A history of modern European cultural pluralism, its current crisis, and its uncertain future
In 2010, the leaders of Germany, Britain, and France each declared that multiculturalism had failed in ...their countries. Over the past decade, a growing consensus in Europe has voiced similar decrees. But what do these ominous proclamations, from across the political spectrum, mean? From the influx of immigrants in the 1950s to contemporary worries about refugees and terrorism, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europeexamines the historical development of multiculturalism on the Continent. Rita Chin argues that there were few efforts to institute state-sponsored policies of multiculturalism, and those that emerged were pronounced failures virtually from their inception. She shows that today's crisis of support for cultural pluralism isn't new but actually has its roots in the 1980s.
Chin looks at the touchstones of European multiculturalism, from the urgent need for laborers after World War II to the public furor over the publication ofThe Satanic Versesand the question of French girls wearing headscarves to school. While many Muslim immigrants had lived in Europe for decades, in the 1980s they came to be defined by their religion and the public's preoccupation with gender relations. Acceptance of sexual equality became the critical gauge of Muslims' compatibility with Western values. The convergence of left and right around the defense of such personal freedoms against a putatively illiberal Islam has threatened to undermine commitment to pluralism as a core ideal. Chin contends that renouncing the principles of diversity brings social costs, particularly for the left, and she considers how Europe might construct an effective political engagement with its varied population.
Challenging the mounting opposition to a diverse society,The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europepresents a historical investigation into one continent's troubled relationship with cultural difference.
After the Nazi racial state Chin, Rita; Fehrenbach, Heide; Eley, Geoff ...
2009., 20100222, 2009, c2009., 20090101
eBook
What happened to "race," race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of "race" since ...1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks—arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany—the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with "race" in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity. After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration—and about just how much "difference" a democracy can accommodate—are implicated in a longer history of "race." This book explores why the concept of "race" became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from "race" for Germany and Europe as a whole.
A striking aspect of contemporary European debates about immigrants is the focus on the Muslim woman as the key figure through which objections to Islamic cultural difference have been articulated. ...This article traces how sexual politics became central to German public debates about guest worker migrants. It shows how Turkish women became a central trope for representing the fundamental cultural differences between Turks and Germans and explores the somewhat surprising hand that feminists had in facilitating this line of thinking.
Drawing on innovative programs at the University of Michigan and Duke University, this essay explores an important trend in humanistic education: the provision of opportunities for experiential ...learning, whether for undergraduates or graduate students. Avenues for applied humanistic research, such as research-based internships and courses structured around collaborative, client-inflected research projects, provide numerous benefits. In addition to cultivating teamwork, leadership, and communications skills, such experiences build intellectual confidence, expand horizons, and foster motivation to pursue additional research challenges. Although humanistic experiments with experiential learning now abound across higher education, pedagogical conservatism among faculty has slowed the pace of change, with pilots often occurring outside the frameworks of standard curricular structures. We call on departments in the humanities and interpretive social sciences to embrace the promise of engaged, public-facing scholarly endeavor, and to make collaborative research a core feature of curricular expectations for students at all levels.
If multiculturalism ultimately became the primary trope through which Europeans debated ethnic diversity, it seems important to understand how this diversity developed in Europe in the first place. ...When, in other words, was multicultural Europe born? What economic and political motors drove large numbers of non-Europeans to settle in post– World War II Europe? And in what ways did different national histories, traditions, and ideas of belonging shape the diverse societies that developed—as well as the distinctive state responses to cultural diversity?
The standard answer to these questions is that Western Euro pean countries became diverse in the aftermath
During the 1970s, there were isolated moments when immigrants and foreign laborers attracted wider national attention. In 1970, for example, the asphyxiation deaths of five African workers in France ...provoked a public outcry about the deplorable housing conditions. Similarly, in Britain, the 1977 murder of Pakistani-born Altab Ali drew thousands onto the streets of London to demand an end to the racial violence committed by East End skinheads. But such episodes were typically occasioned by an individual tragedy, one whose reach could largely be contained by addressing a localized problem. Over the next decade, however, something changed. Not only did
In many respects, 1973 marked the end of postwar prosperity. More specifically, it marked the end of an unspoken assumption—shared by most Europeans—that collective economic expansion would continue ...unabated. Whereas the dominant discourses of the late 1940s and early 1950s had focused on heroic wartime survival and rebuilding from the rubble, the enduring theme of the mid-1970s was a contracting society saddled with intractable problems and intrusive new constraints. The fivemonth OPEC embargo quadrupled the price of oil, and its effects rippled throughout Western Europe in the form of escalating prices, fuel shortages, and massive unemployment. Governments, in
EPILOGUE Chin, Rita
The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe,
08/2017
Book Chapter
Given the longer history we have just considered, it may be that multiculturalism has outlasted its usefulness as a viable blueprint for Western European societies. The term has been saddled with ...criticism—both thoughtful and spurious—from every imaginable political quarter. The sheer weight of these condemnations may simply be too difficult to lay aside or overcome. Even commentators who are committed to “lived multiculture” in Europe have urged its abandonment, and some have offered alternative concepts such as conviviality.¹ At the end of the day, however, such calls for abandonment raise a number of urgent questions: What exactly do
INTRODUCTION Chin, Rita
The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe,
08/2017
Book Chapter
The question of how European nations deal with racial and ethnic diversity has become inescapable in recent years. For some, the issue emerged in the fraught political climate of 9/11. For others, it ...surfaced with the establishment of the European Union (EU) and its efforts to define a collective identity. For still others, questions of difference and national belonging assumed special urgency with the succession of homegrown terrorist acts: the London bombings, the killings at Charlie Hebdo, the attacks at the Bataclan, the assaults in Brussels, and the rampages in Nice and at the Berlin Christmas market. Even before the
On 18 September 1989 (roughly seven months after the Rushdie affair began), sisters Leila and Fatima Achaboun were sent home from the Collège Gabriel Havez, a public middle school in the town of ...Creil near Paris, for refusing to take off their headscarves (foulards) in the classroom. Three days later, a third student, Samira Saidani was also dismissed for covering her head. Although pupils had previously been permitted to wear headscarves, the school’s administrative council now declared that these coverings were no longer allowed. When the girls declined to comply with the new rule, school principal Ernest Chénière suspended them,
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