Once hailed as a way of celebrating diversity while securing citizens' loyalties, multiculturalism has become suspect for its ability to hold differences together. This is especially true in Europe where minorities and Muslim communities in particular have become a point of dispute among intellectuals, academics and policy-makers.There are two main reasons for this dramatic change. The first is the failure of the multiculturalist models to create integrated societies. Multiculturalism has always run the risk of creating parallel communities. While multiculturalist policies in principle embrace diversity and thus care for the overall interests of individuals and communities, they also give a tacit license to “voluntary ghettos” with a postmodern look. Instead of working toward a common good, which as a moral ground should be the anchor point of all social action, various groups and communities are defined as subcultures within a loosely defined network of social relations.
What is wrong with letting everyone do his “thing” and find fulfillment in it? After all, this is the promise of modernity: (to rephrase Kant) dare think for yourself and dare live for yourself. Whatever the outcome, it is that individual's reward or curse.
The problem is that this not only breeds a crude form of individualism, which runs counter to the promises of social integration, but also lands us in a radical form of social relativism. Without a higher good toward which all human beings are expected to work, how do we expect societies to gather around a presiding idea and go beyond their individual or group interests? For Plato and his countless followers among Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers throughout the ages, relativism was a serious philosophical error. Now, it has become a major social ill. With social relativism run wild, only the powerful and the mighty decide what gets defined as the norm.
The second reason why multiculturalism has fallen into disrepute is what happened after the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Many Americans and Europeans became suspect of the ideas and policies of multiculturalism because they saw 9/11 as a result of them. The social conservatives in the US have always been against the “invasion of the American land by foreigners” but never quite gotten over the fact that this is exactly what keeps America going.
The Europeans had their share of prophesying about the misdeeds of multiculturalism. In the name of national security, a score of European countries introduced tougher immigration laws to maintain a close watch on the flow of people in and out of Europe. The same dilemma surfaced for Europeans as well: if Europe wants to be a worthy competitor in the world of transnational markets, it needs new immigrants, the flow of brains and capital.
The debate over multiculturalism in Europe is not so much about other societies but about Europe itself. The headscarf debate in France is more about France than about the Muslim women's emancipation or integration into French culture and society because what really defines the issue here is what French culture and society is all about. First the headscarf and now the burqa issue gives the French purists a chance to define themselves against an imagined threat. This is no less than a search for the soul of Europe. Just as Muslims are trapped in the dungeon of oppositional identities where they define themselves against the West, Westerners are also trapped in a similar struggle.
Western soul-searching thus prefers to export the problem to something other than itself. Islam and Muslims serve as borderlines to define what Europe and America will mean in the 21st century. The result is that the current debate about multiculturalism in Europe and the US is also a debate about what to do with Muslims. As Charles Taylor has pointed out (The Guardian, Sept. 17, 2007), the debate about Islam and Muslims has become a debate about how far multiculturalism will go.
If multiculturalism has failed us, where do we turn? One clue is to be found in the experiences of classical cosmopolitanism where social order was closely knit together with the notion of a “good life” based on virtue and the common good. The cosmopolitan Islam of Baghdad, Alexandria, İstanbul, Andalusia and others allowed freedom and morality to complement each other. An ethical cosmopolitanism can teach us again how to be free and diverse without giving up on a spiritual center.
