The London Bombings on July 7th 2005 provided another opportunity for its opponents to attack multiculturalism. The British National Party issued thousands of anti-Muslim leaflets with a graphic illustration of the devastated No. 30 bus. According to the BNP, multiculturalism was to blame. In the opinion of Melanie Phillips (Daily Mail, July 14th 2005), the bombings arose from the ‘disastrous doctrine of multiculturalism’ because it ‘… refused to teach Muslims… the core of British culture and values. Instead, it has promoted a lethally divisive culture of separateness…’ William Pfaff writing in the Observer (August 21st 2005), argued that ‘… these British bombers are a consequence of a misguided and catastrophic pursuit of multiculturalism’.
Perhaps more surprisingly, this explanation was endorsed by the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), Trevor Phillips. He warned that Britain is ‘sleepwalking into separatism’. Again the culprit was multiculturalism. Unlike his namesake in the Daily Mail, Trevor Phillips provided a well-informed, nuanced and evidence-based analysis of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, he not only agreed that the London bombings were the result of multicultural separateness, he also seemed to agree that the remedy is monocultural Britishness. In what follows I want to critically assess these interrelated claims, beginning with the claim that multiculturalism promotes rather than impedes separatism.
The first problem one encounters when discussing multiculturalism is the lack of agreement on its meaning. On the one hand, the term refers to the situation in which nation-states contain a number of ethnic identities. To this end, multiculturalism highlights a range of ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic and national differences (over economic, sexual, gendered and political ones). On the other hand, multiculturalism refers to set of policies which regard ‘cultural’ diversity in a positive rather than negative light. As a set of policies multiculturalism emerged in Britain from post-war debates over ‘non-white’ immigration. The trajectory of these debates went from ‘keep Britain white’ through ‘assimilation’ and ‘integration’ to multiculturalism. According to Trevor Phillips this trajectory has overshot, taking us away from integration in the direction of separatism.
But is it fair to identify multiculturalism with separatism? If so, this would make Northern Ireland a multicultural society. Here we find just the kind of separate schools, separate housing, separate religions, separate loyalties, etc., to which multiculturalism is putatively taking us. Yet few regard Northern Ireland as a beacon of multiculturalism. For this reason, Phillips does not criticise multiculturalism as such, but reserves criticism for an ‘anything goes’ multiculturalism of his own defining. This allows him to attack multiculturalism without having to address what most people think it is. But even this straw man is hard pressed to explain the July 7th bombings.
According to Melanie Phillips, the bombers were British born, played cricket, helped disabled children and murdered their fellow citizens without anyone in the Muslim or wider community having the slightest suspicion of what they were planning. Similarly, Trevor Phillips notes that the people who planted the bombs ‘stood alone, without the comfort of any community that would support their actions’. But is this evidence that multicultural separatism caused the bombings? If multiculturalism promotes separatism and separatism accounts for the July 7th bombings, then the bombers should have received community support for their actions. The community in question would be so alien in its cultural separateness from the norms and values of British society that murdering and maiming innocent Londoners would appear legitimate. But this is not the case. No family member, no member of the local community, no Muslim representative regarded these actions as legitimate. Compare that to Northern Ireland where the IRA had hundreds of members, thousands of active supporters and tens of thousands of passive supporters for whom bombing campaigns were a legitimate war tactic.
Neither can the IRA’s preparedness to murder indiscriminately be explained in terms of cultural separatism. Separatism may create feelings of alienation but the IRA grew out of years of social oppression coupled with systematic cultural, economic, political and legal discrimination. This still does not justify their murderous tactics, but it does put into perspective the view that multiculturalism can explain why people turn to such tactics. This suggests it takes a lot more than cultural separatism to explain the indiscriminate bombing of innocent civilians, some of whom were themselves Muslim. So where does this leave the prescribed remedy of monocultural Britishness? Few would suggest that the solution to Republican violence in Northern Ireland is a stronger dose of British Loyalism. On the contrary, this is likely to be counterproductive. What, then, of countering the putative dangers of multicultural separatism with monocultural Britishness?
It is worth remembering that multiculturalism emerged from the failures of monocultural Britishness, not least its tendency to institutionalise rather than challenge racism. According to the report On the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain for the Runnymede Trust, Britishness has ‘racial’ connotations (Parekh 2000). In the popular press this was reported as Britishness is ‘racist’. The subsequent backlash then drowned out the report’s constructive engagement with Britishness – which was no doubt the intention. Multiculturalism was developed precisely to combat the narrow terms of integration offered by a Britishness that refused to confront racism, especially institutional racism. To this end, it sought to enhance mutual understanding between, across and within cultures. And in many ways it has been a successful policy. Within a short space of time it not only became normal for people to describe Britain as a ‘multicultural society’, it was also something they took pride in.
Far from ‘sleepwalking into segregation’ as Trevor Phillips claims, indicators of segregation fell between 1991 and 2001 for all ethnic minority groups identified by the National Census. And they fell fastest for people of black and 'other Asian' origin to which Phillips refers, according to Professor Danny Dorling writing in the Observer (September 25th 2005). Given the lack of empirical support for Phillips’ claims of separatism, Lee Jaspers sees something more at stake here (Guardian, October 12th 2005), namely an attempt to blame multiculturalism for the problems of racism.
Attempting to return to a policy of integration on the basis of monocultural Britishness not only fails to tackle racism, it also obscures the lack of agreement over what Britishness means. This raises the spectre of imposing a notion of Britishness that millions of British people do not themselves subscribe to or identify with. Thus, in the preface to the Runnymede Trust Report (2000) Bhikhu Parekh observed that ‘the term “integration”… implies a one-way process in which “minorities” are to be absorbed into the non-existent homogeneous cultural structure of the “‘majority”.’
The exercise may even prove counterproductive, given that by imposing a disputed account of Britishness, you are likely to create the very separatism which you are attempting to overcome. Who can forget David Blunkett’s crass suggestion that Asian people should not speak their own languages at home because it promotes ‘schizophrenia’? This not only comprises the worst kind of cultural intolerance it also arises from an erroneous analysis of the problem (in this case the BNP-provoked ‘riots’ in Bradford).
Blunkett appeared to argue that the cause of the disturbance was the lack of integration by Asians into British life, rather than the violent attempts by British Nazis to exclude them. Despite paying lip service to questions of social exclusion, whenever something goes wrong the tendency is to blame the excluded for living separate lives. But the problem of monocultural Britishness goes deeper than this insofar as it comprises two (mutually inconsistent) elements: one particular and substantive, the other universal and procedural.
The particular and substantive sense of Britishness relates to a specific culture, set of institutions, and national history, at the heart of which lies the Empire. This is summed up by Patrick West in his Civitas pamphlet The Poverty of Multiculturalism. ‘By Britishness’, writes West, ‘I mean the understanding that this nation is underpinned by its imperial Protestant past…’ (2004: 69). From this perspective, Britishness is grounded in a benign even laudatory account of imperialism. Gordon Brown makes a similar linkage, declaring ‘the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over. We should talk… about British values… tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world.’ This confirms the Runnymede report’s identification of Britishness with a sense of racial superiority, to which many in Britain (and not just ethnic minorities) do not subscribe.
But maybe this is unfair. Perhaps we can talk about Britishness in the particular and substantive sense without whitewashing Britain’s imperial past. This is certainly the view of Trevor Phillips. To this end, his particular and substantive version of monocultural Britishness evokes the novels of Dickens and the plays of Shakespeare. But is the teaching of such British (English?) novelists and playwrights likely to enhance integration amongst Britain’s Black and Asian youth, or further alienate them from a culture in which they cannot find themselves represented? In the wake of the July 7th bombings Phillips added to his definition of Britishness so as to include ‘our common language, our good manners, our care for children’. But what is Phillips saying here? That ethnic minorities do not have good manners and do not care for their children, unlike British people who are world-renowned for both? If one is defining Britishness in a particular and substantive sense, then why cherry pick the bits of which you approve? What about binge drinking, road rage and football hooliganism? If integration is the primary aim then should not ethnic minorities also be encouraged to adopt our less savoury ways, less they stand out from the rest of us?
As the above examples demonstrate, the list of more particular and substantive characteristics begins to migrate towards more universal and procedural ones. To this end, Phillips adds to his list of Britishness ‘… an attachment to democracy, freedom of speech, and equality’. Similarly, Gordon Brown refers to ‘a commitment to liberty for all, responsibility by all and fairness to all’. The problem with such definitions of Britishness is that there is nothing specifically British about them. These values are shared by all modern liberal democracies. In which case, it is rather partisan of Brown to view them as specifically British contributions to world history. One could argue that France, for example, has a far stronger claim in this regard. But the point is that these are not narrow, nationalistic ideals. On the contrary, they are universal values – which challenge nationalism at its parochial core.
This suggests that rather than pursuing social integration on the basis of monocultural Britishness, we should pursue social inclusion on the basis of modern liberal notions of social justice. At its best multiculturalism aims to balance competing claims to cultural difference with modern values of freedom, consent and equality. In which case, multiculturalism does not mean ‘anything goes’ as Trevor Phillips argues. Instead it comprises a pragmatic approach to diversity which aims to reconcile the latter with a modern sense of human rights. This specifically rules out cultural practices such as female genital mutilation, child exorcisms and forced marriages. Not because they are incompatible with Britishness but because they are incompatible with a modern sense of human rights. By the same token, but more controversially, multiculturalism also calls into question long established British institutions such as the monarchy, the House of Lords and the established Church insofar as they also diverge from modern principles of democracy, freedom and equality.
However, multiculturalism cannot resolve all the conflicts that arise between ethnic groups, because they are not all ethnic conflicts. The July 7th bombings fall into this category, despite protestations to the contrary by multiculturalism’s detractors. The intolerant version of ‘Islamism’ to which the bombers subscribed is shaped not by antagonism towards Western or modern values so much as antagonism to the West’s policies, and in particular the policies of the USA and Britain towards Muslims in the Middle East. Although the USA and Britain cloak their action in high-sounding moral rhetoric, most of the world (including many in the USA and Britain), believe their governments’ actions are motivated by narrow strategic interests. In light of the disastrous war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the flattening of Fallujah, support for Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, etc, the West appears at best hypocritical and at worst a primary source of global injustice. The danger is that American and British foreign policy will bring the values of western modernity into disrepute, thereby undermining the possibility of resolving these issues in a just fashion.
This suggests we need to stop thinking of multiculturalism in narrow, nationalistic terms, as a specific response to a particular country’s internal diversity. And start thinking of it more in global terms, as setting the normative framework though which different cultures, with different histories and different values accommodate one another in a just fashion. In this respect, multiculturalism goes hand in hand with globalisation and the modern modalities of diversity that it is creating. As the row over the cartoons of Mohammed demonstrates, multiculturalism today has a global dimension.
It might be argued that this is beyond the capacity of multiculturalism to deliver, hence a shift in the discourse towards cosmopolitanism. Perhaps cosmopolitanism is better equipped than multiculturalism to combine the local and the global, in order to interrogate, articulate and incorporate questions of global justice. But if that is the case, then the failure of multiculturalism resides not in its promotion of separatism over integration, but in its inability to do justice to the full panoply of global diversity.
Bob Cannon lectures at the University of East London
© 2004·06
After this point – which may be crossed when there are ‘too many of them’, or when ‘those that are here’ are apparently doing things that ‘we’ disapprove of – it is assumed to be OK for tolerant newspapers to be intolerant
Welcome to this issue
Contents of this issue
Editor’s letter
Academic
Debate
Entertainment
Essays
Journalism
Feedback
Britishness, multiculturalism and globalisation
Consumption, the City and social practice
White flight, black attitude
How the ‘War on Terror’ helps terrorism
Religiosity and the politics of identity
Tolerance with conditions
Shooting the Brazilian
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