Minority Group and Multiculturalism Essay Example for Free

Minority Group and Multi socialism adjudicateIdeas near the legal and semipolitical accommodation of ethnic diversity comm barely termed multi paganism emerged in the West as a vehicle for replacing older defecates of ethnic and racial hierarchy with novel analogy backs of elected citizenship. Despite substantial evidence that these policies ar making progress toward that goal, a chorus of political leading has declared them a failure and heralded the death of multiculturalism.This popular exceed narrative is problematic because it mischaracterizes the temperament of the experiments in multiculturalism that arrive at been lowtaken, exaggerates the ex ten-spott to which they lead been abandoned, and misidentifies not only the genuine difficulties and limitations they befool encountered hardly the options for addressing these problems. palaver about the retrograde from multiculturalism has obscured the fact that a form of multicultural integration remains a animated option for western democracies. This calculate quarrels four powerful myths about multiculturalism. First, it disputes the caricature of multiculturalism as the uncritical jubilation of diversity at the expense of addressing grave societal problems much(prenominal) as unemployment and amicable isolation. Instead it offers an card of multiculturalism as the pursuit of bracing dealing of democratic citizenship, inspired and constrained by forgiving- disciplines thinkerls. Second, it contests the idea that multiculturalism has been in wholesale retreat, and offers instead evidence that multiculturalism policies (MCPs) deplete persisted, and have even grown stronger, over the past ten years. Third, it disputes the idea that multiculturalism has failed, and offers instead evidence that MCPs have had positive effects. Fourth, it disputes the idea that the spread of civil integration policies has displaced multiculturalism or r force outered it obsolete. The report instead offers evidence that MCPs are fully consistent with certain forms of civic integration policies, and that and then the combination of multiculturalism with an enabling form of civic integration is two normatively desirable and empirically effective in at least both(prenominal) cases. To help address these resigns, this paper draws upon the Multiculturalism Policy Index.This index 1) identifies eight cover indemnity areas where liberal-democratic states faced with a choice decided to develop more than multicultural forms of citizenship in relation to immigrant groups and 2) measures the extent to which countries have espoused some or all of these policies over time. While there have been some high-profile cases of retreat from MCPs, such as the Netherlands, the general pattern from 1980 to 2010 has been one of modest strengthening. Ironically, some countries that have been strident about multiculturalisms failure (e. g. , Germany) have not actually practiced an a ctive multicultural strategy. speech about the retreat from multiculturalism has obscured the fact that a form of multicultural integration remains a stick up option for Western democracies. However, not all attempts to adopt new models of multicultural citizenship have taken resolve or succeeded in achieving their intended effects. in that respectfulness are several factors that disregard all facilitate or impede the successful implementation of multiculturalism Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future 1 MIGRATION POLICY name Desecuritization of ethnic dealings.Multiculturalism works topper if relations between the state and minorities are collide withn as an issue of companionable policy, not as an issue of state security. If the state covers immigrants to be a security threat (such as Arabs and Muslims after 9/11), stand for multiculturalism will drop and the space for minorities to even voice multicultural claims will diminish. Human rights. Support for mu lticulturalism rests on the assumption that there is a divisiond commitment to homophile rights crosswise ethnic and unearthly lines. If states perceive certain groups as unable or unwilling to respect pitying-rights norms, they are un belike to accord them multicultural rights or resources.Much of the shrink against multiculturalism is fundamentally driven by anxieties about Muslims, in particular, and their perceived unwillingness to court liberal-democratic norms. Border control. Multiculturalism is more controversial when citizens fear they lack control over their borders for instance when countries are faced with large numbers (or unexpected surges) of unauthorized immigrants or asylum try oners than when citizens feel the borders are secure. transition of immigrant groups.Multiculturalism works best when it is genuinely multicultural that is, when immigrants come from many source countries rather than coming overwhelmingly from nevertheless one (which is more p ossible to lead to polarized relations with the majority). Economic contributions. Support for multiculturalism depends on the learning that immigrants are holding up their end of the bargain and making a well-behaved-faith effort to contribute to caller particularly economically. When these facilitating conditions are present, multiculturalism can be seen as a low-risk option, and indeed seems to have worked wellhead in such cases.Multiculturalism tends to lose support in high-risk situations where immigrants are seen as predominantly illegal, as likely carriers of illiberal practices or movements, or as net burdens on the wel remotee state. However, one could argue that rejecting immigrant multiculturalism under these circumstances is in fact the higher-risk move. It is precisely when immigrants are perceived as illegitimate, illiberal, and burdensome that multiculturalism may be most takeed. I. Introduction Ideas about the legal and political accommodation of ethnic diver sity have been in a state of flux around the world for the past 40 years.One hears much about the rise and declivity of multiculturalism. Indeed, this has become a kind of master narrative, wide invoked by scholars, journalists, and policy take uprs alike to justify the evolution of contemporary debates about diversity. Although people disagree about what comes after multiculturalism, there is a move consensus that we are in a post-multicultural era. This report contends that this master narrative obscures as much as it reveals, and that we need an alternative framework for thinking about the choices we face.Multiculturalisms successes and failures, as well as its level of everyday acceptance, have depended on the disposition of the issues at stake and the countries involved, and we need to understand these variations if we are to identify a more sustainable model for accommodating diversity. This paper will argue that the master narrative 1) mischaracterizes the nature of the experiments in multiculturalism that have been undertaken, 2) exaggerates the extent to which they have been abandoned, and 3) misidentifies the genuine difficulties and limitations they have encountered and the options for addressing these problems.2 Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY lend Before we can decide whether to celebrate or lament the revert of multiculturalism, we need first to make sure we know what multiculturalism has meant both in theory and in practice, where it has succeeded or failed to meet its objectives, and under what conditions it is likely to thrive in the future. The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism The master narrative of the rise and fall of multiculturalism helpfully captures beta features of our current debates.Yet in some respects it is misleading, and may obscure the real contends and opportunities we face. In its simplest form, the master narrative goes like this1 Since the mid-1990s we have seen a backlash and retreat from multiculturalism. From the 1970s to mid-1990s, there was a clear trend across Western democracies toward the increased recognition and accommodation of diversity through a range of multiculturalism policies (MCPs) and minority rights.These policies were endorsed both at the domestic level in some states and by external organizations, and involved a rejection of earliest ideas of unitary and homogeneous nationhood. Since the mid-1990s, however, we have seen a backlash and retreat from multiculturalism, and a reassertion of ideas of nation building, common values and identity, and unitary citizenship even a call for the return of assimilation. This retreat is partly driven by fears among the majority group that the accommodation of diversity has gone too far and is threatening their way of life.This fear often expresses itself in the rise of nativist and populist right-wing political movements, such as the Danish Peoples Party, defending old ideas of Denmark for the Da nish. But the retreat similarly reflects a belief among the center-left that multiculturalism has failed to help the intended beneficiaries namely, minorities themselves because it has failed to address the underlying sources of their social, economic, and political exclusion and may have unintentionally contributed to their social isolation.As a result, even the center-left political movements that initially championed multiculturalism, such as the social democratic parties in Europe, have backed 1 For influential academic statements of this rise and fall narrative, claiming that it applies across the Western democracies, see Rogers Brubaker, The Return of Assimilation? Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 4 (2001) 53148 and Christian Joppke, The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State Theory and Policy, British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (2004) 23757.There are also many counts of the decline, retreat, or crisis of multiculturalism in particular countries. For the N etherlands, see Han Entzinger, The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism in the Netherlands, in Toward Assimilation and Citizenship Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States, eds. Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska (London Palgrave, 2003) and Ruud Koopmans, Trade-Offs between Equality and Difference The Crisis of Dutch Multiculturalism in Cross-National Perspective (Brief, Danish Institute for Intertheme Studies, Copenhagen, December 2006).For Britain, see Randall Hansen, alter, Integration and the Turn from Multiculturalism in the get together Kingdom, in Belonging? Diversity, Recognition and Shared Citizenship in Canada, eds. Keith G. Banting, Thomas J. Courchene, and F. Leslie Seidle (Montreal Institute for Research on unexclusive Policy, 2007) Les Back, Michael Keith, Azra Khan, Kalbir Shukra, and John Solomos, New Labours White Heart Politics, Multiculturalism and the Return of Assimilation, Political Quarterly 73, no(prenominal) 4 (2002) 44554 Steven Vertovec, Towards post-multicultu ralism?Changing communities, conditions and contexts of diversity, International Social Science Journal 61 (2010) 8395. For Australia, see Ien Ang and John Stratton, Multiculturalism in Crisis The New Politics of Race and National Identity in Australia, in On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West, ed. I. Ang (London Routledge, 2001). For Canada, see Lloyd Wong, Joseph Garcea, and Anna Kirova, An Analysis of the Anti- and Post-Multiculturalism Discourses The Fragmentation Position (Alberta Prairie midsection for Excellence in Research on Immigration and Integration, 2005), http//pmc.metropolis.Net/Virtual%20Library/FinalReports/Post-multi%20FINAL%20REPORT%20for%20PCERII%20_2_. pdf. For a good overview of the backlash discourse in various countries, see Steven Vertovec and Susan Wessendorf, eds. , The Multiculturalism Backlash European Discourses, Policies and Practices (London Routledge, 2010). Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future 3 MIGRATION POLICY add away from it and shifted to a discourse that emphasizes civic integration, social cohesion, common values, and shared citizenship.2 The social-democratic discourse of civic integration differs from the radical-right discourse in emphasizing the need to develop a more inclusive national identity and to fight racism and discrimination, but it nonetheless distances itself from the rhetoric and policies of multiculturalism. The term postmulticulturalism has often been invoked to signal this new approach, which seeks to overcome the limits of a naive or misguided multiculturalism while avoiding the oppressive reassertion of homogenizing nationalist ideologies.3 II. What Is Multiculturalism? A. Misleading Model In much of the post-multiculturalist literature, multiculturalism is characterized as a feel-good celebration of ethnocultural diversity, encouraging citizens to acknowledge and embrace the panoply of customs, traditions, music, and cuisine that exist in a multiethnic society. Ya smin Alibhai-Brown calls this the 3S model of multiculturalism in Britain saris, samosas, and steeldrums. 4.Multiculturalism takes these beaten(prenominal) cultural markers of ethnic groups clothing, cuisine, and music and treats them as authentic practices to be preserved by their members and safely consumed by others. Under the measure of multiculturalism they are taught in school, performed in festivals, boasted in media and museums, and so on. This celebratory model of multiculturalism has been the focus of many critiques, including the chase It ignores issues of economic and political inequality.Even if all Britons come to enjoy Jamaican steeldrum music or Indian samosas, this would do nothing to address the real problems facing Caribbean and South Asian communities in Britain problems of unemployment, poor educational outcomes, residential segregation, poor English language skills, and political marginalization. These economic and political issues cannot be solved pl ain by celebrating cultural differences. Even with respect to the (legitimate) goal of promoting greater understanding of cultural differences, the focus on celebrating authentic cultural practices that are unique to each group is potentially dangerous. First, not all customs that may be handed-downly practiced within a particular group are worthful of being celebrated, or even of being legally tolerated, such as forced marriage. To avoid brainchild up controversy, theres a tendency to choose as the focus of multicultural celebrations safely inoffensive practices such as cuisine or music that can be enjoyably consumed by members of the larger society. But this runs the oppo commit risk 2.For an overview of the attitudes of European social democratic parties to these issues, see Rene Cuperus, Karl Duffek, and Johannes Kandel, eds. , The Challenge of Diversity European Social Democracy Facing Migration, Integration and Multiculturalism (Innsbruck Studien Verlag, 2003). For refere nces to post-multiculturalism by progressive intellectuals, who distinguish it from the radical rights antimulticulturalism, see, regarding the fall in Kingdom, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, After Multiculturalism (London Foreign Policy Centre, 2000), and Beyond Multiculturalism, Canadian Diversity/Diversite Canadienne 3, no.2 (2004) 514 regarding Australia, James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera The Story of Australian Immigration, 2nd edition (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2007) and regarding the United States, Desmond King, The self-reliance of Strangers Making the American Nation (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2004), and David A. Hollinger, Post-ethnic America Beyond Multiculturalism, revised edition (New York Basic Books, 2006).Alibhai-Brown, After Multiculturalism. 3 4 4 Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE of the trivialization or Disneyfication of cultural differences,5 ignoring the real challenges that differences in cultural and phantasmal values can raise. Third, the 3S model of multiculturalism can encourage a conception of groups as hermetically sealed and static, each reproducing its own distinct practices.Multiculturalism may be intended to encourage people to share their customs, but the assumption that each group has its own distinctive customs ignores processes of cultural adaptation, mixing, and melange, as well as emerging cultural commonalities, thereby potentially reinforcing perceptions of minorities as eternally other. This in turn can lead to the strengthening of prejudice and stereotyping, and more generally to the polarization of ethnic relations. Fourth, this model can end up reinforcing power inequalities and cultural restrictions within minority groups. In deciding which traditions are authentic, and how to interpret and display them, the state generally consults the traditional elites within the group typically older males while ignoring the way these traditional practices (an d traditional elites) are often challenged by internal reformers, who have distinguishable views about how, say, a good Muslim should act. It can therefore imprison people in cultural scripts that they are not allowed to indecision or dispute.According to post-multiculturalists, the growing recognition of these flaws underlies the retreat from multiculturalism and signals the search for new models of citizenship that emphasize 1) political date and economic opportunities over the symbolic politics of cultural recognition, 2) homophile rights and individual freedom over respect for cultural traditions, 3) the building of inclusive national identities over the recognition of ancestral cultural identities, and 4) cultural change and cultural mixing over the reification of static cultural differences.This narrative about the rise and fall of 3S multiculturalism will no doubt be familiar to many readers. In my view, however, it is inaccurate. Not only is it a caricature of the realit y of multiculturalism as it has real over the past 40 years in the Western democracies, but it is a distr perform from the real issues that we need to face.The 3S model captures something important about natural human tendencies to simplify ethnic differences, and about the logic of global capitalism to sell cosmopolitan cultural products, but it does not capture the nature of post-1960s government MCPs, which have had more complex historical sources and political goals. B. Multiculturalism in Context It is important to put multiculturalism in its historical context. In one sense, it is as old as humanity different cultures have always found ways of coexisting, and respect for diversity was a familiar feature of many historic empires, such as the Ottoman Empire.But the sort of multiculturalism that is said to have had a rise and fall is a more specific historic phenomenon, emerging first in the Western democracies in the deep 1960s. This timing is important, for it helps us situa te multiculturalism in relation to larger social trans data formations of the postwar era. More specifically, multiculturalism is part of a larger human-rights revolution involving ethnic and racial diversity.Prior to valet War II, ethnocultural and religious diversity in the West was characterized by a range of illiberal and monarchic relationships of hierarchy,6 justified by racialist ideologies that explicitly propounded the superiority of some peoples and cultures and their right to rule over others. These ideologies were widely accepted throughout the Western world and underpinned both domestic laws (e. g. , racially biased immigration and citizenship policies) and strange policies (e. g. , in relation to overseas colonies). 5 6 Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada.(Toronto Penguin, 1994). Including relations of conqueror and conquered, colonizer and colonized, master and slave, settler and indigenous, racialized and unmarked, normalized and deviant, orthodox and heretic, civilized and primitive, and ally and enemy. Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future 5 MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE After World War II, however, the world recoiled against Hitlers fanatical and murderous use of such ideologies, and the United Nations decisively repudiated them in favor of a new ideology of the equality of races and peoples.And this new assumption of human equality generated a series of political movements designed to contest the lingering presence or durable effects of older hierarchies. We can distinguish trey waves of such movements 1) the struggle for decolonization, concentrated in the full stop 194865 2) the struggle against racial segregation and discrimination, initiated and exemplified by the AfricanAmerican civil-rights movement from 1955 to 1965 and 3) the struggle for multiculturalism and minority rights, which emerged in the late 1960s.Multiculturalism is part of a larger human-rights revolution involving et hnic and racial diversity. Each of these movements draws upon the human-rights revolution, and its foundational ideology of the equality of races and peoples, to challenge the legacies of earlier ethnic and racial hierarchies. Indeed, the human-rights revolution plays a double role here, not just as the inspiration for a struggle, but also as a constraint on the permissible goals and meaning of that struggle.Insofar as historically excluded or stigmatized groups struggle against earlier hierarchies in the name of equality, they too have to renounce their own traditions of exclusion or oppression in the treatment of, say, women, gays, people of mixed race, religious dissenters, and so on. Human rights, and liberal-democratic constitutionalism more generally, provide the overarching framework within which these struggles are debated and addressed.Each of these movements, therefore, can be seen as contributing to a process of democratic citizenization that is, turning the earlier cat alog of hierarchical relations into relationships of liberaldemocratic citizenship. This entails transforming both the vertical relationships between minorities and the state and the horizontal relationships among the members of different groups. In the past, it was often assumed that the only way to engage in this process of citizenization was to impose a single undifferentiated model of citizenship on all individuals.But the ideas and policies of multiculturalism that emerged from the 1960s start from the assumption that this complex biography inevitably and appropriately generates group-differentiated ethnopolitical claims. The name to citizenization is not to suppress these differential claims but to filter them through and frame them within the language of human rights, civil liberties, and democratic accountability. And this is what multiculturalist movements have aimed to do.The precise character of the resulting multicultural reforms varies from group to group, as befits t he distinctive history that each has faced. They all start from the antidiscrimination principle that underpinned the second wave but go beyond it to challenge other forms of exclusion or stigmatization. In most Western countries, explicit state-sponsored discrimination against ethnic, racial, or religious minorities had largely ceased by the 1960s and 1970s, under the influence of the second wave of humanrights struggles.Yet ethnic and racial hierarchies persist in many societies, whether measured in terms of economic inequalities, political underrepresentation, social stigmatization, or cultural invisibility. Various forms of multiculturalism have been developed to help overcome these lingering inequalities. The focus in this report is on multiculturalism as it pertains to (permanently settled) immigrant groups,7 7 There was briefly in some European countries a form of multiculturalism that was not aimed at the inclusion of permanent immigrants, but rather at ensuring that tempora ry migrants would return to their acres of origin.For example, mothertongue education in Germany was not initially introduced as a minority right but in order to enable guest worker children to reintegrate in their countries of origin (Karen Schonwalder, Germany Integration Policy and Pluralism in a Self-Conscious Country of Immigration, in The Multiculturalism Backlash European Discourses, Policies and Practices, eds. Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf London Routledge, 2010, 160).Needless to say, this sort of returnist multiculturalism premised on the idea that migrants are foreigners who should return to their real home has nothing to do with multiculturalism policies (MCPs) premised on the idea that immigrants belong in their host countries, and which aim to make immigrants 6 Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE but it is worth noting that struggles for multicultural citizenship have also emerged in relation to historic minorities a nd indigenous peoples. 8 C. The Evolution of Multiculturalism Policies.The case of immigrant multiculturalism is just one aspect of a larger ethnic revival across the Western democracies,9 in which different fibres of minorities have struggled for new forms of multicultural citizenship that combine both antidiscrimination measures and positive forms of recognition and accommodation. Multicultural citizenship for immigrant groups clearly does not involve the same types of claims as for indigenous peoples or national minorities immigrant groups do not typically seek land rights, territorial autonomy, or official language status.What then is the centerfield of multicultural citizenship in relation to immigrant groups? The Multiculturalism Policy Index is one attempt to measure the evolution of MCPs in a standardized format that enables comparative research. 10 The index takes the following eight policies as the most common or emblematical forms of immigrant MCPs11 Constitutional, l egislative, or parliamentary affirmation of multiculturalism, at the central and/ or regional and municipal levels The bankers acceptance of multiculturalism in school curricula The inclusion of ethnic representation/sensitivity in the mandate of public media or media licensing Exemptions from dress codes, either by statute or by court cases Allowing of dual citizenship The funding of ethnic group organizations to support cultural activities The funding of bilingual education or mother-tongue instruction Affirmative action for disadvantaged immigrant groups12 feel more at home where they are.The focus of this paper is on the latter type of multiculturalism, which is centrally concerned with constructing new relations of citizenship. 8 In relation to indigenous peoples, for example such as the Maori in New Zealand, Aboriginal peoples in Canada and Australia, American Indians, the Sami in Scandinavia, and the Inuit of Greenland new models of multicultural citizenship have eme rged since the late 1960s that include policies such as land rights, self-government rights, recognition of customary laws, and guarantees of political consultation.And in relation to substate national groups such as the Basques and Catalans in Spain, Flemish and Walloons in Belgium, Scots and welch in Britain, Quebecois in Canada, Germans in South Tyrol, Swedish in Finland we see new models of multicultural citizenship that include policies such as federal or quasi-federal territorial autonomy official language status, either in the region or nationally and guarantees of representation in the central government or on constitutional courts. 9.Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Revival in the Modern World (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1981). 10 Keith Banting and I developed this index, first published in Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka, eds. , Multiculturalism and the Welfare State Recognition and Redistribution in present-day(a) Democracies (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2006). Many of the ideas discussed in this paper are the result of our collaboration. 11 As with all cross-national indices, there is a trade-off between standardization and sensitivity to local nuances.There is no universally accepted explanation of multiculturalism policies and no hard and fast line that would sharply distinguish MCPs from closely related policy fields, such as antidiscrimination policies, citizenship policies, and integration policies. Different countries (or indeed different actors within a single country) are likely to draw this line in different places, and any list is therefore likely to be controversial. 12 For a fuller description of these policies, and the justification for including them in the Multiculturalism Policy Index, see the index website, www.queensu. ca/mcp.The site also includes our separate index of MCPs for indigenous peoples and for national minorities. Multiculturalism Success, Failure, and the Future 7 MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE early(a) polic ies could be added (or subtracted) from the index, but there was a recognizable multiculturalist turn across Western democracies in the detain few decades of the 20th century, and we can identify a range of public policies that are seen, by both critics and defenders, as emblematic of this turn.Each of the eight policy indicators listed above is intended to capture a policy dimension where liberaldemocratic states faced a choice about whether or not to take a multicultural turn and to develop more multicultural forms of citizenship in relation to immigrant groups. While multiculturalism for immigrant groups clearly differs in substance from that for indigenous peoples or national minorities, each policy has been defended as a means to overcome the legacies of earlier hierarchies and to help build fairer and more inclusive democratic societies.Therefore, multiculturalism is first and foremost about developing new models of democratic citizenship, grounded in human-rights ideals, to replace earlier uncivil and undemocratic relations of hierarchy and exclusion. Needless to say, this account of multiculturalism-as-citizenization differs dramatically from the 3S account of multiculturalism as the celebration of static cultural differences.Whereas the 3S account says that multiculturalism is about displaying and consuming differences in cuisine, clothing, and music, while neglecting issues of political and economic inequality, the citizenization account says that multiculturalism is precisely about constructing new civic and political relations to overcome the deeply entrenched inequalities that have persisted after the abolition of formal discrimination. It is important to determine which of these accounts more accurately describes the Western experience with multiculturalism.Before we can decide whether to celebrate or lament the fall of multiculturalism, we first need to make sure we know what multiculturalism has in fact been. The 3S account is misleading for t hree principal reasons. 13 Multiculturalism is first and foremost about developing new models of democratic citizenship, grounded in human-rights ideals. First, the claim that multiculturalism is solely or primarily about symbolic cultural politics depends on a scan of the actual policies.Whether we look at indigenous peoples, national minorities, or immigrant groups, it is immediately apparent that MCPs combine economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions. While minorities are (rightly) concerned to contest the historic stigmatization of their cultures, immigrant multiculturalism also includes policies that are concerned with entranceway to political power and economic opportunities for example, policies of affirmative action, mechanisms of political consultation, funding for ethnic self-organization, and facilitated access to citizenship.In relation all three types of groups, MCPs combine cultural recognition, economic redistribution, and political participation. Second , the claim that multiculturalism ignores the importance of universal human rights is equally misplaced. On the contrary, as weve seen, multiculturalism is itself a human-rights-based movement, inspired and constrained by principles of human rights and liberal-democratic constitutionalism.Its goal is to challenge the traditional ethnic and racial hierarchies that have been discredited by the postwar human-rights revolution. Understood in this way, multiculturalism-as-citizenization offers no support for accommodating the illiberal cultural practices within minority groups that have also The same human-righ.