It is true that many current legitimate claims have been risen up from new associations of citizens. But it is also true that those new groups are minorities: homosexuals, feminists or individuals trying to maintain their cultural and religious traditions. Those associations are still reduced groups of people compared to the overriding so-called “white and occidental” citizen. With that, I am not denying the right of minorities to their legitimate requests, but the right of minorities to obtain all they demand.
This is why democracy is also the Achille´s heel of multiculturalism, because minorities depend on the disposition of bigger and therefore powerful groups to recognise and execute their claims, and that not always happens...
A good example of the aforementioned situation is the approved Proposal 8. California has voted to ban gay marriages only months after the practise was legalised. The proposal to limit marriage to members of the opposite sex was approved by 52.1 percent of voters, compared with 47.9 percent who voted against, with 95 per cent of votes counted (information quoted from Times On Line http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5091994.ece).Although the difference of votes is minimal, already exists a majority of individuals whose beliefs motivate them to deny the civic right of humans with the same sex to benefit from the protections the state grant to the heterosexual marriage institution. Are the demands of homosexual acceptable? Should they have the same rights than the rest of couples? That is very debatable, but while the number of homosexuals or its number of civic supporters do not increase (at least a 2.1 % in California), the liberal democratic system will support heterosexual couples. Some critics over-worried on power relations might understand that us liberalism supporting white and western individuals, what is false, as I have tried to explain here; because this is how democracy works.
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My reflections:
Multiculturalism is an enemy upon itself. Practiced and interpreted in the modern day as “the doctrine of the state to actively encourage its citizens to retain the values of the culture from which they came; as a positive, in, and of, itself” (Johann Hari, columnist for The Independent), multiculturalism unintentionally creates divides, in the place of diversity.
The general principles of Multiculturalism are based around promoting the diversity of the individual; that each person has a right to be themselves, and that this would further develop into the acceptance of all others as their own individual self, this is reflected in Jimmy Carters hopes in 1976, “We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams”.
I think the routes to this failure stem, as rightly mentioned above, from the relationship between multiculturalism and democracy. However, I believe there is a bigger contributor, and that is simply Liberal interpretation.
Liberalism has major questions still hanging over it, not only from “whether [a] difference principle should only be applied within a liberal state such as the United States (where the least well off are the least well off Americans), or whether it should be applied globally (where the least well off are the least well off in the world)” (Rawls) to the ongoing struggle for liberal theories of the self that at least make room for cultural belonging and other non-chosen connections - this breeding widespread communitarian criticism of liberal political theory.
With this in mind, is it any wonder why Multiculturalism is failing? The British government is a prime example, whose misinterpretation has led to stark cultural divides, you just need to walk through the suburbs of any major UK city to see this, Leeds, Bradford and Birmingham evoked in my personal experience – Bradford catching the media tension in 2001 with riots resulting from racial tension.
In a democracy of the majorities I believe that we get a Multicultralism scape-goat effect, whereby rather than address issues of cultural divides our governments instead pocket our minorities in to almost micro-cultures, therefore, not integrating the idea of diversity, but instead alienating cultures from each other.
Peace
Christopher Jones
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