Rethinking Multiculturalism

"Bhikhu Parekh is really the leading British theorist of multiculturalism and he combines extensive public service with political philosophy. For instance, he was the acting chair of the Commission for Racial Equality in the early 1990s and at the end of the 1990s he chaired the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. He published a string of essays on multiculturalism in the 80s and 90s. Then he produced this book which came out in the year 2000 and is a very substantial statement of multiculturalism. Unlike Will Kymlicka, he wants to go beyond liberalism; he wants to argue that we should include groups, and not just because ultimately individual freedom is so important, and that somehow groups contribute to individual freedom. He thinks that both people and groups are important, so he is talking about people whose fulfilment lies in membership of a certain group. He says we shouldn’t have to find reasons for including groups based on what one might call liberal or individualist arguments. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Though, of course, one consequence of this is the tension between individual rights and what one might call group rights. So if we say individuals should be able to run their own community affairs, well, there are some groups, say, South Asian origin groups, who are likely to run their affairs by appointing elderly males as community leaders, and we might say, what about your women? And they could say that their role is something else. But some women within that group might feel that their rights are being less respected than the rights of their male community members. There are other difficult cases, like female circumcision, where individual rights and allowing cultures to continue with their customs and practices conflict. But Bhikhu Parekh discusses in great detail the controversial cases like this and shows how it is possible, through an effort by each side to understand the other, to find some sort of accommodation. He does want to support individual rights but he thinks that sometimes individual rights can be interpreted in very Western ways, which deny other cultures certain opportunities to promote their own ways of living."