SOCIAL COHESION AND TOLERANCE

Introduction

Marking a significant shift from overwhelming concerns with economic issues during the 1980s, in the 1990s research and policy initiatives within governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental bodies have increasingly concerned themselves with matters surrounding the theme of ‘social cohesion’ (see Serageldin 1995). For instance, such matters were central to the United Nations HABITAT II conference in 1996, the UN World Summit on Social Development in 1995, and the 1995 Roskilde Symposium (jointly sponsored by UNESCO, the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization, and European Commission DG XII) entitled ‘From social exclusion to social cohesion: a policy agenda’.

Growing concerns with issues of social cohesion are evident in other ways as well. In the United States, for example, it is said that alongside growing calls for communitarianism and ‘active citizenship, a ‘wave of civic renewal’ has swept the country (The Guardian 8 January 1997). In the last year, the USA has seen a spate of related conferences, books, commissioned studies and the establishment of a new $35 million Institute for Civil Society. In November 1996, at the launch of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, Senator Sam Nunn observed that such concerns have arisen in response to ‘A broad consensus [which] has emerged among both experts and ordinary citizens that the quality of our public and civic life has declined alarmingly in recent decades.’

To be sure, many of these concerns and areas of ‘consensus’ rest upon a popular desire to recover some presumed lost state of social harmony. It is a nostalgia -- like many forms of nostalgia -- for what actually never was. Still, increasing indicators abound for what can be read as social disintegration: high incidence of crime, joblessness and homelessness, growing mistrust of neighbours and of government, worsening quality of social services, new manifestations of racism and xenophobia, an entrenchment of political apathy, and more. Within this context, there is widely and continuously promulgated an assumption that immigration and immigrants contribute significantly to the breakdown of social cohesion, however gauged.

The following essay suggests a variety of concepts, areas of research and policy domains pertinent to the idea of social cohesion, particularly with regard to the place and perception of immigrants. There is no presumption to cover the whole range of relevant issues; most of these have been addressed in numerous overviews to date (including Portes & Böröcz 1989, Heisler 1992, Bauböck 1994a, Weil & Crowley 1994, Janoski & Glennie 1995, Portes & Rumbaut 1996, Lindburg & Niessen 1996, Decoufflé 1996, McAndrew & Weinfeld 1996, Papademetriou 1996, Weinfeld 1997).

Further, here there is offered no precise definition of social cohesion; rather, it is suggested that we need to look at a variety of concepts, issues, perspectives and understandings in order to arrive at a general sense of the term -- and the meanings of immigration pertinent to it.

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