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The purpose of this chapter is to defend group integration against two critiques. The first comes from scholars who believe that the present understanding of culture is profoundly flawed. Their main argument is that rigid, essentialist, and fixed notions of culture lead to policies that do not permit groups to express their true diversity, or to engage in meaningful debates about what practices their group ought to endorse. This problem creates an interesting puzzle: can we protect cultural groups without putting them in a straightjacket that impedes their ability to change? I call scholars that opt for this attack of multiculturalism ‘post-culturalists’, since they do not believe that culture ought to be treated as something tangible. The purpose of the first part of this chapter is to show that the post-culturalist critique of studying culture, like in the project of group integration, is overstated. To make this argument, I first survey some definitions of culture in the literature from post-culturalists and then from liberal multiculturalists. Next, I look at two different ways to avoid the critique of essential ism in the work of Alan Patten and then David Peritz. I argue that Peritz’s way of defining culture, that is, as both consisting of fluid and contested practices, and rigid and well-defined practices, ultimately addresses both problems brought up by, and within, the critique of essentialism. I then conclude the section by defending the proposal of group integration against the criticisms that it would lead to the stereotyping of less integrated groups, and that arguing for group integration necessarily means treating groups as uniform and static entities.

In Chapter 3 of this book, I argue that host societies ought to promote group integration through funding the creation of new communal institutions and through opening up spaces to consult with existing communal groups. I argue that this kind of integration, which is presently understudied in the literature on multiculturalism, has two main benefits to society. First, group integration helps newcomers that establish themselves in a new society by providing them with strong institutions that can help direct individual group members on how to participate and belong to their new host society. These group institutions can then offer unique services to newcomers in a targeted way that understands the particular linguistic restraints, or cultural conventions of the newcomers. Second, groups that are well integrated are more apt to communicate with other groups and the host society. This is important in today’s world where laws that are intended to be neutral often have unintended consequences. So group integration has both the instrumental benefit of expediting individual integration, and intrinsic value in so far as it addresses general equality rights in society.

In the introduction to this book, I brought to light the concept of group integration. But why is it important to study groups to begin with, and how ought we to study their interactions? This chapter looks at each of these questions. First, I turn to liberal theory to demonstrate that group rights are paramount to protecting individual autonomy. As it stands, however, liberal multiculturalism provides a framework that permits, but does not necessarily require, states to make provisions for group integration. So the second section of this chapter explores some problems that are often overlooked by liberal multiculturalism, using the work of Iris Marion Young.

If the previous chapter of this book was about groups that clearly fall into the category of those established through immigration, the subject of this chapter is not so clear-cut. This chapter can be viewed in part as a response to critics of multiculturalism surveyed in Chapter 4 that argue that the theory is based on ideal types which are not applicable to the real world unless we essentialise groups. With this in mind, I turn to the case of anglophone Quebec.