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Tony Fitzpatrick
© Tony Fitzpatrick 2008
In recent years concerns have been raised about the sustainability of redistributive
and universal welfare systems in a period of increasing cultural diversity.
Some of that discussion has identified a general social anxiety in which fear
of the future and fear of others blend into and feed off one another; with
various newspapers, politicians and commentators outbidding themselves in
their efforts to inflate the public’s sense of moral panic and social
decline. Should we take such concerns seriously? Do we need to trade-off either
cultural diversity or social cohesion? (For a longer account of the following
arguments see my Applied Ethics and Social Problems.)
For example, in The New East End, Dench, Gavron and Young observe
that the post-war welfare state was based upon principles of solidarity, desert
and family unity, which promised a New Jerusalem for those who had visibly
earned its benefits. Sometime in the late 1960s this began to change, though.
Solidarity was replaced with a catch-all universalism, desert was displaced
by ‘need’ and family gave way to a centrally and bureaucratically-managed
individualism. In the context of increased migration and ethnic pluralism
this has fuelled racial tension, distrust and urban deprivation. But the blame
for this lies not with the white working-class or with ethnic minorities but
with a something-for-nothing culture of individual entitlement that ignores
values of community, family and participative citizenship.
Is this widely publicised account a reasonable one?
Firstly, their account of those changes is highly impressionistic, lacking
much by way of depth, counter-argument or data triangulation. Despite their
prescriptions (revive communal values and make welfare more conditional) having
dominated government thinking since at least 1979, the authors see themselves
as battling an entrenched, leftist orthodoxy. Secondly, group solidarities
and cultural affiliations are barely critiqued, e.g. white racism is attributed
to misperception, myth and rumour rather than, for instance, to the lingering
effects of imperial identities in a post-imperial era. Finally, family and
community are presented both as deep sources of identity and as fragile
entities which welfare services have managed to destabilize; such narratives
being a typical trick of cultural conservatism. Dench et al therefore
make some interesting points (see below) but as a generalised condemnation
of contemporary approaches to social integration the charge does not stick.
Those approaches are often grouped, rightly or wrongly, under the heading
of multiculturalism; the objection being that, both in principle and practice,
multiculturalism has failed to deliver the level of integration into, and
identification with, a national community that is required for social cohesion.
We first need to appreciate that multiculturalism does not equate to cultural
separatism and relativism. What often gets criticised as multiculturalism
is in fact what Sen (in Identity and Violence) terms ‘plural
monoculturalism’, implying not the creative interaction of cultures
but a federation of separate, homogeneous traditions each defined in terms
of singular identities.
Nevertheless, while many critics often accept the fact of diversity and its
potential for positive contributions, what they doubt is whether society requires
more than equal treatment and fair procedures for all. A common but also pluralised
conception of citizenship is already offered by liberalism, some maintain,
with multiculturalism being either an irrelevant or an unhelpful or a dangerous
addition.
To date the most extensive discussion of state welfare in relation to multiculturalism
has been provided by Banting and Kymlicka’s Multiculturalism and the
Welfare State. They outline two trade-offs. The ‘heterogeneity/redistribution
trade-off’ maintains that ethnic diversity undermines redistributive
policies. If people don’t feel connected to one another, the reasoning
goes, they will be reluctant to fund services for each another. The ‘recognition/redistribution
trade-off’ states that a concern with the politics of recognition and
difference drains attention and energy away from a politics of redistribution.
But the book demonstrates why we should not exaggerate such trade-offs. Redistribution
can be undermined by diversity and a politics of recognition but
more importantly there is no inherent logic at work. Multiculturalism
may threaten trust and solidarity but it may equally support them. There are
too many factors to justify simplistic generalisations, much depending on
how multiculturalism operates. (It is an anti-multiculturalist polemic which
could make it harder to preserve social trust and solidarity.) For instance,
rapid inward migration may exert downward pressure on social spending; however,
research finds that this is then counteracted by an upward pressure in
those countries operating strong multicultural policies, i.e. that the
latter maintain and indeed strengthen relations of trust and solidarity. Access
to welfare services is required in order for everyone to perform the tasks
of social participation that we demand from one another. Without sufficient
public goods, social resources and entitlements, individuals are unable to
participate fully in national life.
Dench et al lamented the decline of social insurance, the principle
that common risks should be commonly pooled and that an upper tranche of welfare
entitlements have to be earned by paying contributions into that pool. Why
this principle declined in Britain is another question, but that decline undoubtedly
weakened the inclusivity of state welfare. We have expanded selectivist and
punitive measures without the ladder-climbing, solidarity-inducing incentives
that social insurance schemes, within an egalitarian context, can provide.
In short, we should not apply culturalist analyses when much of the actual
responsibility for social conflicts and anxieties lies with the erosion of
public goods, public spaces and political empowerment that comes with massive
and continuing socioeconomic inequalities.
Therefore, the welfare state already supplies many of the ethical and administrative
reserves we need to acclimatise ourselves to cultural diversification. By
instituting upward steps of contributory insurance we can perhaps bolster
support for redistributive solidarity, inspiring new synergies between diversity
and trust, recognition and redistribution, class and ethnicity, without the
exclusionary and discriminatory obsessions, directed towards ethnocultural
others, that have poisoned the atmosphere of recent public debates. Much of
the recent sound and fury about multicultural citizenship occurs within a
neoliberal context of social inequality and public scarcity. Alter that context
and the tone of those debates can change. This is not to claim that cultural
and ethnic tensions are dissolved by socioeconomic and material equalities
but it is to claim that we should not be so mesmerised by the former either.
Tony Fitzpatrick is a Reader at the University of Nottingham and
the author of Applied Ethics and Social Problems, published on June 4th by
Policy Press
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