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Multicultural policies often deviate from the principle of equal opportunity since it assumes exclusive policy target groups with extra budget and appropriate organization. If this is so, by what rationale can multicultural policies be justified? Why should we accept such unequal treatment as a procedural method to achieve a more equal society as the final goal? This paper examines justifying logic for multicultural policies that inevitably have an arbitrary aspect of state intervention. This paper first differentiates two kinds of logic, namely universal human rights and the benefits of diversity, which provide supporting rationale for the implementation of multicultural policies. We can witness from the US history that the benefits of diversity have increasingly become the main logic justifying affirmative action instead of liberal discussions on social justice and universal human rights of the 1960s. Korea also shows such a shift towards a utilitarian justification which has focused heavily on the bene...

The aim of this paper is to examine the principles that New Labour has employed in its citizenship and multicultural policies in Britain, and to clarify theoretical locations as well as philosophical rationales of those principles. By deliberative multiculturalism, I mean a set of policies and discourses of New Labour about citizenship and multicultural issues, which emphasizes rational dialogue and mutual respect with firmly guaranteed political rights especially for minorities. New Labour tries to go beyond liberal and republican citizenship practice through enhancing deliberation, the origin of which goes back to the British tradition of parliamentary sovereignty. It also attempts to achieve a one-nation out of cultural cleavages, shifting its focus from redistribution with social rights to multicultural deliberation with political rights. I organize my discussion with a focus on the difference between two theoretical concepts: the relationship between cultural rights and individual equality, and the r...

The aim of this article is to examine the rationales that Thatcher’s Britain employed in dealing with immigration and multicultural policies. With a focus on the responsible political elite hypothesis, I trace the role of New Right citizenship discourse as a combined reflection of elite behaviors as well as mass concerns. I analyze various writings and remarks of Enoch Powell as a precursor of the New Right, and those of Margaret Thatcher as an executor of the New Right, discourses of the reconstruction of the British nation and the bringing back of the active citizen as the main campaign of the New Right, and the emergence of two nations and controversies over the cause of this cleavage as a probable policy outcome of the New Right. Through the theoretical account of New Right citizenship as an unstable combination of libertarian individualism and republican conservatism, I offer an interpretation of post-war Britain that can explain the relationship between the shift toward neo-liberalism and shifts in immigration conceptions and multicultural policies.