Foreign Policy in Multicultural Societies

Abstract

Scholarship on the domestic sources of foreign policy has focused on parties, interest groups, and a generalized notion of public opinion, but it has neglected the societal dimension. This is a mistake given the multiethnic and multinational makeup of many of the world’s states. The focus here is on those European states which imagined themselves settled in the aftermath of war, empire, and the Cold War, yet now find themselves surprised by the new challenges of migration and multiculturality—meaning the growth in ethnocultural diversity as a form of everyday life. These states have adopted varying strategies—or none—in order to address the problems which arise, but did not at first realize the extent to which the domestic realm had become inextricably entangled with external relations—whether through the transnational activities of diasporas or through blowback from their own foreign policies in regions of the world where some of their minority communities have intimate connections. The subject of foreign policy and multicultural societies is thus a new but important one, politically as well as intellectually. To approach it we need both a grounding in foreign policy analysis and an understanding of the debates in political theory and sociology about multiculturalism, given that practitioners have increasingly to face inwards as much as outwards and that the distinction between the external and “homeland” dimensions of security is now blurred. Although the world has not fallen into a simple “clash of civilizations,” the challenges of managing diversity certainly now present themselves in a set of interlinked levels, crossing national boundaries and therefore significantly changing the context of foreign policy and its making.