I find the ideas behind multiculturalism the ideology and multiculturalism
the analytical idea deeply confusing and problematic. What I'm going to try
to suggest to you is that if we think about it historically, we can work out
what these ideas have come to mean, and why they seem confused today, and
we'll be able to understand better some of the problems of this argument.
But on the other hand, while this discourse is confusing and complicated,
I think that it rests on top of a very very simple idea, a very simple and
very old idea, which is - let's pull no punches - racism. In my view, the
whole ideology of multiculturalism is a modern translation of a very classic
European ideology of racism. Now where does this idea of multiculturalism
fit in in Europe?
In the United States, it has rather a different history. European societies
experienced a large immigration from non-European countries in the generation
since 1950. People began to think about a new kind of society and new kinds
of social problems which were beginning to emerge. The idea was that the country,
the city of London, was being confronted for the first time with a new kind
of challenge, which was the emergence of different racial groups in society.
A new kind of society was arising, a multi-racial society. How should politicians
deal with this? How should human beings deal with this? What was the future?
Was the future, as Enoch Powell said, rivers of blood?
Later, this same model of society was translated into a new idiom, and we
began to talk about a society in which there were different cultures. The
word culture is used in a very similar way. I mean, I'm quite struck by the
way that young people today say: 'What culture do you come from?' And, when
you think about it, this is very much the same sort of notion of identity.
The same question is asked about how to deal with a society which is made
up of people from different cultural blocs: can they live together, can they
understand each other?
Now the simplicity of the thing is that we have this politically correct notion
of culture replacing the politically incorrect notion of race without, however,
greatly changing the arguments. Part of the reason that this is possible conceptually
is that the idea of a culture is a very very difficult, complex, muddled idea.
In fact, in the European tradition, there are three very different notions
embodied in this word culture.
The first is Matthew Arnold: 'the best that has been thought and said'. This
is culture as represented in the ministries of culture in different European
countries, responsible for the ballet or the language, for museums of folklore
and so on: that's one notion of culture.
A second notion of culture emerged in the 1870s, just after Matthew Arnold
had published Culture and Anarchy. This said that no, no culture
is not the possession of a small elite. Culture is something human, which
distinguishes humans from all other animals. What was the cause of the difference?
Remember Darwin's Descent of Man had appeared in 1871, raising this
question of what makes human beings different from animals; the answer came
that what makes human beings different is the capacity to transmit knowledge,
to transmit understanding of the world, not by biology, not through instinct
- or, as we would see it, not through genes - but through learning. So culture
is the cumulative learnt heritage of human beings. So that's the second notion
of culture that comes in.
There's a third notion, which was developed in the Germanic countries, which
comes into French and English later, which is that culture - a cultural group
and a culture - is associated with a language, and it defines a nation. It
is the heritage not of all humanity, but of a particular national group and
ethnic group, and that because this group has its own culture, it should also
have its own political identity, it should also be a political nation. It
emerges in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it emerges in central Europe, where
you have all sorts of groups of different languages being ruled by French
speaking courts of German princes.
So we have these three very different notions. Now the idea which has come
into our contemporary discourse about multiculturalism, is this notion that
you have a collectivity, a community of some kind - what in the 19th century
would have been called a race or a nation, ideas which would have been assumed
to be very very similar - which has certain characteristics which make it
unique and special; ideally its own language, its own religion, but also its
own ideas about sex, about marriage, about sport, about leisure, about morality,
all of which are very distinctive to it. Now if you adopt this idea, you have
to ask yourself what collectivity owns the culture. If I say there are three
or four different cultures represented in this room, I'm assuming there's
a collective group of people who own this culture and who are at once defined
by the culture and whose own lives are shaped by this culture. What are these
groups? Are they nations? Are they races? And I suggest to you that in contemporary
Europe, the notion is taken for granted, that these groups are defined by
common biological descent. You inherit a culture. This means that once you
use this notion of culture to think about groups of people, it is going to
be used in a very broad brush way.
So people in England, people in London, talk about African culture, or they
talk about Indian culture, but they don't ask whether the people involved
are Hindus or Muslims, whether they are Punjabi speakers or Hindi speakers,
whether their parents came from a small rural village or whether they came
from the middle of Calcutta, whether they are English-speaking and university
educated or not; there's the assumption that all those difference are comparatively
superficial as opposed to this essence, this inborn essence, this shaping
essence. So that is the idea. I'm not saying that it's an idea that a sophisticated
audience like this would have but it's the idea that is out there in the community
and the country, this a framework people use to shape their ideas. This is
an idea that is shared by both racists and anti-racists.
There was very interesting debate, about 10 of 15 years ago, about adoption.
Should white couples be allowed to adopt black babies? An argument was made
by minority group activists saying no, they should not be allowed, because
they would not be able to nourish the culture of the black children. So the
idea is that race implies a culture, there's absolute identity: culture is
not something that you learn in this kind of model, culture is something that
you are born with, and if you're not taught your own proper culture, you're
somehow robbed of a kind of identity which is a birth identity, which is an
inherited identity, which is a genetically determinable, racially determined
identity of some kind.
Now it's quite clear I think - I hope - that these ideas, this way of thinking
can only nourish illiberal policies which will feed fears of difference, which
will stereotype people by their appearance, and which will label groups of
people with all sorts of classic, stereotyped notions that were in the 19th
century associated with race. I just want to end with an example that I find
deeply shocking, which is right out these in the society in London at the
moment, and which I find doubly shocking because it has hardly met with any
opposition. And this is Scotland Yard's contemporary probe into what is called
'the torso in the Thames'. Are you all familiar with this story? The idea
is that this black child of five years old is picked up, a headless torso
in the Thames. Detective sergeant from Scotland Yard gets into his head that
this is a South African medicine murder. He travels to South Africa where
he finds an ex-apartheid so-called racial scientist, who says, 'Yes, that's
quite true, there's a lot of it about, very likely that this is indeed this
kind of witchcraft murder.' Several months later, nothing further is heard
on this front, the detective sergeant pops up again saying we were wrong in
saying it was a South African medicine murder. No, it is a Yoruba voodoo murder.
The reason they thought of this was that some policemen walking along the
Thames came across a Yoruba ritual which was a celebration of the fact that
a child that had been travelling from the United States had escaped the 11th
of September bombing. They said well, of course once we'd investigated this
we found out that there was nothing sinister going on. But it shows that these
kinds of rituals are about. This is, ladies and gentleman, a classic blood
libel. This is a classic libel associated with a minority group by the authorities
of a country, which reflects the collective fears and hatreds which feed on
stereotyped group differences and the notion of unification. Why has nobody
stood up in the press to denounce this? Why has it seemed plausible to the
journalists and intellectuals who write about this? I have here an article
from The Observer, which carries a series of 19th century stereotypes
at which Kipling would have blushed. And it ends with a statement that Scotland
Yard believe the death of this child may be linked with an extreme element
of the Yoruba people, a tribe with voodoo-like rituals. Is this how we think
about life in London today? Is this the discourse which we're entering into?
It is. And by talking multiculturalism we will only feed this discourse. What
we must do is break down this kind of stereotyped thinking, this attribution
of group identities. Break down this easy association of culture and race.
It's is a long job because it is very deep out these in the society. But I
commend it to you.
I would like to thank the Institute Francais and the Institute of Ideas for
extending an invitation to me. I would like to apologise for the poor quality
of my English, I'm supposed to be French speaking. So far as multiculturalism
is concerned, I think that in a way it is a fact in modern societies. Even
in France where there is long tradition of the Jacobin state and centralisation,
we are in a multicultural society, compared to fifteen, twenty years ago even.
We have many groups coming into the open, calling into question what might
be termed the universalistic view of culture, society and politics.
I think that in many respects, French, English, German and other societies
are looking towards a culture based tolerance. Multiculturalism can be understood
as a kind of zolen, as the Germans would say. That means that you
have to accede to some sort of respect towards the other sub-cultures, and
try to have a sort of tolerance towards each other. Of course the dilemmas
of this idea have already been developed by the two preceding speakers and
I think that this is a notion which is full of ambiguity. That's perhaps why
in some Continental countries, Latin countries, some people question multiculturalism
as a word, as a notion, and as a concept. Some think it is too much of an
Australian, Canadian, English speaking Canadian and perhaps Anglo-Saxon ideology,
so sometimes they prefer metisaje, or metisage in French. The French anthropologist
Kozinsky, for instance, or sociologists in the École des Hautes Etudes
like Viavoqua, Turen and the others would have preferred a more neutral word
for it, although the content would be very similar to multiculturalism and
its ambiguities.
Anyhow, if you take some Continental countries like France, one can at least
speak of monoculturalism, that is what I try and defend in an article. That
means if you think that there is one dominant culture which excludes the others
to the private sphere, and that this dominant culture is based on some sort
of dichotomising idea of the private and the public within it, there is some
sort of ideology which excludes other sub-cultures in the name of universalism.
I think even in France nowadays, we are living the end of monoculturalism,
the basic idea was in France that there was an opposition between the Republicans
and the Catholics in the 19th and early part of the 20th century, and between
the bourgeois and the working class people. All those dichotomies are being
put into question nowadays in French society as well as other parts of Europe,
and the crisis of the left in many European countries feeds in a way the multicultural
ideologies within these societies, because multiculturalism - and this has
been mentioned by other speakers - is very difficult to be put into practice
within a just society. That means sometimes it becomes a kind of justification
for social inequality, by putting forward a the idea that subcultures or cultures
have to be respected as such, so the idea of tolerance might be a kind of
tool to cover up the idea of social justice within societies. That's perhaps
one of the reasons why many people, many intellectuals that have some sort
of leftist leaning, have difficulties with this idea.
Another point I would like to raise is an empirical study I made with an English
institution in Warwick on Muslim detainees, Muslim prisoners in France and
in England. The result was somehow disturbing because many of those people
whom we spoke to within the prisons had a kind of multicultural life-world;
among those who were radicalised, many of them spoke between three and six
languages, so in a way they shared the multicultural world of ours. I would
say, though I cannot give you a detailed description of this because of lack
of time, that the fact of participation in a multicultural world does not
mean respect of all of them. If we describe phenomenologically the life-world
of these people we see multiculturalism might end up in a contradictory way,
in a paradoxical way, into a kind of loneliness, solitude, paranoid attitudes,
and some kind of antagonistic and radicalised attitude towards the others.
This is because multiculturalism leaves many spaces, in a kind of vacuum.
If you live within many cultures, of course there are many positive aspects
and I don't want to reject that, and in a way it can enrich our lives, but
the reverse side of it, the dark side of it, is that sometimes this vacuum
between cultures might end up in the relativisation of all cultures and all
norms, and that might end up in a kind of radicalisation and ideologisation
of one de-culturalised utopia, which might be very dangerous.
I think that some of those Islamic radicals that I interviewed in the French
prisons were in that situation; they were factually, as a matter of fact,
living in a multicultural world. They spoke many languages, they had lived
many years in foreign countries - England, Germany, United States, Holland,
Australia and so on. But this reverse side of multiculturalism means that
being between many cultures means participating in none of them, and I think
there is something of the dark side of multiculturalism in that respect. I
would just like to say that muticulturalism is not something always brilliant
and good; there are other sides of it which have to be taken into account.
I just want to speak from a cultural aspect, I mean that's what I do in the
world, I'm a writer and also a critic of culture. I'm not intellectual or
anything so I won't talk from that end but I would just like to add to what
was said. My brother's [Farhad Khosrokhavar's] idea here of metisage I think
that is exactly what we need to be speaking about now. My film company is
called Emerald City and the first initial of it has an F in it and the F is
for our partner Fred Fortasse, who is a Franco-Algerian actor, based in Paris,
he speaks about five languages. He isn't here today because he's in Rammadan,
but he sends his greetings. Fred came here and worked with us, at a little
theatre called the Alcoa Theatre, which is located in London, run by a young
Turkish director, in a Turkish community. The play was called Jitterbug,
and it had on stage Jewish, African-Caribbean, African-American, Muslim, Christian,
White and Black actors in a common story about humanity, and that's what the
theatre company is about. The G is for myself, African-American, naturalised
British citizen, and the H is for my husband, David Hutchins who is indigenous
English, and his family's probably been here for a long time, and we work
together to make art about Europeans of non-Western European, non-Christian
ancestry.
Just two quick things: what is multiculturalism? First it is a political term,
and it's probably not a very good political term at all. In fact I think it's
probably very old fashioned. My particular interest would naturally be in
people of African decent, and multiculturalism - well, from my experience
of living here and teaching here in Britain, and being in France for the past
17 years, multiculturalism doesn't begin to describe a young black man growing
up in Brixton right now. Multiculturalism does not describe a young person
in the banlieu Saint-Denis. They are way beyond that, and I think
we need to start to look at the way people actually live.
Secondly, I think if we use the word multiculturalism or metisage, I think
it is a point of view, it is a fluid point of view, and it must include, within
its definitions, the reality of this new Europe. This is very important especially
coming from a country like America - and this is the thing about America,
it is deeply and profoundly racist. The difference is that America's base
is fluid. France and Britain do not have fluid bases but they are beginning
to be impacted upon by the new Europeans. I would say that these new Europeans,
they are here, we are all here and we'll make an alternative to the threat
of globalisation - i.e. Americanisation - which is new Europe's biggest threat.
And by taking in and embracing the new Europe, we will begin to have, as the
French would say, a defense, another way of being in this world. So for me,
the 'metisagation' is the most important thing. I would urge us to start thinking,
not so much of including cultures into anything, but to look at the way things
really are, and to proceed from there, because the Europe of the year 2025,
as we all know, is going to be a very different place than it is today.