The Contribution of Multiculturalism to Political Depolarisation

Tariq Modood, Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy, University of Bristol.

A fundamental question about the future of Multiculturalism as a political project is: will it be polarising or can it bring people together? We seem to have a deepening polarization between those who are pro-diversity (possibly also pro-immigration) and those who feel that this is going too far and/or too fast and fear that their national identities are being demoted at the expense of other identities. Moreover, it’s not only minorities who have identity-anxieties but also majorities. Indeed, it has been suggested that multiculturalism has contributed to these anxieties and thereby to the polarization.

This presentation will focus on how we can tackle and lessen this polarization which is fostering mutual distrust and threatening the national, democratic citizenships upon which any multiculturalist, egalitarian and unifying project must be built, and so which multiculturalists, together with others, must defend. Not just by creating or elaborating arguments but by also identifying the conditions undermining it, taking care to not reinforce but stem and reverse them. This does not involve giving up on multiculturalism but, rather, developing a multicultural national identity, to which all citizens can have a sense of belonging without giving up other identities that are important to them. Such national and group identities cannot be conceived as monistic or static, rather, interactive and dialogical. The goal should be that such a multicultural sense of the national can be adapted to be part of an electoral majority on a stable, continuing basis; above all such a sense of the national allows one to be sensitive to minority identity vulnerabilities and majority identity anxieties within an integrated theoretical and political framework.