The Human Development Report (HDR)
of 2004 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is entitled Cultural
Liberty in Today's Diverse World [1]. It argues
for active "multicultural policies that recognize differences, champion
diversity and promote cultural freedoms, so that all people can choose
to speak their language, practice their religion, and participate in shaping
their culture-so that all people can choose to be who they are".
The Report identifies two major forms of cultural exclusion: living mode
exclusion and participation exclusion.
Living mode exclusion occurs when the state or social custom denigrates
or suppresses a group's culture, including its language, religion or traditional
customs or lifestyles. Needed are policies that give some form of public
recognition, accommodation.
Participation exclusion-social, economic and political exclusion
along ethnic, linguistic or religious lines-refers to discrimination or
disadvantage based on cultural identity. Such exclusions operate through
discriminatory policies from the state (such as the denial of citizenship
or of the right to vote or run for office), past discrimination that has
not been remedied (lower performance in education) or social practice
(such as less access in the media to a cultural group's point of view,
or discrimination in job interviews). Needed are approaches that integrate
multicultural policies with human development strategies (HDR 2004: 27).
The Report estimates that a total of 518 million people suffer living
mode exclusion, and 750 million and 832 million suffer economic and political
exclusion respectively. In order to counter these exclusions, the HDR
recommends four specific types of multicultural policies:
- Political participation (asymmetric federalism, proportional representation)
- Religious freedom (secularism with principled distance)
- Legal pluralism (recognition of customary law at the local level)
- Language policies (official language, bi-lingual education where possible)
- Socio-economic policies (equity measures including affirmative action)
There is obviously no reason to disagree with the substance of these
proposals. However, such policies have been in effect in many contemporary
societies for a number of years now. Canada, for instance, adopted its
multiculturalist policy in 1971; India has been a secular democracy for
the last 57 years. And yet, while the Report asks how the Canadian (and
similar) experience(s) with multiculturalism can be expanded, it does
not ask why, despite the existence of an official multicultural policy
for over three decades, racism remains a persistent reality in Canada.
Similarly, while it commends India's secularist, multicultural policies
(e.g. those related to language in West Bengal), it does not ask why Indian
Muslims continue to suffer the forms of exclusion they do. Why in India
do we still not see a robust, inclusive model of human development? Why
are minorities in secular, multicultural democracies still forced to choose
between a paternalistic minority politics and anti-minority fundamentalisms?
Even more disturbing are the new, and more intense faces of racism that
we have recently seen unmasked on a global scale. I speak here not only
of post-9/11 racism or cultural conflicts such as those involving the
hijab. I speak rather of the racist basis of the Iraq War or the War on
Terror; the use of foreign soldiers; the promise of citizenship against
participation in the war; and similar other racist dimensions of contemporary
imperialism. How do these trends affect human development? What kind of
multiculturalism can offset these trends?
In what follows, I wish to raise some questions about the central categories
the report employs and its main recommendations. My comments focus on
three related themes:
(a) The underlying model of social justice which informs the analysis
of cultural
liberty and human development;
(b) The understanding of difference and diversity;
(c ) The feasibility of multiculturalism as the appropriate policy mechanism
for
human development
I will begin from this last point about multiculturalism. Let us consider
the Canadian example in some detail, as it has earned quite a distinct
place in the discourse on multiculturalism. Most marginalised social groups
in Canada have come to regard multiculturalism as a means to formalise
unequal power relations amongst citizens, rather than to alter them. Most
notably, multicultural policies have failed to dismantle perhaps the most
critical barrier to cultural liberty in Canada, i.e., racism. A recent
report on visible minority communities in Canada revealed the following:
- Visible minorities generally have higher education levels than either non-racialized groups or Aboriginals. In spite of their higher educational attainment, visible minorities still trail behind non-racialized groups with regard to employment and income.
- C o m p a red to non-racialized groups, visible minority and Aboriginals with university education are less likely to hold managerial/professional jobs.
- F o re i g n - b o rn visible minorities experience g reater education-occupation discrepancies compared to other groups as less than half of those with a university education have high skill level jobs.
- Aboriginals and foreign-born visible minorities are over-represented in the lowest income quintile and they are under-represented in the highest income quintile. Given the same level of education, non-racialized groups, whether foreign-born or Canadian-born, are three times as likely as Aboriginal peoples and about twice as likely as foreign-born visible minorities to be in the top 20% income distribution. Moreover, even if they are born in Canada, visible minorities are still less likely than foreign-born and Canadian-born nonracialized group to be in the top 20% income distribution.
- Even when racial minorities have attained a university level education, they are still less likely than non-racialized groups to be in the top income quintile.
- Foreign-born visible minorities earned, on average, about 78 cents
for every dollar earned by a foreign - b o rn non-racialized person.
Though not unexpected, these findings raise questions at at least two
levels. For one, they raise questions about at least one cornerstone of
the human development paradigm, viz., education. If racial inequality
continues despite equalizing levels of education, then it suggests some
limitations of education as a human development strategy. In other words,
if capability equality cannot overcome other forms of inequality, then
the human development approach must be able to identify the factors that
prevent such equality. A rudimentary analysis of the relationships between
capability equality and other forms of equality suggest that "capability"
may be a social/cultural construct - constituted and reinforced through
institutional and social relations of power. It is these relations of
power that devalues one's education and valorises another's even when
technically the levels of education may be equal. Race and gender obviously
most directly mediate these understandings of capability – and help legitimise
the type of inequalities we saw above. An example that comes to mind is
the discrimination that persists in the "worth" of foreign degrees;
while degrees from the UK, US, Europe and Australia are considered equivalent,
degrees from countries such as India are not. Sure, there are "valid"
technical explanations for such discrimination. I would argue however
that the technical explanations cannot adequately explain the phenomena.
The systemic nature of these inequalities also raises questions about
the feasibility of legal strategy and official policy. To the extent that
policies towards excluded groups are developed within an overall structural
and historical context of racism, they necessarily reflect these structures
and histories. These can give rise to what some have called legalized
or institutionalised racism. The persistent marginalisation faced by aboriginal
communities in Canada is perhaps the best indicator of this: "The
Canadian government, through the Indian Act of 1876 and subsequent legislation
and treaties, introduced institutionalized racism in the relationship
between Canada and its Aboriginal Peoples that continues to flourish today."(Henry,
Tator, Mattis & Rees: 1995).
As the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism has noted
in his Report on Canada:
Because of its history, Canadian society, as in all the countries of North
and South America, carries a heavy legacy of racial discrimination, which
was the ideological prop of trans-Atlantic slavery and of the colonial
system. .. The sacrificial victims of this culture of discrimination since
historical times have been the aboriginal peoples and the communities
of African and Caribbean origin. … the fact that two communities, which
were historically the victims of discrimination, both individually and
collectively, are still placed on the lowest rungs of the social, economic,
political and cultural ladder, bears witness to the sustained force of
discrimination as a major factor in the structure of Canadian society
(Report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial
discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, 2003, p.21).
These experiences are probably not very different in other democracies
like Canada, especially in other OECD countries, some of which are noted
in the HDR (e..g., not a single member of the lower house of the French
and Swiss parliaments belong to minority groups). And yet, racism is not
a central category the HDR has chosen to employ in its analysis of cultural
liberty, although it recognises many manifestations of racism. While it
acknowledges the various symptoms of the problematic, it refuses to acknowledge
the salience of the underlying structures that generate those symptoms[2].
Is anything really lost – in speaking of issues and yet not of the phenomena
that these issues comprise as a totality? I believe so. As Marilyn Frye,
the feminist philosopher explains with her metaphor of the birdcage, if
one looks at a cage one wire at a time, then it is not quite clear how
it might have the power to imprison a living being. If however, one examines
the cage in its entirety, focusing on the specific pattern which connects
the wires to make possible the imprisonment, then a different picture
emerges. The problem is not simply one of omission. It gives the mistaken
impression that the cage is only a simple sum of the wires; and that liberty
can be won by removing one wire at a time.
Understanding of social justice
This refusal to take seriously underlying structures and the imperatives
that arise from it, derives in turn from a commitment to a distributive
paradigm of justice. Following Iris Young, this paradigm could be identified
as the distributive paradigm of social justice[3].
The distributive paradigm defines social justice as the morally proper
distribution of social benefits and burdens among society's members. Paramount
among these are wealth, income and other material resources. The distributive
definition of justice often includes, however, non-material social goods
such as rights, opportunity, power and self-respect (Young 1990:16).
The focus on distribution ignores and tends to obscure the underlying
structural/institutional context within which those distributions take
place; this context "includes any structures or practices, the rules
and norms which guide them, and the language and symbols that mediate
social interactions within them, in institutions of state, family and
civil society, as well as the workplace (Young 1990:22)" This emphasis
on patterns of distribution is typical of liberal models of justice, which
as Marx pointed "frequently presuppose institutions of private property,
wage labor, and credit, when these might come into question for a more
critical conception of justice" (Young 2004). Indeed, the precise
goal of policy approaches premised on the liberal distributive model is
to accommodate political demands within existing structures of property
rights, gender relations, divisions of labour and cultural norms.
In the distributive model, inequalities and exclusions can be corrected
only by distributing rights and resources within existing social/institutional
structures. Here, a first problem is that existing institutions are themselves
critical elements of the structures that cause the inequality and exclusion.
Second, as many have argued, rights are rather limited as political instruments
for correcting such imbalances: "rights are not fruitfully conceived
as possessions. Rights are relationships, not things; they are institutionally
defined rules specifying what people can do in relation to one another.
Rights refer to doing more than having, to social relationships that enable
or constrain action. (Young 1990:25). The difference – between rights
conceived of a social relations and rights distributed as possessions
by an entity such as the government - is quite apparent when we consider
the discourse of rights associated with certain social movements like
the MST, and the rights generated by multicultural policies in countries
such as Canada. For the former, the relationship between land rights and
human development is clear; for the latter not at all so.
Understanding of difference/culture
The refusal to take structures fully into account results in a very specific
understanding of difference (and culture). In what follows, I wish to
draw a distinction between a structural view of difference and culture
as opposed to an identity-centric view of difference. Much of this section
draws on the work of Iris Young, a critical theorist of difference (2000;
1990).
Consider this opening paragraph of the overview to the Report:
How will the new constitution of Iraq satisfy demands for fair representation
for Shiites and Kurds? Which-and how many-of the languages spoken in Afghanistan
should the new constitution recognize as the official language of the
state? How will the Nigerian federal court deal with a Sharia law ruling
to punish adultery by death? Will the French legislature approve the proposal
to ban headscarves and other religious symbols in public schools? Do Hispanics
in the United States resist assimilation into the mainstream American
culture?..Will the peace talks to end the Tamil-Sinhala conflict in Sri
Lanka ever conclude? These are just some headlines from the past few months.
Managing cultural diversity is one of the central challenges of our time
(HDR 2004:1; emphasis mine).
At one level, it is arguable if cultural diversity is the appropriate
category here at all; at another level, it is difficult to see how one
framework of culture/multiculturalism can be applicable to the entire
range of problems mentioned here. It seems a forced commonality is imposed
upon this complex set of problems, a commonality which is forged on the
basis of a problematic notion of "culture." This notion of culture
refers primarily to differences between groups based on ethnicity, nationality,
or religion (Kymlicka 1995).
Central to this view of culture is an identity-centered view of group
difference. In this view, social groups are differentiated by unique sets
of essential attributes such as ethnicity, nationality, or religion; it
is these attributes that constitute group identity (Young 2000:88). It
is this attribute-centered view of difference that informs the multiculturalist
perspective and is reflected in the issues identified in the Report under
living mode exclusion and participation exclusion (see quote above).
In place of this identity-centered notion of difference, Young proposes
a relational view of difference. "In a relational conceptualization,
what makes a group a group is less some set of attributes its members
share than the relations in which it stands to others" (Young 2000:90).
In this view, "a social group is a collective of persons differentiated
from others by cultural forms, practices, special needs or capacities,
structures of power or privilege" (Young 2000:90).
Social groups conceptualised in this relational sense, can be either cultural,
or structural. A structural social group is a collection of people who
have similar structural locations that similarly condition their opportunities
and life-chances, and similarly constrain or enable their ability to act
as agents. Structural groups sometimes overlap with cultural groups, as
in most structures of racial or ethnicized difference. However, ‘while
they are often built upon and intersect with cultural difference, the
social relations constituting gender, race, class, sexuality and ability
are best understood as structural" (Young 2000: 92).
In this understanding, difference is primarily structural difference;
such structural difference generates structural inequality. Structural
inequalities cannot be remedied only by giving rights/freedoms/resources
to collectivities which possess certain attributes. Rather, correcting
structural inequalities require altering the structure itself, and the
social relations between structural groups that are embodied by those
structures.
In my view, it is structural inequality between different social groups
that should be the subject matter of human development. In this sense,
the right to education in Spanish for Hispanics in America can fulfil
a requirement of multiculturalist politics, but cannot meaningfully advance
human development in and of itself. For the latter, one needs to focus
on the systemic racism that Hispanics face in America. To address the
latter, one has to intervene in the structures through which such racism
is sustained. For example, as long as Hispanics immigrate to the US under
the conditions that they do, and are forced to seek employment in a productive
system that profits from their vulnerabilities, multicultural rights will
hardly enhance their well-being. In fact, as many marginalised social
groups argue, multiculturalist policies often prempt trajectories of more
substantive social change, by obscuring the underlying issues of structural
inequality. As we noted above, this tendency is inherent in the model
of justice that informs multiculturalist policies.
With respect to India, Muslim authors have repeatedly pointed out, identity-based
politics of multiculturalism have functioned as an important barrier to
the democratisation of the Muslim community. This in fact the central
point of the burgeoning Dalit Muslim movement in India. While inequities
within the Indian Muslim community have deepened, the Muslim elite has
focused on issues such as Babri masjid, Muslim Personal Law and issues
around the Urdu language (Alam 2003), which have little to do with structural
inequity faced by the majority of the Muslim community. The politics of
Urdu is particularly telling. As Alam points out, the use of urdu in India
remains confined largely to a Muslim elite, while the Muslim masses speak
mostly languages of the area in which they reside : "a critical observation
reveals that it is the upper caste Muslim elite in Hindi heartland, particularly
in UP, who champion the cause of Urdu at national level so as to secure
access to state grants and aids in the name of Urdu" (Alam, ibid).
More recently, Asghar Ali Engineer has warned against an uncritical acceptance
of the proposal for reservation for Muslims in Andhra Pradesh. He calls
rather for reservation under Mandal Commission categories, which would
imply that not only religion but one's material reality be taken as the
primary criteria for reservation (Engineer 2004). As Alam explains, this
dependence on identity politics unleashes a vicious cycle between the
communalisms of minority and majority communities which do not redress
the inequities faced by most Muslims. It provides rather convenient political
strategies for majority elites.
Racial minorities in the West share a very similar experience. Multiculturalism
often becomes a very convenient tool for both white and non-white elites,
where the latter seeks only integration into existing structures, rather
than substantive social change (for example, in the relations of production).
In Canada, a very interesting example of how disadvantaged social groups
demand structural change is seen in the resistance movement waged by the
Filipino Canadian women, who migrate to Canada primarily as domestic workers.
Their analysis of their situation is not articulated in terms of political/economic
exclusion. It is rooted in an analysis of US imperialism, the relationship
of the Philippines to this imperialism, racist and patriarchal social
relations in Canadian society, and the political and economic crisis in
the Philippines.
The point of course is not to argue against multiculturalism or secularism.
Multiculturalism will, and does, allow for greater participation of excluded
groups. In particular, it is necessary to note that multiculturalism or
secularism provide the platforms for raising issues related to minorities.
However, while the goal of participation remains a salient one, it can
not substitute the broader goal of altering the very nature of the societies
in which participation is sought[4]. Participation
can be a proximate goal of human development, albeit one that will not
go far unless it is embedded in broader vision of structural change. With
respect to the former, the evidence for multiculturalism as an appropriate
policy tool is at best mixed. With respect to the latter, the evidence
is weak, sometimes negative. That multiculturalism continues to be used
for formalising unequal social relations engendered by colonialism and
contemporary imperialisms, gives us serious reasons to worry.
In analysing the relationship between multiculturalism and human development,
then, a different view of culture/identity may be required – one that
is based on the specificity of social relations in which human collectivities
are entrenched. In the end, this might require a reconceptualisation of
human development itself. As I argue elsewhere, a notion of human development
relevant to our contemporary context might entail a stronger emphasis
on social power. Such a social power perspective does not deny the importance
of education or health as a critical component of human development. However,
it argues that education must be regarded as a site of struggle for power,
rather than as a good or a right to be distributed by benevolent elites.
As Leiten has argued, the tremendous success of educational attainment
in Kerala has much to do with the broader processed of politicization
and social change in which it was embedded (Leiten 2002). Social power,
it may be argued, is the focus of many major grassroots mobilisations
that we are currently witnessing: the MST, the water wars in Bolivia,
Naya Krishi Andolan in Bangladesh etc.
Let me conclude by quoting the following words from the inaugural speech
delivered by the Prince of Belgium at the ceremony which launched the
Report:
"We in Belgium are the decision-making capital of Europe, which is
a laboratory of multiculturalism. But we are ourselves also a country
that has tried, and continues to try, to bring together different cultures
in one society, having created a federal system that both recognises autonomy
and unity".
Rwanda, even in this 10th Anniversary of the genocide, did not seem to
figure in the Prince's speech. Perhaps another irony of multiculturalism?
References
Alam, Anwar. "Democratisation of Indian Muslims: Some Reflections",
Economic & Political Weekly, November 15, 2003
Canadian Race Relations Foundation, Unequal Access: A report card on racism
(Toronto, 2000.
Canadian Race Relations Foundation, Fact sheet on Legalized Racism (Toronto,
2004).
Engineer, Asghar Ali. "ON RESERVATION FOR MUSLIMS – SHOULD OR SHOULD
NOT BE", Secular Perspective, August 1-15, 2004.
Henry, Frances; Tator, Carol; Mattis, Winston & Rees, Tim. The Colour
of Democracy. Toronto: Harcourt Brace & Co. Canada, (1995).
Kymlicka, W. Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995)
Lieten G K "Human Development in Kerala: Structure and Agency in
History" Economic & Political Weekly, April 20, 2002.
Nussbaum, M. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Sen, A.K. Development As Freedom, (New York: Anchor Books, 1999).
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Cultural Liberty in Today's
Diverse World (New York:2004).
Young, Iris M. Justice and the Politics of Difference (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1990)
Young, Iris M. Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000)
Young, Iris M. "Taking the Basic Structure Seriously", forthcoming
in Perspectives on Politics, APSA 2004.