Enlightened Understanding, Empowerment and Leadership - Three Ways to Enhance Multiculturalism: Comment on Will Kymlicka’s article: “Solidarity in Diverse Societies”

Comparative Migration Studies, Dec 2015

Hanspeter Kriesi

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Enlightened Understanding, Empowerment and Leadership - Three Ways to Enhance Multiculturalism: Comment on Will Kymlicka’s article: “Solidarity in Diverse Societies”

Kriesi Comparative Migration Studies Enlightened Understanding, Empowerment and Leadership - Three Ways to Enhance Multiculturalism: Comment on Will Kymlicka's article: “Solidarity in Diverse Societies” Hanspeter Kriesi In my comment on Will Kymlicka's (2015), very stimulating essay, I would like to argue that his basic scheme is sound, but incomplete and that his proposal for the progressive forces falls short in several respects. To begin with, Will Kymlicka stresses, in my view correctly, that the welfare state is built on national solidarity. The idea of the 'people's home' (folkshemmet) of the Swedish Social Democrats, to which he refers in his text, serves as a perfect illustration of this point. Even the 'universalistic' Nordic welfare state intends to be universalistic within the boundaries of the national political community only. The welfare state is, as Kymlicka underlines, generally tied to an image of social membership, not to universal humanitarianism. In this respect it is important to keep in mind, as Kymlicka also argues, that the national community is conceived in egalitarian terms: the two fundamental principles of the nation - popular sovereignty and equality of all members of the national community - are at the same time the two core principles of democracy (Greenfeld, 1992: 10). The idea of democracy was, in Greenfeld's nice formulation, contained in the idea of the nation like the butterfly in the chrysalis. (Kymlicka, 2015). Accordingly, Kymlicka (2015), suggests that appeals to national solidarity constitute a resource for progressives. One might add that appeals to national solidarity fall on particularly open ears among the poor, who identify more with the nation than the rich, because they have less to be proud of in their immediate social group compared to the rich and because they are more similar to the average member of their nation (Shayo, 2009: 162). However, national solidarity is an ambiguous resource for progressives - not only, as Kymlicka argues, because of its tendency to exclude groups not perceived as belonging to the nation, but also for yet another reason: as Shayo (2009) shows, people with a strong national identity are less supportive of redistribution in general, and, at the macro-level, the most nationalistic countries are known for being those with the least redistributive welfare states (and vice versa). The Swedes may again serve as an illustrative example. They are comparatively (compared to the Anglo-Saxon settler states, in particular) little nationalistic - class identities were relatively strong compared to national identities in Sweden - and, accordingly, Sweden did - construct a relatively redistributive welfare state. If the construction of the ‘folkshemmet’ did benefit from appeals to national solidarity, we should not forget that it was above all constructed by a social movement based on class identities, a movement that, in the process, succeeded in decisively shaping the Swedish national identity – constructing a ‘social democratic image of society,’ as Frank Castles (1978) has aptly put it. However, as Kymlicka (2015) , goes on in his argument, national solidarity is not only a resource for progressives, but it also poses endemic risks for all those who are not perceived as belonging to the nation. His list of excluded groups (indigenous peoples, sub-state national groups and immigrants) is, however, incomplete. First of all, national solidarity generally tends to exclude those members of the nation who are perceived as undeserving – because they are perceived as not having appropriately contributed to the common good (in violation of the norm of reciprocity), or because they are perceived as abusing the common good (in violation of the norm of self-reliance). Second, with respect to the non-nationals, we need to distinguish between immigrants on the national territory and the residents of other nation-states. Thus, within the European Union, not only the immigrants pose problems for national solidarity, but also the claims of other member-states, as has been illustrated by the recent Euro-crisis and the European refugees’ crisis: the Germans are called upon to be solidary not only with the flood of refugees, but also with the Greeks. Third, with respect to immigrants in particular, we should distinguish between access to the national territory and integration of those who have gotten access and are likely here to stay. To counter the endemic risks of national solidarity, Kymlicka argues that we need multiculturalism. However, if multiculturalism may contribute to counter the exclusion of the second and third type, it may not at all help to counteract the exclusion of the first type. Moreover, the measures of multiculturalism it takes to enhance solidarity with other nations, or to grant access to immigrants in the first place, may well be different from the measures designed to integrate immigrants who are already more or less permane (...truncated)


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Hanspeter Kriesi. Enlightened Understanding, Empowerment and Leadership - Three Ways to Enhance Multiculturalism: Comment on Will Kymlicka’s article: “Solidarity in Diverse Societies”, Comparative Migration Studies, 2015, pp. 18, Volume 3, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1186/s40878-015-0019-2