Recent headlines reflect a growing unease about the fate of multiculturalism in Britain. From the political fallout of Gaza-related protests to concerns over segregated communities, debates on community cohesion are no longer confined to fringe discourse. 

Social reality does not imply political ideology

But what if the problem is not multiple cultures as a demographic fact, but multiculturalism as a political ideology?

Conversations with Muslim and non-Muslim inner-city residents in Yorkshire, Birmingham, and London have persuaded me that, just because Britain is a multicultural country, it does not follow that we should follow multiculturalism as an ideology. Instead, as I show in a recent book, the fact that Britain is multicultural makes the need for integration even more pressing. 

A shifting political landscape

When I entered Britain in 2007, myself a migrant from Germany, multiculturalism was still part of the national brand.

At the same time, there were searching discussions in the wake of the 2005 London bombings and communal riots in Bradford and other Northern cities a few years earlier.

Then, in 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron famously declared that state multiculturalism has failed, in unison with Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy.

Taking a longer view

In Europe, we should perhaps not rush to premature judgment as the lived experience of Western countries with Muslim and other ethnoreligious minorities is still relatively recent, although, by now, many migrant minorities go back by generations.

Outside the West, community relations between Muslim minorities and non-Muslim majorities have a much older history. In India and China, for example, Muslim and non-Muslim communities have lived together for many centuries. 

India, China, and contrasting traditions

Comparing India and China is interesting. In India, before independence, a rather weak imperial state run by non-Hindu rulers would preside over intensely fractured but highly energetic communal groups. In China, by contrast, communal groups were less energetic and imperial rulers would aspire for, and sometimes achieve, high levels of political control.

In continuation of such tendencies, community relations in India mostly unfold in society, although increasingly with the state backing majoritarian elements, whereas community relations in China are largely state-managed. Harking back to ancient practices, ethnoreligious minorities in the Middle Kingdom are treated differently depending on their degree of perceived cultural affinity with the dominant core. 

Western parallels and divergences

Despite differences in context, we can draw a parallel distinction for Western countries.

In Britain, where a liberal state has traditionally tried to keep itself aloof from what happens in society, community relations are largely left to people on the ground. In France, with its dirigiste tradition, the central state, with limited success, tries to act as the arbiter of community relations. 

India’s debate as Europe’s warning

While anything related to religion and minorities is deemed sensitive in China, in India I was able to interview Hindus and Muslims. I spoke to politicians and other people from manifold walks of life, gathering views not only from cosmopolitan secularists close to the Congress Party, but also from leftists and Islamists on the one hand and Hindu Nationalists on the other. Given India’s long history of majority-Muslim relations, I asked interviewees was what 'we', in Europe, might learn. 

Competing visions of secularism and diversity

Cosmopolitan secularists, leftists, and Islamists told me that multireligious India was an exemplar of intercommunal harmony, although such harmony was unfortunately being ruined by the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his associates. Hindu nationalists, on the contrary, painted themselves as saving India from Congress-style "pseudo-secularism" and suggested that Europeans should avoid its mistakes of “pandering” or “caving in” to minorities. 

On one end of the spectrum, I found a striking affinity between India’s cosmopolitan secularism and Europe’s multiculturalism. On the other end, I found an equally striking affinity between Hindu nationalist critiques of cosmopolitan secularism and populist critiques of multiculturalism. 

Given the way things had played out, with Modi in power since 2014, I concluded that India does hold a warning for Europe.

Many European voters identify with national majorities. Unless European elites find ways to persuade people, with good arguments, that their policies benefit the majority as much as minorities, a majoritarian protest vote may sweep them away. 

Taking the inquiry back to Britain

Having studied majority-Muslim relations in distant climes, I went 'native' and conducted fieldwork in English inner cities.

I visited London’s East End, an area in Birmingham, and Halifax in Yorkshire. All of these have neighbourhoods where, locally, a majority is Muslim, yet the majority in the wider urban area remains non-Muslim (not necessarily White British). 

As in India, my approach has been to learn from my interlocutors.

Given media reporting, I would have expected non-Muslims to talk a lot about things like radicalization, and Muslims about racism and Islamophobia.

However, few did.

While hot-button issues might exercise the minds of politicians and journalists, it seems, they hardly register in the lived reality of people on the ground. 

Instead, inner-city residents speak of mundane issues like raising families and sending children to school under alienating circumstances. Muslims and non-Muslims alike deplore that, in their area, children hardly meet each other because they go to ethno-religiously segregated schools. While many non-Muslim interviewees suggest that Muslims should integrate more, Muslim interviewees echo the sentiment. 

At every step, what I heard suggests a shared appetite for improved integration. 

Multiculturalism and its discontents

Whilst I found common ground across communal boundaries regarding the need for integration, I found misgivings about multiculturalism as an ideology.

People accept as a matter of course that cultural differences are here to stay. Almost nobody demands assimilation. Yet, precisely because Britain is so multicultural, people see an urgent need to overcome communal separation and for community norms to become more compatible with norms prevailing in wider society. 

This is a challenge not only for minorities. It is a challenge for anyone pursuing a distinctive way of life.

Acculturation in a plural society

Think of conservative Christians or millennials following alternative lifestyles. In principle, they are obviously free to pursue these. To progress in life, however, they must pass the test of acculturation; that is, they must adapt to wider society in ways that, while remaining faithful to community norms, allow them to function not only in their group but also among strangers. 

Integration is indispensable precisely because we live in a multicultural society. 

This blog was first published as an Expert Comment by the University of Oxford.