Multiculturalism In Europe Research Articles

The Making and Unmaking of Religious Boundaries

In public debates over multiculturalism in Europe, Islamic values and ways of life are commonly represented as incompatible with Western rights and liberties. Against this background, Muslim minorities have developed generally strong and stable religious identities. This paper asks when and how multicultural cities and ethnic communities give rise to strong and stable religion. Taking an approach from religious boundary making as a heuristic framework, we bring together a series of five studies on the religious identities of Muslim minorities. The studies compare religious group boundaries and replicate boundary making processes (cf. Wimmer, 2008) across ethnic communities and multicultural cities as comparative cases. Drawing on several large-scale surveys of Muslim minorities, our comparative findings illuminate the making and unmaking of religious boundaries. We conclude that strong religion is ‘made in Europe’ as institutional rigidities and social inequalities enforce religious boundary making through social closure and cultural maintenance within ethnic communities.

Examination of multiculturalism in Europe (in the debate of the Basques) shown at Taylors “Politics of Recognition”

In international history the definition of „self-determination“ has a dynamic as well as a regulating effect. The main question of the paper is: Does self-determination mean that groups are owners of special collective or group rights, or does it mean that universal human rights are guaranteed as rights which every human individual has to the same extent? Does guaranteeing universal human rights suffice for reach or maintaining peace? To answer this question, it will be necessary to look at the origin of the idea of self-determination. Therefore we will analyse the points of view of Kant, Hegel, Rawls and Taylor; than their view will be compared with the guarantee of the right of self-determination in the UN-Charta and contrasted with the reality of national minorities in different states in the European Union.

The Varieties of Cultural Perception: Multiculturalism after Recognition

Doubts about the enterprise of cultural recognition have helped to fuel a backlash against the politics of multiculturalism in Europe during the last decade. Such doubts are well-founded. Charles Taylor's seminal discussion of the politics of recognition neglects serious difficulties that arise for the activity of recognition when the objective and subjective dimensions of cultural identity diverge. Narratives of cultural “passing” help to highlight these difficulties and demonstrate that recognition can sometimes contribute to identity-based oppression. However, this conclusion does not commit us to a politics of cultural indifference or assimilation: the rejection of recognition does not entail the rejection of perception in general. Iris Murdoch's notion of “attention” provides a corrective to our understanding of recognition and thereby supplies a potentially superior ethical and perceptual basis for European multiculturalism in the twenty-first century.

European multiculturalism revisited

* Introduction - Alessandro Silj * 1. Progressive Multiculturalism: The British Experience - Maleiha Malik * 2. Revisiting the multiculturalist model: France - Valerie Amiraux * 3. The German Sonderweg: Multiculturalism as Racism with a Distance - Stephan Lanz * 4. Multiculturalism in Italy: The Missing Model - Stefano Allievi * 5. Making Room: Encompassing Diversity in Denmark - Tina Gudrun Jensen * 6. Assimilation by conviction or by coercion? Integration policies in the Netherlands - Thijl Sunier * Conclusion: Mistaken models of integration? A comparative and critical perspective on the crisis of citizenship and multiculturalism in Europe - Christophe Bertossi

Extreme right-wing vote and support for multiculturalism in Europe

While Europe is unifying, it is also becoming more diverse, making multiculturalism one of the most hotly debated political issues in Western Europe. Minority citizens occupy an important place in the landscape of this challenging issue. Using the Eurobarometer 53 survey of European citizens, I look at the gap between Europeans who claim minority heritage and those who do not in support for multiculturalism in fifteen European Union member nations, taking into account percentage of extreme right-wing vote. This contextual factor has a persistent significant effect on the difference between minority and non-minority attitudes. High levels of support for extreme right-wing parties may have a polarizing effect, heightening awareness of personal heritage and making ethnic identity more salient in attitudes towards multiculturalism. This suggests an extension of group threat theory in which conceptions of what constitutes both a group and a threat can be created at the level of discourse.

Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Europe: The Role of CPLOL and Its Relevance to Education Regarding Cultural Diversity in the United States

Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Europe: The Role of CPLOL and Its Relevance to Education Regarding Cultural Diversity in the United States

URBAN MULTICULTURALISM IN EUROPE: IMMIGRANT MINORITY LANGUAGES AT HOME AND SCHOOL

URBAN MULTICULTURALISM IN EUROPE: IMMIGRANT MINORITY LANGUAGES AT HOME AND SCHOOL. Guus Extra and Kutlay Yagmur (Eds.) . Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. viii + 428. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paper. This volume reports a large-scale international study on immigrant languages in several European cities. The book contains 16 chapters and four appendixes. The first chapter is the introduction, in which the editors explain the content of the book and its crossnational and multidisciplinary perspectives. The rest of the chapters are grouped into three parts.

The role of educational institutions in the clientization of immigrants: The Swedish case

European nations are multicultural societies. Multiculturalism is more a part of these countries' intellectual debates, however, than part of their policies and practices. The public and governmental sectors of Europe still remain monocultural. Monoculturalism, which entails the cultural hegemony of the ‘white majority’ of European societies over ‘other’ cultural groups, is a part of the systematic reproduction of an established social order. Formal education is an important means of reproduction of the monocultural order. European monoculturalism is based on an ethnocentrism that has a long tradition in the Western worldview and is institutionalized in its political, judicial, educational and bureaucratic systems. Western monoculturalism has become increasingly problematic in the face of growing multiculturalism in Europe and jeopardizes the existing social order. The integration of diverse immigrant groups into the host societies is not compatible with the reproduction of Western cultural hegemony, a hegemony through which the policy of integration is simply reduced to a political goal that limits immigrants' action to that of adjusting themselves to objective norms and rules. Monoculturally educated groups, who are supposed to help immigrants become integrated into such societies, paradoxically construct obstacles to their integration.

Multiculturalism in Europe and America

Abstract. Although there is a popular discourse about multiculturalism in Europe and North America which suggests that there is a single set of problems, the political problems which multiculturalism addresses are different in these two contexts. As outlined here the problem in Western Europe is that in liberal democracies and social democratic welfare states two questions have to be addressed. One is that of equality, the other the recognition of cultural diversity. As is shown here a number of important European social scientists have feared that the acceptance of cultural diversity will actually undermine important and valued political structures without improving the condition of minorities. In the United States a different set of problems has arisen. While the Civil Rights movement appeared to be helping Blacks to achieve equality in the sixties, by the late eighties there was a sense of disillusion about this process and the emergence of ideologies based upon separatism which appeared to point to the ‘disuniting’ of America. Some of these ideologies were what was being discussed under the heading of multiculturalism. A further contrast has to be made with Canada which is often thought of as an arch‐exponent of multiculturalism, but in which all problems of ethnic equality are tied up with the specific problems generated by Quebecois nationalism.