Drawing Aside the Veil: Examining Multiculturalism’s Liberal Underpinnings with a Singaporean Lens

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ABSTRACT Multicultural theorisations have presumed principles adopted from liberalism, and multiculturalists have explicated their theorisations within liberal democratic contexts. This article problematises both these conflations by focusing on an avowedly non-liberal polity, Singapore. Rather than focussing on developing and identifying normative justifications for multiculturalism, it advocates a practice-based approach which examines multiculturalism as an ethos of accepting cultural difference and actions that uphold such an ethos. This approach allows this paper to do three things: First, it demonstrates that Singapore’s approach to engaging with its internal ethnic diversity is indeed a form of multiculturalism. Second, it highlights the pragmatic basis for the country’s adoption of multiculturalism to manage diversity. Third, by identifying commonalities in multicultural practice in liberal and non-liberal settings, this article calls for a more critical examination of the slippage between theory and practice that is often overlooked by scholars on multiculturalism.