Western political communities are in crisis. Previously, obstacles to the fundamental liberal-democratic commitment to equal citizenship emerged mainly from minority claims, and their experience of inequality. Currently, in contrast, a majoritarian crises has emerged from the other direction. Majority communities across the West are expressing high levels of frustration with diversity, identity-politics, immigration and social cohesion. These new conflicts threaten not only to halt progress on minority politics but, in many cases, to roll back symbolic and institutional forms designed to make our political communities inclusive. At its heart, this situation is a problem of political belonging: of the relation between cultural and political identity and their roles in the terms and symbols of inclusion within liberal-democratic political communities. Despite this need and centrality, the concept of political belonging and this cultural-political tension have not been systematically theorised in political theory. This article examines one notable exception, the accounts of belonging in the “Bristol School of Multiculturalism”. Focusing on the work of Tariq Modood and Bhikhu Parekh, both the most influential voices in this school and the most overt users of the concept, it teases out their still often implicit theories of belonging. It argues that these theories stem from their understandings of two concepts: culture and identity. It illustrates that Parekh and Modood neither understand nor balance these concepts in the same way. These differences, it demonstrates, have implications for their prescriptions for multiculturalising political/national identity. All of this highlights the fundamental insights into membership in their theories, and the unanswered elements that point towards how a fuller Bristolian theory of belonging could be developed. Importantly, this fuller account, the article argues, has deep insights into how majorities and minorities can belong to contemporary democracies.
Clayton Chin (Mon,) studied this question.