Traditionally sociologists have thought about the consequences of ethnic
diversity in one of two ways. The conflict model claims that the more that
diverse groups interact, the more social tension there will be. The contact
model, on the other hand, suggests that the more that different groups interact,
the less they will fear each other. Unsurprisingly the first model is favoured
by conservatives to justify restrictions on immigration, while liberals often
call on the second in arguing for multicultural education.
New research from the American sociologist Robert Putnam suggests that both
models are wrong. Putnam's data, published in the journal Scandinavian
Political Studies, shows that greater diversity creates neither conflict
nor cooperation but anomie. Putnam and his colleagues interviewed 30,000 people
in 41 communities across America. The more diverse a community, the less socially
engaged were its members - they voted less, did less community work, gave
less to charity, and had fewer friends.
Most strikingly, people in more diverse society people are more distrustful
not just of members of other ethnic groups but of their own, too. 'It's not
just that we don't trust people who are not like us', Putnam says. 'In diverse
communities, we don't trust people who do look like us.'
One of the most influential social scientists in the world, Putnam has the
ear of politicians as widely different as Bill Clinton, George Bush, Gordon
Brown and even Muammar Gaddaffi. He worries that his new research will undermine
his liberal message about immigration and multiculturalism. Putnam actually
conducted the research in 2000, but has only just published the results because
of its potentially explosive political message.
The implications of the data are, however, far from straightforward. The real
problem with the study, as Putnam himself has pointed out, is that it offers
only a snapshot of attitudes at one moment in time. Diversity, though, is
not static phenomena. The character of diversity changes over time, as does
our political response to it.
A broader view of diversity helps puncture the myth that contemporary Western
societies are particularly diverse. 'When I was a child', the Ghanaian born
American philosopher Kwame Appiah recalls, 'we lived in a household where
you could hear at least three mother tongues spoken each day. Ghana, with
a population close to that of New York State, has several dozen languages
in active use and no one language that is spoken at home - or even fluently
understood - by a majority of the population.' So why is it, he asks,
that in America 'which seems so much less diverse than most other societies
are we so preoccupied with diversity and inclined to conceive of it as cultural?'
The diversity of American society is small in comparison, not just to most
third world countries, but also to its past. The proportion of foreign-born
Americans is far less than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Intermarriage between immigrant groups continues to increase. More than 97
per cent of Americans speak English.
A century ago new immigrants did not simply speak their own language, they
also read their own newspapers, ate their own food and lived their own lives.
In 1923, for instance, the Polish community alone published 67 weekly newspapers,
and 19 dailies, the largest of which had a circulation of more than a hundred
thousand. Today, not just language, but the shopping mall, the sports field,
the Hollywood film and the TV sitcom all serve to bind differences and create
a set of experiences and cultural practices that is more common than at any
time in the past.
The European experience reveals another problem with the current debate on
diversity - our tendency to equate diversity simply with the presence of peoples
from the third world. That just reflects our current obsessions with race
and culture. In the past, diversity was often seen in economic or social terms.
The indigenous working class and rural poor were as alien to the nineteenth
century political elite as third world immigrants often seem today. How come,
the Christian socialist Phillipe Buchez asked in 1857, that the French countryside
was full of 'races so miserable, inferior and bastardised that they may be
classed below the most inferior savage races'? An article in Saturday
Review, an English liberal magazine, described the poor of East London
as 'a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion
from ours, persons with whom we have no point of contact'. What we now see
as homogenous societies were felt then as deeply diverse.
There is nothing new in plural societies. What is different today is the perception
of greater diversity and the sense that such diversity is a problem because
social differences cannot or should not be overcome. Or to put it another
way, the real problem is not diversity or immigration but the political context
in which we think about such issues - in particular, the loss of belief in
the possibility of universal values and of a common culture. This inevitably
leads to civic disengagement and a sense of anomie - and is why greater diversity
leads to greater distrust of everyone, whatever their ethnic or cultural background.
Both sides in the diversity debate pigeonhole people into distinct ethnic
and cultural compartments and assume little possibility of creating commonalities.
Multiculturalists argue that the presence in a society of diversity of peoples
precludes the possibility of common values. Nativists suggest that such values
are possible only within an ethnically homogenous society. Both, in other
words, confuse the diversity of peoples and the diversity of values. And both
are wrong. There is no reason why different peoples should not accept common
values - so long as we stop subscribing to the absurd notion that cultural
distinctions cannot, or should not, be overcome. The real problem is not immigration
or diversity as lived experience. It is the political process that transforms
diversity into division and disengagement.