Multiculturalism and Integration

Abstract

There is a lot of confusion about what multiculturalism is and what it is not. This is partly because ‘multiculturalism’ is too often defined by its critics, whose sole purpose is to create a straw man to knock down. But it is also because both its critics and some of its defenders falsely oppose multiculturalism with integration; and the confusion also partly stems from the fact that there is more than one form of multiculturalism, and they relate to integration in different ways. I would like to use this chapter to clarify the key terms of assimilation, integration, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. I hope this helps us better to increase understandings within this debate, to have a clear idea of what is being said or objected to. I would like to think that my analysis will bring people closer to my own advocacy of multiculturalism, but it will have succeeded if it increases understanding of what the issues are. My argument is that discourses of integration and multiculturalism are exercises in conceptualising post-immigration difference and, as such, operate at three distinct levels: as an (implicit) sociology; as a political response; and as a vision of what is the whole in which difference is to be integrated.