Celebrating diversity is now central to progressive politics. But the left--most recently in the Parekh report - has failed to acknowledge the conflict between multiculturalism and the solidarity that underpins welfare states. National pride and the fragile bonds of citizenship must be taken more seriously

The weblog

Alan Wolfe and Jytte Klausen, Prospect
Guardian Unlimited

Friday December 1, 2000

In continental Europe the stress on social solidarity, managed by the state, is even greater than in individualistic Britain. For reasons linked to feudalism, Christianity, and the fear of revolution or invasion, the idea of a benign national state protecting all its citizens is a powerful one--most famously embodied by French republicanism, assimilating citizens into a state religion transcending class and ethnicity. But the historic preference for solidarity before diversity is now a source of great tension as well. Nowhere is this truer than in the small, egalitarian, formerly ethnically homogeneous states of Sweden and Denmark.

The governments in both these countries have issued reports along the lines of the Home Office's Race Equality in Public Services. Faced with the prospect of immigrants making up almost 20 per cent of the population within the next 20 years, Danes and Swedes have reasserted national values. The Swedes have embraced the idea of diversity but rejected multiculturalism; the Danes have rejected multiculturalism and barely accepted diversity at all. Yet those reports have been widely accepted by the left in both countries; there is nothing comparable to the Parekh report's challenging of common national norms in the name of difference.

Like Marshall and Beveridge, the theorists of Scandinavia's welfare states insisted on the need for national solidarity. A feeling for what she called "patriotic pride" marked Alva Myrdal's 1941 Family and Nation. Sweden, she happily pointed out, was a relatively uncontested idea. Its boundaries had been fixed for over 100 years. There were, moreover, no big subnationalities within its borders at the time she wrote; there were 34,000 Finns, but "there was never any urge to enforce their total assimilation or to keep them out of the Swedish communion."

But the days when Alva Myrdal could take Swedishness for granted are gone. While Sweden, like most European countries, invited in some guest workers during the booming 1960s and 1970s, the past two decades have seen a second wave of immigration unprecedented in Swedish history. According to a 1997 government report (The Future and Diversity), 17 per cent of all children born in Sweden have at least one foreign-born parent. Within another decade, one quarter of people living in Sweden under the age of 17 will be immigrants or the children of immigrants. Similar conditions exist in Denmark. A recent white paper (Better Integration) projects that by 2020 there will be 800,000 "foreigners" living in Denmark ("foreigner" denotes immigrants and their children, including those born in Denmark). They will then form 13.7 per cent of the population.

In both Sweden and Denmark, the second wave of immigration differs from the first, not only in numbers. Unlike the Turks and Yugoslavs who came as guest workers, the new immigrants include many Africans, Pakistanis and Iraqis. They are arriving at a time when the economy, with its tight labour market, cannot easily absorb them. New immigrants in Sweden, according to the government, are badly educated, have poor language skills, and feel alienated and discriminated against. They also behave differently. In Denmark, where the fertility rate is 1.7 children per couple, immigrants from Somalia reproduce at a rate of 5.6 and those from Iraq at a rate of 4.5.

Priding themselves on their inclusiveness and solidarity, Sweden and Denmark give immigrants the right to vote in local elections and expend great effort thinking about how to integrate them. But these are also countries with big welfare states, in which people are used to passing on large parts of their income to strangers--until recently, strangers quite like themselves. In both languages, the term "welfare state" is synonymous with "welfare society," and the solidarity which underpins it is premised upon society-wide norms and a common morality.

Appeals to common moral understandings are not vague incantations. The Scandinavian welfare states assume agreement over issues which can be highly divisive in many parts of the world. In Scandinavia, for example, it is common to view gender equality as the most recent chapter in the advancing history of rights detailed by Marshall. Social policies emphasising gender equality are needed, because without them, women cannot be full citizens, participating in public and private life. Support for gender equality is so deeply entrenched in these societies that the welfare state is not morally neutral between different conceptions of the family. Were the welfare state to tolerate patriarchal or authoritarian treatment of women in the name of pluralism, it would be violating the welfare state's insistence on equality.

Because the welfare state is not neutral with respect to gender equality, it also takes sides on the question of language. Immigrants are expected to learn the language of their new country as rapidly as possible: "It is expected of foreigners who wish to live in Denmark that they will make an effort to learn Danish and adjust to Danish society," says Better Integration.The reason is clear. Immigrant men, to the extent that they find jobs, will join the larger society. Without command of the language, women who stay at home will be unable to claim the rights offered to them by the welfare state. Hence the state must work its way inside ethnic families in order to ensure that everyone becomes part of the same society.

Official documents in both Sweden and Denmark insist that, for the welfare state to protect itself, immigrants must abandon any beliefs and practices that violate the norms of Scandinavian solidarity. The objective of integration, the Swedish report holds, should be "equal rights and opportunities for all without regard to ethnic or cultural background." Echoing Marshall's ideas about class abatement, the report argues that the purpose of policy "should be to abate ethnic segregation." The Danish report goes even further. "Foreigners who are legally in the country must be introduced to Danish society in a fruitful fashion... society has to demand that foreigners act to become self-sufficient and integrated into Danish society by becoming conversant with its basic values. It is a truism that foreigners as well as Danes must obey the country's laws and rules."

Compared to the Parekh report, there is no emphasis in either document on group rights or the protection of group customs; it is individuals who have rights, not the ethnic communities themselves. Both, moreover, stress the reciprocal obligations of immigrants far more than the Parekh report.

"The Danish welfare state faces a dilemma," wrote law professor Stig Jorgensen in the newspaper Information. "On the one hand, foreigners receive more from the state than they contribute to the common insurance pool, but on the other hand, we cannot accept different treatment between them and Danes." The only solution seems to be to try to make foreigners more like Danes as quickly as possible. It is not enough, writes the director of the Federation of Danish Social Workers in the same newspaper, to insist that Amra from Iran learns Danish and throws away her chador. "If she is to become integrated as a citizen, employers have to employ her, her neighbours have to invite her in for coffee, landlords have to rent her a room..." To counter the politics of exclusion of right-wing parties, social democrats support a politics of inclusion. But what the Danes call integration, the Parekh report dismisses as assimilation.

The Scandinavian insistence on solidarity and integration carries a price--as it does elsewhere in Europe. Sweden and Denmark were once viewed as among the most tolerant places in the world. Yet the defence of the welfare state in the face of the new immigration has revealed an undercurrent of racism. Also, Swedish and Danish industrial policy, which favours high-paying jobs and strong unions, exacerbates the problem by confining migrants to the margins. So, 54 per cent of men and 67 per cent of women in Denmark from non-European societies are unemployed. Since 1985, 92 per cent of Turks living in Albertslund, a Copenhagen suburb, have married other Turks. In most cases, one partner either still lived in Turkey or had arrived in Denmark that year.

For all the talk of integration, Swedes and Danes--unlike the French and British with their colonial pasts--have little experience of mixing with people who are different from them. The Swedish report on diversity says that "in order for Swedish to work as a bridge between people, it is necessary to increase the tolerance Swedes have for those who do not speak the language perfectly or speak it with an accent," a formulation which suggests the existence of considerable intolerance in daily life. Integration is proclaimed--but nothing like it has been achieved.

The problems that the Scandinavian countries are experiencing highlight the difficulty of clinging to the old ideal of solidarity in a globalising world with high levels of immigration. At the same time the Parekh report, and the many others like it, go too far in the other direction--underestimating the extent to which social solidarity requires strong national cultures. Britain seems to be navigating this divide better than many. For example, it requires all immigrants to learn English but subsidises minority languages; it imposes a common core curriculum in schools, but still allows some to call themselves Islamic, Hindu or Jewish. And attitude surveys in Britain have been recording a steady decline in racial prejudice. According to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's book True Colours, 74 per cent of whites (88 per cent of young whites) said they would not mind if a close relative married an Afro-Caribbean. (In the hugely successful television series Big Brother, two of the most popular characters were a lesbian and a black man.) But there is also a significant minority who do not embrace diversity. And working-class Britons are still far more likely to hold conservative views across the range of moral and social issues, including immigration. According to the latest British Social Attitudes Survey, 60 per cent of working-class people think that sex between two adults of the same sex is wrong, which compares with only 37 per cent of the salariat. There are similar moral gulfs between the generations. The same survey records that 72 per cent of 25 to 34 year olds believe it is "not wrong at all" if a man and woman have sex before marriage, while only 32 per cent of 55 to 64 year olds agree.

In the midst of this moral diversity, Britons still need a unifying idea of Britishness that can encompass diversity but is not eclipsed by it. As Melanie Phillips and others have argued, it is those at the bottom of the pile, economically and educationally, who suffer most from cultural rootlessness. Yet the Parekh report's rejection of the idea of a British way of life echoes Margaret Thatcher's famous remark that there is no such thing as society. Right-wing libertarians want business to do whatever it decides is in its best interest, irrespective of its impact on the common good, and left-wing multicultural libertarians want minorities to do whatever is in their interests, irrespective of its impact on the common good. Multiculturalists seem to believe that it is sufficient to base solidarity on abstract concepts of international law rather than real people with recognisable values and motives.

The story of modernity has been about people's ability to master forces once considered outside their control. Unwilling to grow old without some guarantee of economic security, or to face a labour market which could throw them out of work with no means of support, citizens of modern liberal democracies have pooled their exposure to risk in welfare states. In the absence of common threats it is the shared interests we have in the effectiveness of institutions like the NHS that binds us together most. And despite the limits of social democracy, the collapse of communism, and the ascendancy of Reaganism and Thatcherism in the 1980s and 1990s, there is no mass support for a politics which would return us to the kinds of lives people led before the 20th century.

Modern individuals want to feel some control over their moral environment for the same reasons they want control over their economic environment. Without broad common standards of right and wrong, some agreement on the nature of marriage and the family, respect for law, and some consensus about the role of religion in public life, our ability to live together happily is weakened. This does not mean that we must return to a time when racial and religious diversity was discouraged, and moral conformity trampled on individual freedom. It is one of the shining accomplishments of modernity that individuals have learned to share their fates with people very unlike themselves. No society in western Europe or North America is any longer homogeneous in ethnic, racial or religious terms, and all of them are richer for it. But the willingness to extend solidarity to those with whom one does not share such common bonds--or, indeed, attitudes towards pre-marital sex and homosexuality--depends on the mutual responsibilities imposed by citizenship.

The unavoidable negotiation between solidarity and diversity will be resolved in different societies in different ways, depending on their history and culture. Both principles must, of course, coexist, and there is no blueprint for dealing with the conflicts when they arise. But a few general points can be made. First, the conflict between solidarity and diversity must at least be more openly acknowledged, especially on the left, and political rhetoric and public policy should not shy away from pressing the claims of solidarity even sometimes against diversity. Second, the opinions and attitudes of the mainstream majority should not be ignored or treated with contempt. (They barely feature in the Parekh report except as representatives of official Britain.) It is true that they are not the people who are facing discrimination for being gay or black, but they are a necessary part of the solution. There is a wide spectrum of opinion in Britain, ranging from those who embrace difference to those who fear and hate it. Michael Ignatieff's useful distinction between positive and negative tolerance insists on a negative minimum of respect for the law and a public display of civilised behaviour, but also acknowledges that some people will not want to embrace difference and, within the law, should be free not to. Third, holding on to an idea of social solidarity through the welfare state in an increasingly diverse society requires conformity with some minimum, over-arching idea of Britishness--to which everyone signs up.

Immigrants come to societies like Britain for a reason. They expect to find ways of life, either economic or political, unavailable at home. How ironic it would be if, in the name of making them welcome, advocates of diversity were to undermine the conditions that made these economic and political miracles possible. Fortrtunately, that is unlikely to happen. Solidarity does not need diversity, although it can be strengthened and rejuvenated by it. But diversity does require solidarity because, without a common agreement on morality, no principle, including the principle of diversity itself, can ever be safe.

Alan Wolfe is the director of the Boisi Centre at Boston College and author of One Nation, After All (Penguin).

© Prospect 2000