Abstract
When Ethnicities launched in 2001, multiculturalism as a distinctive approach to incorporating ethnocultural diversity was on the verge of becoming the reigning orthodoxy. Research and philosophical reflection on multicultural citizenship had likewise surged in the 1990s. Leading issues included how to justify multicultural recognition and minority cultural rights in regimes that previously championed assimilation or tolerated ethnic difference as private concerns, reconciling group rights with individual rights, and the relevant differences and similarities between immigrant, national, and Indigenous minorities. Scholarly critiques of multiculturalism spanned conservative-nationalist, liberal-nationalist, Marxist, libertarian, feminist, and postmodernist perspectives. Multiculturalism nevertheless remained ascendant. Nathan Glazer (1997), long an advocate of stately benign neglect in the United States, proclaimed that ‘we are all multiculturalists now’ regarding education. Brian Barry (2001) declared that although multiculturalism was unworthy of attention, he now felt the need to defend the neutral state in the name of liberal equality against multiculturalists who, he said, had plainly misunderstood it. Multiculturalists were unfazed. Writing in the symposium launching Ethnicities, Will Kymlicka (2001) opined that issues of ethnicity in the West had now moved from a security/loyalty framework into the realm of normal politics and regular democratic procedures informed by principles of justice. That sanguine assessment was upended 6 months later by 9/11 and subsequent Islamist terrorist attacks.
Multiculturalism and multiculturalists have been on the defensive in one way or another ever since. Early this century, defenders rebutted public confusions about multiculturalism, clarifying its liberal and/or democratic credentials; confronted the moral panic and Islamophobia that enveloped Muslim communities in Western democracies; enjoined religious identity to be treated like ethnic identity; and observed that much multicultural policy endures despite public controversy over the word and concept. New ways of thinking about ethnic and cultural diversity spoke to the times, such as ‘ethnicity without groups’ (Brubaker, 2004), ‘multiculturalism without culture’ (Phillips, 2007), ‘national identity without nations and nationalism’ (Uberoi, 2015, expounding on Bhikhu Parekh’s work), and ‘multicultural nationalism’ (Modood, 2017). One troubling development, which had been brewing for decades, appeared to be worsening – an erosion of public trust in democratic institutions and general disillusionment with liberal democracy (e.g. Foa et al., 2020; Mounk, 2018). While evidence of such change is still being assessed (e.g., see Valgarðsson et al., 2025), defending multiculturalism as a fuller expression of liberal and/or democratic values clearly becomes more challenging if these foundational values are losing their appeal.
Not anticipated was a striking shift in the critical assessment of multiculturalism, which has seen immigration supplant it as the chief bogey in the culture wars. Twenty years ago, multiculturalism was criticised for being fundamentally misguided, flawed, or damaging. It was routinely blamed, for example, for encouraging group segregation, communities leading parallel lives, and the rise of homegrown religious extremism. However, over the past decade, a view emerged that multiculturalism was a necessary and positive development whose job is mainly done. On this view, the problem with multiculturalism is that it became lopsided: advancing minority cultural interests and rights while denying or ignoring the like interests of the ethnocultural majority.
This sense of ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’, in Eric Kaufmann’s (2018) phrase, does not wholly explain the growing public disquiet about immigration evident today in many democracies. A range of context-variable factors animates this unease, including shrinking employment opportunities, affordable housing crises, strained infrastructure and services such as transport and hospitals, concerns about environmental sustainability, crime and gang warfare, irregular and unlawful migration and a perception of uncontrolled borders. Still, worries about the established culture, national identity, and/or status of the ethnocultural majority, as well as doubts about immigrants’ loyalty and commitment, colour much of the sentiment. These discontents are commonly depicted as nationalist populism (or populist nationalism). That is sometimes a fitting description, especially regarding expressions of raw nativism or rank xenophobia. However, there is also a pervasive ‘pre-nationalist’ aspect at work, obscured in the discourse on contemporary politics.
Hans Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism (1944) is known (and criticised) for its identification of Western and Eastern nationalisms, associated, respectively, with ‘civic’ or ‘ethnic’ characteristics. Often overlooked is that the book begins by describing the conditions that fuelled all modern nationalisms, that is, before the territorial integration of masses of people under a central government. Kohn observes people’s identification with their birthplace or place of upbringing and their connection to their physical environment and the weather. He notes the ‘immense power of habitude’ and the ‘understandable preference’ people have for their native language and customs. Above all, he notes how they – we – seek the warmth and reassurance of the familiar and are most at ease at ‘home’ (Kohn, 2008: 4–6). It is not hard to see how rapid, large-scale immigration might disturb these sensibilities (both in the host society and among immigrants). What may be called the sentimental politics of home is powerful and need not be nationalist.
Much multiculturalist advocacy similarly challenges these sensibilities by assuming a tabula rasa as the baseline of justice. A slate/state wiped clean of any cultural precedence. A clean slate, however, is an unrealistic baseline. For most folk, it is also undesirable. I’d wager that even most multiculturalists do not fancy travelling to a foreign country only to find it blandly like the one they left, shorn of its public cultural distinctiveness. The striking Buddha that dominates Phnom Penh’s new airport terminal and the mammoth Samudra Manthan Statue inside Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport (itself so-called from Sanskrit tradition), for example, signify arrival at and departure from a unique cultural destination. Even multinational hotel chains understand this by embracing – sometimes effectively, often poorly – locally distinctive architecture and décor for their ambience. Yet, on reading much multicultural (and liberal) theory, one could be forgiven for thinking that such privileged symbolism is a form of cultural domination, group inequality, or minority alienation that requires either removal or offsetting through the addition of minorities’ cultural symbols or some other form of cultural compensation.
If some multiculturalist arguments and claims are on the exuberant side, the ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’ thesis grossly exaggerates matters. Numerous studies document how ethnocultural minorities in various jurisdictions continue to face disadvantage: in accessing services and sharing in public resources, in representation and participation, in public rhetoric and how they are portrayed, and in being recognised as equal and valued members (see, for example, the Global Centre for Pluralism’s country reports). Our fraught times could benefit, then, from analyses that are sensitive to the interests and sensibilities of both migrant groups and host societies, and which can distinguish vital claims from those that are overblown or unrealistic.
Reflecting on the hardening attitudes towards immigration in contemporary politics, Charles Taylor (2024) notes the fear among many that newcomers will change their society, making it unrecognisable. Citing his experience in Quebec, Taylor suggests this fear is unfounded, as migrants seek to join our society and participate in our way of life. This, however, conflates three distinct issues: immigrants’ intentions, the impact of immigration, and changes that leave the society recognisable or unrecognisable to its established inhabitants. Perhaps all these things align in Quebec, with little change resulting from immigration. However, that is not the case, I submit, with other New-World and even Old-World democracies. At any pace or scale, immigration changes most societies. Immigrants introduce different ideas, perspectives, and practices into their adopted society, even if their intention was only to join it. Usually, these contributions do not render the society unrecognisable; on the contrary, they are incorporated into the established institutions and culture and often go unrecognised as immigrant contributions at all. This occurs before or in addition to governments reforming institutions or policies expressly to accommodate minorities, thereby further developing the established culture.
The pace and scale of immigration are legitimate issues for public debate and policy calibration. However, the narrative that needs to be told about immigration is not the reassuring but generally false one that it doesn’t change our societies. Rather, it is that, notwithstanding the challenges, immigrants typically improve our societies. The established culture many associate with the ethnocultural majority, and which nourishes the sentimental politics of home, generally is the product of diverse minds and hands (Levey 2025). The established culture thus needs to be understood and treated as analytically distinct from the ethnocultural majority. Demonstrating the immigrant contribution to societal cultures through known examples and new scholarship is vital.
