Introduction

Abstract

This book addresses an important issue of the contemporary politics of multiculturalism within Western and neo-Western democratic states: how to provide normative grounds for multiculturalism without relying on or reinforcing potentially ‘coercive notions of bounded or unified cultures’, while preventing multiculturalism from collapsing into a plural monoculturalism.¹ In doing so, this book contributes to the ongoing recent critiques of essentialist notions of culture, as well as critiquing the normative underpinnings of Will Kymlicka’s theory of liberal multiculturalism, and attempts to develop a normative theory of the politics of ‘multicultural integration’ within the paradigm of an anti-essentialist notion of culture. Kymlicka’s theory of multiculturalism is considered as the ‘clearest’ point of departure in ‘anglophone political theories of multiculturalism’ (Modood 2007: 21)² against which other multicultural ‘revisionists’ have reacted. One of the aims of this book is to overcome the normative deficiencies of Kymlicka’s (1995) theory of liberal multiculturalism. In deriving a set of normative criteria for the politics of multicultural integration, this book critiques some features of liberalism for multiculturalism and adopts key concepts of modern republicanism. Finally, it shows that the criteria enable us to normatively discriminate among competing political approaches to multiculturalism and diversity in a principled manner and that modern republicanism is more conducive to the sort of multiculturalism it advocates than liberalism and communitarianism, even though a coupling of republicanism and multiculturalism is generally considered contentious.