Multicultural Citizenship: Towards a European Policy

Abstrakti

As we enter the new millennium, multiculturalism seems hardly a novelty but more like a baggage we carry over from the final three decades of the last century Without causing much protest the American sociologist and educationalist Nathan Glazer could claim in 1997 that ”we are all multiculturalists now” (Glazer 1997). Indeed, this consensus appears to bridge the ideological divides. Multiculturalism is a broad church. Its mainstream version has been associated with the democratic left. However, far right parties like the Front National in France or the Freedom Party in Austria defend their own version of a ”right to difference” for all nations and cultures. In its broadest sense multiculturalism merely implies recognizing the value that their cultural identities might have for others. This excludes a claim that my culture is the best and all should adopt it for their own sake, but it does not prevent me from maintaining that my culture is best for my group and ought to be protected against foreign elements that might infiltrate and dilute it. The core idea of multiculturalism is that there is an irreducible plurality of culturally defined communities that cannot be ranked within a hierarchy of human civilization. This allows for widely different views how these cultures relate to each other. Should they be separate with regard to membership and territory or can they freely intermix? Are cultural traditions intranslatable or is there a potential for intercultural understanding? Questions like these cannot be answered in general; answers vary not only across the ideological spectrum, but depend also on the kind of cultural communities we have in mind and on the context for their encounters. We ought to distinguish between religious, linguistic, racially stigmatised or life style groups, between national, immigrant or aboriginal minorities as well as between the contexts of family life, the market place, civil society and the political community.