Theorising political belonging: The Bristol school and the identity of diverse political communities

Abstract

Western political communities are in crisis. Previously, obstacles to the fundamental liberal-democratic commitment to equal citizenship emerged mainly from minority claims, and their experience of inequality. Currently, in contrast, a majoritarian crises has emerged from the other direction. Majority communities across the West are expressing high levels of frustration with diversity, identity-politics, immigration and social cohesion. These new conflicts threaten not only to halt progress on minority politics but, in many cases, to roll back symbolic and institutional forms designed to make our political communities inclusive. At its heart, this situation is a problem of political belonging: of the relation between cultural and political identity and their roles in the terms and symbols of inclusion within liberal-democratic political communities. Despite this need and centrality, the concept of political belonging and this cultural-political tension have not been systematically theorised in political theory. This article examines one notable exception, the accounts of belonging in the “Bristol School of Multiculturalism”. Focusing on the work of Tariq Modood and Bhikhu Parekh, both the most influential voices in this school and the most overt users of the concept, it teases out their still often implicit theories of belonging. It argues that these theories stem from their understandings of two concepts: culture and identity. It illustrates that Parekh and Modood neither understand nor balance these concepts in the same way. These differences, it demonstrates, have implications for their prescriptions for multiculturalising political/national identity. All of this highlights the fundamental insights into membership in their theories, and the unanswered elements that point towards how a fuller Bristolian theory of belonging could be developed. Importantly, this fuller account, the article argues, has deep insights into how majorities and minorities can belong to contemporary democracies.

Introduction

Western political communities are in crisis. Previously, obstacles to the fundamental liberal-democratic commitment to equal citizenship emerged mainly from minority claims, and their experiences of inequality. Currently, a majoritarian crisis has emerged. Majority communities across the West are expressing high levels of anxiety with diversity, identity-politics, immigration and social cohesion. These new conflicts threaten not only progress on minority politics but regression on the symbolic and institutional forms designed to make political communities inclusive. This situation is a problem of political belonging: of the experience, terms, and symbols of inclusion within liberal-democratic political communities.

Such a situation requires turning to the concept of political belonging to gain understanding of the nature of social and political membership (Chin 2019). Traditionally, political theory has not sufficiently theorised the relation between the various forms of group membership individuals experience in contemporary liberal-democratic societies, and their impacts on membership to the political community. However, equally, it requires focusing on figures who ask the question of belonging. This paper does so, focusing on the “Bristol School of Multiculturalism” (BSM) and its insights for understanding political community. As Geoffrey Brahm Levey has recently noted, the concept of belonging is central to this group (Levey 2019, 209). Not only do BSM thinkers theorise belonging, membership and their relation to political community, they employ these to offer normative justifications of models of multicultural belonging that speak to contemporary minority and majority anxieties.

Despite this potential, BSM accounts of belonging remain unsystematised and implicit. Though there is no single reason for this amongst that group’s diverse members, it is often connected to how a theorist navigates the fundamental tension between culture and politics in liberal-democratic states. This is a foundational tension to the form of political community within these types of states, and a longstanding question in political theory. It stems from the recurrent attempt to draw a line between the cultural and political spheres of life, in a way that does not make the politics of a state operate in the culture of its dominant group. It is a purported solution to the broader problem of how it is possible for members of diverse groups to belong to one political community. Liberal discussions of belonging, even more implicit than the BSM’s, have been responses to this broad problem (Chin 2024). The difficulty and pernicious nature of this tension means that even the BSM’s answers are often qualified and directed at more specific, local versions of the issue.

To examine these tensions and draw out a BSM approach, this article focuses on two of its most notable political theorists. Bhikhu Parekh and Tariq Modood both address this constitutive tension and its centrality to the history of Liberal thought. Further, they both turn to the concept of belonging to navigate it. I argue that their theoretical conceptions of belonging highlight the challenge that social identities present to liberal democratic political community while their attempt to multiculturalize national and political belonging offers a fertile ground for addressing those tensions.

This analysis also clarifies an important difference ¹ : the theoretical root of their respective conceptions of belonging. Parekh theorises belonging from within the category of culture and understands membership in positive, substantialist terms (i.e. in terms of shared content). Modood, in contrast, roots belonging in the broader concept of identity, and sees it as characterized by both positive content and negative externalities. This difference, I argue, leads to a varying relation to the object of political belonging they seek to multiculturalize; where Modood argues that multiculturalizing contemporary national identities remains the best option to address majority-minority anxieties, Parekh will remain hesitant to employ national identities. As such, this article balances two key aims: 1) to develop the BSM understanding of belonging (a conceptual task) and illustrate how its connection to a multicultural form of belonging (a normative task); and 2) to highlight differences in how Modood and Parekh theorise belonging and prescribe its multicultural form. Parekh and Modood’s reformulations of national/political identity offer different strategies for reinterpreting belonging in contemporary political communities. Neither, it is suggested, are exhaustive and, while they both offer useful insights, each may be necessary but inadequate (on its own) to address contemporary political tensions around “majority anxiety”.

Section 1 outlines the recent identification of the “Bristol School of Multiculturalism” and how the concept of belonging has been identified as core to its theory of multiculturalism. Section 2 examines Parekh and Modood’s accounts of culture and identity, and their relations to belonging. Finally, section 3 compares their resulting models of multicultural belonging, through their respective accounts of the idea of a multicultural national identity.

Belonging and the Bristol school

The Bristol School of Multiculturalism (BSM) offers a distinctive approach to a) understanding multicultural politics (empirically), and b) justifying multicultural policy in socio-political life (normatively). There is a fundamental theoretical consequence to this mixing: the legitimacy of multiculturalism stems not from normative principles, such as a commitment to individual autonomy, but from the situations and claims of individuals and groups seeking recognition within their political communities. This “political approach” to multiculturalism begins with minority claims.

The concept of belonging, as a result, is the “master principle” of the BSM (Levey 2019). Where liberals see belonging as flowing from cultural liberty (e.g. Will Kymlicka assumes minorities will belong to political community if they can freely belong to their cultures), the BSM argues increased choice will not necessarily lead to social equality. Rather, belonging, a horizontal relationship of togetherness, is an autonomous task necessary for full membership in the political community (Levey 2019, 209). An account of the relation between belonging, culture, identity and equality, thus, motivates their theory of multiculturalism and their approach to political identity and community. Equally, it informs their critique of liberalism.

Modood and Parekh both distinguish their multiculturalism from liberalism (Modood 2013; Parekh 2000). ² The question of Modood and Parekh’s overall relation to liberalism is beyond our focus. What is key is, rather, their relation to a tension liberals confront in belonging: the tension between cultural and political belonging. Stemming from a long history of conceptualising belonging, 20^th century liberalism offered a model of community, group membership, primarily focused on the political, rather than national or cultural, community. The horizontal ties of membership it idealises are not framed as national or extra-political (i.e. cultural). Rather, they are rational, cooperative and, primarily, distributive (Chin 2024). Liberals conceived non-political forms of membership as broadly cultural, and as belongings below the level of the political community that were potentially in competition with it. This sets up cultural belonging as something that rivals political belonging, a challenge to the normative status of the political community. ³ It famously resulted in Kymlicka’s argument to thin down national culture to make it compatible with multiculturalism. ⁴

Modood and Parekh’s approaches to the cultural-political tension, though not identical, distinguish them from liberal multiculturalism. They situate their accounts of multiculturalism in theories of group membership (belonging), rather than individual autonomy, that highlight the structure of social identity and culture that minorities confront and prescribe transformations of national or political identity to rectify these inequalities within the context of a democratic political community. As a result, they confront the cultural-political tension through a distinctive strategy: multiculturalizing the mode of belonging to political community. They differ on whether that multiculturalizing should focus on national or political identities. Their accounts, in this, are more oriented to equal belonging than liberal multiculturalism (Chin 2024). This is of greater use in the present context where liberalism is on the seeming decline and contestations over national/political identities are central.

BSM unity does not preclude differences between how their theories of belonging navigate the cultural-political tension. Levey claims there is a consistent ambiguity around the cultural versus political content of the identity of the political community (Levey 2019, 216). It is clear both Parekh and Modood reject the possibility and ideal of a neutral “political” state. However, the balance of cultural elements from the minority and majority differs between them (Uberoi 2015). Parekh’s work argues that national identity should be defined in a “politico-institutional” way (excluding minority and majority elements). Modood argued this not only contradicts Parekh’s view of the impossibility of dividing culture and politics neatly, but it closes a key avenue for recognition minorities often claim (Parekh 2000, 231; Modood 2001, 249). This debate remains unresolved and has not been systemically investigated. A comparative examination of their accounts of belonging, rooted in culture and identity, and prescriptions for national/political identity, reveals not only what Modood and Parekh share but their differences for navigating the cultural-political tension.

Modood and Parekh on culture and identity

The relation between the cultural and political in contemporary diverse democracies is the background structural tension motivating Parekh and Modood’s accounts of belonging. Unsurprisingly, their accounts substantially overlap. Both root belonging in the same context: the ethno-cultural diversity of Western liberal-democratic states and their histories of migration. ⁵ Their response is an account of belonging, of having membership in a variety of ethno-cultural groups within those contexts, and the tensions that raises with belonging to political community. Parekh and Modood see these “belongings below” as characterised by both internal and external dynamics of belonging: internal accounts of what it means to belong to a group, and external, ascribed (usually) negative social relations of inequality. The differences emerge in how they balance the internal and external dynamics. Through discussions of culture and identity, Modood generally attempts an even balance, while Parekh strongly favours the internal positive accounts groups have of their own belonging. These variations have consequences discussed in the next section.

This raises the question of belonging. Belonging is often construed as an individual feeling. For Varun Uberoi, another BSM thinker, it is a sense that a group reflects to some extent what an individual member is. This is not only about being welcomed but connected and represented in a substantive sense (Uberoi 2007, 142). However, belonging is not only a feeling, but a structure: different models of political belonging construct membership for majorities and minorities in different ways with differing levels of inclusion and acknowledgment (Chin 2021). There is no one-to-one relationship between different structures and how they are experienced, but there are constraints and possibilities within each model.

Parekh and Modood navigate the experiential and structural sides to belonging within the context of a significant theoretical debate in political theory around ideas of culture, identity and community (or belonging) in the late 1990s and 2000s: the essentialism debate. Critics, such as Brian Barry (2001) and James Johnson (2000), argued that claims for the political significance of culture relied on an essentialist view that groups have ‘a set of fixed characteristics that unchangeably inhere in particular individuals, and which parcel them out into particular groups’ (Festenstein 2010, 79). If multiculturalism is based on a false social ontology, then we cannot: (a) employ the idea of group belonging to identify a group or (b) make normative claims on behalf of those who belong to groups (Moore 2020, 189–90). Parekh and Modood respond to this critique.

For Parekh, groups are a “complex structure made up of different elements and tendencies” (Parekh 1995, 263). This complexity for Parekh is twofold. First, there is internal contestation: different views of the core traits, characteristics or essential features of a group and what is necessary to belong to it. For example, in a cultural group, descent, participation in practices, and ethnicity are all relevant and there will likely be contestation over their priority/relevance. This level of contestation surrounds what elements are included within the group. Second, groups can also be differentially inhabited. Given the variety of symbolic resources within any shared form of life, belonging to one group is never fully separate from other forms of group life (religious, sexual, economic, etc.), which employ similar resources of meaning and groupness. Even when various individuals and sub-groups have the same identity, they will often not practice the same parts of that identity equally. Some will deploy certain parts of the symbolic resources (historical, ideational, political, etc.), and others will focus on another set. While there will be connections between these different parts, there will also be tensions (Parekh 1995, 259-61; Parekh 2008, 21-5). This is why, for example, a single national identity can be civically, ethnically, religiously, xenophobically, and inclusively articulated. Belonging “cannot be defined abstractly but only in relation to one’s sense of identity. And since the latter is often complex and multiple, so is the former” (Parekh 1999, 312).

For Modood, group belonging is neither naturalistic and settled, nor essentialist fantasy. Anti-essentialists go too far in arguing that the constructed nature of cultures means we cannot take them as a coherent object for political claims (Modood 2013, 90). For Modood, we can still discuss groups and the terms of belonging to them, without claiming essence. He employs Wittgenstein’s notion of the family resemblance that bonds concepts like games: there may not be any essential feature of a group that makes it that group. But a series of likely features, only some of which will be present in any moment, in the context of a historical trajectory of identification, gives reality to that group (Modood 2013, 89). Identifying groups as existing and having conditions of belonging is compatible with recognizing their ongoing development (Modood 2013, 86). ⁶

The complexity of belonging for both thinkers involves not only the spatial dimension identified by Parekh, nor the temporal dimension highlighted by Modood. Both are internal aspects of belonging: group membership lived through how groups understand themselves. This is important as many scholars making the essentialism charge also claimed that group belonging was not the result of internal sameness but external (oppressive) difference. Groups are identified not by what they share but their differences from others. Parekh cautioned against this view, arguing it assumes a relationship of necessary priority between internal sameness and external difference. For him, “identity and difference are logically interrelated concepts … However, the two are neither identical nor of equal ontological importance … difference cannot be the basis of identity, and is important only insofar as it grows naturally out of the kind of person [or group] one is” (Parekh, 1995, 256). Understandings of the difference between insiders and outsiders will play key imaginative roles in constituting a group. This is true of any group aware of others and their features, though the extent if this significance will vary. However, this is different from the claim that the content of an identity is determined by its differences with others. For Parekh, the latter misunderstands the dynamics of unity and diversity within identity.

While Parekh periodically calls for balancing the internal/external aspects of belonging, he emphasises positive, internal accounts. He consistently employs a language of “constitution” to describe belonging. For members to belong, they must see themselves as bonded to other members and connected to the group. The nature of that constitution will not only determine who is a member but the nature of that membership (Parekh 2019, 188). The priority of constitutive features of a group for its belonging remained in his work. In Parekh’s A New Politics of Identity (2008), which we will see reformed some points Modood and others critiqued in relation to national identity, this structure continued. “The identity of a thing consists in those constitutive features that define it as this thing or this kind of thing rather than some other, and distinguish it from others” (7). Belonging does not emerge from differences but the self-interpreted features of a group imbued with meaning and central to their self-image.

Modood, similarly, considers the internal and external features of belonging. However, he strikes a balance as a solution to the essentialist problematic and the critique of multiculturalism’s focus on cultural self-understanding. For him, the “starting point is the politics of recognition of difference or respect for identities that are important to people, as identified in minority assertiveness” (Modood 2013, 34). However, unlike Parekh, the importance of positive, substantive features does not stem from their constitutive function. It begins with the “fact of negative difference”, understood as group differences which have created unequal relations of “alienness, inferiorization, stigmatization, stereotyping, exclusion, discrimination, racism, etc.; but also the senses of identity that groups so perceived have of themselves” (Modood 2013, 34). Negative difference includes external social relations of inequality that create disparities between groups. In the context of broadly liberal-democratic forms of citizenship and political community, these negative differences are in tension with the broad ideals of inclusion/equality. This illustrates a “dialectic of negative difference and ethno-cultural assertiveness” where positive meaning and external relations/interpretation (i.e. the differences with others) cannot be separated (Chin and Levey 2022, 461). By beginning with both negative difference and positive substantive articulation, Modood defines groupness in contemporary Western liberal democracies not only from within minority groups but also “from the outside, from the representations and treatment of the minorities in question” (Modood 2013, 36). Other theorists have identified the negative differences that post-immigration groups experience, including Parekh. ⁷ However, Modood’s framework outlines how this negativity and positivity relate. He “recognizes post-immigration groups exist in western societies in ways that both they and others, formally and informally, negatively and positively are aware that these group-differentiating dimensions are central to their social constitution” (Modood 2013, 36). Belonging in these contexts is characterized by duality. While Parekh focuses more on constitutive self-identification, Modood balances self-identification and external ascription in theorising minority belonging.

Their concepts of culture and identity illustrate the implications of these accounts of belonging. In Rethinking Multiculturalism, Parekh offers a comprehensive account of culture, rooted it in a minimalist view of human nature that understands socio-cultural forms as necessary elaborations of this minimal structure. Culture stems from a human propensity to seek meaning in our ideas and activities. “Culture is a historically created system of meaning and significance… in terms of which a group of human beings understand, regulate and structure their individual and collective lives” (Parekh 2000, 143). ⁸ Unsurprisingly, Parekh reinforces the deep complexity within cultures in his definition along the lines discussed above (internal contestation and differential inhabitation) (e.g. Parekh 2000, 148).

Parekh’s key concern defining culture is to clarify two distinctions: 1) the difference between individual and group (cultural) belonging, and 2) the difference between our belonging to content versus belonging to a group itself. Regarding the former, Parekh emphasises that individuals are both structured by but, to an extent, autonomous within the cultures they belong to. For him, “human beings are articulated at three different but interrelated levels: what they share as members of a common species, what they derive from and share as members of a cultural community, and what they succeed in giving themselves as reflective individuals” (Parekh 2000, 123). Putting our thin human nature to the side, culture offers a loose and contestable structure for individuals. Belonging to a culture does not entail being determined by it but limiting possibilities. Nonetheless, this structure is ambiguous. Our relation to our culture (or any culture we belong to) involves relating to at least two things, which raises the second distinction. For Parekh, there are two dimensions of cultural belonging: the cultural and the communal. Cultural belonging “has a content in the form of a particular culture, and a communal basis in the form of a group of men and women who share that culture” (Parekh 2000, 154). We relate to each of these and can have differing forms of belonging to each. While usually we belong to both, we can reject our culture while retaining community ties or reject the community while continuing to practice the culture. This is why, for Parekh, culture both “structures and shapes the individual personality in a certain way and gives it a content or identity”, and is “also a system of regulation… It both opens up and closes options… creates the conditions of choice but also demands conformity” (Parekh 2000, 156).

This account raises the place of identity in Parekh’s work. While he often employed the concept, it has increased significance after Rethinking Multiculturalism, culminating in his 2008 work, A New Politics of Identity. However, despite this growing usage, if you pair these major works with Parekh’s earlier essays on identity (1995, 1999), there is remarkable consistently on the key features of belonging, whether it is to culture or identity. Parekh emphasises the importance of the substantive content of an identity to ones belonging to a group. “‘The identity of a thing consists in those constitutive features that define it as this thing or this kind of thing rather than some other” (Parekh 2008 4; see also Parekh 1995, 256 and Parekh 1999, 309). Identities are personal and social, and they are a blend of agency and power. These trends continue into his latest work on the subject (Parekh 2019, 61). Parekh defines belonging along cultural lines, belonging is to a substantive system of meaning that frames and enables an individual and ties them to a definitive group.

Modood has much to say about culture. However, its role and emphasis differ; culture is not the primary object for his account of post-immigration belonging. This is surprising for a multiculturalist. However, it is a longstanding feature of Modood’s work, deeply integrated into his method. His primary category is not culture, but identity. Both normatively and sociologically, identity is the proper starting point for his dialectic of negative difference and positive articulation. “To speak of ‘difference’ rather than ‘culture’ as the sociological starting point is to recognize that the difference in question is not just constituted from the ‘inside’, from the side of a minority culture, but also from the outside, from the representations and treatment of the minorities in question” (Modood 2013, 36). Culture is not unimportant. Rather, culture is a feature of a more primary political claim: that belonging to a group identity has politically significant consequences.

It is not primarily because groups have a different (substantive) culture that they have a politically significant form of belonging, but because the group has a different identity. Belonging to that identity is the beginning. Recently, Modood claims, “Societies hang together or fall apart because of the power of identities and the desire to belong, not just because of values, principles, and laws” (Modood 2022, 210). He is not ignoring that cultural distinctiveness will be part of having a different identity but that identity better explains the nature of the bond between the individual and the group, and the structure of that group. This allows both the positive content and negative difference to be illuminated in the situation of this group. As such, “the primary interest of multiculturalism is not in culture per se but in the political uses of non-European origin ethnic and related identities, especially in turning their negative and stigmatic status into a positive feature of the societies that they are now part of” (Modood 2013, 39-40). For Modood, this is a political rather than philosophical multiculturalism that highlights the internal and external factors that constitute post-immigration belonging in contemporary liberal democracies. It is not arguing for the normative value of culture per se, like Parekh’s “philosophical multiculturalism”, but the political salience of identity-claims rooted in democratic inequality (Modood 2013, 61). Seeing belonging as to identity and as a dialectic of internal and external factors, highlights this.

Modood would agree with what Parekh says about cultural belonging. The difference is articulation and emphasis. Parekh focuses on internal aspects of group belonging and characterises that internal life culturally. To belong to a group is to navigate a substantive set of cultural meanings and forms of life: the norms, values, practices and forms of power that exist within a culture. The primary tension, around membership, is the individual-group relation and the tension a particular individual might feel between different groups they belong to. This is not incorrect for Modood, but incomplete. Group belonging, in a post-immigration context, is premised on a prior tension: the dialectic of internal identity and external inequality in the context of liberal-democratic political community and its normative universe. ⁹ The implications emerge in the models of multicultural belonging both develop.

Multicultural belonging: National and political identity

Both Modood and Parekh anticipated current debates around multiculturalism, recognition, belonging, national identity and majority-minority anxieties. While this partially stems from their accounts of culture and identity, it manifests fully in their thinking on national and political identity. Through his account of diversified belonging, Modood calls for a form of ‘multicultural nationalism’, while Parekh focuses on ‘multiculturalizing’ political, not national, identity. This may seem a narrow difference, but it flows from the theoretical divides illustrated above and Levey’s observations in section 1. These differences, I argue, explain their contrasting articulations of inclusive political community. As Kymlicka notes, “disagreements about multicultural nationalism are often, at their heart, disagreements about the nature and role of social membership.” (Kymlicka 2022, 2). Parekh and Modood’s prescriptions for multicultural national/political identity represent two different ways of navigating the cultural-political tension in a multicultural way.

Modood and Parekh’s political accounts of belonging can be introduced through their discussions of recognition. Interestingly, while he employs the term frequently, the concept of recognition is not prominent in Parekh’s work. He often uses the word without explicitly developing the idea. The most extended discussions occur in his contributions to the recognition-redistribution debate. For Parekh, “The politics of recognition is therefore part of a wider and nuanced theory of justice, with the crucial difference that unlike liberties and resources, recognition cannot be individually enjoyed, or centrally distributed and calls for a more complex theory of justice” (Parekh 2000, 211). This is a “bifocal theory of justice” that expands the traditional, distribution-focused theory to include recognition claims. Despite this expansion, Parekh emphasises that recognition is different from redistributive justice: “identities are often contested and subject to redefinition and change, it might be sometimes unwise to institutionalize them or even grant them public recognition” (Parekh 2004, 212). This is important. Parekh is hesitant, arguing that cultural conflict raises issues outside what uniform justice can prescribe because it not only addresses inequality in areas that have been traditionally ignored but political contestation over the institutionalisation of public life.

Multiculturalism, for Modood, is about recognition. Empirically, it arises as claims from the dialectic of negative difference and positive self-affirmation. Normatively, “It is best to see recognition of positive difference as a civic principle that in general should inform the relations between fellow citizens and ought to be manifest across the varied sites and institutions of civil society” (Modood 2013, 52). Recognition of positive identities is a civic principle of diverse political belonging. It expands political belonging beyond the traditional liberal-democratic focus of the individual citizen: it “is different from integration because it recognizes groups, not just individuals, at the level of: identities, associations, belonging, including diasporic connections; behaviour, culture, religious practice, etc.; and political mobilization.” (Modood 2013, 46). Groups, and the core features of their shared belonging (including culture, identity, etc), are included in the political community. And recognition concerns establishing the equal status and belonging of all groups (Chin and Levey 2022).

Parekh’s hesitancy with recognition, and Modood’s embrace, extends into their models of multicultural belonging and multiculturalising political community. The concept of belonging is central to Parekh’s prescriptions here. The most consistent language he uses to describe this new relation is common belonging. This is a reciprocal set of relations, of belonging together, that requires mutual movement from all groups toward a shared life and commonality. “Commitment or belonging is reciprocal in nature. Citizens cannot be committed to their political community unless it is also committed to them, and they cannot belong to it unless it accepts them as belonging to it” (Parekh 2000, 342). As such, common belonging is a “two-way process”, requiring willingness from minorities and welcoming from majorities (Parekh 2005, 10). He uses a variety of terms to describe this, including a “multiculturally constituted culture” (Parekh 2000, 219, 221-4, 236) and a “community of communities” (The Runnymede Trust 2000, 105). In every instance, this is a bottom up, dialogical construction of limited commonality. This “shared culture can only grow out of their [different cultures] interaction and should both respect and nurture their diversity and unite them around a common way of life”; it will be an “unplanned growth… not universally agreed, and remain subject to dispute” (Parekh 2000, 219, 221). As an ideal, it is a process, not a model. Recently, Parekh argued the purpose of this dialogue is to get citizens to “recognise themselves as members of a single community, sharing common interests and mutual obligations” (Parekh 2019, 188). It creates an additional culture and identity that unites majority and minorities on top of exiting cultures.

There is, however, a clear tension in how Parekh describes a multicultural common culture. Taking a largely dialogical view of common belonging, Parekh has not generally outlined the shape of that political culture, identity and community in anything but broad strokes. Further, he is ambivalent about how common political belonging would relate to the current, dominant form of political belonging: the national identity of a place. Parekh’s account of national identity stretches across many publications (Parekh 1994, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2008). ¹⁰ Much of this has been critical, seeing national identity as dangerous and paradoxical. It has tended, to deleterious effects, to stand in for the general concept of political identity, despite containing ideological assumptions relating to the natural and perennial nature of the groups it identifies. This places it in a basic tension with diversity (Parekh 1995, 256). This view remains constant in Parekh’s work. Much later he argued that national identity’s tendency to base political identity in an “ontological fact”, a pre-political community, makes it a dangerous form of justification. Consequently, at best “national identity is a force for both unity and division, a condition of the community’s reproduction that can also become as cause of its fragmentation” (Parekh 2008, 64). In earlier, more negative moments, he claims it is not a precursor of other democratic goods and is in a zero-sum relation with common belonging (Parekh 1999 312-5).

Parekh preferred political identity, rather than national, as the ideal form of political belonging in diverse liberal-democracies. This trend begins early in his work with his tendency to describe national identity as really about the identity of the political community; this is both related to but distinct from cultural notions like a nation. “The political life of a community is embedded in and deeply shaped by its wider culture. However it also has its own distinct and autonomous character, and both articulates the cultural identity of the community in a distinct manner and adds to it new elements of its own” (Parekh 1995, 259). When discussing national/political identities, he argued that they be articulated in political and institutional terms and avoid reference to cultural and national features. In both Rethinking Multiculturalism and A New Politics of Identity, he claims that one of the key conditions of an inclusive political identity is that it “should be located int its political structure and in the widely shared personal characteristics of its individual members”; it should be articulated in “politico-institutional” terms (Parekh 2000, 231; see also Parekh 2008, 64). Most recently, while he employs national identity more, he still emphasises its political over ethno-cultural nature and argues it only requires a thin consensus on political values around the basic rules for social interactions, the constitution of the political community, its basic purposes and the rights and liberties it protects (Parekh 2019, 188-91). ¹¹

Parekh’s politico-institutional focus has been criticised. Modood argues it not only contradicts his view of the impossibility of dividing culture and politics neatly, but that it shuts a key avenue for recognition that minorities often pursue (Modood 2001, 249). If the cultural aspects of identities cannot be included in national/political identities, what does that mean for minority claims to recognition? Similarly, how can we expect majorities and minorities to be bonded to institutions if they have no relation to their broader senses of membership?

Modood’ model of multicultural belonging and manner of multiculturalising national identity navigates the cultural-political tension differently. In recent work, he has developed a notion of “Multicultural Nationalism”; however, the seeds of this view are present much earlier. He has consistently argued that multiculturalism pays more attention to national identity, to theorise how it might be made a “container” for the forms of political claiming and identity characteristic of multicultural politics (Modood 2013, 135-6). Whether inclusive or not, every national identity is a model of political belonging, a structure the sets the terms of membership. These interact with the view of the majority and the minority and their shared relations. Multicultural recognition requires national identity is an inclusive form of belonging.

Recently, Modood has claimed that nationality is a more open model of belonging than Parekh realises; “national identity is not a fixed or static “given,” but a resource that is to be used and must be replenished. Indeed, a core feature of a national citizenship in a democracy is an open-ended discussion of the terms of membership and the meaning of the whole to which members belong” (Modood 2024, 95). As a form of belonging, national identity admits of more possibility than critics usually admit. The reason, for this, is its ability to absorb additional meanings, even ones that contradict earlier trends. In Parekh’s terms, its internal variation and contestation, and its capacity to be differentially inhabited, means that national identity can be multiculturalised. Importantly, this is, contra Parkeh, not about thinning down to a politico-institutional minimum. ‘In general, a multicultural society requires state action to not merely respect diversity, but to gather it into a common sense of national belonging. In many instances, this will mean adding to a sense of national culture rather than trying to hollow it out” (Modood 2024, 99). Modood’s model of multicultural belonging is fundamentally additive, rather than subtractive or thinning. It is not about removing majority cultural elements to address the cultural-political tension, it is about including minority cultural elements in equal measure. It is “about multiculturalizing the public culture by adding minority cultural needs and identities and their interpretations of the public culture and how it can be made more inclusive and enable their participation within and sense of belonging to it” (Modood 2022, 213). This approach stems from Modood’s understanding of belonging. Thinning national culture, especially to the point where it is not national at all, is unlikely to increase belonging. In fact, it will compromise majority belonging, exacerbating the widely perceived uptick of majority anxieties. A belonging focused theory of multiculturalism is, in contrast, “about giving minorities what majorities have or seek to have—namely, their own national or cultural identities folded into their citizenship” (Modood 2024 94).

Parekh and Modood’s respective work on multiculturalising belonging and national identity are different negotiations of the cultural-political tension, informed by their theories of belonging. They share, with the BSM, the insight that when the importance of belonging in liberal-democratic communities is recognized, political/national identity becomes key. Political theorists must understand the identity of a political community as a form of belonging that has effects on citizens individual and group lives, and we must prescribe a version of it appropriate to contemporary conditions of membership. However, this can be done in different ways, stemming from an account of belonging, and its relation to the internal-external division.

Modood’s balanced account of the dialectic of positive, internal identity and negative, external differences leads to his prescription to multiculturalise national identity, not by thinning it, but by adding minority cultural elements into its forms of recognition. Because belonging requires a response to the dual situation of negative inequalities and positive self-assertion, to belong minorities require a rectification of that exclusion and a positive assertion of their identities as part of the structure of belonging (its model) in the political community. Political and national identities become a key ground of contestation for minority politics because they tie their positive assertions of group belonging, motivated by negative social inequalities, into a political program of equality. The demand to “multiculturalise” political community develops out of real inequalities, the positive identities that experience them and their assertion, and the resulting transformation of the political community and its existing (national) identity.

In contrast, Parekh begins closer (not identically) to liberalism: the claim for recognition stems from the internally articulated differences between cultures and the fact that no state will remain neutral between these positive, substantive differences. Generally favouring the existing majority, the state/political community will be subject to demands for equality. Recognizing that this will have a symbolic dimension around belonging, Parekh mandates two moves: 1) thinning out political/national culture to ensure it does not privilege any group, and 2) fostering new modes of belonging through common, dialogical construction. He seeks to move minorities and majorities to co-develop politico-institutional, shared modes of belonging that are neither neutral nor a pre-existing national majority.

Both Parekh and Modood offer insights for a multicultural national identity, while each also incurs a fundamental limitation. Parekh’s account flows from a substantialist theory of belonging as culture to argue that what is needed is co-creation of something distinctly political (the common belonging ideal). The focus on something “in-between” cultures, leads him to embrace a politico-institutional language. This offers an important opportunity to set aside aspects of the political culture and national identity that explicitly reject minorities, should they exist, and level the symbolic playing field. However, it also risks satisfying no one. While the relative, unequal belonging between majority and minority is addressed, the basis for belonging to this new thin political identity is procedural (i.e. they co-developed it). Modood, in contrast, seeing belonging as co-constituted by positive identity and negative inequality, argues that the positive identity of these groups must be included in the symbolic object they were excluded from. The existing national identity must be added to in a substantive way. While in one sense Modood is less focused on positive identity (e.g. cultural content) in his account of belonging, balancing it against negative difference, this results in a more pronounced role for it in national-political identity. A multicultural nationalism is “an inclusive vision of national citizenship and national identity. The idea is to give everyone a sense of belonging. Every accommodation for minorities or reimagining of the public space serves that end. This is the core of what I have come to call “multicultural nationalism”” (Modood 2024, 101). However, as Parekh rightly notes, any national identity is a bundle of norms, values, symbols and ideas amongst a complex and contested history. Utilising the existing national identity (with an exclusionary past), risks leaving exclusionary aspects of the majority untouched. At the very least, it may leave unaddressed in the minds of minorities and majorities past exclusions through the continued use of a previously non-inclusive set of symbols. Exclusion may have become embedded in the majority’s political symbolism itself, such as when a symbol associated with racism or segregation is dearly held. ¹²

What neither thinker sees is that both co-creation of something new and addition of what was past excluded, are necessary. And that, despite the importance of both, these necessarily will be in tension, as all groups in a political community will constantly be negotiating over when to include particularistic content and when to appeal to common creation in any actual case. For example, is the solution to religious inequality and partial establishment in an area of socio-political life under discussion a new commonly created practice, belief or institution, or is it the addition of minority practices, beliefs or institutions where previously only those of the majority were public? The tension is that in any actual case, either solution could be appropriate. This illustrates that all groups, minority and majority, will have to navigate this tension (between cultural and political solutions to majority-minority relation) which will inevitably cause some level of anxiety for the groups involved. Modood, with others, has recently been considering contemporary tensions around majority communities and the idea that they are also experiencing “identity anxiety” (Hill et al., 2025). Parekh’s solution only works for minorities to the extent that it removes their relative inequality in their belonging. However, it does nothing to address their continued negative differences socially, as there is no particular inclusion of their identity within the reformed political identity, nor may it be palatable (on its own) to elements of the majority. Modood’s only works to the extent that it includes minorities in the existing national identity, and may not fully address the history of exclusion that could continue to affect minorities and privilege majorities.

Parekh and Modood, thus, each provide half of the puzzle for understanding and navigating this tension. What they both call for, without yet providing, is a strategy to manage this tension/anxiety in the cultural-political morass that will continue to pervade majority-minority relations. Such a strategy will need to think about what it is to be a majority or minority (their structural situations), and give us tools to use this theory to assess the situations and normative solutions to any tension for a specific political community. Together these two theories, combined, may offer a solution for the whole political community that navigates the cultural-political tension by ensuring an equal presence of cultural content in the national identity for minorities that becomes part of and in dialogue with majority identity.

Conclusion

The BSM, Parekh and Modood all offer new insights and possibilities for navigating the cultural-political tension and the new pressures it manifests in, in contemporary majoritarian politics. Primarily, they shift the focus to theorising the nature of belonging and the how this furthers our understanding of the situation of minorities/majorities within a liberal-democratic state. Further, they offer accounts of political belonging, the nature of membership to a political community, that clarify the structure of symbolic life that belonging occurs within. And, they offer the broad insight that inclusion requires work on our political/national identities, a transformation in the terms of political membership and the places of minorities and majorities therein.

Where Modood and Parekh differ is in the details of these accounts of belonging and prescriptions for “multiculturalising” political/national identity. Parekh’s theory of belonging is rooted in a constitutive account of culture, where Modood’s is balanced between negative externalities and positive self-assertion of identity. This results in a key normative difference and their respective commitments to a politico-institutional process of common belonging, versus a multicultural nationalism that includes minority symbolism alongside the majority. Both are necessary but each is incomplete on its own. Contemporary political communities must both create spaces for commonly creating new political symbols, and for reforming past and present ones. They must help us navigate past and present exclusions, by either replacing or supplementing our present forms of shared identity, and they must help us navigate how and to what extent we include the (cultural) particularities of minorities and majorities in our shared life. That is, they begin to give us a theory for assessing and prescribing how to normatively reconstruct common identities amongst difference. Much of present conflicts stem from minority claims to what equality demands, and majority reactions to what they think is reasonable and/or necessary. Parekh and Modood’s work on belonging illustrate that this will not be a process without tension, loss and anxiety for majorities and minorities. The cultural-political tension that both Modood and Parekh confront so head on, and offer respective insights for, cannot be definitively resolved by either approach. Rather, both offer new possibilities for transforming the identities of political communities in the context of minority and majority anxieties, and a deep relevance for multiculturalism as it returns to the centre of political conflict.