Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism, as a policy rather than a demographic fact, is the doctrine that the state should actively preserve and promote distinct cultural communities within its borders rather than encourage their assimilation into a common national culture. Conservatives draw a sharp line between the older liberal idea of tolerance, which they accept, and official multiculturalism, which they regard as a programme that weakens the shared identity on which a free society depends.

The conservative claim is that a nation is not merely a market or a set of procedures but a community of memory, language, and loyalty. A policy that treats every culture as equally entitled to public support, conservatives argue, erodes the common inheritance that allows strangers to trust one another and to accept majority rule.

Key Takeaways

• Conservatives distinguish private cultural diversity, which they tolerate, from state-sponsored multiculturalism, which they oppose.
• National cohesion is held to rest on a shared culture, language, and history, not merely on legal procedures.
• Critics on the right warn that multicultural policy can entrench parallel societies and weaken social trust.
• Assimilation, not separation, is the conservative ideal for integrating newcomers.
• The debate intensified in Europe and Canada, where multiculturalism became explicit state policy.

History And Context

Canada adopted official multiculturalism first, declaring it federal policy in 1971 under Pierre Trudeau and entrenching it in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988. Australia and several European states followed with their own versions. The doctrine grew out of the postwar expansion of immigration and a reaction against earlier assimilationist and, in some cases, racially exclusionary policies.

The conservative critique was put forcefully by Samuel P. Huntington, whose 2004 book Who Are We? argued that mass immigration without assimilation threatened the Anglo-Protestant cultural core he saw as the source of American institutions. In Britain, the philosopher Roger Scruton argued that a shared national loyalty, what he called oikophilia, the love of home, was the precondition for the trust and sacrifice that democracy and the welfare state require.

By the 2010s several European leaders, including Angela Merkel and David Cameron, publicly declared state multiculturalism a failure, citing segregated communities and weak integration. The empirical question of how diversity affects social trust was given prominence by the work of Robert Putnam, whose research suggested that, at least in the short run, ethnic diversity can lower civic engagement and trust within communities.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives argue that a political community cannot run on procedures alone. Democracy asks citizens to accept the rule of people they will never meet, to pay taxes that benefit strangers, and to abide by laws they voted against. This, conservatives contend, requires a prior sense of shared membership, a “we,” and that sense is cultural before it is legal.

Official multiculturalism, on this account, attacks the foundation while standing on it. By teaching that the host culture has no special claim and that all traditions deserve equal public endorsement, it dissolves the common identity that made the host society attractive to newcomers in the first place. Scruton’s argument is that loyalty to a shared home, not abstract universal principle, is what sustains the institutions multiculturalists themselves value.

The conservative alternative is assimilation: a generous welcome to immigrants combined with a clear expectation that they adopt the language, law, and civic loyalties of their new country. This is not hostility to immigrants but a condition for their successful integration and for the continued cohesion of the whole.

Differing Positions

Defenders of multiculturalism argue that the assimilationist ideal is both unjust and unrealistic. It demands that minorities surrender their heritage to a majority culture that is itself neither static nor neutral, and it has historically masked pressure to conform to one dominant ethnic group. Multiculturalists hold that recognising and accommodating difference, in schooling, language, and public symbols, produces a fairer society and, in time, a deeper loyalty, because citizens are accepted as they are rather than asked to disappear. They point to successful diverse societies as evidence that cohesion and pluralism can coexist. Conservatives respond that such successes usually rest on a strong shared framework that multicultural rhetoric obscures, and that the long-run effects on trust are not yet known. The evidence on diversity and cohesion is genuinely mixed.

References

1. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon & Schuster, 2004), ch. 1.
2. Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative (Bloomsbury, 2014), ch. 3.
3. Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 137-174.
4. David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (Hurst, 2017), ch. 1.