SOCIAL COHESION AND TOLERANCE

Conclusion

As described earlier in this essay, there are numerous ways in which Western societies are becoming more heterogeneous, diverse and differentiated through an emergent constellation of social, political and economic shifts. Immigration and the presence of immigrants -- although fingered by racists and nationalists as a prime cause of social decline -- should be clearly put into perspective as hardly ‘disruptive’ compared to other ongoing and fundamental restructurings affecting society. The social morphology is changing and the images of ‘nation’, community, collective identity and ‘cohesion’ must adjust in any case. Some sociological concepts and political philosophies are better posed than others for addressing these changes, images and necessary adjustments: the arguments over which are the better posed cannot be decided until we have a fuller understanding of the nature of contemporary social, economic and political restructuring.

Rather than longing for some presumed lost state of social cohesion marked by a homogeneous fabric of common values and close reciprocal relationships, we should re-think our notions of heterogeneity and difference in such a way that we realize ‘social cohesion’ -- witnessed in cooperative activity surrounding common causes -- can certainly be maintained. And whither, then, ‘the nation’, that people-binding idea presumed to be so threatened by the complexification of society? Again, difference and diversity needn’t threaten this construct if it, too, can be re-thought (or, we should argue, re-awakened) in terms of providing a common framework for ever greater heterogeneity. Rather than by some spurious notion of cultural and ‘racial’ (and, in many places, class-based and implicitly gendered) sameness, the nation should be defined by, and identified with, its democratic institutions. This is surely what Jürgen Habermas (1994: 27) has in mind when urging that ‘the political culture must serve as the common denominator for a constitutional patriotism which simultaneously sharpens an awareness of the multiplicity and integrity of the different forms of life which coexist in a multicultural society.’

As underscored by social scientists for the last hundred years, the city represents perhaps the key arena for examining a wide range of processes, effects, interventions and feedbacks across a variety of overlapping social, political and economic domains. All of the issues and concepts pointed to in this essay have their manifestations in cities. It is for these reasons that the METROPOLIS initiative is to be welcomed. Through its stimulation of a constant interchange between social scientific researchers and policy-making agents concerned with societal change in general and the incorporation of immigrants in particular, we might better facilitate the fashioning of a truly heterogeneous form of social cohesion appropriate to our times.

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