Multicultural Citizenship and Muslim Identity Politics

I offer a rebuttal of the view, now common among the political classes in Western Europe, that Muslim assertiveness is incompatible with the universalism of liberal democratic citizenship. I do so by sketching a view of multicultural citizenship in which respect for difference is grounded in universalist values. My conception of political multiculturalism is based on the ideas of ‘difference’, ‘multi’ and a double conception of equality. Multiculturalism seeks the goal of positive difference and the means to achieve it, which crucially involve the appreciation of the fact of multiplicity and groupness, the building of group pride among those marked by negative difference, and political engagement with the sources of negatitivity and racism. While the focus is not on anything so narrow as normally understood by ‘culture’, and multicultural equality cannot be achieved without other forms of equality, such as those relating to socioeconomic opportunities, its distinctive feature is about the inclusion into and the making of a shared public space in terms of equality of respect as well as equal dignity. I marry this conception of multiculturalism to a vision of citizenship that is not confined to the state but dispersed across society, compatible with the multiple forms of contemporary groupness and sustained through dialogue, plural forms of representation that do not take one group as the model to whom all others have to conform and new, reformed national identities. Citizenship consists of a framework of rights and practices of participation, but also discourses and symbols of belonging, ways of imagining and remaking ourselves as a country and expressing our sense of commonalities, as well as differences in ways in which these identities qualify each other and create inclusive public spaces. I show in some detail that some British Muslims' identity debates have precisely this character. Ideological and violent extremism is indeed undermining the conditions and hopes for multiculturalism, but this extremism has nothing to do with multiculturalism and is coming into the domestic arena from the international.