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Some liberals argue that political polarization is caused by "identity politics" that has created a kind of new tribalism. This essay argues that this is a misreading. Instead, the essay addresses polarization between those who are pro-diversity (possibly also pro-immigration) and those who fear that their national identities are being demoted at the expense of other identities. The clash is not between universalism and identitarianism but over the value or recognition to be accorded to different group identities. While multiculturalism has been concerned with the normative status of minority identities, it has been counterposed, sometimes aggressively, by those who bemoan the neglect of majorities and their identity-based anxieties. This essay focuses on how we can tackle and lessen the polarization that is fostering mutual distrust and threatening the national, democratic citizenships upon which any multiculturalist, egalitarian, and unifying project must be built, and which multiculturalists, together with others, must defend. This involves developing a multicultural national identity to which all citizens can have a sense of belonging without giving up other identities that are important to them. Such national and group identities should not be conceived as monistic or static but rather as interactive and dialogical. Such a sense of the national allows one to be sensitive to minority-identity vulnerabilities and majority-identity anxieties within an integrated theoretical and political framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I rally behind Floyd's call to arms for an approach to political philosophy based on the broad hope 'that we can successfully treat certain forms of human action as expressions [of] normative preferences ripe for conversion into political principles'. I have doubts, however, about his use of social science: it is too selective and is selected on the basis of the avoidance of two social evils and thus does not answer the fundamental questions of political philosophy about the good life and a polity that is based on positive ideals and aspirations. Nor do I see that the avoidance of the normative aloofness of 'continental' critical theory requires the postulation of a universal human nature, a postulate that in any case is unavailable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class has been central to European sociology and especially to sociology of education. Class origins (through one's parents) do indeed largely determine one's educational attainments and through them, with further support from one's class origins, determine one's class destination. And the cycle continues in one's own children. However, class does not affect all ethnic groups in the same manner, given that different groups bring different resources to any given situation, in this case, education, through their ethnic capital. Ethnic capital is the social capital that may be distinctive to a particular ethnic group and so can vary across groups. It can motivate, support and channel the behaviour of members of a group. This article focuses on the ethnic capital of one set of parents and the wider community. It is based on qualitative research undertaken with a small group of British Kashmiris who have been educationally successful. The investigation explored the contribution of their parents and the wider community to their education: how the parents and the wider family communicated their expectations on education and the support and encouragement they provided to the young people. The findings showed that in a socioeconomically disadvantaged context the ethnic capital of the parents and the community can be a driving factor in their children's education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates and controversies over the governance of religious diversity are important features of the social and political landscape in all five regions covered in this collection. All have historical as well as contemporary forms of these debates that have had a significant impact on not just the structures and forms of governance but also on the very identity of each state as it has grappled, and continues to grapple, with religious diversity and the issues it raises. This final contribution presents an inter-regional comparative analysis and findings of different modes of state-religion connections between our different regions, following on from the discussions in the individual contributions of the collection focused on intra-regional analyses. Moreover, central to state-religion relations is the idea of political secularism and so we offer a definition of political secularism from which we can compare countries and regions. We assess the idea of political secularism against our typology of modes of governance of religious diversity and explore convergences and divergences between our regions along three conceptual lines: the idea of secularism, the idea of freedom of religion, and the relationship between national identity and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between and within different world regions today religious diversity remains a significant challenge and researchers have identified a wide variety of church-state relations as well as of legal, institutional, and political arrangements related to state-religion connections. These variations in type and degree owe something to distinctive political, institutional, theological, and historical inheritances and have led to different normative conceptions of secularism and of state-religion relations and connections. This first contribution begins by mapping the ground of existing conceptions of secularism and state-religion connections. Our discussion first assesses normative approaches that emanate from 'the West' as well as from perspectives outside of 'the West' (such as India), and which might directly challenge the former. It then turns to outline a new framework of five modes of governance of religious diversity, presenting each in relation to a series of constitutive features or norms that characterise it and which distinguish it from other modes. This typology of modes forms the basis of the intra- and inter-regional comparative analyses presented in the regionally focused contributions to this collection. We finally provide an overview of these contributions and their application of the typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly established religious minorities in Western European countries and Australia have sparked fresh questions about the public place of religion. The current situation in the region reflects a certain agonism over the place of public religion and its relation to liberal secular order. This has especially been the case for the region's Muslims in a context marked by fears of radicalisation and extremism. This contribution considers these responses in relation to Belgium, France, Germany, and the UK; and Australia. The contribution explores the norm of freedom of religion that forms the region's core similarity but also the ground on which divergences in norms of state-religion connections can be found. It identifies key norms that operate in the region in order to draw out similarities as well as important differences between the countries. Exploring how the governance of religious diversity comes to reflect diversity-enhancing or diversity-limiting features, it assesses the ways and extent to which the region can be characterised under 'moderate secularism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2019, a conference was held at the University of Bristol to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship. This special issue of Ethnicities brings together a set of articles by a number of the keynote speakers at that conference. By doing so, it celebrates the Centre's achievements over these two decades, reveals how the field has changed over the last twenty years, gives a good indication of the range of the Centre's current activities and also hints at some of the directions which it may take in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between religion and the state, focusing on cases of establishment in which one religion is formally recognized. Arguing that religious establishment is wrong if it causes some citizens to feel alienated, we reject the criticism that feelings of alienation are too subjective a foundation for a robust normative case about establishment. We base our argument on an account of collective identities, which may have an 'inside' but are also subject to a process of othering in which a dominant group imposes an identity on a subordinate group. The establishment of a religion may contribute to othering, and the othered group may consequently be alienated from the state. However, since establishment does not always cause alienation, it is necessary to seek evidence and engage in a dialogue in order to understand a group's own account of its experience of its situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the killing of George Floyd by the police in the US in May 2020, a new anti-racism has erupted across the world. While this anti-racism is squarely focussed on dismantling anti-black racism, scholarship--especially in western Europe--has for some decades now been emphasising racisms: Anti-South Asian racism, Islamophobia and Sinophobia in Britain, anti-Arab racism in France and anti-Turk and anti-migrant racisms in Germany, and so on. These various forms of racism do not just refer to the use of biological features, but also perceived cultural features in the way that particular groups are constructed and rendered as 'other'--cultural racisms. Yet, this scholarship is deeply Euro-Americancentric as it barely acknowledges racisms outside the West and least of all racisms that do not involve white perpetrators. This special issue considers a number of such racisms and anti-racisms in Asia and the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There may be various reasons to rethink political secularism but, in my view, the most significant today, certainly in Western Europe, is what I understand as the multicultural challenge. It is clear West European states are now highly challenged by the issues posed by post-immigration ethno-religious diversity, and that the new Muslim settlements of the last fifty years or so are at the centre of it. This has forced new thinking, not only about questions of social integration but also about the role of religion in relation to the state and citizenship. Accordingly, a fundamental issue that many thought had long been settled has re-emerged with new vitality and controversy, namely political secularism, especially as it articulates with questions of tolerance, recognition, and governance. My own contribution to the climate of 're-thinking secularism' has been to argue that what is sometimes talked about as the 'post-secular' or a 'crisis of secularism' is, in Western Europe, quite crucially to do with the reality of multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decline of multiculturalism as a public discourse has been caused by various socio-political factors – such as 9/11 and its aftermath and the growth in migration – and new pro- and anti-diversity isms have been offered instead. One such pro-diversity discourse is interculturalism. Whilst some of its advocates, especially in Quebec and Europe, have seen it as a replacement of multiculturalism, a closer examination shows a high degree of complementarity. We demonstrate this by a theoretical-normative unpacking of multiculturalism and of the claims of interculturalism, and by evidence that Australian publics see multiculturalism as supportive of interculturalism, perceived as a renewal of multiculturalism. We express the hope that the sometimes oppositional debate between these two isms may now move forward into a phase of complementarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One could say, the multiculturalist project of making ethnic minorities hyphenated British was so successful that ethnic minorities in England are more affirming of a British identity than the white English and this is now said to be a problem. So here the Scottish vision of a British multinationalism and an English ethnic minority aspiration of a multicultural Britishness can come together to head off separatist and insular nationalisms, whether they be civic or ethnic. I focus on the changing nature of British identity from the point of view of ethnic minorities, for example that for most Britons it is not understood in terms of being white or Christian, and most ethnic minorities have come to embrace it but in their own way, typically by hyphenating it (black British, British Indian, British Muslim and so on) so that it does not efface a proud minority identity. I am grateful to Jocelyne Cesari, Krishan Kumar and Michael Rosie for taking the time to read and engage with my book. [Extracted from the article]

The four articles that make up this symposium on Tariq Modood's recent collection, Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism (2019), are based on a public conversation and research colloquium held at Utrecht University on 18 February 2020. In the first article, Modood introduces the conversation with a statement of his thinking over two decades on the subjects of secularism and multiculturalism. This is followed by responses by Pooyan Tamimi Arab and Ernst van den Hemel and, in the fourth and final article, Modood has the last word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The four articles that make up this symposium on Tariq Modood's recent collection, Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism (2019), are based on a public conversation and research colloquium held at Utrecht University on 18 February 2020. In the first article, Modood introduces the conversation with a statement of his thinking over two decades on the subjects of secularism and multiculturalism. This is followed by responses by Pooyan Tamimi Arab and Ernst van den Hemel and, in the fourth and final article, Modood has the last word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Banton was one of the founders of the study of ethnic relations in Britain, including what might be called "the Bristol School of Ethnic Relations". Both in historical and contemporary terms, Banton repeatedly identified the American Deep South as the worst case of this racial dualism (Banton, 1983, pp. 28-29). Banton's perspective therefore leads to an entirely different evaluation of what Omi and Winant celebrate, namely, the emergence of black consciousness in America. While Omi and Winant identify with the formation of a black political ethnicity which followed the civil rights movement, Banton is at one with the thinking which gave rise to the civil rights movement. [Extracted from the article]

What is often described today as neo‐nationalism or nationalist populism today arguably looks like the old nationalism. What is emerging as genuinely new are the identity‐based nationalisms of the centre left, sometimes called "liberal nationalism" or "progressive patriotism." I offer my own contribution to the latter, which may be called "multicultural nationalism." I argue that multiculturalism is a mode of integration that does not just emphasise the centrality of minority group identities but argues that integration is incomplete without remaking national identity so that all can have a sense of belonging to it. This multiculturalist approach to national belonging has some relation to liberal nationalism. It, however, makes not just individual rights but minority accommodation a feature of acceptable nationalism. Moreover, accommodation here particularly includes ethno‐religious groups in ways that are difficult for radical regimes of secularism. For these reasons, multicultural nationalism unites the concerns of some of those currently sympathetic to majoritarian nationalism and those who are prodiversity and minority accommodationist in the way that liberal nationalism (with its emphasis on individualism and majoritarianism) does not. It therefore represents the political idea and tendency most likely to offer a feasible alternative rallying point to monocultural nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geoffrey Brahm Levey plausibly describes how a group of scholars who he calls the 'Bristol School of Multiculturalism' (BSM) differ from scholars who are often called Liberal Multiculturalists (LMs). We expand Levey's analysis by showing what in the history of the BSM's thought made the liberalism and the multiculturalism of LMs unconvincing for BSM scholars. Hence, we show how certain thinkers influenced BSM scholars in ways that made them unwilling to offer liberal theories and how BSM scholars began their work with multiculturalist ideas that differ from the multiculturalist ideas of LMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a form of nationalism that is pro-diversity and that accommodates multiculturalism and minorities. Topics include cultural integration, liberal nationalism, Quebecer interculturalism, the role of the majority culture, impact of minorities on national culture, report of the Commission on Multi-Ethnic Britain, Muslims in Great Britain, cosmopolitanism, and immigration.

This study compares the educational attainment of Muslim and Christian White-British boys and girls at the following junctions: Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, GCSE, getting into universities and achieving a place at a Russell Group university. The study utilises the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England waves 1–6 with linked data from the National Pupil Database. The analysis shows that once we take previous school performance into account, Muslim students seem to be performing as well as the majority group, even in attending Russell group universities. Muslim girls seem to now be outperforming Muslim boys, especially in relation to their school performance. Furthermore, parental expectations and students’ own expectations play an important role in determining the attainment of students. The study concludes that the higher achievement of young Muslims may be strongly correlated with their own unusually high expectations of going to university; but a primary source of the latter is likely to be the parents’ unusually high expectations, the messages they receive and the discipline in place in relation to schoolwork at home and their relationship with their parents and their parents’ norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of working out a viable relationship between accepting and/or living with diversity on the one hand and fostering integration on the other has occupied public debates, political agendas, and social sciences for decades. Our point of departure is that the contemporary European context provides distinct challenges. We need to understand how postmigrant integration is shaped and conditioned by the European public space understood as a geographical space; a composite of legally and institutionally constituted entities; covering nations, regions, and cities mainly within but also beyond the EU; and a site of interaction, and public expression of contestation and cooperation. In so doing, we have to contend with the fact that such important perspectives for handling diversity as multiculturalism, interculturalism, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism occupy distinct roles within the European public space whose governance is multi-levelled yet not reducible to a single tiered system. The European public space is more encompassing than the EU even while that level of governance has some important regulative functions upon member states and to some extent even on non-EU states such as Norway and the UK, especially in what we refer to as the outer circle. While the national level is the most powerful normatively and by most other measures on the inclusion of difference (our inner circle), municipalities also contribute to the constitution of this space. We explore the logics of our four 'isms' and of the tiers of governance and their interaction with each other, both the isms in tensions and syntheses with each other and differentially in relation to the levels of governance. This is an exercise that has not been done before. Our purpose is to suggest a new normativity that might feasibly achieve a broader degree of support and success than any of the isms have achieved alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses whether multiculturalism, interculturalism and cosmopolitanism find themselves in tension or, rather, coexist in UK politics. This is done through the analysis of recent policy and civil society documents, complemented with semi-structured interviews with race equality organizations. Results suggest a complementary relationship between these normative perspectives, with interculturalism and multiculturalism jointly shaping the central government's policy as well as the discourse of civil society organizations. As for cosmopolitanism, it manifests itself primarily in civil society's support for a more humane system for asylum seekers, as well as in the endorsement of EU intervention in the governance of cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some social scientists are sceptical of the explanatory power of ethnicity and seek to explain ethnic differences by references to non-ethnic factors such as discrimination. We challenge this scepticism by considering two theoretical objections: there is no such thing as ethnicity and ethnic categories are unable to explain social processes; and by showing how ethnic strategies affect outcomes that cannot be captured in standard ethnic penalty analyses, we offer a new way to examine ethnic penalties in unemployment. We calculate a set of net ethnic penalties and then analyse longitudinal labour-force data to examine how strategies such as self-employment change ethnic penalties in unemployment amongst six different ethnic groups in Britain. The results show that self-employment reduces the ethnic penalty for Indians, Pakistanis-Bangladeshis and others, but not for Blacks, White-Others and White-British. This supports the argument that ethnicity can provide an explanation for some of the ethnic differentials in the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a historically informed analysis of the contemporary incorporation of Islam and Muslims into an idea of common – national – membership in the United States and Britain. It shows that there is a current movement towards synthesis between religious and national identities by Muslims themselves, and explores the ways in which this synthesis is occurring within rich and dynamic public spheres in societies that have historically included and incorporated other religious groups. The authors argue that both countries are wrestling with the extent to which they accommodate Muslims in ways that allow them to reconcile their faith and citizenship commitments, and that the British ‘establishment’ is no less successful at achieving this than secular republicanism in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the case of the probability of being in employment among different ethno-religious groups in Britain over a period of 12 years (2002-2013) to illustrate how different degrees of labor market penalty in the United Kingdom are highly associated with the different processes of racialization they undergo in the United Kingdom. It is argued that what matters in producing the observed inequalities in the United Kingdom is the inescapable centrality of "color" (mainly blackness) and "culture" (particularly being Muslim) and the way different Muslim and black groups have been racialized. The findings of this study leave little doubt that there is a black and a Muslim penalty in the labor market, but at the same time it suggest that these penalties are not fixed but tend to vary in extent and nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The alleged death of British multiculturalism has been celebrated in some quarters and regretted in others. Invoking Ulrich Beck’s discussion of zombie categories, we argue that while the appeal of ‘multiculturalism’ asa termhas clearly declined, thecategoryin Britain that it refers to encompasses not a single charter, but a series of political settlements and public policies that remain in place even though they have been joined (and frequently challenged) by others. Distinguishing between thetermand thecategoryis a valuable means of assessing the persistence of multiculturalism as a mode of integration in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the author's commentary on the issue's featured article "The national identities of the ‘death of multiculturalism’ discourse in Western Europe," by Marinus Ossewaarde, included in the issue, discussing the alleged failed status of multiculturalism in Western Europe. The author reviews Ossewaarde's major assertions, offers comments and critique of Ossewaarde's perspectives, and presents an exploration of different manifestations of cultural integration.

Interculturalism, in its two forms, critiques multiculturalism. A European version emphasises cultural encounter and novelty, and is relatively apolitical except for its disavowal of the national in preference for the local and the transnational. In contrast, its Quebecan counterpart gives significance to the idea of the right of a national community to use state power to reproduce itself. Whilst the former is a recognisably cosmopolitan vision I ask if the latter represents a distinctive mode of integration. The core of the article is a textual examination of two recent publications by leading public intellectual scholars in Quebec, Gerard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, respectively, including a lengthy discussion of the former’s concept of ‘majority precedence’. I argue that Quebecan interculturalism challenges multiculturalists to offer a positive view of ‘the majority’, which to date they have largely neglected to do, but which is possible within the conceptual and normative resources of multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This extended commentary engages in debate about the place of religion within multicultural social structures and the perceived risks and benefits of the incorporation of this within state and social policy. If social policy has indeed been extended from ethnicity to include religion, what are the implications of this? Key issues within the debate include the relationship between secular and religious identities and the kind of secularism that should inform the way in which the state is seeking to accommodate religious demands and identities in its engagement with particular communities, particularly ethnic minority communities. The commentary takes as its starting point an article published in 2011 in Critical Social Policy 31(3) by Singh and Cowden on ‘Multiculturalism’s New Fault Lines’ and a response to this by Tariq Modood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses aspects of doctors Gurnam Singh and Stephen Cowden's response regarding the fault lines of multiculturalism in Great Britain. He is critical of the measures of radical secularism that religion is private or non-political and must be maintained by law and government. He also comments on his failure to consider religious movements in the state of multiculturalism.

The article presents inter-related understandings of multiculturalism in Great Britain. According to the authors, scholars think that multiculturalism in the country is in retreat. The authors explain that multiculturalism is said to denote a multicultural society, or a citizenry which is culturally diverse. The authors further assert that a multiculturalism policy commonly aims to reduce fear of cultural difference.

Scholars argue that policies of multiculturalism in different countries are in retreat or in question. Britain is often used as an example of this, and leading British politicians and commentators often criticise such a policy. Yet a long-held multiculturalist goal has been to make Britishness more inclusive and this is something leading politicians were until recently uncommitted to. We use interviews with politicians who have served in this government and the last, the measures they have introduced, their media contributions, speeches and policy documents, to show that they are now committed to this goal. At a time when a British policy of multiculturalism is said to be in retreat or in question we identify a multiculturalist advance and show that this raises a range of difficult questions about government approaches to 'Britishness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It may be the case that all of the attempted models of integration are in crisis. We can, however, have a better sense of what the issues are if, firstly, we recognize that discourses on integration and multiculturalism are exercises in conceptualising post-immigration difference and, as such, operate at three distinct levels: as (implicit) sociology, as a political response, and as a vision of what is the whole in which difference is to be integrated. The term "difference" primarily refers to the way people are identified, how they identify themselves, how they identify others, and how others identify them. I suggest some possible scenarios after having identified "group difference" as the main concept for understanding the normative guidelines and their implicit sociology, assimilation, individualist-integration, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism. Each mode offers a different approach to freedom, equality, and civic unity. The enlargement, hyphenation, and internal pluralizing of national identities is essential to an integration in which all citizens have not just rights, but also a sense of belonging to the whole as well as to their own "little platoon". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses key concepts related to post-immigration in Europe. Topics include the relevance of core integration processes, the implication of race, religion, and ethnicity to migration, and sociological and political aspects of immigration. Also mentioned the different types of integration, including assimilation, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism.

The article discusses political secularism as an institutional arrangement where religious authority and religious reasons for action and political authority and political reasons for action are distinguished. It cites the author's focus in Western Europe which is currently witnessing a transition from a secular to a postsecular society where secular citizens must express a previously denied respect for religious citizens. It notes how religion is again being recognized as a legitimate basis of public engagement and political action which results in a contemporary crisis of secularism globally. It suggests for political secularists to thing on how to multiculturalize moderate secularism and avoid provoking the crisis by pressing for radical secularism.

The article offers information on the understanding of multiculturalism and interculturalism. It states that a better strategy is to ensure that multiculturalism is presented as one, amongst other, modes of integration, and that is what one of us has done. It mentions that literature searches failed to identify a political interculturalism in Europe in the English language and turned to Quebec to identify a political interculturalism.

This paper critically examines some of the ways in which conceptions of interculturalism are being positively contrasted with multiculturalism, especially as political ideas. It argues that while some advocates of a political interculturalism wish to emphasise its positive qualities in terms of encouraging communication, recognising dynamic identities, promoting unity and critiquing illiberal cultural practices, each of these qualities too are important (on occasion foundational) features of multiculturalism. The paper begins with a broad introduction before exploring the provenance of multiculturalism as an intellectual tradition, with a view to assessing the extent to which its origins continue to shape its contemporary public ‘identity’. We adopt this line of enquiry to identify the extent to which some of the criticism of multiculturalism is rooted in an objection to earlier formulations that displayed precisely those elements deemed unsatisfactory when compared with interculturalism. Following this discussion, the paper moves on to four specific areas of comparison between multiculturalism and interculturalism. It concludes that until interculturalism as a political discourse is able to offer a distinct perspective, one that can speak to a variety of concerns emanating from complex identities and matters of equality and diversity in a more persuasive manner than at present, interculturalism cannot, intellectually at least, eclipse multiculturalism, and so should be considered as complementary to multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that the debate on cultural politics and social renewal should include multiculturalism. The authors argue that there has been a major division in what they might call the multicultural constituency and they suggest a more plural approach that can help to heal breaches both within the "multicultural community" and beyond. The two modes of differences and the two versions of a multicultural society namely multiculturalism and multiculture are elaborated.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politicians increasingly promote Britishness. We thus ask who do they think has difficulty feeling British and why do they think this? Scholars have not yet tried to address these questions and in this article we attempt to do so. Using interviews with former home secretaries, junior ministers and their shadow cabinet counterparts, we examine whether leading politicians think that Muslims have difficulty feeling British. We show that senior members of the main political parties are not only internally divided on this issue, but that a cross-party divide exists and that many of the members of these divisions are unaware of the relevant sociological data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political secularism takes many forms but a fundamental distinction is between radical and moderate kinds. The latter is a genuine secularism and not just a failure to take secularism to its logical conclusion. The failure to appreciate this obscures the secularism that exists in western Europe. Namely, an accommodation of organised religion which sees it as a potential public good or national resource (not just a private benefit), which the state can in some circumstances assist to realise—even through an ‘established’ church. I adumbrate five types of reasons the state might be interested in religion: truth, danger, utility, identity and respect. The challenge facing such secularism today is whether it can be pluralised or multiculturalised, in particular whether it can accommodate Muslims. A ground for optimism is the respect that some people, especially some Muslims, have for religions other than their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to a set of articles on the theme of religion and politics in the U.S.

British multiculturalism is alleged to have buckled under various Muslim-related pressures. Indeed, some intellectuals, commentators and politicians of different political persuasions have pointed to evidence of a ‘retreat’ to be found in an increased governmental emphasis upon ‘integration’ and ‘social cohesion’. One response to these developments, from defenders of diversity-related politics, has comprised a discursive reorientation of British multiculturalism to focus upon an anti-essentialist ‘multiculture’ that can transcend the alleged hitherto reification of British multiculturalism. This article offers an alternative appraisal of British multiculturalism. We contest the idea that British multiculturalism is subject to a wholesale ‘retreat’ and suggest instead that it has been, and continues to be, subject to a productive critique that is resulting in something best characterised as a ‘civic re-balancing’. Simultaneously, and rather than seeking comfort in a depoliticised ‘multiculture’ view, we defend the ideal of a dynamic political multiculturalism, comprised of a body of discourses and policies originating from a racial equality paradigm inaugurated by the first Race Relations Act (1965). It is argued that this tradition has successfully and legislatively embedded a recognition of ‘difference’– with the goal of promoting equality of access and opportunity – into Britain's self-image which has led to some significant accommodations for certain groups. Muslim minorities are currently appealing to this tradition as one means of achieving greater civic inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Danish cartoon affair presents a vehicle for rethinking some of our longstanding assumptions about liberal democracy and its capacity to accommodate cultural difference. The public and academic debates have tended to frame the affair as either a clash between liberal-democratic and illiberal religious values or as a question of whose position is most consistent with liberal-democratic values. We begin, instead, from the assumption that liberal-democratic values conflict, not only between liberalism and democracy, but also within liberalism and democracy. We argue that cases such as the Muhammad cartoons controversy present liberal democracies with choices about which liberal-democratic principles and conceptions of these principles they emphasize and when. Guiding these choices should also be the pragmatic question of how best to make multicultural democracies work. We suggest that the Muhammad cartoons encompass not one, but three distinct problem areas: the violation of a religious norm in the representation of Muhammad, attacks on Islam as a religion, and attacks on Muslims as a group. We examine how liberal democratic values and multicultural citizenship relate to each of these cases, and argue that attacks on Muslims as a group are a form of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meer and Modood identify a variety of reasons why the notion that Muslim minorities could be subject to racism by virtue of their real or perceived 'Muslimness' is met with much less sympathy than the widely accepted notion that other religious minorities in Europe, particularly Jewish groups, can be the victims of racism. They begin by elaborating the relationships between Islamophobia, anti-Muslim sentiment and cultural racism, before turning to the results of interviews with journalists who make allegedly formative contributions to our understanding of anti-Muslim sentiment. Meer and Modood delineate and discuss four tendencies. The first is the conceptualization of racism that assumes that the protections afforded to racial minorities conventionally conceived as involuntarily constituted should not be extended to Muslims because theirs is a religious identity that is voluntarily chosen. The second is that the way that religion per se is frowned upon by the contemporary intelligentsia invites the ridiculing of Muslims as being salutary for intellectual debate and not, therefore, an issue of discrimination. Third, while ethnic identities are welcomed in the public space, there is much more unease about religious minorities. Finally, some find it difficult to sympathize with a minority that is perceived to be disloyal or associated with terrorism, a view that leads to a perception of Muslims as a threat rather than as a disadvantaged minority, subject to increasingly pernicious discourses of racialization. Each of these tendencies could benefit from further study, underscoring the need for a greater exploration of anti-Muslim discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on criticisms that have been raised regarding his beliefs on multicultural equality and moderate secularism. The relation in which the author's views on secularism has in regards to politics is discussed. Comments that the author has made regarding equality and its justification are discussed.

The article offers explanation from Tariq Modood regarding his book "Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea" in Great Britain. He states that the word multiculturalism refers to multicultural citizenship. Accordingly, the core ideas of citizenship are membership and equality. He added that seeing citizenship as a work in progress and as partly constituted and certainly extended by contestatory dialogues and novels demands for identity recognition and that it can be understood as conversations and re-negotiations about the terms of citizenship itself.