Introduction
Our book – Multiculturalism on the Mend? The Political Left and Ethnic Minorities in Liberal Democracies – explores the impact of recent shifts to the left in government in eight democracies of the Global North on multiculturalism, a political project traditionally associated with left-wing ideologies and left-leaning governments.
The book’s aim is to see whether multiculturalism is ‘mending’ in an increasingly ideologically complex environment or whether the victories of the political right in the 2000s-2010s, the rise of populism, the COVID-19 pandemic, the shuttering of borders, and the changing dynamics of minority mobilization have irreversibly altered the course of multicultural affairs.
What Is Multiculturalism?
Any book dealing with multiculturalism faces the immediate task of defining what is an admittedly complex and elusive concept.
On television and the internet, political pundits and commentators tend to employ multiculturalism as shorthand to describe a pro-diversity, pro-immigration ideology. Increasingly, they are articulating multiculturalism as a threat to the survival of Western civilization.
Scholars and researchers, by contrast, tend to employ multiculturalism in reference to a distinct model of immigrant integration (that differs dramatically from assimilation), to a broadly defined politics of diversity, or to a particular type of public policy.
Given how difficult it is to arrive at a consensus on what multiculturalism is, our book employs a four-fold definition designed for cross-national comparison. We use this novel approach to enhance the cross-national comparability of cases and reveal complex (and possibly contradictory) multicultural trajectories both across and within cases.
- First and foremost, each of the book’s case studies explore multiculturalism as a type of public policy that involves either the public recognition or the cultural, religious, and linguistic accommodation, or both, of immigrant (i.e., ethnic) minorities. This part of the definition draws from Will Kymlicka and Keith Banting’s groundbreaking work on the Multiculturalism Policy Index (see https://www.queensu.ca/mcp/).
- A second part of the definition draws from scholarship that understands multiculturalism as a type of public discourse. Multicultural discourse differs from country to country, but it does evoke certain shared themes. More specifically, multicultural discourse tends to advance the idea that societies are composed of a privileged majority and of disenfranchised minorities and it frequently notes that it falls to the state to redress imbalances in power and to ensure minority participation in economic, political, and social arenas.
- We base the third part of the definition on research that deploys multiculturalism to describe a demographic change brought about by immigration from the Global South to the Global North.
- The fourth part of the definition stems from the case studies themselves. Some of the book’s contributors view multiculturalism as aggregates of liberal (non-restrictive) laws and regulations on the acquisition of citizenship and permanent residency, asylum seeking, and welcoming refugees.
From Normative to Empirical Analysis
Our book employs this four-fold definition in the context of a changing scholarly discussion on multiculturalism. This discussion once centered on the normative value of multiculturalism in addressing democratic deficits in liberal democracies.
Advocates of multiculturalism argued that liberal democracies should either publicly recognize and accommodate minority cultural identities in the process of immigrant integration or adopt special representation and self-government rights for national minorities and indigenous peoples that, at one point in time, the state had forcibly incorporated.
Some observers argue that multiculturalism is now in ‘retreat’ while others contend that it is surviving and perhaps even expanding.
Although several prominent political theorists and philosophers advanced multiculturalism as an instrument to make democracies fairer and more just, others disagreed about the need to abandon assimilationist models.
While the normative discussion (and debate) continues to this day, multiculturalism is now also the object of empirical analysis. The emerging empirical discussion on multiculturalism has two major dimensions.
Along one dimension, scholars have re-conceptualized multiculturalism as an independent variable (i.e., a cause) and researchers have set out to examine its impact on issues such as, economic redistribution, immigrant integration, conflict and social cohesion. Along another dimension, scholars have articulated multiculturalism as a dependent variable (i.e., an effect).
The more recent articulation of multiculturalism as a dependent variable has itself generated two important avenues of inquiry. One of these avenues aims to describe accurately multiculturalism’s current situation as a global sociopolitical phenomenon. There is no agreement yet as to what is going on: some observers argue that multiculturalism is now in ‘retreat’ while others contend that it is surviving and perhaps even expanding.
The other avenue hopes to uncover explanations for multiculturalism’s retreat and survival. To be sure, empirical multicultural scholarship is still at its preliminary stage but potential explanations for these developments already include public opinion, policy design and effectiveness, and a country’s experience with immigration and diversity politics.
Shifts to the Left and Multiculturalism
Our book specifically contributes to the empirical discussion on multiculturalism and to both of its avenues of inquiry. It does so by examining the impact of shifts to the left in government on multiculturalism as policy, discourse, demographic trends, and immigration and asylum laws.
To be clear: a ‘shift to the left in government’ means simply that in each of the cases under examination in the book there is evidence that the ideological positions of newly elected leaders and legislators and governing political parties and coalitions are more to the left along the ideological spectrum than those of the outgoing government.
Our book examines four types of shifts to the left in government that have taken place across eight countries over a ten-year period (2014-2024).
- One type of shift to the left examined in the book involves the formation of a left-led coalition government following an extended period of center-right governing. This type of shift took place in Sweden in 2014, in New Zealand in 2017, and in Germany in 2021.
- A second type of shift to the left occurs when the Political Right suffers an electoral defeat, and a Center-Left (or less right-wing) government replaces it. This type of shift took place in Canada in 2015, in the United States in 2020, in Australia in 2022, and in the United Kingdom in 2024.
- A third type of shift to the left results from one or several minority left-wing political parties increasing either their share of the popular vote or their representation in the legislative branch of government, or both. This type of shift took place in Switzerland in 2019.
- A fourth type of shift to the left in government occurs when a governing left-wing party increases its power in the assembly. This type of shift took place in New Zealand 2020 when the Jacinda Ardern-led Labour Party formed a single-party majority government (and shed its New Zealand First coalition partner).
Why Focus on Shifts to the Left?
Our book’s focus on shifts in government to the left serves the empirical objectives of the study of multiculturalism in two ways.
It provides an opportunity to evaluate competing hypotheses about the relationship between the political left and multiculturalism and about multiculturalism’s current state of affairs.
Our book’s cross-national examination reveals both expected as well as puzzling results.
On the one hand, the standard expectation based on conventional wisdom is that multiculturalism is faring better following a shift to the left in government. For one, in most cases, multiculturalism policies originated under center-left and left-leaning governments and the political right has long been the source of opposition to multiculturalism. Furthermore, multiculturalism is more logically compatible with left-leaning ideological positions – such as the pursuit of equal opportunity and the use of the state to redress inequalities – than it is with right-wing ideological positions.
If the propositions detailed above hold true, we should therefore expect multiculturalism to bounce back following a shift to the left in government.
There is, however, an alternative hypothesis based on the so-called ‘master narrative’ on multiculturalism (as described by Will Kymlicka in 2010). This narrative posits that, in recent decades, ‘the center-left political movements that had initially championed multiculturalism, such as the social democratic parties in Europe, have backed away from it, and shifted to a discourse that emphasizes ideas of “integration,” “social cohesion,” “common values,” and “shared citizenship”’.
Since the political left has been on the outside of political power looking in, it has only recently become possible to evaluate the veracity of the ‘master narrative’ and to compare it with the standard expectation.
In addition to evaluating these hypotheses, our book’s focus on shifts to the left in government also aims to increase ‘explanatory leverage’ in the search for explanations of multiculturalism’s movement and directionality. It does so by allowing to control a shared stimulus (i.e., a shift to the left) across the cases under examination.
Evidence of variance in policy, demographic, legal, discursive trajectories either across or within cases would suggest, under these conditions, that factors other than the political left are responsible for multiculturalism’s fate.
Expected and Puzzling Results
In pursuing the abovementioned empirical objectives, our book’s cross-national examination reveals both expected as well as puzzling results.
Why does multiculturalism sometimes mend following a shift to the left in government? The book’s contributors provide rich and diverse accounts about multiculturalism’s movement and directionality, but some common themes do stand out.
- First, it is the public discourse of left-wing parties and governments – and not their policies – that provides the main evidence of multiculturalism ‘mending.’
- Second, when pro-multicultural policy and legal changes have been implemented, they are seemingly the result of path-dependent processes, initiated well in the past (and sometimes at the international level), and less connected to electoral results and the rotation of political parties and governments.
- Third, some more recent multicultural developments are also the unintended consequences of government initiatives unrelated to the recognition and accommodation of immigrant minorities – such as the recognition and accommodation of Indigenous peoples, for example.
Why does multiculturalism sometimes fail to bounce back following a shift to the left in government? There are here, too, some recurring themes that we can draw out from the book’s case studies.
- First, several center-left and left-leaning political parties have continued to implement the restrictive immigration and asylum laws adopted by their right-wing predecessors. This seems to be due to strategic electoral concerns and to left-wing parties’ embrace of a neo-liberal political agenda.
- Second, some puzzling results may be the unintended consequences of institutions designed to enhance democracy by giving ‘the people’ a more direct say in policymaking.
- Third, puzzling results may also be evidence of the absence in parties of the political left of a substantive and transformative commitment to deep diversity.
Conclusion
What can our book tell us about multiculturalism’s future? To be sure, the contributing chapters suggest that a shift to the political left will likely bring about some multicultural developments, particularly in terms of immigrant-centered discourse and, perhaps, in some cases, even regarding policy and institutional changes.
However, the book also serves as warning to those who might be swayed by the diversity-oriented rhetoric of political leaders and assume that a shift to the left will automatically translate into concrete policy or institutional action (or, for that matter that a shift to the right will automatically lead to multiculturalism’s retreat).
Readers of Multiculturalism on the Mend? will see that the development of a substantial politics of diversity (and its decline) may be contingent on factors that have little to do with the government of the day.
Further Reading
