FABRIZIO BENSCH / COURTESY REUTERS

COMMENT March/April 2015 Issue

The Failure of Multiculturalism

Community Versus Society in Europe

By Kenan Malik

2487 47

T
hirty years ago, many Europeans saw multiculturalismthe embrace of an
inclusive, diverse societyas an answer to Europes social problems. Today, a
growing number consider it to be a cause of them. That perception has led
some mainstream politicians, including British Prime Minister David Cameron and
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to publicly denounce multiculturalism and speak
out against its dangers. It has fueled the success of far-right parties and populist
politicians across Europe, from the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands to the
National Front in France. And in the most extreme cases, it has inspired obscene acts
of violence, such as Anders Behring Breiviks homicidal rampage on the Norwegian
island of Utoya in July 2011.

How did this transformation come about? According to multiculturalisms critics,

Europe has allowed excessive immigration without demanding enough integrationa
mismatch that has eroded social cohesion, undermined national identities, and
degraded public trust. Multiculturalisms proponents, on the other hand, counter that
the problem is not too much diversity but too much racism.

But the truth about multiculturalism is far more complex than either side will allow,
and the debate about it has often devolved into sophistry. Multiculturalism has become
a proxy for other social and political issues: immigration, identity, political
disenchantment, working-class decline. Dierent countries, moreover, have followed
distinct paths. The United Kingdom has sought to give various ethnic communities an
equal stake in the political system. Germany has encouraged immigrants to pursue
separate lives in lieu of granting them citizenship. And France has rejected
multicultural policies in favor of assimilationist ones. The specic outcomes have also
varied: in the United Kingdom, there has been communal violence; in Germany,
Turkish communities have drifted further from mainstream society; and in France, the
relationship between the authorities and North African communities has become
highly charged. But everywhere, the overarching consequences have been the same:
fragmented societies, alienated minorities, and resentful citizenries.

As a political tool, multiculturalism has functioned as not merely a response to

diversity but also a means of constraining it. And that insight reveals a paradox.
Multicultural policies accept as a given that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly
assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. They seek to
institutionalize diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxesinto a
singular, homogeneous Muslim community, for exampleand dening their needs and
rights accordingly. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions
they were meant to manage.

THE DIVERSITY MYTH

Untangling the many strands of the multiculturalism debate requires understanding

the concept itself. The term multicultural has come to dene both a society that is
particularly diverse, usually as a result of immigration, and the policies necessary to
manage such a society. It thus embodies both a description of society and a
prescription for dealing with it. Conating the twoperceived problem with supposed
solutionhas tightened the knot at the heart of the debate. Unpicking that knot
requires a careful evaluation of each.

Both proponents and critics of multiculturalism broadly accept the premise that mass
immigration has transformed European societies by making them more diverse. To a
certain extent, this seems self-evidently true. Today, Germany is the worlds second
most popular immigrant destination, after the United States. In 2013, more than ten
million people, or just over 12 percent of the population, were born abroad. In Austria,
that gure was 16 percent; in Sweden, 15 percent; and in France and the United
Kingdom, around 12 percent. From a historical perspective, however, the claim that
these countries are more plural than ever is not as straightforward as it may seem.
Nineteenth-century European societies may look homogeneous from the vantage point
of today, but that is not how those societies saw themselves then.

Consider France. In the years of the French Revolution, for instance, only half the
population spoke French and only around 12 percent spoke it correctly. As the
historian Eugen Weber showed, modernizing and unifying France in the revolutions
aftermath required a traumatic and lengthy process of cultural, educational, political,
and economic self-colonization. That eort created the modern French state and gave
birth to notions of French (and European) superiority over non-European cultures.
But it also reinforced a sense of how socially and culturally disparate most of the
population still was. In an address to the Medico-Psychological Society of Paris in
1857, the Christian socialist Philippe Buchez wondered how it could happen that
within a population such as ours, races may formnot merely one, but several races
so miserable, inferior and bastardised that they may be classed as below the most
inferior savage races, for their inferiority is sometimes beyond cure. The races that
caused Buchez such anxiety were not immigrants from Africa or Asia but the rural
poor in France.

In the Victorian era, many Britons, too, viewed the urban working class and the rural
poor as the other. A vignette of working-class life in East Londons Bethnal Green,
appearing in an 1864 edition of The Saturday Review, a well-read liberal magazine of
the era, was typical of Victorian middle-class attitudes. The Bethnal Green poor, the
story explained, were a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are
of quite dierent complexion from ours, persons with whom we have no point of
contact. Much the same was true, the article suggested, of the great mass of the
agricultural poor. Although the distinctions between slaves and masters were
considered more glaring than those separating the moneyed and the poor, they
oered a very fair parallel; indeed, the dierences were so profound that they
prevented anything like association or companionship.

Today, Bethnal Green represents the heart of the Bangladeshi community in East
London. Many white Britons see its inhabitants as the new Bethnal Green poor,
culturally and racially distinct from themselves. Yet only those on the political fringes
would compare the dierences between white Britons and their Bangladeshi neighbors
with those of masters and slaves. The social and cultural dierences between a
Victorian gentleman or factory owner, on the one hand, and a farm hand or a
machinist, on the other, were in reality much greater than those between a white
resident and a resident of Bangladeshi origin are today. However much they may view
each other as dierent, a 16-year-old of Bangladeshi origin living in Bethnal Green and
a white 16-year-old probably wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, and
follow the same soccer club. The shopping mall, the sports eld, and the Internet bind
them together, creating a set of experiences and cultural practices more common than
any others in the past.

A similar historical amnesia plagues discussions surrounding immigration. Many

critics of multiculturalism suggest that immigration to Europe today is unlike that seen
in previous times. In his book Reections on the Revolution in Europe, the journalist
Christopher Caldwell suggests that prior to World War II, immigrants to European
countries came almost exclusively from the continent and therefore assimilated easily.
Using the word immigration to describe intra-European movements, Caldwell argues,
makes only slightly more sense than describing a New Yorker as an immigrant to
California. According to Caldwell, prewar immigration between European nations
diered from postwar immigration from outside Europe because immigration from
neighboring countries does not provoke the most worrisome immigration questions,
such as How well will they t in? Is assimilation what they want? and, most of all,
Where are their true loyalties?

Yet these very questions greeted European immigrants in the prewar years. As the
scholar Max Silverman has written, the notion that France assimilated immigrants
from elsewhere in Europe with ease before World War II is a retrospective illusion.
And much the same is true of the United Kingdom. In 1903, witnesses to the Royal
Commission on Alien Immigration expressed fears that newcomers to the United
Kingdom would be inclined to live according to their traditions, usages and customs.
There were also concerns, as the newspaper editor J. L. Silver put it, that the
debilitated sickly and vicious products of Europe could be grafted onto the English
stock. The countrys rst immigration law, the 1905 Aliens Act, was designed
principally to stem the ow of European Jews. Without such a law, then Prime
Minister Arthur Balfour argued at the time, British nationality would not be the same
and would not be the nationality we should desire to be our heirs through the ages yet
to come. The echoes of contemporary anxieties are unmistakable.

RACE TO THE TOP

Whether contemporary Europe really is more plural than it was in the nineteenth
century remains subject to debate, but the fact that Europeans perceive it to be more
diverse is unquestionable. This owes in large part to changes in how people dene
social dierences. A century and a half ago, class was a far more important frame for
understanding social interactions. However dicult it is to conceive of now, many at
the time saw racial distinctions in terms of dierences not in skin color but in class or
social standing. Most nineteenth-century thinkers were concerned not with the
strangers who crossed their countries borders but with those who inhabited the dark
spaces within them.

One of the most prevalent myths in European politics is that governments

adopted multicultural policies because minorities wanted to assert their
dierences.

Over the past few decades, however, class has diminished in importance in Europe,
both as a political category and as a marker of social identity. At the same time, culture
has become an increasingly central medium through which people perceive social
dierences. The shift reects broader trends. The ideological divides that characterized
politics for much of the past 200 years have receded, and the old distinctions between
left and right have become less meaningful. As the working classes have lost economic
and political power, labor organizations and collectivistic ideologies have declined. The
market, meanwhile, has expanded into almost every nook and cranny of social life. And
institutions that traditionally brought disparate individuals together, from trade unions
to the church, have faded from public life.

As a result, Europeans have begun to see themselves and their social aliations in a
dierent way. Increasingly, they dene social solidarity not in political terms but rather
in terms of ethnicity, culture, or faith. And they are concerned less with determining
the kind of society they want to create than with dening the community to which
they belong. These two matters are, of course, intimately related, and any sense of
social identity must take both into account. But as the ideological spectrum has
narrowed and as the mechanisms for change have eroded, the politics of ideology have
given way to the politics of identity. It is against this background that Europeans have
come to view their homelands as particularly, even impossibly, diverseand have
formulated ways of responding.

UNDER MY UMBRELLA

In describing contemporary European societies as exceptionally diverse,

multiculturalism is clearly awed. What, then, of multiculturalisms prescription for
managing that supposed diversity? Over the past three decades, many European
nations have adopted multicultural policies, but they have done so in distinct ways.
Comparing just two of these histories, that of the United Kingdom and that of
Germany, and understanding what they have in common, reveals much about
multiculturalism itself.

One of the most prevalent myths in European politics is that governments adopted
multicultural policies because minorities wanted to assert their dierences. Although
questions about cultural assimilation have certainly engrossed political elites, they have
not, until relatively recently, preoccupied immigrants themselves. When large numbers
of immigrants from the Caribbean, India, and Pakistan arrived in the United Kingdom
during the late 1940s and 1950s to ll labor shortages, British ocials feared that they
might undermine the countrys sense of identity. As a government report warned in
1953, A large coloured community as a noticeable feature of our social life would
weaken . . . the concept of England or Britain to which people of British stock
throughout the Commonwealth are attached.

The immigrants brought with them traditions and mores from their homelands, of
which they were often very proud. But they were rarely preoccupied with preserving
their cultural dierences, nor did they generally consider culture to be a political issue.
What troubled them was not a desire to be treated dierently but the fact that they
were treated dierently. Racism and inequality, not religion and ethnicity, constituted
their key concerns. In the following decades, a new generation of black and Asian
activists, forming groups such as the Asian Youth Movements and the Race Today
Collective, acted on those grievances, organizing strikes and protests challenging
workplace discrimination, deportations, and police brutality. These eorts came to
explosive climax in a series of riots that tore through the United Kingdoms inner cities
in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

At that point, British authorities recognized that unless minority communities were
given a political stake in the system, tensions would continue to threaten urban
stability. It was in this context that multicultural policies emerged. The state, at both
the national and the local level, pioneered a new strategy of drawing black and Asian
communities into the mainstream political process by designating specic
organizations or community leaders to represent their interests. At its heart, the
approach redened the concepts of racism and equality. Racism now meant not simply
the denial of equal rights but also the denial of the right to be dierent. And equality
no longer entailed possessing rights that transcended race, ethnicity, culture, and faith;
it meant asserting dierent rights because of them.

Consider the case of Birmingham, the United Kingdoms second most populous city. In
1985, the citys Handsworth area was engulfed by riots sparked by a simmering
resentment of poverty, joblessness, and, in particular, police harassment. Two people
died and dozens were injured in the violence. In the aftermath of the unrest, the city
council attempted to engage minorities by creating nine so-called umbrella groups
organizations that were supposed to advocate for their members on matters of city
policy. These committees decided on the needs of each community, how and to whom
resources should be disbursed, and how political power should be distributed. They
eectively became surrogate voices for ethnically dened efdoms.

The city council had hoped to draw minorities into the democratic process, but the
groups struggled to dene their individual and collective mandates. Some of them,
such as the African and Caribbean Peoples Movement, represented an ethnic group,
whereas others, such as the Council of Black-Led Churches, were also religious.
Diversity among the groups was matched by diversity within them; not all the people
supposedly represented by the Bangladeshi Islamic Projects Consultative Committee,
for example, were equally devout. Yet the city councils plan eectively assigned every
member of a minority to a discrete community, dened each groups needs as a whole,
and set the various organizations in competition with one another for city resources.
And anyone who fell outside these dened communities was eectively excluded from
the multicultural process altogether.

The problem with Birminghams policies, observed Joy Warmington, director of what
was then the Birmingham Race Action Partnership (now BRAP), a charitable
organization working to reduce inequality, in 2005, is that they have tended to
emphasize ethnicity as a key to entitlement. Its become accepted as good practice to
allocate resources on ethnic or faith lines. So rather than thinking of meeting peoples
needs or about distributing resources equitably, organizations are forced to think about
the distribution of ethnicity. The consequences were catastrophic. In October 2005,
two decades after the original Handsworth riots, violence broke out in the neighboring
area of Lozells. In 1985, Asian, black, and white demonstrators had taken to the streets
together to protest poverty, unemployment, and police harassment. In 2005, the
ghting was between blacks and Asians. The spark had been a rumor, never
substantiated, that a group of Asian men had raped a Jamaican girl. The ghting lasted
a full weekend.

Why did two communities that had fought side by side in 1985 ght against each other
in 2005? The answer lies largely in Birminghams multicultural policies. As one
academic study of Birminghams policies observed, The model of engagement through
Umbrella Groups tended to result in competition between BME [black and minority
ethnic] communities for resources. Rather than prioritizing needs and cross-
community working, the dierent Umbrella Groups generally attempted to maximize
their own interests.

The councils policies, in other words, not only bound people more closely to particular
identities but also led them to fear and resent other groups as competitors for power
and inuence. An individuals identity had to be armed as distinctive from the
identities of those from other groups: being Bangladeshi in Birmingham also meant
being not Irish, not Sikh, and not African Caribbean. The consequence was the
creation of what the economist Amartya Sen has termed plural monoculturalisma
policy driven by the myth that society is made up of distinct, uniform cultures that
dance around one another. The result in Birmingham was to entrench divisions
between black and Asian communities to such an extent that those divisions broke out
into communal violence.

SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL

 Instead of welcoming immigrants as equals, German politicians dealt with
the so-called Turkish problem through a policy of multiculturalism.

Germanys road to multiculturalism was dierent from the United Kingdoms,

although the starting point was the same. Like many countries in western Europe,
Germany faced an immense labor shortage in the years following World War II and
actively recruited foreign workers. Unlike in the United Kingdom, the new workers
came not from former colonies but from the countries around the Mediterranean: rst
from Greece, Italy, and Spain, and then from Turkey. They also came not as
immigrants, still less as potential citizens, but as so-called Gastarbeiter (guest
workers), who were expected to return to their countries of origin when the German
economy no longer required their services.

Over time, however, these guests, the vast majority of them Turks, went from being a
temporary necessity to a permanent presence. This was partly because Germany
continued to rely on their labor and partly because the immigrants, and more so their
children, came to see Germany as their home. But the German state continued to treat
them as outsiders and refuse them citizenship.

German citizenship was, until recently, based on the principle of jus sanguinis, by which
one can acquire citizenship only if ones parents were citizens. The principle excluded
from citizenship not just rst-generation immigrants but also their German-born
children. In 1999, a new nationality law made it easier for immigrants to acquire
citizenship. Yet most Turks remain outsiders. Out of the three million people of
Turkish origin in Germany today, only some 800,000 have managed to acquire
citizenship.

Instead of welcoming immigrants as equals, German politicians dealt with the so-
called Turkish problem through a policy of multiculturalism. Beginning in the 1980s,
the government encouraged Turkish immigrants to preserve their own culture,
language, and lifestyle. The policy did not represent a respect for diversity so much as
a convenient means of avoiding the issue of how to create a common, inclusive culture.
And its main consequence was the emergence of parallel communities.

First-generation immigrants were broadly secular, and those who were religious were
rarely hard-line in their beliefs and practices. Today, almost one-third of adult Turks in
Germany regularly attend mosque, a higher rate than among other Turkish
communities in western Europe and even in many parts of Turkey. Similarly, rst-
generation Turkish women almost never wore headscarves; now many of their
daughters do. Without any incentive to participate in the national community, many
Turks dont bother learning German.

At the same time that Germanys multicultural policies have encouraged Turks to
approach German society with indierence, they have led Germans to view Turkish
culture with increasing antagonism. Popular notions of what it means to be German
have come to be dened partly in opposition to the perceived values and beliefs of the
excluded immigrant community. A 2011 survey conducted by the French polling rm
Ifop showed that 40 percent of Germans considered the presence of Islamic
communities a threat to their national identity. Another poll, conducted by
Germanys Bielefeld University in 2005, suggested that three out of four Germans
believed that Muslim culture did not t into the Western world. Anti-Muslim groups,
such as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA, are on
the rise, and anti-immigration protests held in cities across the country this past
January were some of the largest in recent memory. Many German politicians,
including Merkel, have taken a strong stance against the anti-Muslim movement. But
the damage has already been done.

SUBCONTRACTING POLICY

In both the United Kingdom and Germany, governments failed to recognize the
complexity, elasticity, and sheer contrariness of identity. Personal identities emerge out
of relationshipsnot merely personal ties but social ones, tooand constantly mutate.

Group identities are not natural categories; they arise out of social
interaction.

Take Muslim identity. Today there is much talk in European countries of a so-called
Muslim communityof its views, its needs, its aspirations. But the concept is entirely
new. Until the late 1980s, few Muslim immigrants to Europe thought of themselves as
belonging to any such thing. That wasnt because they were few in number. In France,
Germany, and the United Kingdom, for example, there were already large and well-
established South Asian, North African, and Turkish immigrant communities by the
1980s.

The rst generation of North African immigrants to France was broadly secular, as was
the rst generation of Turkish immigrants to Germany. By contrast, the rst wave of
South Asian immigrants to arrive in the United Kingdom after World War II was more
religious. Yet even they thought of themselves not as Muslims rst but as Punjabis or
Bengalis or Sylhetis. Although pious, they wore their faith lightly. Many men drank
alcohol. Few women wore a hijab, let alone a burqa or a niqab (a full-faced veil). Most
attended mosque only occasionally. Islam was not, in their eyes, an all-encompassing
philosophy. Their faith dened their relationship with God, not a sacrosanct public
identity.

Members of the second generation of Britons with Muslim backgrounds were even less
likely to identify with their religion. The same went for those whose parents were
Hindu or Sikh. Religious organizations were barely visible within minority
communities. The organizations that bound immigrants together were primarily
secular and often political; in the United Kingdom, for example, such groups included
the Asian Youth Movements, which fought racism, and the Indian Workers
Association, which focused on labor rights.

Only in the late 1980s did the question of cultural dierences become important. A
generation that, ironically, is far more integrated and westernized than the rst turned
out to be the more insistent on maintaining its alleged distinctiveness. The reasons for
this shift are complex. Partly they lie in a tangled web of larger social, political, and
economic changes over the past half century, such as the collapse of the left and the
rise of identity politics. Partly they lie in international developments, such as the
Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, both of which
played an important role in fostering a more heightened sense of Muslim identity in
Europe. And partly they lie in European multicultural policies.

Group identities are not natural categories; they arise out of social interaction. But as
cultural categories received ocial sanction, certain identities came to seem xed. In
channeling nancial resources and political power through ethnically based
organizations, governments provided a form of authenticity to certain ethnic identities
and denied it to others.

Multicultural policies seek to build a bridge between the state and minority
communities by looking to particular community organizations and leaders to act as
intermediaries. Rather than appeal to Muslims and other minorities as citizens,
politicians tend to assume minorities true loyalty is to their faith or ethnic community.
In eect, governments subcontract their political responsibilities out to minority
leaders.

Such leaders are, however, rarely representative of their communities. That shouldnt
be a surprise: no single group or set of leaders could represent a single white
community. Some white Europeans are conservative, many are liberal, and still others
are communist or neofascist. And most whites would not see their interests as
specically white. A white Christian probably has more in common with a black
Christian than with a white atheist; a white socialist would likely think more like a
Bangladeshi socialist than like a white conservative; and so on. Muslims and Sikhs and
African Caribbeans are no dierent; herein rests the fundamental aw of
multiculturalism.

ASSIMILATE NOW

Frances policy of assimilationism is generally regarded as the polar opposite of

multiculturalism, which French politicians have proudly rejected. Unlike the rest of
Europe, they insist, France treats every individual as a citizen rather than as a member
of a particular racial, ethnic, or cultural group. In reality, however, France is as socially
divided as Germany or the United Kingdom, and in a strikingly similar way.

Questions surrounding French social policy, and the countrys social divisions, came
sharply into focus in Paris this past January, when Islamist gunmen shot 12 people
dead at the oces of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and four Jews in a kosher
supermarket. French politicians had long held multicultural policies responsible for
nurturing homegrown jihadists in the United Kingdom. Now they had to answer for
why such terrorists had been nurtured in assimilationist France, too.

It is often claimed that there are some ve million Muslims in Francesupposedly the
largest Muslim community in western Europe. In fact, those of North African origin
in France, who have been lumped into this group, have never constituted a single
community, still less a religious one. Immigrants from North Africa have been broadly
secular and indeed often hostile to religion. A 2006 report by the Pew Research Center
showed that 42 percent of Muslims in France identied themselves as French citizens
rstmore than in Germany, Spain, or the United Kingdom. A growing number have,
in recent years, become attracted to Islam. But even today, according to a 2011 study by
Ifop, only 40 percent identify themselves as observant Muslims, and only 25 percent
attend Friday prayers.

Those of North African origin in France are also often described as immigrants. In
fact, the majority are second-generation French citizens, born in France and as French
as any voter for the National Front. The use of the terms Muslim and immigrant as
labels for French citizens of North African origin is not, however, accidental. It is part
of the process whereby the state casts such citizens as the otheras not really part of
the French nation.

As in the United Kingdom, in France, the rst generation of postWorld War II

immigrants faced considerable racism, and the second generation was far less willing to
accept social discrimination, unemployment, and police brutality. They organized,
largely through secular organizations, and took to the streets, often in violent protest.
The riots that swept through French cities in the fall of 2005 exposed the fractures in
French society as clearly as had those that engulfed British cities two decades earlier.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, the French authorities took a relatively laid-back
stance on multiculturalism, generally tolerating cultural and religious dierences at a
time when few within minority communities expressed their identities in cultural or
religious terms. French President Franois Mitterrand even coined the slogan le droit
la dirence (the right to dierence). As tensions within North African communities
became more open and as the National Front emerged as a political force, Paris
abandoned that approach for a more hard-line position. The riots in 2005, and the
disaection they expressed, were presented less as a response to racism than as an
expression of Islams growing threat to France. In principle, the French authorities
rejected the multicultural approach of the United Kingdom. In practice, however, they
treated North African immigrants and their descendents in a multicultural wayas a
single community, primarily a Muslim one. Concerns about Islam came to reect
larger anxieties about the crisis of values and identity that now beset France.

A much-discussed 2013 poll conducted by the French research group Ipsos and the
Centre de Recherches Politiques, or CEVIPOF, at the Institut dtudes Politiques de
Paris (known as Sciences Po) found that 50 percent of the French population believed
that the economic and cultural decline of their country was inevitable. Fewer than
one-third thought that French democracy worked well, and 62 percent considered
most politicians to be corrupt. The pollsters report described a fractured France,
divided along tribal lines, alienated from mainstream politics, distrustful of national
leaders, and resentful of Muslims. The main sentiment driving French society, the
report concluded, was fear.

In the United Kingdom, multicultural policies were at once an acknowledgment of a

more fractured society and the source of one. In France, assimilationist policies have,
paradoxically, had the same result. Faced with a distrustful and disengaged public,
politicians have attempted to reassert a common French identity. But unable to dene
clearly the ideas and values that characterize the country, they have done so primarily
by sowing hostility toward symbols of aliennessby banning the burqa, for example, in
2010.

Instead of accepting North Africans as full citizens, French policy has tended to ignore
the racism and discrimination they have faced. Many in France view its citizens of
North African origin not as French but as Arab or Muslim. But second-generation
North Africans are often as estranged from their parents culture and moresand from
mainstream Islamas they are from wider French society. They are caught not
between two cultures, as it is often claimed, but without one. As a consequence, some
of them have turned to Islamism, and a few have expressed their inchoate rage through
jihadist violence.

At the same time, French assimilationist policies have exacerbated the sense of
disengagement felt by traditional working-class communities. The social geographer
Christophe Guilluy has coined the phrase the peripheral France to describe those
people pushed out by the deindustrialization and gentrication of the urban centers,
who live away from the economic and decision-making centers, in a state of social
non-integration, and have thus come to feel excluded. The peripheral France has
emerged mainly as a result of economic and political developments. But like many
parts of the countrys North African communities, it has come to see its
marginalization through the lens of cultural and ethnic identity. According to the 2013
Ipsos-CEVIPOF poll, seven out of ten people thought there were too many
foreigners in France, and 74 percent considered Islam to be incompatible with French
society. Presenting Islam as a threat to French values has not only strengthened
cultures political role but also sharpened popular disenchantment with mainstream
politics.

In the past, disaection, whether within North African or white working-class

communities, would have led to direct political action. Today, however, both groups are
expressing their grievances through identity politics. In their own ways, racist
populism and radical Islamism are each expressions of a similar kind of social
disengagement in an era of identity politics.

ANOTHER WAY

Multiculturalism and assimilationism are dierent policy responses to the same

problem: the fracturing of society. And yet both have had the eect of making things
worse. Its time, then, to move beyond the increasingly sterile debate between the two
approaches. And that requires making three kinds of distinctions.

First, Europe should separate diversity as a lived experience from multiculturalism as a

political process. The experience of living in a society made diverse by mass
immigration should be welcomed. Attempts to institutionalize such diversity through
the formal recognition of cultural dierences should be resisted.

Second, Europe should distinguish colorblindness from blindness to racism. The

assimilationist resolve to treat everyone equally as citizens, rather than as bearers of
specic racial or cultural histories, is valuable. But that does not mean that the state
should ignore discrimination against particular groups. Citizenship has no meaning if
dierent classes of citizens are treated dierently, whether because of multicultural
policies or because of racism.

Finally, Europe should dierentiate between peoples and values. Multiculturalists

argue that societal diversity erodes the possibility of common values. Similarly,
assimilationists suggest that such values are possible only within a more culturally
and, for some, ethnicallyhomogeneous society. Both regard minority communities as
homogeneous wholes, attached to a particular set of cultural traits, faiths, beliefs, and
values, rather than as constituent parts of a modern democracy.
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The real debate should be not between multiculturalism and assimilationism but
between two forms of the former and two forms of the latter. An ideal policy would
marry multiculturalisms embrace of actual diversity, rather than its tendency to
institutionalize dierences, and assimilationisms resolve to treat everyone as citizens,
rather than its tendency to construct a national identity by characterizing certain
groups as alien to the nation. In practice, European countries have done the opposite.
They have enacted either multicultural policies that place communities in constricting
boxes or assimilationist ones that distance minorities from the mainstream.

Moving forward, Europe must rediscover a progressive sense of universal values,

something that the continents liberals have largely abandoned, albeit in dierent ways.
On the one hand, there is a section of the left that has combined relativism and
multiculturalism, arguing that the very notion of universal values is in some sense
racist. On the other, there are those, exemplied by such French assimilationists as the
philosopher Bernard-Henri Lvy, who insist on upholding traditional Enlightenment
values but who do so in a tribal fashion that presumes a clash of civilizations.

There has also been a guiding assumption throughout Europe that immigration and
integration must be managed through state policies and institutions. Yet real
integration, whether of immigrants or of indigenous groups, is rarely brought about by
the actions of the state; it is shaped primarily by civil society, by the individual bonds
that people form with one another, and by the organizations they establish to further
their shared political and social interests. It is the erosion of such bonds and
institutions that has proved so problematicthat links assimilationist policy failures to
multicultural ones and that explains why social disengagement is a feature not simply
of immigrant communities but of the wider society, too. To repair the damage that
disengagement has done, and to revive a progressive universalism, Europe needs not so
much new state policies as a renewal of civil society.

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