Abstract
Multiculturalism used to be a buzz word all over Europe, but has in recent years suffered a severe backlash especially in the UK and the central EU states (Vertovec and Wessendorf, 2010). All the more interesting, then, to read a book from the European periphery on this topic. How has multiculturalism fared in Finland? What is multiculturalism in Finland, a country with a notoriously low rate of immigration? This book, the author’s doctoral thesis, throws light on these and other questions. The chief aim of the book, however, speaks primarily to feminist theory: ‘to explore, firstly, how multicultural women’s politics as it is practised in Finland could bring more nuance to feminist thinking; and, secondly, how feminist theory could open up multiculturalism in the Finnish context and perhaps introduce new perspectives to the existing debates’ (p. 16). There is much to commend such an approach, especially given the emphases on gender politics in the Nordic countries which makes the intersection of gender and ‘multiculturalism’ a particularly rich field of study.
A few words about the choice of ‘multiculturalism’ as an analytical concept. This, I feel, is a murky and highly politicized term which should be used with care, and the author attempts to defend and define her use of it in a way which I do not find entirely convincing. This may also be why she ends up not really answering the main questions that she sets out to explore. For her, ‘Multiculturalism refers to the ways in which the differences relating to race and ethnicity in the nation are imagined’ (p. 21), a definition that is original at best and imprecise at worst. She considers and rejects what she feels are alternative terms such as ‘ethnic minorities’ on the grounds that they ‘can have “minoritising” effects, meaning that the number of people described is understood to have bearing on the significance of their experiences. This phrase can also imply that some people are more ethnic than others’ (p. 20). While I agree with this, I fail to understand why she has not considered using a term like ‘ethnicity’ as a theoretical concept – also a contested concept, but with a considerably stronger theoretical foothold than multiculturalism. ‘Ethnicity’ is also empirically closer to the material presented in the book, which surely has less to do with ‘cultures’ than with the intergroup, power-laden dynamics of encounters that ethnicity as a theoretical and analytical concept is well suited to grasp. This would also have made it possible to avoid mixing up the various meanings and aspects of ‘multiculturalism’ – as a term describing empirical phenomena, as an ideology promoting diversity as a good in itself, as a native term, an analytical term and so on. What I have in mind is not a concept of ethnicity as it is used in this book (for instance ‘“Finnishness” is an “ethnicity” understood as being defined by certain “cultural traits”’, p. 203). Rather, I would suggest to the author an exploration of ‘a more dialectical model of ethnicity [where] organizational boundaries and “cultural stuff” inflect each other . . . [and] the effects of power differentials and the categorization by others are acknowledged’ (Gullestad, 2002: 60).
The main empirical focus of the book is on a project called ‘the Globe’, a three-year project focusing on the empowerment and integration of migrant women, especially through mentoring, where the mentors too were women of migrant background. The project was initiated and run by a Finnish women’s NGO. The descriptions and analyses of this project are excellent. We are presented with a vivid image of a many-faceted and complex phenomenon, and the author convincingly frames this phenomenon within a neoliberal European system of project-based policy funding. Her acute and critical observations strengthen the wider relevance of the book: I think researchers and practitioners in all parts of Europe will at some level find the material and political conditions of the Globe disturbingly familiar. The dynamics between what happens within the Globe and what happens around it are well described and admirably analysed. Historical conditions, viewed through the lens of postcolonial theory, as well as contemporary conditions, viewed through the lens of feminist and queer theory, are highlighted and analysed in relation to each other. I would especially direct the attention to Chapter 7, where these perspectives and descriptions really come together and inform one another in the analysis of expertise versus experience as racialized concepts.
So, what about multiculturalism in Finland? Is it still going strong? The answer is, a reading of this book tells us, that it never was. Not only has Finland never adopted any official, multicultural policy, but even an ostensibly multicultural project like the Globe turns out to be both monocultural and discriminatory. The author’s ‘paranoid reading’ (p. 97) of the Globe reveals that in the project’s very focus on empowerment lies its doom: it addresses the individual agency of immigrant women within a framework of structural racism where such agency makes little or no difference. Surprisingly, her conclusion is that ‘with the rise of racism and xenophobic parties across Europe (including Finland), there is a need to work with and against multiculturalism as a concept, rather than to merely critique it for it being superficial, apolitical and individualistic’ (p. 213). I wonder if multiculturalism is really the best candidate for the job.