Community Cohesion

Describing the Concept

Like other multicultural metaphors (such as melting pot, mosaic, and cultural bridge), community cohesion carries a message about solidarity, social equality, and connectedness to which many people can respond positively. It implies that all communities should look for a unifying common purpose and commitment and that the broader society should stick together rather than fragment in a way that privileges some over others. The new discourse of community cohesion lacks the accrued baggage of disagreements that surrounds terms like antiracism and multicultur-alism, and this has provided the government with the opportunity to relaunch a debate about issues such as shared values, integration, race relations, equality, inclusion, interdependence, participation, and minority rights in a way that is closer to communitarian values and third-way politics.

What has emerged from this ongoing debate on community cohesion is a soft line and a harder line on interethnic relations. The soft line stresses the importance of inclusivity and the positive valuing of diversity in the broader community, so that all groups feel equally at home in it and none feel excluded or disconnected. Adherents believe that people are able to relate to each other in an atmosphere of mutual trust despite possible disagreements and differences, because they understand what ties them together as members of that broader community and feel they have a stake in that community as full citizens and a shared commitment to its well-being. They recognize that this loyalty may make demands on them in return for the privileges it grants. Undergirding the soft line is the sense that people have similar opportunities irrespective of their backgrounds, and community institutions like schools and social services nurture positive relationships between people from different backgrounds.

The harder line involves the belief that cohesion cannot be achieved without a common vision, a common language, a common commitment to national institutions, a higher level of social control, and a substantial set of shared values. In this view, the solution to the suspicions and misunderstandings experienced [Page 325]by some ethnic minority groups lies with those groups themselves. Hard-liners believe they must avoid self-segregation, dissociate themselves from intolerance and extremism, and conform more fully to the values of the broader society.

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