The end of multiculturalism

National Interest, The, Jan-Feb, 2008 by Lawrence E. Harrison

FUTURE GENERATIONS may look back on Iraq and immigration as the two great disasters of the Bush presidency. Ironically, for a conservative administration, both of these policy initiatives were rooted in a multicultural view of the world.

Since the 1960s, multiculturalism, the idea that all cultures are essentially equal, has become a dominant feature of the political and intellectual landscape of the West. It has profoundly influenced Iraq War policy, the policy of democracy promotion, international development agendas and immigration policy, with consequences for the cultural composition of societies.

But multiculturalism rests on a frail foundation: Cultural relativism, the notion that no culture is better or worse than any other--it is merely different. That's doubtlessly good advice for cultural anthropologists doing ethnographic studies in the field. If one's goal is full understanding of a value system quite different from one's own, ethnocentrism can seriously distort the quest and the conclusions. But what if the objective is to assess the extent to which a culture nurtures values, attitudes and beliefs that facilitate progress toward democratic governance, social justice and an end to poverty, the goals of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The idea that some cultures are more nurturing than others of progress thus defined--and that this assumption can be measured and assessed--challenges the very essence of cultural relativism.

The idea also has major implications for a variety of domestic and foreign policies, from the ability of a country to absorb large numbers of new immigrants to the ease with which one expects to export democracy and free-market systems. Why, for example, have free-market economic reforms worked well in India yet poorly in Latin America (Chile excepted), where socialism, even authoritarian socialism in the case of Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, appears to be alive and well?

Cultural factors do not wholly explain political, economic, and social success or failure, but surely they are relevant--as more than two decades of research, some of it published in the pages of this magazine, has demonstrated. (1) Yet many policymakers are uncomfortable addressing cultural differences, even when there is clear evidence that culture matters.

Multiculturalism and Foreign Policy

IF CULTURE matters, then, by influencing the degree of receptivity of a society to democracy and free-market institutions and the degree to which the society is just and produces and encourages entrepreneurs, what are the implications for a foreign policy, a fundament of which is the doctrine that "These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society?"--this implies that any culture in the world is capable of sustaining a functioning democracy. The Bush Administration has staked huge human, financial, diplomatic and prestige resources on the doctrine's applicability in Iraq. It is now apparent that the doctrine is fallacious.

What were the chances of consolidating democracy--not just elections, but also the full array of political rights and civil liberties--in Iraq, an Arab country with no real experience with democracy and with two conflict-prone Islamic sects, Sunni and Shi'a, and an ethnolinguistic group, the Kurds, seeking autonomy? And why did people think that this would ignite a "democracy wave" that would sweep through the region, when many of the preconditions associated with a successful transition to democracy--including societal openness and literacy, particularly female literacy--were lacking? The accompanying table (next page), based on information gathered by Freedom House and the 2004 UN Human Development Report, makes this particularly apparent.

The Arab world is not fertile soil for the rapid cultivation of democracy.

A key component of a successful democratic transition is trust. Trust is a particularly important cultural factor for social justice and prosperity. Trust in others reduces the cost of economic transactions, and democratic stability depends on it.

Trust is periodically measured in some eighty countries by the World Values Survey. Four Nordic countries--Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland-enjoy very high levels of trust: 58-67 percent of respondents in these countries believe that most people can be trusted. By contrast, 12 percent of respondents in Zimbabwe and South Africa, 11 percent in Algeria, 8 percent in Tanzania and Uganda, and 3 percent of Brazilians believe that most people can be trusted. There are no survey data for Iraq, but the data from the other Middle Eastern states are not particularly encouraging.

The high levels of identification and trust in Nordic societies reflect their homogeneity; common Lutheran antecedents, including a rigorous ethical code and heavy emphasis on education; and a consequent sense of the nation as one big family imbued with the Golden Rule. In sharp contrast, Cameroon's Daniel Etounga-Manguelle points to some of the cultural factors that help explain the low levels of trust in Africa and the propensity of the region for corruption and strife: fatalism, authoritarianism and a communitarianism that suffocates both individual initiative and economic rationality. One can point to many of the same factors in Iraq--to which the current ethno-sectarian conflicts vividly attest.