Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism as a concept, principle, and policy has become, since the 1980s, one of the most controversial issues in social sciences and humanities. The term refers to countries with territorial and/or linguistic minorities and those formed as a result of the migration of religious or racial and/or ethnic groups. Minority claims for equality have given rise to what the philosopher Charles Taylor (1992) has called the politics of recognition, relating it to the “democratic defense of cultural diversity within a universalistic perspective.” Recognition policies along with differentiated group rights are at the core of a “multicultural citizenship” elaborated by Will Kymlicka. For defenders of the principle, multiculturalism matches with the public recognition of cultural identities, with equal rights for ethnic, racial, religious, or national minorities. It therefore constitutes the foundation of democracy. For those who oppose the principle, it leads, on the contrary, to the “disunion” of the nation and to isolated communities in the political arena, and it is therefore perceived as a challenge to the national unity guaranteed by the state. For some, it serves to thwart nationalism and for others, inversely, it serves as the basis of national sentiments and expressions.

The debates oppose those who defend a liberal vision against a republican vision of pluralist society that recognizes citizen identity only on the grounds of social justice. While liberal multiculturalism looks for a response to the management of cultural diversity as a means of equal inclusion of minorities in the political community, the republican view represents multiculturalism as politics, turning the society into a battleground where common values [Page 1630]are transformed into particular interests and where identities perceived as majority or minority compete with each other in search of public resources and representation. As a whole, multiculturalism is fundamentally concerned with both universalistic ideology and the idea of a common civic space of political participation for all groups; it questions how to reconcile the integration of minorities into a common civic culture with the protection of the most vulnerable groups. The process has transformed an anthropological perspective of cultural diversity into a normative vision of plural societies. Multicultural ism is thus systematically associated with the question of national unity and its integrative capacity.

Each state has its own understanding of minority and elaborates specific relations with its minorities. Progress in the judicial sphere now involves questions regarding the cultural and religious rights of minorities in their fight against all forms of discrimination. That does not resolve the issue of whether to define a minority in territorial or nonterritorial terms. Definitions continue to remain ambiguous and differ according to national experiences that define the relations between states and minorities. In Canada, the confrontation between the French and English languages, because of Quebec's status and the debates around a bilingual and bicultural society, defined as such by the Royal Commission on Multiculturalism, gave political legitimacy to the concept, thanks to the constitutional multiculturalism used in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, enacted by the British Parliament and signed by Queen Elizabeth II as part of the Canada Act in 1982, which was thus officially accepted as the fundamental characteristic of the Canadian state. In the United States, the concept has been grounded on the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It took a political and legal shape with the establishment of affirmative action starting in 1965, as a way of increasing the access of members of historically disadvantaged groups to benefits such as employment, college or university admission, and the granting of government contracts. These measures sought to reduce racial or ethnic inequalities and historical injustices by trying to repair the effect of past policies, notably slavery and racial segregation.

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