The two books reviewed here offer a variety of ways to think about multiculturalism and the issue of Muslim immigration into Europe. The anthology edited by Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood centers on the question of Muslim identity and citizenship in modern secular societies. Will Kymlicka's book looks at the tensions and dilemmas that arise as relatively new international organizations try to formulate and implement universal norms for individuals living in what are still largely Westphalian nation-states. In other words, Levey and Modood's volume takes the challenge that multicultural citizenship poses to the liberal state as its point of departure, while Kymlicka starts with the challenge of a new international regime of minority rights.
Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship grew out of a conference held in Sydney on the issue of integrating Muslims into Western societies. While inspired by recent events, the organizers of that conference sought to root the discussions in the long history of religious settlements and the development of secular societies. Papers from that conference developed into the book, along with a foreward by Charles Taylor and an additional essay written by the editors on the Danish cartoon affair. Following an introductory chapter by Levey, the book is divided into two parts: “Debating Secularism,” with chapters by Ian Hunter, David Saunders, Rajeev Bhargava, and Veit Bader, and “Secularism and Multicultural Citizenship,” with chapters by José Casanova, Modood, S. Sayyid, and Abdullah Saeed, and concluding with the editors' essay. (This is a distinguished lineup, but alas, it does not include a single woman. For a book explicitly on multiculturalism, this is especially unfortunate.)
There are indeed many debates about secularism in Part I. Hunter echoes Hobbes and Samuel von Pufendorf in contending that the legitimacy of liberal societies is secured in keeping the peace and keeping the state's coercive power out of dangerous hands. Hunter rejects all normative accounts of state legitimacy in favor of a purely empirical and historical one that shows how liberal secular societies have managed to broker peace between “mutually hostile religious or ideological communities” (p. 29). His quarrel seems to be with those philosophers who would “overshoot the ineluctable shallowness of historical liberal orders” (such as the one he traces in early modern Brandenburg-Prussia) with deep notions of popular sovereignty, whether of John Rawls, of communitarians, or of critical theorists (and here he is clearly alluding to Jürgen Habermas).
Saunders follows Hunter's historical approach, though less combatively, to put the 1905 French Law of Separation Between Church and State, and the accompanying conception of laïcité, in a softer light than that shone by those who see the pact as a violent abrogation of the Catholic Church's perogatives. Saunders's historical account argues that the pact was a “liberal middle way between rival sectarianisms—one religious, the other secular—not an illiberal (or totalitarian) imposition of a secularist ideology in pure Enlightenment style” (p. 79).
In the next chapter, Bhargava holds up India as an exemplar of a modern secular state, one that has had to broker peace among many different religions, breaking the supposedly necessary link between secularism and Christianity (p. 107). While the separation of church and state arose from within Christianity (namely, from the Catholic Church's distinction between Diocesan priests and parish priests, as Taylor discusses), Christianity is neither a necessary nor a sufficient feature of a society for it to become secular.
Bader takes issue with the equation of liberal societies with secular ones and the tendency for liberals to focus on setting up rules to hold religious language in check in public discourse. Taking Rawls as an exemplar of this tendency, but also one whose work recognizes its limits, Bader finds “that ‘reasons’ should not be reduced to (clearly and propositionally articulated) ‘arguments,’ that they should be fully open not only to theoretical but also to practical knowledge, that they should not exclude emotions and passions, that homogeneous views of public reason (singular) have to be rejected and that the plurality or multiplicity of perspectives has to be recognized” (p. 133). In Bader's “moderately agonistic democracy” where some “virtues of moderation and tolerance have been cultivated,” there is not only room for but also a need for many different points of view, including religious ones.
Casanova begins the second half of the book with a comparison of immigration and religious pluralism in the European Union and the United States. He finds that immigration has gone better in the United States than in the EU, largely because America is more accommodating of religious identity and affiliation, whereas European countries on the whole wall off religion from public life, identifying their increasing enlightenment with a decrease in religious sentiment. Moreover, Muslims account for just 10% of immigrants to the United States but are the bulk of immigrants to Europe. Despite all the post-9/11 wariness in the United States, Islam is less of a threat there, largely because it has become an indigenous religion among African Americans, not just recent immigrants, whereas in Europe, the huge influx of Muslim immigration seems to many, on the right as well as the left, to pose a threat to European religious as well as secular norms.
In his chapter on Muslims, religious equality, and secularism, Modood argues for seeing the Muslim immigration and its backlash in Europe along the same lines that political multiculturalism in the United States and Britain has proceeded. It is not just a call for equality to assimilate into the host culture; it is also a call for recognition of the immigrants' ethnic and religious identity. Rather than see Muslim immigrants as unruly elements threatening the public–private distinction, Modood argues, we should see them as asking for recognition and respect and inclusion into society qua Muslims, just as blacks, gays, and women in the United States and Britain have been seeking positive recognition and inclusion. This, he thinks, is consistent with a moderate secularism, though not with the radical secularism fueled by the “clash of civilizations” mind-set.
Sayyid's chapter, “Contemporary Politics of Secularism,” argues that the discourse of secularism is symptomatic of an underlying phenomenon: The story the West tells itself about itself is being threatened by what Muslim identity seems to represent. The discourse of secularism, Sayyid shows, is being marshaled in the west and in India to deal with an emerging Muslim identity. This is an identity that is unruly in many ways: It cannot be categorized as a matter of nationality, class, race, or even religion; it is best understood as a shared history that links Muslims around the world and poses as a “counter-history to the dominant Plato-to-NATO sequence”; it is diasporic and threatens the neat lines drawn by the Westphalian system between nations and between national majorities and “ethnicized minorities” (pp. 198–99).
In the penultimate chapter, Saeed asks whether it is imaginable that Muslims could willingly live under non-Muslim rule. To answer, he looks historically at the attitude of Islam toward life under non-Muslim rule and the relationship between Islam and the West. Looking more recently, he identifies several generations and accompanying attitudes toward integration into Western societies. Three generations were decidedly isolationist. The most recent generation, namely, those born in Western countries, tend more to be what he dubs “participants”: They are “actively negotiating Islam within the context of the local culture” and “developing strategies to deal with questions of integration and adaptation without assimilation” (p. 212).
In the concluding chapter, written specifically for the book, the editors take up the Danish cartoon affair. Against those who interpret the affair as a clash between Western liberal values and Muslim values, Levey and Modood interpret it as a problem that can be understood within liberal-democratic ideals themselves. That is, they judge the Danish cartoons according to values of liberal democracy, namely, liberty, fraternity, and equality. They argue that on these grounds alone, without having to appeal to Muslim ones at all, the cartoons should not have been published. While liberty might give one license to publish something inflammatory, fraternity calls for trying to improve relations among citizens, not inflame them. Moreover, they argue well, the cartoons were racist and so could be banned as instances of hate speech.
Kymlicka continues his impressive and influential work on multiculturalism in his latest book, which explores how international governmental organizations can and should promote multiculturalism in a way that will help national minorities, indigenous peoples, and immigrant groups. Part I describes how state–minority relations have been, since World War II, internationalized. Part II focuses on liberal multiculturalism, the forms it takes, the conditions that are necessary, and how it is faring in practice. Part III reflects on the paradoxes found in the experiments to instantiate liberal multiculturalism in Europe and globally.
This is a rather personal book in which the author confesses the tensions he has experienced as a much-consulted academic expert in the crucible of attempts to decide whether to support a good-enough policy that might actually be adopted at the expense of working for a better policy that might never prevail. A good example—though this is hardly Kymlicka's central focus—is the problem of securing protection for immigrant groups in Europe: whether to secure them under the existing protocol, the Council of Europe's Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM), which really is not suited to the needs of immigrants, or to create a new document that would expressly protect immigrant groups but in the current climate does not stand a chance of being adopted (pp. 223–25).
The reason for the problem is, of course, that in Europe, Muslims make up 80% of immigrants and their presence, given recent events, destroys what he says are two of the five preconditions necessary for liberal multiculturalism to flourish: the “liberal expectancy” and the “desecuritization of ethnic relations” (pp. 122 and 155). Kymlicka finds this all to be unfortunate, and he hopes the situation will improve, but he does not give an adequate analysis of whether Muslim immigrants pose a threat to liberalism or security or what might be done to promote multiculturalism precisely when it is needed most (p. 127).
