Howard Duncan, Metropolis Project:
Good morning ladies and gentlemen. My name is Howard Duncan, I'm with the Metropolis Project in Ottawa and I'm going to chair this session on Immigration, Trust and Social Order. It is one of our assumptions in the Metropolis Project that immigration and growing diversity will be among the mainstays of our common futures. That there will be features of our countries, especially our cities, that we must manage well, especially if our societies are to be cohesive and prosperous and otherwise healthy.
By its very nature, immigration introduces change into societies and when newcomers are visibly different from those who make up most of the population, the change may be felt yet more strongly and may require more effort and thought for successful, mutual adaptation. In the best cases, we have social harmony, in the worst, we have social division. When immigration and diversity are poorly managed, social order can break down and the quality of life for all suffers - sometimes terribly so. When immigration and diversity are handled well, multiculturalism becomes a collective asset.
The Metropolis Project also assumes, that to some significant degree, societies manage the effects of immigration through government policy. That governments are not impotent bystanders to social change but are effective agents in determining the trajectories of change and how they are received by the population. Through criteria for selecting those who gain admission, through settlement, integration and citizenship programs, through policy and legal frameworks, and by encouraging welcoming attitudes amongst the public, employers, educators and service providers, governments can work towards creating social environments of trust. Where trust among society's members is lacking, strife may follow readily and solutions, often hard to come by at all, will be imposed. Where we create trust, cohesion and prosperity are more likely to follow.
As our populations become more diversified, our attention to these matters becomes more concentrated. At the forefront of the United Kingdom's efforts to harness and direct to positive ends the social forces at play within its increasingly multicultural population, is today's keynote speaker, Dr. Bhikhu Parekh. We are very fortunate indeed to have Dr. Parekh with us. He is professor of political theory at the University of Hull. He has been a visiting professor at several universities including the University of British Columbia, McGill University, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of several widely acclaimed books in political philosophy and his latest book, Rethinking Multiculturalism, was published by Harvard University Press in September of this year. Professor Parekh is also active in British political life - he was Deputy Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, and is currently the Chair of the Commission on the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain whose report on the state of race relations in Britain was published last month. This report here, called the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain and it has come to be known as, the Parekh Report. He received the BBC's Special Lifetime Achievement Award in November, 1999 and was appointed, if all of this wasn't enough, was appointed to House of Lords in March this year. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Bhikhu Parekh.
Dr. Parekh: Dr. Duncan, and members of this distinguished audience. One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, once said that, "There is one very great pleasures in life which we are condemned never to enjoy, and that is the pleasure of reading your own obituary." My good friend Howard has given me a foretaste of what that would look like, and I want to thank you for that rather rare pleasure. I must also thank you for holding up the report, I think it's going to flog the report and if there are a few buyers that would be rather nice, except,to reassure you that the royalty will not go to me - it will go to nobody really, it simply goes to the publishers. If you buy it, please remember you are not obliging me, you are simply helping the publishers.
I have been asked to talk about Immigration, Trust and Social Order. Immigration is a fact of life, increasingly so in recent years and although it is changing its character in several profound ways, it also shares certain features in common with earlier patterns of immigration. It involves manual labourers, it involves skilled manpower, it involves refugees, it involves students, and all kinds of people. And I think as a result of that, all societies are increasingly multi-ethnic, and many of them are even multi-cultural. Now, this is not new. Almost all societies that one can think of in history have been multi-cultural or multi-ethnic. I think what is new is the following: first of all, there is the logic of industrialization and therefore different communities can no longer be ghettoized or lead their self-contained lives.
Then, there is the logic of democracy: that groups coming in demand certain kinds of rights including the right to political participation and it's not possible to deny these rights to them.
Then there is the logic of liberalism, so that groups that come in are not non-liberal, they're already infused by liberal ideas, and their members insist upon enjoying their rights to individual autonomy and self-determination. Which is why much of the discussion on multiculturalism goes profoundly wrong in distinguishing groups and societies into liberal and non-liberal. In the book that Howard mentioned, this is the distinction I am seriously concerned to question. Because you can't have societies based on one set of principles alone, human societies are not artificial products and therefore, so-called liberal societies also have profound non-liberal impulses and tendencies. Just as so-called non-liberal groups also harbour all kinds of liberal sentiments sometimes in forms which are not easy to identify.
And there is finally the logic of identity, that groups that come in - for all kinds of historical reasons, which I wouldn't have the time to go into here, groups cherish their cultural identify and traditions and demand their right to preserve them. Given these four kinds of logic: logic of industrialization, democracy, liberalism and identity, the ways in which earlier societies managed to integrate people are no longer open to us.
If you look at almost all pre-modern multicultural societies, they followed a relatively common uniform standard pattern of integration which was, that there was a dominant culture, a dominant group and others were given far more freedom than enjoyed today but always living on the cultural and geographical periphery of the dominant society. This was the case in the Ottoman Empire, where the Jews and the Armenians and a lot of other people enjoyed considerable degrees of autonomy but were not allowed to participate in the mainstream society. This was true of classical Greece, classical Rome and India and lots of other societies. So this model of integration, where there is a dominant cultural structure and other ethnic groups live on the periphery enjoying tremendous degrees of autonomy but nevertheless enjoying a second-class status and therefore living on the cultural and geographical periphery of society. That option is no longer open to us. And I think the agony since the end of the Second World War has been an attempt to evolve a form of cohesive society, which is also capable of respecting cultural diversity. And given the way in which communities can no longer be segregated, are compelled to live together and demand equal rights, the question that has become very important for us, is the relationship between equality and difference. That has come up again and again in the seven sessions that we've had since yesterday.
Because the classical discussion of equality is based on uniformity, we are all to be treated equally because we are all human beings in the sense that we have the same needs, we look alike, we are all children of God, and so on. And if you base equality on similarity, then the question is, how do you fit in difference? You might then bring it in on pragmatic grounds, let's recognize differences, let's respect peoples' differences. But these demands of differences do not enjoy the same status as demands of equality because we have squeezed different sides of equality. In the current climate, that is just no longer possible. That equality needs to be based, not on similarity but on recognition of differences. And we need to be treated equally precisely because we are different from each other and have different needs.
So for all these reasons, we need to evolve a new way of creating a cohesive society which has all the things that Howard talked about; a sense of purpose, a sense of identity, integration and so on, but nevertheless is respectful of and even cherishes different cultural demands of different groups.
Now, given that this is the problem, two things follow: We can't define cultural diversity in such a way that the demands of social cohesion are ruled out. And conversely, we can't define social cohesion in such a way that there is no room for cultural diversity. In other words, we need to balance, each country in its own way, the conflicting demands or imperatives of social cohesion and cultural diversity. So the demands for cultural diversity rule out certain forms of social cohesion. Just as demands for social cohesion rule out or delimit certain forms of cultural diversity.
Let me mention one or two concrete examples. Given the fact of cultural diversity, we can't think of social cohesion which is based on let's say total cultural assimilation. That option is no longer open to us. And you might say, well, who's talking about it, because we all recognise that total cultural assimilation is not possible. Well, lots of people are talking about it. The response to my old report in England is one evidence of this. But in Germany, there is a big debate raging about the Christian Democratic Party passing a resolution insisting upon what is called Leitkultur, meaning dominant culture or prevailing culture and the demand being made that all who come to Germany must become German in the sense of sharing and totally assimilating into Leitkultur? And if you ask for the content of Leitkultur? It means Christian values, Enlightenment values, as if the two are the same, and even something like Sonntagsrühe: the rule that on Sunday, you don't make noise. And immigrants are expected not to make noise on Sunday and the others can. But the point simply being that, this gives you some idea, of how not only in Europe and, I could have given examples even from the United States where there is a constant pressure for people to assimilate. Squeezing out diversity from public life and confining it only to consensual relations between two adults.
So just as total cultural assimilation is no longer possible, nor is it possible to insist that immigrants and other groups should have no extraterritorial loyalty. Now you might say who is demanding this and once again, I could draw countless examples from the United States including the rightwing and conservatives parties in France who have been saying that the immigrants must recognise the Gauls are their ancestors and they don't have ancestors in their countries of origin. Insistence again on total social assimilation. In Britain that was a big thing, that immigrant communities must freely intermarry with the majority community, and the greater the range of inter-ethnic marriages was, the greater was supposed to be the degree of social cohesion. By that criterion, I think in the United States, certainly the black Americans would fail.
So you can't have social cohesion that insists on these kinds of things. Nor can you have, at the other end, cultural diversity, which cherishes diversity as if it doesn't have to accommodate the demands of social cohesion. Because you can't accommodate cultural diversity unless society has the confidence to live with the differences. And a society can't have that confidence unless it is cohesive and it has the confidence that it will continue to survive in the midst of differences. Again demands of different cultural groups have to be reconciled, accommodated, and therefore we need common principles, a shared public culture, in terms of which these demands can even be formulated. Again, minority communities, if they want to be accepted, have to make certain adjustments to the kind of society in which they live, and learn to share their values, although open to democratic conversation.
So, I would suggest that we need to formulate a realistic and morally acceptable balance between social cohesion and cultural diversity. And what I want to do for the next 10 to 15 minutes, that I have, is try to outline certain general principles which, in my view, must be followed by a society, if it is going to realise this purpose. The purpose, as I say, being a realistic and morally acceptable balance, between the demands of social cohesion and cultural diversity.
And I want to suggest there are half a dozen policies which any community needs to follow if it is going to realise this objective. First of all, there has to be a collective acceptance of what I call procedural values. While we may disagree about how we should lead our personal lives, in our sexual orientation, in the way we bring up children, there are certain procedural values which go to the heart of any society because these values relate to how collective decisions affecting the entire community will be taken. And these values include such things as mutual respect, tolerance, respect for authority, and willingness to accept the outcome of the debate.
Secondly, there must be an agreement on a certain body of what I shall call ethical norms. Certain basic principles in terms of which a society must be organised. Now these ethical norms, by and large but not entirely, are articulated in internationally-accepted conventions of human rights. I don't want to argue that human rights provide the universal minimum or the basic ethical norms because these rights themselves have to be defined, interpreted, balanced, traded off differently, in different contexts. In other words, they have to be pluralized if they are going to fit an ongoing society. But they provide the minimal formal set of principles in terms of which human beings ought to be able to regulate their relations with each other, and therefore one has in mind the ethical norms like respect for human dignity, equality of the sexes, respect for individual autonomy, and so on.
The third policy which I think is absolutely critical, is equality of rights. Now, this is a long story and basically what I have in mind is this - to confer equal rights upon people is to indicate to them that one values and cherishes them equally. And this involves formal legislative requirement conferring equal rights on people but also machinery like the equal opportunities commissions in the United States - Equal Employment Opportunities Commission in the United States or the Commission for Racial Equality in the United States - a powerful body which is able to enforce the legislative requirement relating to equality.
The fourth policy that's absolutely crucial is what I shall call social inclusion, as different from cultural inclusion, about which I shall talk about in a minute. By social inclusion, I mean, that those who are for some reason disadvantaged - it's not enough just to treat them equally. Those who are disadvantaged have to be helped in such a way that they are able to integrate themselves into society, and social inclusion also requires, not only inclusion that the threshold, which is the way in which the idea of inclusion has been interpreted in Britain and elsewhere, where people can come into society as it were, but then when you come to the power structures of that society, they are systematically excluded. So when we talk about inclusion, which is not a very inclusive language but when I talk about inclusion, I have in mind not only inclusion in terms of formal membership of society, but being included into the major structures of power of that society. And that would involve not only removing certain disadvantages from which these communities might suffer, but also positive government intervention to make sure there is adequate representation of all major groups in the major institutions of society, and that might therefore involve some degree of political engineering, and even some forms of targets and even in certain extraordinary circumstances, like India, even the quotas.
The fifth thing, in my view, which is quite important, is cultural inclusion. Generally the language of inclusion seems simply to think of social or political inclusion conferring rights. Cultural inclusion is a different kind of thing. It's perfectly possible for me to enjoy all the rights of citizenship as others and yet to feel that the dominant ethos of society excludes me, that I don't quite belong to that society, that its culture is not mine. This is quite a common feeling amongst minorities in Europe - it's also quite a common feeling let's say amongst the African-Americans in the United States. That you might enjoy after the 60s all the equal rights, and yet you somehow feel that the dominant ethos, the dominant culture, is not yours, that it excludes you, you don't quite belong to it, you don't identify it.
I think therefore it is quite important there must be ways found of including the idea of culture that might exist in society into a kind of shared public dialogue so that the common public culture evolves out of the interaction between the constituent cultures of that society. And the phrase that I have used in my writings is a multiculturally-constituted common culture. A multicultural society does need a common culture but it is not a common culture in the sense of a culture of a particular dominant group. It is a culture which has evolved out of a constant ongoing thoroughly empowered dialogue between different communities.
Sixthly, if a society is to be cohesive it also needs what I shall call an inclusive definition of national identity. Just as I said earlier, it's not enough that I have the same rights as others, it also is quite important that I ought feel that I belong to that society. But that's only one side of the story, that I should belong to that society, it is equally important that the society should belong to me. And it's perfectly possible for one thing to exist without the other. And when I talk about national identity, one thinks not only of what it means to be a Canadian or American or British or Indian, one is also thinking of national symbols, the dialogue of public debate, and so on. And here, let me give a simple example, which became rather controversial in the United Kingdom.
We argue in our report, precisely the point that I am making, that if all the immigrants and other citizens of Britain are to feel British and develop a sense of common belonging to Britain, then Britishness must be so defined that it is open to all to identify with it. And our argument in the report was that this is not currently the case. Britishness is often equated with Englishness and therefore the Scots and others feel excluded. It is sometimes equated with Christianity, when Margaret Thatcher for example argued that Britain was a fundamentally Christian country and it excluded Atheists, secularists, Jews, Hindus and others, and we ought to recognize that one could still be British and still belong to non-Christian religions. And thirdly, we argued that it was quite important not to equate Britishness with whiteness. The standard images of Britain are as a white country, the last Prime Minister but one, when he conjured up images of Britain he talked about of green and pleasant lands, cricket pitches, old ladies cycling for communion to the church on Sundays - I mean, all these wonderful images - warm beer, but it had no room for either cold lassi or it didn't have room for the industrial towns of the north where blacks and browns work.
So, in the report we argued that Britishness needs to be de-coupled from Englishness, from Christianity, and from whiteness. And this is what has already been happening in practice although the formal institutions of the State might resist. When, for example, black British athletes at the Olympics in Sydney draped themselves in the Union Jack they were making a gesture whose hermeneutics is profoundly significant and ambiguous. When these black athletes who had been in Britain for 10 or 12 years draped themselves in Union Jacks and displayed their medals, they were doing two things: first, they were saying "We belong to Britain," and the British people say "Of course you do, how wonderful" because "you have brought us gold medals." But, they were also saying something else - Britain belongs to us. We have taken over the Union Jack, we have made it our own, therefore we are not simply tenants of this country - we are its fellow owners, and together we will control the destiny of the United Kingdom.
Now the second part of that semiotics, of draping themselves in the Union Jack, not just that we belong to Britain, that Britain belongs to us, and we are going to paint a little bit of black in the Union Jack. Now that was a profoundly significant, at one level subversive, gesture. And the conservative press in Britain was delighted that they had worn the Union Jack, thinking that they are now a part of Britain. They did not realize that they were also engaged in a subversive activity. And this is what I mean by saying that British identity or any kind of national identity, is constantly contested. The groups that have been marginalized are constantly going to be questioning and sometimes leads to struggle. As a result of all that, one begins to open up and over time make acceptable a certain view of what it is to be American or British or whatever.
The last point I want to mention, last but one, but which is critically important for any kind of cohesive society, is this notion, delivered by Robert Putnam of Harvard, of social capital. Trust is a very complex thing and one can easily turn into a romantic notion. Trust in any large community is very difficult to build up because people have different cultural backgrounds. We talk in different languages, it's never total, it's never terribly deep and yet, it is important. It's important insofar as "I ought to be able to count on you," that you will follow the same rules that I do so that you wouldn't be a free rider, and also that I should be able to count on you that you will take account of my interest in future, just as I take account of yours now. So trust is an expectation that in future I can make certain assumptions, entertain certain expectations of you, base my actions on certain predictions about your behaviour, and that I could count upon you to conform to that pattern.
Now, this sort of trust is a very complex thing. It's built up slowly and needs to be constantly revitalized which is why to talk of it as a capital is very dangerous, because capital can be stored up. Trust has to be constantly earned and it only exists insofar as it is constantly exercised, it can't be stored up. It is built up through thick networks of social relations, cutting across cultural, ethnic, religious boundaries where people develop habits of working together, mutual understanding and some measure of mutual trust. And this involves a number of things. Recent research, for example, on the communal violence in half a dozen countries, conducted by a friend of mine, showed that in those countries, where there are cross-cultural cutting groups, and some measure of trust, inter-ethnic or inter-communal violence is relatively rare and when it occurs it is very easily controlled. That the media or malevolent leaders are not able to exploit the tensions. Simply because you have built up a certain degree of mutual understanding, and more importantly, have built up a body of leaders who have sufficient authority to persuade their followers to behave in certain ways and not to fall prey to wild rumours.
Trust also requires a new kind of politics. A politics which is not state-centred, but a politics in which state-society partnership is constantly institutionalized. A kind of politics which doesn't rely on administrative and political institutions alone but on institutions which are at once communal and political.
And finally, the kind of cohesive society that I am talking about requires education, and education of a certain kind, loosely called multicultural, but much more complex than that. It's the kind of education whose job is to foster intercultural understanding, to develop in its pupils and therefore future adults a delight in diversity and willingness to accept diversity as a part of life and equally importantly, a basic culture of civility and the kinds of political virtues that go with it.
To conclude, social orders are very fragile entities - they can be easily weakened, they can be easily destroyed. And I can't think of one society in history which can confidently say that it is so cohesive and so stable that it stands no danger of falling apart. We know in the case of Bosnia, how easy it is for neighbours to kill each other. We saw that in Rwanda, we saw even that 50 odd years ago in Germany, a country in which Jews had been the most assimilated, a country which had one of the highest levels of cultural sophistication in Europe or indeed in the world. And yet, within a short span of 7-8 years, a society in which Jews had reasonably well integrated, and were perfectly at ease, became a nightmarish society, engaged in a horrendous form of genocide. And this remember, happened only 50 years ago - it didn't happen 500 years ago, only 50 years ago. And it didn't happen in the so-called dark Africa, it happened right in the heart of Europe.
And we therefore need to recognize that social orders are extremely fragile entities, positions of minorities can easily be used to turn them into scapegoats, made into objects of most murderous forms of violence, and therefore, I think we ought to bear in mind that a society can be cohesive only if it has a culture of civility, where citizens have developed political virtues that go with that culture of civility, where we have multiple centres of power so that no political institution is able to take over the entire society, where you have sensitive political leadership, and at the end of it all, where there is such a degree of common sense of belonging and emotional bonding that citizens would never dream of resorting to certain kinds of actions.
Now, that's a long agenda. Some societies have moved towards it to a greater degree than others, none has arrived fully and completely and therefore in a position to preach to the rest how they should behave and I think we can learn useful lessons, both from those that have been successful and those that have failed.
Thank you.
