Multicultural Politics: racism, ethnicity and Muslims in Britain Tariq Modood Edinburgh University Press, 272pp, £45 (hbk)/£16.99 (pbk) ISBN 0748621725 After the Cosmopolitan?: multicultural cities and the future of racism Michael Keith Routledge, 232pp, £65 (hbk)/£21.99 (pbk)

Multiculturalism has received a serious battering in recent years. Trevor Phillips, the hyperventilating chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, has consistently argued that it cannot work because it leads to cultural differences being emphasised at the expense of cohesion. Others, such as the Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, have even written its obituary. In the wake of the London terrorist attacks, the dissenting voices seem about to become still more pronounced. What, then, is the way forward?

In Multicultural Politics, Tariq Modood argues that multiculturalism should not be written off because of a few setbacks. Multiculturalism works - and the proof that it does is right before us. Britain today is far less racist than it used to be; black Britons have made significant strides; and an educated, participatory Asian middle class has emerged that is changing the social fabric of the country. British Asian films such as Bend It Like Beckham and television shows such as The Kumars at No 42 have transformed our image at home and abroad. All this, says Modood, must be counted in multiculturalism's favour.

None the less, Modood stops short of painting a uniformly rosy picture. There is, he says, a significant caveat in the success story of British multiculturalism. British Asians, despite their many achievements, continue to suffer from a largely unacknowledged form of racism. This is not the "biological racism" usually directed at blacks. Rather, it is a new-style "cultural racism", focusing on language, religion, family structures, dress and cuisine. Such traits define what it means to be "Asian" and are used to explain why British Asians - and in particular British Muslims - are alien, backward and undesirable. The problem has arisen, according to Modood, because we have imported from the United States an overly simplistic model of race relations, one based on a black/white dualism. This model is in no way adequate to represent the complex realities of contemporary Britain.

So how does Modood propose to remedy this situation? Liberalism is not the answer, because its emphasis on individualism suggests that ethnicity and culture are matters of choice, whereas in fact many of us are not in a position to choose how we live. We also need to get beyond secularism, in particular the dogmatic, fundamentalist secularism typified by the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, which Modood claims is incompatible with multiculturalism. What is needed is an aggressive assertion of ethnicity. Members of minorities have the right, as equal citizens, to assimilate with the dominant culture in the public domain while insisting that their differences be recognised and tolerated in the private sphere. And they have a right to public support and funding, as well as appropriate educational and cultural policies, for maintaining their differences. Instead of lumping peoples together as "Asians", we should make the effort to differentiate between groups: Pakistanis are not the same as Bangladeshis, and there are considerable cultural differences between Sindhi Pakistanis and Mirpuri Pakistanis.

Modood's thesis, while full of original insights, is not without problems. His emphasis on ethnicity, for example, is troubling. The word has its roots in America, where all those other than European immigrants are classified as "ethnic". Ethnicity connotes, more than anything else, primordially constituted Otherness in relation to non-ethnics, the Europeans, who are the true Americans. It is the polite term for a racial hierarchy within American society. White people of European origin are never ethnic: they are Italian-Americans, or Irish-Americans, or German-Americans. The non-Europeans (Chinese, Asians, blacks) are always ethnic. Hyphenated Americans amble through the corridors of power; ethnics occupy lowlier positions. The term is inherently racist.

Overemphasis on ethnicity is also a prescription for fragmentation. If each individual has an immutable right of attachment to a distinct ethnicity, many problems of difference become insurmountable. Worse still, those who are not members of a distinct ethnic group then feel obliged to manufacture identi-ties in order to assert their distinctness. Ethnicity fuels an insatiable desire for difference; it leads to dissatisfaction, frustration and animosity. In the US, new ethnicities are manufactured virtually every day.

Modood's distinction between conventional "biological" racism and new-style "cultural" racism is also flawed. Western racism has always been cultural racism. It can be traced back to the theory of "natural law" advanced by theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas. Natural law defined as being right and righteous those things which conformed with laws created by God. It became difficult to conceive that a non-Christian life could be natural. Crucially, however, this idea made no reference to skin colour. It was how people lived, worshipped and acted that was important.

Colour as a marker of difference appeared only with the development of chattel slavery in the New World. In the US, it was central to the development of physical anthropology, a field whose raison d'etre was to provide the intellectual justification for slavery. Colour-coded caste systems, incorporating blacks and Indians, also developed in Latin America at this time. But even with such colour markers, it was still essentially differences in behaviour that were being graded. The truth is that you cannot distinguish between one type of racism and another. Cultural racism is pernicious to everyone, including blacks; and to denigrate someone's colour is to denigrate their culture in all its complexity.

Another flaw in Modood's argument is that he overlooks the importance of global politics in multiculturalism. In a globalised world, as Michael Keith demonstrates in After the Cosmopolitan?, the idea that any person belongs to a single, unchanging culture is untenable. Critics of multiculturalism must face a stark reality: multiculturalism is demographically inevitable. It has be-come the driving force of our cities, the lifeblood of innovation and the engine of economic growth. The world is becoming one giant metropolis with seven billion inhabitants. All cultural change, and hence multiculturalism, must be seen in this context.

Globalisation, according to Keith, is producing a new kind of multiculturalism whose hallmark is "iteration" - the notion that ethnic specificity and cultural difference are invariably and constantly changing. We cannot understand this new multiculturalism, argues Keith, by using the language of the old. The complex realities of tomorrow's Britain demand that we ditch categories such as "black and white", "Asian and Muslim", "ethnicity" and "difference". It makes no sense to ascribe ethnicity to a group, when conventionally defined similarities and differences are dissolving. The language of belonging, exile and diaspora has also become irrelevant in the face of this new pluralism, where "home" is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Indeed, Keith suggests that we need to understand the word "immigrant" in a different way. According to official statistics, the population of London increased by almost a million between 1991 and 2001. But who are these new immigrants? Asians, blacks, refugees? The large proportion are in fact Canadians, Americans, Australians and South Africans, followed by Lithuanians, Muscovites and refugees from international traumas in the Balkans and the Horn of Africa. So what does the term "immigrant" mean now? What are the implications for conventional race relations, with their binary opposition between "black and minority ethnic" and the "white" communities?

The new multiculturalism is challenging conventional wisdom and familiar hierarchies. It can transform a term of abuse - "black" or "Banglatown", for instance - into a badge of honour. It is directly connected to international politics, and is continually being moulded into new formations. What happens in Chechnya and Iraq has consequences on the streets of London. Indeed, the street is literally "where it's at", and is where we must look for an understanding of how multiculturalism is transforming Britain.

So, multiculturalism is dead! Long live multiculturalism!

Ziauddin Sardar's Desperately Seeking Paradise: journeys of a sceptical Muslim is out in paperback from Granta (£8.99)

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website