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sphere (Bauman, 1991; Habermas, 1992; Schnapper, 2002). Lately there has been a demand to discard or radically revise state multiculturalism as traditionally practised and to recognize, not just tolerate, new religious identities. This has upset the status quo accommodation of ethnic identities and changed the traditional political left/right divisions in European politics. What is being challenged here, through culture, is the historical identity of the nation itself. Nation versus state In Britain, multiculturalism has been officially accepted since the 1970s as a
definition and manifestation of British multiculturalism, as well as its success and longevity, have long been the topics of academic debates and disagreements, this political response is nevertheless key to understanding the development of ideas surrounding the concept of integration. 2 Furthermore, it was often Labour-led local authorities across Britain that spearheaded these multicultural policies and initiatives, which it has frequently been argued flew in the face of some segments of Thatcher’s government. 3 Throughout these decades, race relations legislation and
framework of British multiculturalism the very designation of the Irish as ‘the same’ appeared to enact a denial of their claims to difference. As Mo Moulton has suggested, this kind of denial reflected a fundamental ambivalence in how Irishness was regarded in twentieth-century England, stemming from the unresolved legacies of Anglo-Irish history. As earlier noted, while the Anglo-Irish Treaty effected a political settlement of the ‘Irish Question’, the continued presence of Irish people and cultures within English society after 1921 necessitated a complex process of
emphasised policy failure.28 Brian Turner has argued that British multiculturalism was defined by British liberalism (what Rorty calls liberal-culturalism); this permitted the ‘benign neglect’ of minorities. In explaining this, Turner draws on Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty, the distinction between negative and positive conceptions of liberty; immigrants were generally accorded the former but were often denied the latter.29 As defined by Berlin, negative freedom was ‘freedom from’; it existed until someone encroached upon it, examples being freedoms of expression
the twenty-first century, the shrinking of the welfare state combined with the “war on terrorism” has effected a change in both official and popular attitudes towards minorities that threatens to eradicate the hard-won gains of the last three decades. Hybridity, in late-twentieth-century Europe, had worked well with the policies of “multiculturalism”, which acted as (safe) discourses about race. For example, in Britain, multiculturalism (as state policy)1 and hybridity (as identity) had become part of the state’s apparatus in “dealing with” its minorities. This also
recognises that this continuing war has led to attacks on the civil liberties and political rights of Irish people living in Britain. 41 The discourse on Irish experience generated around ethnic mobilisation in the 1980s thus syncretised the schemas of British multiculturalism and a nationalist mythology with much deeper roots in British–Irish history. Multiculturalism supplied the concept of an ‘ethnic minority’ entitled to recognition on the grounds of cultural difference and discrimination, and Irish nationalism supplied an adversarial interpretation of Anglo
Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800 ( Harlow : Longman , 2010 ). 47 For example, see Sally Tomlinson , Race and Education: Policy and Politics in Britain ( Maidenhead : McGraw-Hill Open University Press , 2008 ); Ken Clark and Stephen Drinkwater , ‘ Recent trends in minority ethnic entrepreneurship in Britain ’, International Small Business Journal , 28 : 2 ( 2010 ), 136 – 46 ; and Deborah Phillips , ‘ Claiming spaces: British Muslim negotiations of urban citizenship in an era of new migration ’, Transactions of the
. 50 Kenan Malik, quoted in Meer, N. and Modood, T., “The Multicultural State We're In: Muslims, ‘Multiculture’ and the ‘Civic Re-Balancing’ of British Multiculturalism,” Political Studies 57 (2009): 487. 51 Quoted in ibid. 52 University of Essex
–18. See Ceri Peach, West Indian Migration to Britain: A Social Geography (London, 1968); Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (Basingstoke, 1988); and Panikos Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800 (Harlow, 2010). 3940 Foreigners, minorities and integration:Layout 1 Introduction 22/4/13 10:18 Page 5 5 There is also an abundant body of literature detailing the features of Germany’s post-war guest-worker system and the initial experiences of foreign workers.13 Guest-workers began arriving
United States and 7 July 2005 in London led to a rollback of some of these gains. Both events provoked questions anew about Islam and Britishness, with some on the right debating Muslims’ ability to coexist, some questioning whether British multiculturalism had led to a lack of integration and others insisting that violence wasn’t a natural part of Islam. Two organizations in the 1990s, one independent and one governmental, were central to the public debate that accompanied this change. The Runnymede Trust, a research and public policy agency established in 1968 and