Multiculturalism in Canada, the UK, and France - Case Study Example

Multiculturalism in Canada, the UK, and France: A Comparative Glance It is quite remarkable, given human history, that many Western countries today have as their established policy one of respecting group rights and group identities as expressed by individuals. Very often human communities have sought to root out differences, especially those which they feared or did not understand. Multiculturalism has posited the right of people to be outwardly "different." The discourse of multiculturalism is one which has posited a stratified division of cultural space. Traditionally academics approached the concept of a nation, in the spirit of Romanticism, as a unified cultural, political, and social space. As a part of the onset of postmodern thought, that objective, 'grand' narrative was rehashed. The sociologist Peter Berger, in his work on the sociology of knowledge, formulated a conception of the nation as an overlapping conglomeration of subjective perceptions, confined to a specific space. Only a small part of the totality of human experiences is retained in consciousness. The experiences that are so retained become sedimented, that is, they congeal in recollection as recognizable and memorable entities. Unless such sedimentation took place the individual could not make sense of his biography. Intersubjective sedimentation also takes place when several individuals share a common biography, experiences of which become incorporated in a common stock of knowledge. (Berger 1966, p. 66) This intersubjective sedimentation has, in differing degrees, been adopted by many of the world's liberal regimes as official policy. And yet this has not been achieved without certain noticeable problems. Liberalism has ever sought to rationalise a given political space so that it may have a set of contiguous sign systems and a well-defined sense of national identity. Individual rights could be protected if all agreed to adhere to one political and cultural ethos. The emergence of 'group-differentiated rights' brought with it a major challenge to traditional liberalism. Multiculturalist critics of liberalism have condemned difference-blind liberal laws as generally insufficient for addressing contemporary questions of [social] justice...[and offered] a challenge to laws [for] the general public [which entails] a conflict between liberalism and the demand for group-differentiated rights. (Akan 2003, p. 57) As such multiculturalism has asserted the need to allow for a pluralistic and (inter)subjective division of cultural space. In the cases of Canada, the UK, and France, to varying degrees and in different ways, there exists a scaled polarity between the rationalising, conformist tendencies of liberalism and the nebulous, dissociating effects of multiculturalism. It is a question of analysing how and to what extent. Canada has had an historical experience in which the aforementioned polarity has found a unique and profound voice. Canada has ever been 'a nation of immigrants'. It has one of the highest percentages of immigrants to native-born in the world. '[F]rom its birth as a self-governing nation in 1867 Canada was a multicultural mixture of British and French settlers and the indigenous people they called Indians' (One 2006). This historical experience largely founded on pluralism made Canada well-suited to develop an official policy mandating multiculturalism as the law of the land. Multiculturalism, as it is now known and referenced, is recognized as having been born in Canada. In 1971 Pierre Trudeau, a Liberal prime minister, declared Canada bilingual and multicultural. The Multiculturalism Act of 1988 replaced the previous policy of assimilation with one of acceptance of diversity. Multiculturalism has since sunk deep roots in government, reflected in everything from broadcasting to education policy. It has itself become a basic Canadian value. Polls show that a majority support continued immigration and do not want it limited to whites. Almost half believe that immigrants should be free to maintain their cultural and religious practices. (One 2006) Thus Canada has a long historical tradition and now official government policy of recognising and protecting minority rights and communities. It has as its dogma that cultural and political space be intersedimented and intersubjective. No one group can rightfully claim to be 'Canadian'. At the same time Canada was founded, in the tradition of the English-speaking world, as a liberal regime. Liberalism always sought to maintain a diversity of opinion but also a conformity of habit and manner. Liberalism holds its most basic unit as being the individual. This individual is sovereign and entitled to protection from interference. The advantages of Canadian multiculturalism have been that it has effectively transcended the putatively known differences between liberalism and formal multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, in theory, holds as its most basic unit the group, of which the individual is a member. In Canada, where one could draw upon the long tradition of French and English coexistence, multiculturalism has been effective because the individual has been able to preserve his/her rights and express those rights through the matrix of a group of his/her choosing. Canada stands as a fusion of the two poles and can thus more accurately be labelled as maintaining a 'multicultural liberalism'. Individuals and groups together form an intersedimentation of differing expressions and meanings. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988 sought to embed this mantra into the country's collective conscience. A liberal state set as its rationalizing policy a discourse of plurality in hopes of bringing about the uniformity sought after by traditional liberalism. In France the historical experience, being different, has produced an entirely different outcome. Modern France was born in the chaos of the French Revolution. The country has since had a distinct and proud sense of self. If a nation is in fact a construct, France is the rule that de-emphasizes any possible exception. Republican France was founded on an ethic of secularism. The state has always played a central role in the promulgation of this ethic, known as 'laicit''. As such official policy there has stressed the development and inculcation of a specifically French identity and a distinct sense of 'Frenchness'. France's secularism is rooted in the original political distinction there as having been between secular republicanism and religious monarchism. Culturally then space was all 'French', but religiously it was deeply divided. The defining historical point, and one which would have profound effects later on any attempt to implement multiculturalism, originates in the 1901 Law on Associations and the 1905 Law on the Separation of Churches and the State. As a consequence of these two laws 'a religiously neutralized public space came into being, for the purpose of governing a religiously (and ideologically) divided population (Saunders 2008, p. 151). These two laws sought to create a space devoid of any religious identity. This fit well into France's liberalism which sought to promote a universalized conception of the individual as being endowed with a specific 'Frenchness'. An overriding feature of this 'Frenchness' was the absence and sometimes even the denial of any sort of religiosity, particularly by politicians but also in public places paid for with government-funding. For more than 130 years, governments nurtured an idea of Frenchness. All children learned the basics of French history, tradition, and reverence for the secular state through a famously centralized school system. The brightest went on to the universities, which produced first-rate civil servants who promoted the secular state in the next generation. The broad-based crafted a system of social benefits that cemented popular support. (Rossant 2004, p. 57) Schools have thus been the most obvious place to establish a religious-free space by virtue both of their being state-funded and of their unique ability to mould the young into French men and women. This well-pronounced sense of state-backed national identity, founded in a liberal age and by an ostensibly liberal regime, has encountered problems of late. France, like much of the West, has in the last several decades also incorporated the ethic of multiculturalism into its own national rhetoric and state policy. It has laws protecting minorities and other which ban hate speech. In contrast to Canada where liberalism developed concurrently with multiculturalism, in France's case the latter came much later than the former. With the relatively novel phenomenon of immigration to France of non-European peoples (principally those from the Maghreb), multiculturalism has come into conflict with liberalism. The political and cultural monolith so much a feature of its liberal regime has not easily coped with the arrival of so many people who have wanted to come to France to live and work but who have decided that they want to maintain a heightened degree of their original cultural identity, instead of assimilating outright as traditional immigrants have done. As well many North African immigrant youths, alienated by the main political parties' hesitance to reach out to them, '[have] often figure[d] they've nothing to lose if they join extremist movements' (Rossant 2004). The row there over the banning of headscarves was a case in point. Liberalism demanded a secular atmosphere in the schools while multiculturalism mandated that Muslim students should be able to wear head scarves. There has yet been no solution found to satisfy all parties. France has thus not been able to weave the ideas of multiculturalism efficaciously into its traditional liberal fabric. There subjective (individual) and objective (state) sedimentation has not easily overlapped, instead choosing to simply lie side by side. The United Kingdom, compared to France and Canada, could be said to reside somewhere closer to multiculturalism than France but, interestingly, also maintaining well its liberal traditions. One main difference has ever been the fact that the United Kingdom itself, given Berger's ideas, stands as a multicultural construct. One must be careful not to apply a modern understanding of 'multiculturalism' which would distort British history. Britain in some ways anticipated 20th century multiculturalism through its various political unifications of the Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and English peoples (for practical reasons the methods of those unifications, while often brutal and violent, will not be here discussed). Each cultural subset of the crown, admittedly in differing degrees, received official recognition. As such space was defined generally as British but was also officially recognized to have 'sub-spaces', particularly in the case of Scotland and Wales. By peacefully integrating in the United Kingdom, a political union based upon someone cultural diversity was founded. All the while the UK was the birthplace of modern parliamentary government and counts among its own most of the great and influential liberal thinkers from Locke to Mill. The precedent, prior to the 20th century, was such that particular minorities received official sanction not in their capacity as minorities per se but rather in their capacity as Welshmen or Scotsmen. This greatly affected the way that multiculturalism was implemented in the 20th century. The UK policy has been one of extending official recognition to minority groups: 'Welsh, Scottish, Hindu, Caribbean, Muslim' (Alibhai-Brown 2000, p.2). The idea was to maintain the liberal ethic by firmly establishing minority identities as part of a 'British whole'. Ironically British multicultural policy has sought to assimilate these groups by promoting their individual cultural traditions and ethnic contiguity. One drawback often attributed to British multiculturalism has been its tendency to approach the issue of minorities and their overall cohesion with British society as a 'problem.' [Y]oung black or Asian males [are constructed] as 'others' or 'outsiders' [which] create[s] a view of them as criminal and disrespectful citizens. Therefore, the debate is moving towards a discussions of how to integrate these youths into mainstream society and encourage them to accept their responsibilities as active citizens' (France 2007, p. 306). British multiculturalism, as a state policy, developed after there was recognition of this 'problem', and thus suffered from the stigma of being 'too little, too late'. This should not overly distort things, for '[f]ew would deny there has been progress on race relations in recent years...' (Alibhai-Brown 2000). Britain, unlike France where the state promotes an all-encompassing monolithic identity and Canada where the state actively fosters minority expression and even funds minority-language television (and thus space), stands somewhere in between these two. Its status as a founding liberal regime has compelled it to maintain a veneer of assimilation while its history of multiculturalism has led to official state recognition of groups but only once those groups had challenged the overriding sense 'of Britishness and its values' (France 2007, p. 306). All three countries have adopted multiculturalism and have each had their respective failures and successes. In Canada, the poster-child for multiculturalism, there has of late been a notable upswing in xenophobia and anti-immigrant feelings as expressed by the public in polls. Particularly there has been a growing mistrust of non-Christian religions. Whereas '72% said they have a generally favourable opinion of Christianity', Islam received only 28%, Sikhism 30%, Hinduism 41%, Buddhism 57%, and Judaism 53% (Geddes 2009, p. 21). This has turned out to be one of the main challenges which multiculturalism now faces. Similar feelings have been found to also exist in the UK and France. Multiculturalism, though perhaps always controversial, created less acrimony when there were fewer immigrants. Today in each of these three countries, the foreign-born segment of the population is the highest it has ever been and has consequently stirred up these heightened feelings of xenophobia and renewed questioning of the efficacy of multiculturalism. These challenges can surely be met by each country provided leaders can articulate a clear policy and foster an atmosphere built upon commonality and respect. Each country could learn from the others' examples. A enhanced cultural intersedimentation can be formed which continues to value diversity but which also promises a state and country to which all 'sediments' can relate and adhere. Each country can find strength in its respective history and continue to promote the multicultural ethic. Given past human tyranny and oppression, it is an historically unprecedented point of encouragement that today several countries in the West have sought to buck the trend of history and allow and even promote people to 'be themselves' instead pushing them to be unconditionally 'British', 'French', or 'Canadian'. It is a social experiment with some risks but whose rewards will surely prove to have been well worth the effort. Works Cited Akan, Murat. "Contextualizing Multiculturalism." Studies in Comparative International Development 38:2 (2003): 57-76. Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin. "Why Multiculturalism has failed." Daily Telegraph 23 May 2000: 2. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge, New York: Random House Inc., 1966. France, Alan. "Youth Culture and Citizenship in Multicultural Britain." Journal of Contemporary European Studies 15:3 (2007): 303-316. Geddes, John. "What Canadians Think of Sikhs, Jews, Christians, and Muslims." Maclean's 122:16 (2009): 20-24. "One Nation or Many'." Economist 18 November 2006: 39-40. Rossant, John. "Is France's Center Coming Unglued." BusinessWeek 23 February 2004: 57. Saunders, David. "Anticommunautarisme and the government of religious difference." Economy & Society 37:2 (2008): 151-171. Read More