement and the Black
Panther Party in the 1960s, the black Muslims
rejected non-violence, they supported more
confrontational methods, including a willingness
to use arms.
It is not an accident, it is worth remembering,
that they put the issue on the agenda in the
mid-to-late 1960s in a way that that procedural
approaches - keeping within the law, keeping
within the official structures - had failed
to do; and the riots in Watts in Los Angeles
in the summer of 1965 showed that United States
society would not be the same again.
The immediate cause of those was a very confrontational
police officer who had provoked confrontations
wherever he would gone, just because he was
a rather confrontational person.
But from then that moment on it was clear
that the United States would have to address
this issue - the whole issue of racial segregation
and racial discrimination.
Now it is also worth noting that, like a lot
of other movements around the world, the United
States movements asserted forms of cultural
or ethnocultural identity as a means of resistance,
that is, resistance to often ancient and brutal
forms of systematic oppression and racial
or cultural subjugation.
This was the case not only in the United States,
but in former imperial powers, in the United
Kingdom and in France.
Assumptions of racial and cultural superiority
were widely used and widely shown in the tone
and forms of language and in the range and
scope of for example, media coverage.
Resistance also came from movements like the
language based Quebec, language based Québec
separatist movements in Canada and the Basque
movements in Spain, and ethnonationalist movements
such as those of Maoris in New Zealand, and
Aboriginal peoples in Australia.
They have [also] had an impact in Canada.
Well, it is very obvious, Québecois - and
in the written form something closer to Parisian
French, is just part of the cultural fabric
of the nation and documents, official documents
are written in both languages and that is
that.
In other parts of the world, of course - the
Basque movement have recently relatively recently
abdicated violent methods; for a time they
were very violent.
The Welsh language has had its own impact
because of the resistance by the Welsh language
movements from the late 60s onwards.
They started as, as a violent movement, the
Free Wales army, but if I am not mistaken,
the, the people involved were, were quickly
imprisoned.
But today in Wales, you, you get off the train
and you find all the signs in Welsh first
and English afterwards.
Welsh language is part of the fabric of life
in Wales, when at a time 40 or so years ago,
it looked as though it was dying out.
Now, much the same has been recognized in
Australia where, where aboriginal claims to
land - although land ownership, I understand,
is not an aboriginal concept, aboriginal occupation
of land has been recognized in a range of
ways we don’t need to go into the details.
We do not need to do that here.
But in the second half of the twentieth century,
other forms of multiculturalism arose in the
United States and in other Western countries,
as they imported relatively large amounts
of cheap labour from other parts of the world.
Now in the United States, of course, it is
in effect apart from Native Americans or First
Americans, the United States is an immigrant
nation and for a very long time now has readily
received substantial numbers of people from
other parts of the world.
For example, very poor people from Southern
Europe, people escaping racial persecution
of Jews in what was then Russia and well,
after the Second World War, industrial countries
in Western Europe and Scandinavia, imported
large amounts of cheap labour from very poor
regions of the world, either for post-war
reconstruction, or as in the case of the United
States, for agricultural work.
As the economy expanded very rapidly, the
post-war economies expanded very rapidly.
The importation in the case of the United
States was from Central and Latin America;
it is still a very serious issue.
Well, today, it is hard to believe that some
of the governments concerned even thought
that those they imported who largely came
from the poorest classes, even in their own
country of origin, would actually go back
after a few years.
But this has been documented in the case of
the British decision in the early 1950s to
import cheap labour from South Asia and from
the what was then the British Caribbean.
But it is documented that the cultural issues
involved and that the permanence of those
imported were simply not considered or were
largely discounted by the states concerned,
the percentages are not great, even though
the media are often extremely inflammatory
in their coverage.
In 2011, about 10 percent of the then British
population were of South Asian or African
Caribbean descent.
So, we’re not looking at very substantial
proportions at all.
Of course, as people in the street now say,
20 percent 40 percent and so, on the usual
‘We’re being swamped.’
Frankly, nonsense.
But much of that has to do with inflammatory
media coverage and virtually all the media
have participated in this, either for headlines
or because they have not checked the facts
or because in cases they could not be bothered
to do so, or because some of them simply were
expressing the prejudices of their editors
and owners.
Well, in the last quarter of a century or
so, there has been a further factor.
Industrial countries in particular have experienced
significant influxes of refugees as a result
of war, and ethnic conflict and other forms
of upheaval, some of which have been documentedly
exacerbated by foreign intervention.
The obvious example for us is the invasion
of Iraq in 2003, the legality of which is
severely disputed; it was almost certainly
illegal.
It has resulted in the desperate outflow of
very substantial numbers of people from the
Middle East, as, has the intervention in 2011,
in Libya, which was intended to cause regime
change.
Similarly, the well, the war in Syria, was
undoubtedly the result of an attempt to cause
regime change, even though domestic assemblies
such as the United Kingdom parliament have
rejected and resisted military intervention.
The continuing civil war in Syria, which has
now lasted seven or eight years, has resulted
in perhaps 4 four to 6 million displaced people,
millions who fled Syria - and my point here
is that in recent times, perhaps the last
20 years or so, significant flows of refugees
have taken place as a result of foreign intervention
whether military or economic reasons.
In South Asia of course, we are familiar with
the fact that India took about 8 million refugees
from what became Bangladesh in 1971-72, and
in the early 1990s, several countries in the
Great Lakes region of Africa took a total
amounting to over a million people fleeing
from genocidal wars, well that is the background.
Now, what about multiculturalism as policy?
This dates from the mid 1960s and early 1970s.
At that time, Canada and Australia officially
started to call themselves multicultural societies.
At about that time, public service staff in
many industrial countries also started modifying
policies and everyday practice, for example,
in health care and education, and they came
to see that earlier assumptions about uniformity
of culture and language were actively causing
harm to substantial sections of their societies
or preventing the relevant groups from making
the best use of public institutions and public
services.
This happened in the mid-1960s, when, if I
am not mistaken, opinions were divided on
the ethnic monitoring of claimants for Social
Security and even the limited public health
care that was available.
Opinions were divided even among African,
African-American movements.
But the monitoring did, I think monitoring
did start, and it showed very significant
under-claiming on the part of African-American
communities throughout the United States.
Now that led to changes in policy and staff
training, in making publicly available information
about the services available and so on; this
has been done in other parts of the industrial
world.
Now the point is that these were, you know,
these attempts to act on the recognition that
the societies involved were now significantly,
now had significant elements or significant
proportions of people from very different
cultures, originally from very different cultures
did lead to significantly expanded public
debates on, on multiculturalism, and that
started in the 90s; and they were intense
arguments for and against the very idea of
multiculturalism.
Multiculturalist policies are based on the
recognition that particular cultural groups
may have distinctive needs and that if we
adapt policy and practice to such needs, we
reduce unjustifiable discrimination and we
also show a recognition, even a celebration,
of complexity and diversity in modern societies.
This kind of approach has even been extended
to the design of countries’ constitutions.
That happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina, multiculturalism.
Now of course the issue of post coloniality
is a vast one and we shall not cover it here.
Major writers such as Frantz Fanon on Edward
Saeed and others have written famous works
on it and among other things.
They show the, well, the impact of colonial
subjects [Correction - colonial powers] on
colonized peoples, and they show that this
impact has been immense it permeates the consciousness
of colonized and formerly colonized peoples,
in language, expression, manner, reactions
to encounters with, with the peoples of former
colonial cultures and so on.
Contemporary novelists such as Salman Rushdie
have included acerbic, acidic, passages on
colonial and postcolonial encounters and relationships.
Well, what we need to note here is that claims
to the public recognition of diversity and
demands for the redress of past collective
harm have been strongly justified and have
often resulted in substantial changes in law,
policy, and public institutions.
But the issues raised by the idea of multiculturalism
can be almost intractable or insoluble.
There have been successes.
For example, the 1944 Education Act in England
and Wales - there was no doubt a corresponding
act for Scotland - required that public sector
education institutions have an act of Christian
worship every day.
Now when the Education Act was significantly
amended in 1988, this provision was modified
to recognize the very great cultural and religious
diversity of the United Kingdom as it then
stood, and if I am not mistaken, the act was
rephrased to require a broadly Christian act
of worship, if I am not mistaken, but public
sector education institutions could apply
for exemptions, if their student composition
or pupil composition would justify that, and
I can recall teaching in a public-sector plus-two
college for many years, and one day because
I had a key the that would open almost every
door in the college - not many of us did,
I happen to have been issued it perfectly
correctly - group students asked me, came
to my office.
I think I have met them at the door just by
chance at lunchtime.
It was a Friday and they asked if I would
open a neighbouring classroom which was empty,
because they were planning to hold their Friday
Namaz in there.
So I said, ‘Yes, of course I will; who's
your Imam?’, and one of them was acting
as the Imam for that occasion/.
I opened the door and let them in of course
you know, they carried on.
Nothing unusual, we were very much a public
sector college, we had a very diverse intake,
and it was hardly surprising that people wanted
to, to observe their particular religious
practice in the way it required - no great
issue.
And I, you know when I opened the door I thought,
yes, this is the, the 1988 Education Act at
work; a lot of us in education has had issues,
other issues with the 88 Act, but we certainly
were not worried about this part of it, and
this kind of acceptance is now fairly widespread
in the industrial world.
It is often specified in constitutions or
constitutional provisions which already existed
have been developed in the light of this.
But the issue is that the wider issues raised
by the idea of multiculturalism can be, as
I said, almost intractable or insoluble.
For example, liberalism requires that we tolerate
diversity, but that we cannot accept cultures
or subcultures in which individual rights
are violated.
Now, for example, the United Kingdom accepts
the jurisdiction of Jewish civil tribunals,
which are called I think Beth Din, and Islamic
Sharia councils in respect of family disputes,
because in English law, that is the one I
am thinking of, particularly in English law,
the parties in a civil dispute can refer the
matter to an agreed third party.
As long as the process is agreed and the outcome
is reasonable, the decision the decision itself
really does not have to be based on English
law.
It can be based on other systems of law, provided
the processes is agreed and the outcome is
reasonable.
Now, the Beth Din jurisdiction was approved
by an Act of Parliament in the nineteenth
century.
As it happens, Sharia domestic councils in
the United Kingdom seem to adjudicate more
on divorce than on anything else, and 90 percent
of the divorce cases they hear are initiated
by women.
That is consistent with divorce proceedings,
all over the world.
Women initiate these to a far greater extent
than men, and that is the kind of issue we
will come to later on in our topic on feminism,
we are likely to encounter that one again.
But problems over cultural identity arise
when particular practices violate existing
rights, particularly under liberal, liberal
or liberal-democratic systems of law.
These could occur under other systems such
as republican-socialist systems.
But we are looking here at conflicts between
particular cultural practices and liberal
or liberal-democratic systems of law.
For example, the British foreign ministry,
the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has a
unit dedicated to assisting British residents
or citizens, British citizens or I should
say subjects of the crown, who are victims
of forced marriages, not arranged marriages
freely entered into by both partners - those
are recognized in the law of the United Kingdom
and had been for a long time.
Another issue over which the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office has a dedicated unit.
I beg your pardon.
I will correct that and I will pause there,
so I can do this in editing.
The foreign ministry in the UK, the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office, has a unit dedicated
to assisting British residents or citizens
who are victims of forced marriages, not freely
arranged marriages, but forced marriages.
They, they have these offices and units in
many parts of the world and some of them have
been very active in other countries in assisting
not just British citizens, but British subjects
who have been involved in forced marriages
in their own countries, sometimes by deceit,
and have therefore, in one or two cases, been
held captive by their families, when they
were settled in the United Kingdom had rights
of residence, and we are even working there.
Now, in the UK, the practice of female genital
mutilation is a cultural practice.
It is been a criminal offence since 1985.
It is also a criminal offence for British
nationals - now all British residents - to
participate, participate in or assist in female
genital mutilation outside the United Kingdom.
That is a very interesting point there.
So, the UK jurisdiction would extend to British
residents or British citizens participating
in an illegal practice in English law - I
say in English law, specifically there is
corresponding law in Scotland - even if they
are outside UK jurisdiction.
So, the criminal liability obtains, even outside
UK jurisdiction, if UK residents or British
citizens participate in such practices, and
British public service staff in health care
or teaching have a legal duty now to report
the offence if young people under 18 are the
victims.
We have to note, of course, that the current
Conservative government is yet to implement
a section of the Equality Act 2010 which would
enable a minister to declare caste discrimination
an offence under the Act.
That is yet to happen.
It has been raised from time to time, for
example, in the House of Lords in, I think,
2009 or thereabouts.
But no further action has resulted since then.
But there are more problems over cultural
identity, not just the violation by particular
cultural practices of existing rights in a
liberal or liberal, liberal democratic society.
But this further problem is, what does it
actually mean to belong - what's involved
in belonging to a particular group, and do
members have significant authority to declare
themselves not bound by the any particular
groups ways over particular issues?
This in turn raises wider questions of who
in a group has the authority or power to decide
who does and who does not belong and why.
The point is that there is no avoiding questions
of the substance and content of the rights
claimed, or the cultural practices which are
at issue, and uncritical separation of faith
and the state is of no help here.
Because in practice that closes down discussion
and does not create a space in which the relation
between faith or traditional cultural practices
irrespective of faith, and the state can be
reasonably articulated and addressed.
The point is that a very hard separation between
faith and the state closes down discussion
and does not open up or create a space in
which the relation between faith or cultural
practices and the stage can be articulated
and discussed the results well, the results
can be extremely troublesome and problematic.
Much of the current debate in European countries
about possible bans on the Hijaab have excluded
for example, European women who happened to
be Muslims from any serious exploration and
exploration, and expression of what equality,
citizenship and faith might mean to them.
That can hardly be what we mean if we are
liberals and we advocate Cultural Rights,
in effect, as it has been pointed out in France,
French citizens who happened to be Muslim
women seem to have gone unnoticed in the argument
about the hijab, about wearing the veil in
public or in public services or in public
institutions and so on.
That is been documented my source here is
someone called Kennedy who wrote a paper on
this.
Now, other major ideologies have also had
their problems over multiculturalism, conservatism,
unsurprisingly is one of the ideologies most
incompatible with it.
Because according to conservatism, shared
values and shared practices and traditions
are part of a shared history, and they form
a national identity.
For most conservative thinkers, nationalism
overrides or takes priority over multiculturalism
precisely because of the extent to which shared
cultural assumptions, a shared cultural history,
shared practices are part and parcel of a
conservative outlook on life and a conservative
outlook on what makes a cultural practice
a nation and so on.
Now it is further the case that any a countercultural
multiculturalism faces a problem over inequalities
of power and status that is structural inequalities.
A great deal of work on multiculturalism rather
neglects this.
It is the case that advocates of multiculturalism
have often sought recognition, advancement
or redress through the assertion of cultural
or ethnic identity.
But that in turn opens the possibility that
practices such as child marriage, could at
least in theory be justified as being central
to any given culture and that shows another
significant area that multiculturalism seems
to have neglected and that is the question
of what constitutes a culture in the first
place.
Any serious examination that will of course,
very quickly show us the complexity and variety
of almost any culture on the planet and the
mutability of any and all cultures.
It is a very uncomfortable space to be in
but it is the space we are in any way and
that emerges when we examine multiculturalism
closely.
Well for example, the Salmeen and Tarik Mahdood
have pointed out that what they call inter
culturalism has to be a political discourse,
if it is to enable us to express and address
the wide range of concerns, which inevitably
arise, because our identities are complex,
as are the areas in respect of which we significantly
and you know, are equally and significantly
different.
We are equal in significantly different in,
in an enormous number of ways.
But, the fact is that our identities are equally
complex, uncertain, often mutable, think of
the arguments around gender cell fascination
or sexual or self or the self description
of sexual orientation today.
These are current issues rightly so, and getting
attention which they, of course, should have.
But think of the ways in which we no longer
readily accept assigned identities over things
like sexual orientation or gender self or
gender identification and so on.
Now, in effect, what multiculturalism shows
us if we take it seriously, is that all cultures
are continuing conversations.
That is a point I take from Bhikhu Parekh
who wrote about this in the late 1990s.
That means that all cultures are involved
in so to speak, exchanges with their own inheritances,
and those other cultures.
However different those others might seem
to be and we find archaeological and other
evidence of cultural influences all over the
world, like dating back even thousands of
years, nothing unusual.
Humans have always exchanged languages, ideas,
currency, trade, knowledge and so on.
We do not need to spend too much time on this
here.
But the work of Aristotle was rescued by a
Roman general, if I am not mistaken, called
Sulla, when Sulla’s soldiers might have
burnt the books.
Sulla recognized he was quite a scholar himself,
that he was reading the work of a great philosopher
and took it back to Rome with him.
But something like 1000 years later, perhaps
just under a 1000 years later, in Moorish
Spain, at least one scholar I think it was
Ibn Rushd recognize that the work of Aristotle
was that of a great philosopher translated
it into Latin because very few people at that
time had classical Greek and return made the
work therefore available in Europe where the
literal people had Latin a similar project
was undertaken by a Persian philosopher I
think it was Ibn Sina I cannot remember which
was version which was which was moreish.
But they both in effect returned the work
to it’s to its cultural home.
But they recognize the great philosopher where
they saw one and this is, there's nothing
unusual about this works have been.
It is not just works but cultures, food habits,
trading food, trading textiles, has continued
as far as we know as long as humans have existed
and therefore the very idea of cultures as
walled off as self and closed cells of some
kind is ultimately the incoherent and untenable.
But what does that require of us?
It does mean that we have to engage with the
substance of cultures we encounter and for
liberal political philosophy for liberal ideology,
that does mean having to find a response to
cultures and practices where the fundamental
precepts of liberalism are violated.
This is not straightforward and in practice,
liberal democracies have usually made it clear
that existing rights must not be infringed
by cultural practices of any kind.
It does not matter whose culture they are,
they must not be infringed.
This issue has arisen, as a result, I will
just give you an example of a lecture given
to senior lawyers, barristers, courtroom lawyers
in England by the then archbishop of Canterbury,
Rowan Williams, now Dr. Williams pointed out
that if I am not mistaken, he pointed out
that the Jewish domestic tribunal the family
tribunal has long had legal recognition in,
in the United Kingdom and Dr. Williams expected
that Sharia law or aspects of Sharia law would
be formally recognized before too long.
Now, inevitably, the press I would say badly
misreported Dr. Williams and grossly exaggerated
the likely consequences of what he would said.
What the press coverage seemed not to say
at the time, was that Sharia law was already
a perfectly good and valid procedure for the
settlement of certain kinds of family disputes
and had already been in use for quite a long
time.
It was perfectly consistent in these uses
with existing English law.
Right and by implication, Scotts law as well
by implication, but the point is that existing
rights in English law or Scotts law were not
to be not to be violated.
Now that is one kind of liberal response liberalism
can accommodate.
It has to accommodate plurality and diversity,
but it cannot accept the violation of fundamental
liberal principles.
We shall see an example of that as we proceed.
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