What is multiculturalism?
The term multiculturalism has gained wide currency in both academic and popular
debate, and its employment is not restricted to political theory or political science:
there are multicultural perspectives not only in other social sciences, but also in the
humanities, and even in the natural sciences. For this reason it is important to
demarcate the debate in political theory, and this requires making some distinctions:
(a) Multiculturalism as an attitude Although it is more usual to describe a person
as cosmopolitan than multicultural, the two can be taken as synonyms, which
define either a positive and open attitude to different cultures or, at least, respect
for people, where such respect means recognising their rights to make choices
about how they live their lives.
(b) Multiculturalism as a tool of public policy If you conduct an online search of
university library holdings using the word ‘multiculturalism’ most items will be
concerned with education policy, followed by other areas of public policy such
as health and social services. Multicultural education policy is concerned with
school organisation and curriculum; health and social policy focuses particularly
on social inclusion and identifying the special needs of particular cultural groups.
(c) Multiculturalism as an aspect of institutional design Whereas policy questions
assume the existence of a particular set of political institutions, the question
here is what kind of institutions we should have. Examples of institutional design
that make explicit the concern with cultural diversity include the power-sharing
Assembly and Executive created in Northern Ireland as a result of the 1998
Belfast Agreement, and the constitutional arrangements for Bosnia-Herzegovina
which resulted from the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords.
(d) Multiculturalism and moral justification Institutions are important, but political
theory is not concerned merely with what political institutions should exist, but
with how they are justified. It is possible for institutions to be respected for bad
reasons, so ‘justificatory multiculturalism’ is concerned with reasons that all
reasonable people can accept. What constitutes reasonableness is, of course,
central to the debate. For the most part we will be concerned with this dimension
of multiculturalism.Culture, race, ethnicity and religion
Culture
A difficulty that characterises the multiculturalism debate is the failure to explain
what is meant by culture. Will Kymlicka, for example, in the opening lines of his
book Multicultural Citizenship(1995), makes the following claim:
Most countries are culturally diverse. According to recent estimates, the world’s
184 independent states contain over 600 living language groups, and 5,000 ethnic
groups. In very few countries can the citizens be said to share the same language,
or belong to the same ethnonational group.
(Kymlicka, 1995: 1)Chapter 15 Multiculturalism 337