by DILEK KARAL
Europe’s multicultural societies are posing a major test for the continent, and there is nothing novel about the issue question being posed so starkly. In 2010, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, made a speech to the Christian Democrat Union (CDU) in which she remarked that multiculturalism had collapsed, and gave the signal for harsher measures against immigrants. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has adopted a style similar to Merkel’s, emphasizing that the government’s multicultural policies pursued over many years have now collapsed and that “now is the time to be firmly attached to British identity.” These events have all put the debate about multiculturalism firmly back on the agenda.
Rethinking Multiculturalism
Bhikhu Parekh, a social scientist who was Chairman of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain from 1998 to 2000, defines a multicultural society as one which contains two or more cultural communities simultaneously. This definition suggests that a society may either tolerate cultural diversity and reinforce this with social policies and so develop a multicultural structure, or it may prefer to assimilate different cultures within an oppressive culture. So the expression multicultural points to the fact that a society has a culture which harbours cultural diversity and ‘multiculturalism’ expresses the standard reaction to this fact. According to Parekh, neither Britain where cultural monism was dominant, nor France where human rights are limited by strong traditions of citizenship, is multicultural. Consequently, it might be more appropriate to speak, not of the bankruptcy of multiculturalism in Europe in particular, but of the abandonment of an ideal that has never been attained.
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