Description

Multiculturalism is not doing well. In country after country, politicians intone its shortcomings and pledge to do things differently. The result has been a turn to “civic integration” policies aimed at shoring up social cohesion. Our paper offers a different prognosis. While multiculturalism has indeed been rejected by political actors spanning the ideological spectrum, we detect important vital signs: in the Netherlands, local authorities continue to implement existing policies based on multicultural principles of group recognition and are busy devising new approaches to issues such as honour related violence through consultations with representatives of ethno-religious groups; in Germany, the previous CDU-SPD Grand Coalition’s overt rejection of multiculturalism did not stop it from pursuing consultation with representatives of Muslim faith communities through a series of “Islam conferences.” Drawing on these and other examples, we maintain that multiculturalism is enjoying a renaissance of sorts. The difficulty for many lies in understanding what this new form of multiculturalism is. We argue that multiculturalism is best thought of as an institutional logic, holding that the accommodation of religious and cultural pluralism should be pursued via negotiations between representatives of the state and target groups. This Institutional logic is meant to serve the principal aim of integration, which is to encourage social cohesion based on liberal democratic principles. Far from being the opposing logics they once were thought to be, multiculturalism and integration have become complementary means to the end of social cohesion.