Changing Perceptions of Multiculturalism in the British Public Sphere

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the examination of the evolution of the uses of the term multiculturalism in a corpus of selected speeches by prominent British politicians, officials and diplomats in the United Kingdom within the decade 2001–2011. Britain is considered to be one of Europe’s most multicultural countries and there was a time when its government took pride in its pro-integration policies. That is why within the elite discourses of the Labour governments of the late 1990s, multiculturalism had overwhelmingly positive connotations: it was associated with new opportunities, strength, enrichment, social progress and economic success. However, over the course of the 2000s there was much debate over the alleged failure of multiculturalism as a state policy, as a project for social cohesion and as a human value in itself. There have been calls for restrictions of immigration and asylum, increased demands on immigrants to assimilate and a focus on shared British national identity. In the most recent speeches of Conservatives, multiculturalism has started to connote alienation of minorities and threat of terror. Using qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper traces collocations and topoi with multiculturalism and illustrates the changing semantic prosody of the term resulting from the shifting evaluations ascribed to it.