Europe needs not so much new state policies as a renewal of civil society

An excellent essay, The Failure of Multiculturalism by Kenan Malik.

He points out that statist efforts at both codifying multiculturalism in the form of plural cultures within one polity AND statist efforts to enforce assimilation have both failed in Europe. He uses Britain, France and Germany as his principle examples.

There has also been a guiding assumption throughout Europe that immigration and integration must be managed through state policies and institutions. Yet real integration, whether of immigrants or of indigenous groups, is rarely brought about by the actions of the state; it is shaped primarily by civil society, by the individual bonds that people form with one another, and by the organizations they establish to further their shared political and social interests. It is the erosion of such bonds and institutions that has proved so problematic – that links assimilationist policy failures to multicultural ones and that explains why social disengagement is a feature not simply of immigrant communities but of the wider society, too. To repair the damage that disengagement has done, and to revive a progressive universalism, Europe needs not so much new state policies as a renewal of civil society.

Malik's overarching conclusions are:

Multiculturalism and assimilationism are different policy responses to the same problem: the fracturing of society. And yet both have had the effect of making things worse. It is time, then, to move beyond the increasingly sterile debate between the two approaches. And that requires making three kinds of distinctions.

First, Europe should separate diversity as a lived experience from multiculturalism as a political process. The experience of living in a society made diverse by mass immigration should be welcomed. Attempts to institutionalize such diversity through the formal recognition of cultural differences should be resisted.

Second, Europe should distinguish colorblindness from blindness to racism. The assimilationist resolve to treat everyone equally as citizens, rather than as bearers of specific racial or cultural histories, is valuable. But that does not mean that the state should ignore discrimination against particular groups. Citizenship has no meaning if different classes of citizens are treated differently, whether because of multi- cultural policies or because of racism.

Finally, Europe should differentiate between peoples and values. Multiculturalists argue that societal diversity erodes the possibility of common values. Similarly, assimilationists suggest that such values are possible only within a more culturally – and, for some, ethnically – homogeneous society. Both regard minority communities as homogeneous wholes, attached to a particular set of cultural traits, faiths, beliefs, and values, rather than as constituent parts of a modern democracy.

It is interesting his focus on renewing civil society.

Here in the US we have many of the same issues of societal fracturing but they are magnified out of proportion by the tendency of the academy and the clerisy, having sipped at the European cup of multiculturalism, postmodernism, and moral relativism, to see everything through the lenses of race and gender (but not, oddly enough, through class which is really the greater issue).

In other words, our clerisy want to see more of a race issue and gender issue than actually exists in the experience of the greater part of the population. The academy has become a distorting bubble that misunderstands how people outside the academy live. And while there is a tendency in the academy to look down on the benighted heathen out there, the response of the non-academy is, in some ways even worse. When they don't ignore the clerisy, they laugh at them. Concerns about patriarchy and cisgenderism and authenticity and appropriation and microaggressions and triggers and identity and unconscious bias, etc. are all treated as irrelevant or as a source for a laugh.