The importance of intercultural dialogue

I am very pleased to contribute to this symposium in honour of Bhikhu Parekh, my friend and colleague in the field of studies on multiculturalism. I take this term in the broadest sense, to cover studies in how democratic polities with a wide variety of cultures, races and religions can operate equitably and (ideally) harmoniously.

The subject of this essay is troubling: I want to look at the forces which have in recent years opposed and driven back multiculturalism in this broad sense. I wish I could add to this the description of effective policies which could reverse this trend, but I confess to a high degree of uncertainty about these – but I will try to indicate some promising lines of reflection.

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The first important development which has strengthened the opponents of multiculturalism in recent years has been the growing wave of asylum seekers. It is clear that this was inevitable. The combination of wars, climate change - and some wars, like those in the Sahel are produced or worsened by climate change – and growing awareness in poorer regions of the globe of the opportunities in richer countries of the West have unleashed mass migrations which will only increase in the future. Geography dictates two channels: the Mediterranean into Europe, and the southern border of the US in the Americas.

Along both channels, the politics of the receiving societies has been affected. In the European case, the influx has triggered a shift to the right; in the US, the pressure at the southern border has strengthened a rightward turn which has other sources.

To take Europe first, we have to reckon with the fact that mass immigration of people of a quite different culture is always unsettling to the native population. This seems to be a fact about human psychology which shouldn’t of itself be morally judged; it is how the disturbance is ultimately worked through which needs moral assessment. The psychological inevitability is evident in the fact, for instance, that even a humane and internationally-minded society, like social-democratic Sweden, saw a sharp rise in rightist voting with the arrival of a significant number of asylum-seekers.

Of course, the reactions of a society depend very much on its history. In the Western hemisphere, societies generally have been accustomed to receiving large numbers of immigrants annually for more than a century; which is not to say that they always remain unruffled: the present obsession of MAGA Americans with the Mexican border makes this clear. But generally, large numbers of immigrants are the norm. Even back in the middle of the 19^th Century, when many waves of Irish Catholics arrived in the mainly Protestant US, their reception was very different: alarm triggered a backlash which had serious political effects.

Similarly, in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, in a context of labour shortage, many North African and Middle Eastern workers entered. Which is not to say that people were prepared for the waves which are now landing on the northern side of the Mediterranean, but nevertheless, some level of immigration became “normal”. We can see this, if we compare West and East Germany at the present moment: in contrast with the West, the DDR received close to zero immigration in the post-war period, and as we might expect, the effect of the present crisis is much greater in the East, where the rise of support for the AFD is dramatic.

And beyond these local differences, the present wave of asylum-seekers dwarfs any historical precedent, and the resultant right-wing shift in recent elections is visible virtually everywhere.

And the “right” which is strengthened here is not only socio-economic, but more essentially anti-foreign. Marine LePen is the paradigmatic figure.

But we shouldn’t see the case of France as the lens in which to read other European exclusionary movements. France, unlike, say Germany, is home to many of its former colonial subjects, in particular those from the Maghreb, especially Algeria and Morocco. Here we have to take into account the history, fraught with violent conflict, between the metropolitan power and its North African colonies. Long term Maghreban residents in France do not feel like, and are not seen as, citizens-like-the-others. The alienation here has resulted in terrorist violence which both feeds on and entrenches the division. The alienation/division is one of the sources Le Pen’s Ralliement National tries to feed on, with only partial success: Islam as a threat to the French identity is felt well outside the ranks of Ralliement voters.

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By contrast, the situation in the USA is rather different, and the background needs some explaining. Because in this case, those relegated to second-class citizenship are not only immigrants, or recent arrivals, but include long-standing members of the society. They are victims of stranger, somewhat troubling notions of precedence.

In a very interesting book by Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, the author describes the mentality. In the imaginary of certain “old stock” populations, there is a kind of order of precedence: the natives (original settlers, but, of course, these don’t include the indigenous populations, who are conveniently forgotten) come first, the people who arrived later come second (as happens in many countries); but, in an even more damaging version, precedence also holds between groups who by any measure are long-standing residents: so that whites come first, and blacks, Hispanics, etc. come after. Or, in virtually all “settler” societies, aboriginals’ interests tend to have low priority, when indigenous people are not seen as total outsiders. These, rarely explicitly avowed, assumptions of precedence provide the basis for campaigns against “liberal” governments who are allegedly helping all these people with second priority and at the expense of those with first priority. That was a very powerful part of the Trump’s campaign, who described refugees arriving at the southern border as aliens wreaking all sorts of damage in the United States. The crazy logic here: you move from all Americans are equal, to: some are more fully, really core Americans, and we shouldn’t lose sight of this. ¹

And the historical power of such hierarchical, or exclusionary assumptions go beyond those enumerated above, and include age-old notions of precedence, of men over women; and of unacceptable behaviour, e,g., against homosexuals,

Assumptions of precedence can cast light on phenomena like the hostile reactions of many whites to “Black Lives Matter” campaigns, in spite of the powerful evidence that many white policemen don’t share this view. But the inspiring reactions to the murder of George Floyd, across the United States, and also globally, show that these unstated hierarchical presumptions are not unchangeable. This is perhaps another way in which the pandemic has woken us up to the uglier and terribly dysfunctional side of our societies.

But the background to the surge of right-wing “populism” under Trump includes not only these historic assumptions of hierarchy, but also the surge of opposition to them, and attempts to overcome them which, starting in the 1960s, and gaining strength steadily since, have made serious headway in US society. So the Trump phenomenon has to be seen in one perspective, as a backlash against these attempts to relegate forever historical inequalities, and certain oddities of the MAGA alignment - such as Christians evangelicals supporting the champion spewer of hatred (against Mexicans crossing the border, allegedly the source of the fentanyl crisis) become understandable - if not excusable.

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But this rift in American politics has to be placed in another perspective: as a profound split in a long-standing underlying confidence that the American traditions of public reason have the resources needed to resolve differences of this kind through rational argument and persuasion.

This is the thesis of a profound and very insightful book on the deep continuities in Americans’ understanding of the legacy they received from the founders of the Republic ² . Like Americans today, this first generation was made up of leading figures of very different religious and/or metaphysical outlooks, from the pious Adams family on one side to the free-thinking Jefferson on the other. Yet they all held the view that the believers and doubters, that Enlightenment and religion properly understood, converged on a common political philosophy of freedom and self-government. Hunter calls this “America’s hybrid Enlightenment”

In Hunter’s view, it is this common ground which has finally given away in our time. Crucial differences between the faith-based and secular wings have arisen, of which the battles over abortion and free choice are perhaps the most evident and passionately felt.

So the aetiology of the two rightward threats to democracy on both sides of the Atlantic is similar, but significantly different, and the kind of threat – the restriction, tending to abolition of democracy – is also visible outside the borders of the Atlantic – for instance, in India (Parekh, 2015: 188) and Hungary – we can see that the driving force is some form of mobilized hatred and condemnation of diversity: exactly what multiculturalism seeks to preserve and cherish.

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I wish I could close this short essay with a strategy to combat and defeat these movements. I have some ideas, but they are lamentably insufficient in face of the threat. I want to leave the reader, however, with some sources of hope.

I want to refer us again to the steady growth of movements to challenge the reigning assumptions of hierarchy and exclusion: feminist movements, battles for gay rights, black lives matter campaigns, and the like. So the struggles seem existential: one or other political identity must prevail.

Normally these battles are seen by those engaged in them as fights over privileges enjoyed, for example, by whites, deservedly in the eyes of many whites, but clearly undeservedly by blacks and most uninvolved by-standers. To resolve these disputes in a satisfactory way whites would have to lose something. Instinctively, many of those in the privileged categories respond in self-defense. Very often their sense of identity is bound up with their privileged situation: a man seems to lose dignity if women can do the same job; or the culture and self-respect of whites may be inseparable in their minds from their higher position.

Of course the resisters don’t see things in these terms, but in fact, they are struggling to defend their identity. They condemn their challengers as indulging in gratuitous “identity politics”, but when liberal élites dismiss them contemptuously as “rednecks” or “deplorables”, they react with all the fury of an offended identity.

The politics which ensues has all the appearance of a zero-sum game. But the discourse of civil rights has another take on the situation. From this standpoint, the defence of privilege here exacts huge costs. It involves inhabiting a cage which inhibits, even crushes ethical growth. (1) Whites have to cling to a deep untruth, that of their superiority over blacks; (2) At some deep level, whites are aware of what they have inflicted on blacks, and they fear retaliation; and this even when they refuse conscious acknowledgement of this. A factor in many cases of white policemen shooting black men is that fear, which pushes them to shoot first and ask questions afterward. So racist whites have to live with an untruth (1), and a fear (2). But there is a third deprivation: (3) this privilege is an obstacle to the kinds of collective achievements that a more equal society could enable whites and blacks to realize together.

Factor (1) goes against the human telos to live in the truth; Factor (2) subjects racists to live in fear, and (3) deprives them of the positive achievements of democratic self-rule, provided they could come to see the person in each other. And perhaps most important of all, (4) the continued division deprives them of the mutual enrichment, the enlarging and deepening of their humanity which comes from open exchange between people of widely different backgrounds and cultures (Parekh, 2000: 167, 268–272; Parekh, 2007: 212).

This is what John Lewis was talking about when he called on his fellow-citizens to “lay down the burden of hatred”. To identify this as a burden requires ethical discernment. To build this insight into a democratic society’s self-understanding takes this insight further, beyond the enlightened views of some individuals, into the collective awareness of the community. This would be something new in human history.

Of course, for believers in white superiority, whether self-admitted or denied, this message of liberation is seen as another gratuitous insult heaped on them by “liberal élites”: are you saying we live in untruth and fear? How dare you? It can only be delivered by people who understand their sense of identity and the many admirable features it contains. Ideally, it should come from insiders who have come to see the limitations of the traditional self-understanding.

But even coming from the victims of discrimination (as was the case with John Lewis), it can unlock a situation of seemingly unbridgeable mutual hostility. Within the zero-sum mentality, both sides are filled with hatred and fear. The very suggestion that we could move to another plane, could deliberate together how work positively on a common project of reconciliation, may have the power to overcome the impasse.

Will this deeper insight win through in the polarized exchange of insult and accusation which politics has become in many Western democracies? There is certainly no guarantee. But the very fact that such spaces of reconciliation can be conceived, and the possible repertory of creative and humane social life enlarged, needs to be taken into account. There is a more humane space beyond and above our present bitter divisions.

We should also note that those who are most effective in communicating these new insights are people in whom the satisfactions of winning the contest, and/or of venting their anger on agents of destruction, are overcome by a recognition of the human potential of their adversaries and the desire to establish a new relation of mutual recognition and collaboration with them. In fact, those who are capable of this are people who are deeply rooted in their spiritual sources, often religious.

And indeed, the gains (1)–(4) above only become stable and secure where this new understanding of them becomes widespread, and the sense that we are fighting a zero-sum game, where the gains of the former under-privileged entail a corresponding loss by those who used to be on top, begins to fade. The actual experience of mutual enrichment is what enables us to go beyond the crippling inequalities of history.

And here we can take hope from the fact that many younger people, from the fact that many younger people have already learned from their own experience how enriching this contact across cultures and life conditions can be.

Ethical growth comes as a result of battles; but only if these are followed with a peace grounded in mutual recognition.

But is there evidence, which is more than subjective and impressionistic, that younger generations see and appreciate more this experience of mutual enrichment? Here is some which is tracked by “scientific” polling:

I am part of a movement demanding that our provincial government in Québec rescind a law which discriminates against Muslim women wearing the hijab (making them ineligible for certain very desirable jobs). Studies have shown that support for this law declines as we move from the oldest to the youngest age-cohort. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that younger people in metropolitan areas have much greater contact with their Muslim counterparts. But it also indicates that the experience changes their values. Here are grounds for hope.