The 'Parekh Report' - national identities with nations and nationalism

‘Multiculturalists’ often advocate national identities. Yet few study the ways in which ‘multiculturalists’ do so and in this article I will help to fill this gap. I will show that the Commission for Multi-Ethnic Britain’s report reflects a previously unnoticed way of thinking about the nature and worth of national identities that the Commission’s chair, and prominent political theorist, Bhikhu Parekh, had been developing since the 1970s. This way of thinking will be shown to avoid the questionable ways in which conservative and liberal nationalists discuss the nature and worth of national identities while offering an alternative way to do so. I will thus show that a report that was once criticised for the way it discussed national identities reflects how ‘multiculturalists’ think about national identities in a distinct and valuable way that has gone unrecognised

Examining 'postmulticultural' and civic turns in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and Denmark

There is a widely shared view that the appeal of multiculturalism as a public policy has suffered considerable political damage. In many European states the turn to “civic” measures and discourses has been deemed more suitable for the objectives of minority integration and the promotion of preferred modes of social and political unity. It is therefore said that the first decade of the new century has been characterized by a reorientation in immigrant integration policies—from liberal culturalist to the “return of assimilation” (Brubaker, 2001), on route to a broader “retreat from multiculturalism” (Joppke, 2004). In this article, we argue that such portrayals mask a tendency that is more complicated in some cases and much less evident in others. To elaborate this, we offer a detailed account of the inception and then alleged movement away from positions in favor of multiculturalism in two countries that have adopted different versions of it, namely the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and two countries that have historically rejected multiculturalism, namely Denmark and Germany. We argue that while there is undoubtedly a rhetorical separation between multiculturalism and civic integration, the latter is in some cases building on the former, and broadly needs to be understood as more than a retreat of multiculturalism. Taking seriously Banting and Kymlicka’s argument that understanding the evolution of integration requires the “the mind-set of an archaeologist,” we offer a policy genealogy that allows us to set the backlash against multiculturalism in context, in manner that explicates its provenance, permutations, and implications

Foundations of Collective Cultural Rights in International Human Rights Law

Although collective cultural rights are included in international human rights law, their precise place and their nature and significance are not well-explored or understood. This paper aims to show where collective cultural rights can be found in international human rights law and explore how these rights fit in the general body and framework of international human rights law. The starting point in this chapter is international human rights law, which implies that the analysis of collective cultural rights is framed by positive law and international legal instruments, such as treaties and conventions, as well as by soft law instruments, such as declarations, recommendations and resolutions. In this paper, the two categories of collective rights and cultural rights are defined, drawing a distinction between a) different types of collective rights, including rights for collectivities as such, rights for individuals as members of collectivities, and rights with a collective interest or object; and b) between different types of cultural rights, including rights that explicitly refer to ‘culture’ and rights that relate to culture or have a cultural dimension. This paper furthermore analyses various contentious issues surrounding collective rights and cultural rights in international human rights law, including the lack of clarity on the object and subject of these rights. The paper then outlines the different forms of collective cultural rights in international human rights law, by providing examples of legal provisions in international human rights law that can be classified as collective cultural rights. Finally, the paper elaborates on how collective subjects and collective cultural interests are integrated in international human rights law and analyses how and to what extent collective cultural rights provisions provide answers to the above-noted issues