Multiculturalism and its discontents: Left,Right and liberal

Introduction

From the 1960s to the 1990s, attacks on multiculturalism in Britain came largely from the political Right. A major theme of conservative discourse over this time was the idea that ethnic diversity had introduced into the British body politic a crisis of values which, given that the ethnic cleansing of non-whites through mass ‘repatriation’ was politically impractical, would have to be managed through promoting assimilation to an idea of unchanging Englishness (Levitas, 1986). Yet the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ discourse that has emerged in Britain over the last 10 to 15 years is marked by themes that are eminently liberal: secularism, individualism, gender equality, sexual freedom and freedom of expression. Multiculturalism is no longer criticized for destroying conservative ideas of English civility, but for destroying liberal ideas of the open society. Moreover, left-wing themes of social solidarity, welfare rights and anti-fascism also have been hitched to an anti-multiculturalist discourse. Thus, multiculturalism has lost many of the friends that it had among liberals and the Left, and faces rejection from across the political spectrum. In addition, in the name of fighting multiculturalism, odd alliances have emerged: liberal ideals have been adopted by conservatives as emblems of western superiority, and former 1960s radicals find themselves recycling notions of imperialism and racism. In what follows, I trace this transition from a conservative castigation of multiculturalism in earlier decades to a more recent liberal reproach, and argue that this shift goes hand-in-hand with changing discourses of racism, from one that focuses on constructing African-Caribbean and Asian ethnicities as ‘alien wedges’, to one that racializes ‘Muslimness’ as a disruptive ‘other’. In order to trace this discursive shift, I examine texts produced by a number of ostensibly liberal writers and politicians who have been influential in articulating this ‘integrationist’ position, such as Andrew Anthony, Martin Amis and New Labour politicians, and point to some of the correlations of this discourse in central government policy. I also describe some of the key news events around which the notion of a ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ has been narrated in Britain over the last 10 to 15 years.

Multiculturalism’s multiple meanings

Multiculturalism in Britain has always had multiple meanings. What may well distinguish Britain from other European countries was the presence from the late 1960s of a multi-ethnic, anti-racist social movement, made possible both by the citizenship rights that South Asian, African and Caribbean settlers had due to the legacy of the British Empire, and by the existence of a tradition of anti-colonial politics in these regions. This social movement also uniquely had an idea of ‘black’ as a political colour, which was able to unify people with different cultural histories who shared a politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. The idea of multiculturalism had a certain resonance within this movement but it was understood, at least initially, either as a description of a new demographic reality, or as a way of living that was a spin-off from a political struggle against institutional racism and against fascism, rather than as a political ideal in itself (Sivanandan, 2006). By the early 1980s, in response to large-scale urban disturbances in the UK, a rather different idea of multiculturalism emerged from government, driven by the need to manage these conflicts. The link between institutionalizing an official idea of cultural diversity and preventing urban violence was made explicitly by government ministers. William Whitelaw, then home secretary, described the introduction of specialist television programmes for black audiences in the following terms:

If you are Home Secretary in any government, you are going to take the view that there are a lot of minority interests in this country, [for example] different races. If they don’t get some outlet for their activities you are going to run yourself into much more trouble. (quoted in Docherty et al., 1988: 11)

Similarly, in local authorities, the allocation of resources to different ethnic groups on the basis of ‘cultural’ needs was seen as a way of absorbing political protest. Thus by the 1980s, there were at least two ideas of multiculturalism in Britain, often in conflict with each other: a ‘top-down’ multiculturalism which was about managing communities, and a ‘bottom-up’ multiculturalism which was about a shared political struggle. For the former, culture and ethnicity were the main ways in which minority identity was conceived, while blackness as a positive political identity was seen as problematic. For the latter, the growing focus among the intellectual Left of the 1980s on cultural and ethnic differences as key sites of liberatory struggle led to the notion of a shared black political identity increasingly coming to be seen as passé (Hall, 1988).

The riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in summer 2001 were interpreted by the government as evidence that its top-down multiculturalism was no longer doing an effective job of channelling political conflicts into safer cultural territory, as Whitelaw had hoped. Indeed, the ‘cultural’ now seemed to be the problem: the riots were thought to have been caused by the emergence of separatist identities which had been encouraged, it was said, by the multiculturalist policies introduced from the 1980s. The policy agenda that emerged from mid-2001 onwards under home secretary David Blunkett involved dropping official multiculturalism in favour of a notion of community cohesion, which was defined as the active promotion of a set of shared national values. David Goodhart’s influential essay, ‘Too Diverse?’ (2004) developed this idea further, arguing that multiculturalism be replaced by a new ‘Third Way’ nationalism based on liberal values, and that the social solidarity underpinning the welfare state is ultimately incompatible with ethnic diversity. After the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London in 2005, Trevor Phillips, then chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, argued that multiculturalism had allowed Islamist extremism to fester in British society and that a new emphasis on integrating minorities and immigrants to ‘British values’ was needed (Phillips, 2005). This was a position that was adopted enthusiastically by future prime minister Gordon Brown, while a number of writers tried to work out how much of the conventional baggage of nationalism – such as flag-waving, conscription or imperialist history teaching – ought to be borrowed in this effort to recharge the batteries of national belonging. The emergence of a new ‘Britishness’ policy discourse was accompanied by angry calls to reject multicultural naivety, made by popular political writers such as Nick Cohen (2007) and Andrew Anthony (2007). Their arguments attested to the ways in which popular liberal discourses of women’s rights, gay rights, anti-totalitarianism and secularism were becoming closely tied to rejection of multiculturalism and anxieties about the Muslim presence in Europe. On the Left, the pre-1960s tendency to see ethnic diversity as undermining class solidarity and citizenship was revived in new forms by writers such as Kenan Malik, who argued that culture and religion should be absolutely constrained to the ‘private sphere’, in line with the French republican model (Malik, 2005, 2007). That there might be ways of combining solidarity and diversity in the public sphere was not considered; neither was the possibility of an absolute private/public separation acting as a mechanism of exclusion – as demonstrated by the 2004 French ban on ‘oversized religious symbols’ in state schools, which was transparently directed at Islamic headscarves (Scott, 2007).

The crisis of multiculturalism narrative – a mainstay of British political culture by 2007 – held that the country’s generosity and tolerance were being taken advantage of by people who did not share the same liberal values, and thus a necessary rebalancing was in order. The prevailing sentiment was that new limits of acceptability needed to be laid down which annulled an earlier period of supposed tolerance of cultural difference. As communities minister Hazel Blears (2009) put it, ‘the pendulum’ of tolerance had ‘swung too far’. This demand for a ‘rebalancing’ played out across a number of issues. Anxieties over women’s veiling practices, for example, first focused on Shabina Begum, a Luton teenager who had been sent home from school in 2002 for wearing a jilbab and had fought her case through the courts over the following four years. This ‘debate’ further intensified in 2006, when cabinet minister Jack Straw expressed discomfort over a constituent who covered her face at a surgery meeting with him (Straw, 2006). Then there was the question of diversity in family law which arose with Archbishop Rowan Williams’ suggestion in 2008 that an accommodation with certain aspects of Shari’a law might be desirable (Williams, 2008). Finally, there was the issue of extremism and an ongoing question of whether specific Muslim political organizations should be criminalized, shunned, tolerated or engaged. Often, this question was framed in terms of a recasting of a liberal-Left, anti-totalitarian political tradition, with Islamism being regarded as the new ‘Muslim face’ of fascism (Kundnani, 2008).

Almost all of the issues which are taken up by this discourse and repeatedly cited as evidence of a crisis of multiculturalism are linked to Muslim communities. The rebalancing of tolerance is regarded as a necessary response to a clash between a separatist Muslim communal identity (sometimes defined as ‘Islamism’), and the liberal values of women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of expression, secularism and anti-totalitarianism. Muslims – or in some accounts, certain kinds of political Muslims – come to symbolize the danger of cultural difference and become the focus for a project of producing good, liberal individuals who have absorbed British, European or western values. Muslims occupy this special role within the crisis discourse, even if other groups deemed ‘alien’ are caught up in it as well and designated as analogous threats: for example, multiculturalism is held responsible for allowing the ‘alien’ practices of child abuse to flourish among African communities in Britain.

Moreover, there is a pessimism as to the possibility of resolving this supposed crisis of Muslim identity and liberal values through conventional democratic processes of representation and negotiation between different European citizens; rather, the crisis is defined as marking an exception to the normal functioning of politics. This ‘state of exception’ mirrors the permanent ‘state of emergency’ invoked to withdraw civil rights in the policing of terrorism, leading to policies of detention without trial, virtual house arrest and complicity in torture. The ‘exceptional’ need to restrict normal democratic expressions of difference leads to a programme of assimilation of the required ‘shared values’. Ministerial statements and policy documents repeatedly assume that only through such an absorption of national values can the clash be resolved (Blears, 2009; Brown, 2006; Home Office, 2002; Smith, 2008).

In emphasizing the notion of an end of tolerance of ethnic and religious difference, the crisis of multiculturalism discourse erases the complex histories of settlement and interaction which have characterized actual multiculturalism in Britain, and this discourse is stubbornly ignorant of the multiple meanings that multiculturalism has always had. That the issues such as veiling, extremism and separatism which are cited within the crisis discourse are amenable to more plausible alternative readings than that of a fundamental, irresolvable conflict between Islamic and liberal values, is not seriously addressed.

Integration as a civilizing process

Currently, it is conventional liberal wisdom that in a diverse society, minority groups need to be forcefully integrated into a set of national values in order to guarantee social cohesion. The 1960s liberal ideal of ‘cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’, as the Labour home secretary Roy Jenkins put it in 1966 (Jenkins, 1967: 267), is now widely seen as a mistake. Looking back, many liberals feel that the formula should have been ‘cultural diversity in an atmosphere of British values’. They argue that if Britain had asserted national values as the non-negotiable limit to any accommodation of cultural difference, then liberalism now would have less difficulty with diversity, and the process of producing appropriately liberal minority subjects would have begun much earlier (Toynbee, 2004; Young, 2001). Still, it is not too late, say these liberals. In order to reverse years of neglect, they argue, a new idea of integration is needed, which involves dropping Jenkins’ definition in favour of an idea of state-led assimilation to national values. This new notion of ‘integration’, then, must take precedence over considerations of minority rights and equality: the fight for racial and religious equality should ‘play second fiddle’ to the defence of British values – indeed, racism could be reinterpreted as the majority’s natural reaction to a minority’s rejection of its national values.

This new integrationist sentiment has gripped the mainstream of liberal thinking over recent years, and is articulated most forcefully across Europe by liberals and former Leftists of the 1968 generation. Their particular experiences and memories of campaigning on issues of gender, sexuality, religious authority and censorship have been turned into markers of European identity in the present decade. For these liberals, what defines Europe is its gender equality, attitudes to sexual freedom, rejection of church authority and freedom of expression. The political struggle waged by liberals in earlier decades to achieve these goals is seen as essentially complete. Indeed, with some rewriting of history, liberal veterans of the 1960s can even start to believe that the relative ease with which Europe was able to absorb their generation’s demands for freedom is evidence of a certain core of liberal values at the heart of European identity. It is this liberal core to Europe – rather than a more conservative notion of Judeo-Christian civilization (Huntington, 1993) – that functions as a Burkean ‘inheritance’: the founding cultural and moral habits to which all political differences must be constrained for the sake of preserving European identity. Paradoxically, liberal values are regarded as both universal and particular: they serve both to define the local identities of individual European nations, and as the global measure by which all other cultures can be disparaged. Liberalism, nationalism and civilization are intertwined, apparently seamlessly, into a unified discourse of identity. However, now this European legacy is regarded as under threat from alien identities – symbolized by the Muslim presence in Europe – which do not value this liberal legacy. On one level, this path from a 1960s politics of progress and reform to a 21st-century politics of fear and division repeats the cliche of moving to the Right as one gets older. More importantly, it constitutes a rearticulation of notions of racial and civilizational superiority in an ostensibly liberal idiom, and the explanation for its emergence lies more in global political shifts than individual biography.

It is important to note that the liberal idea of integration to British values has important differences from conservative notions of nationalism. The conservative notion, that we need to preserve an unchanging, unspoken English cultural essence from the threat of dilution by immigration of different ethnic identities, was the dominant motif of popular racism in the Britain of the 1980s. African-Caribbean and South Asian communities were regarded as culturally alien intrusions threatening to disrupt the homogeneity that was supposedly essential to the national political order. Margaret Thatcher infamously expressed this idea a year before she took office, when she stated in 1978 that the British people were worried that ‘this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’ (in Stolcke, 1995: 3). Whereas conservatives emphasize such an idea of unchanging national identity as the necessary cultural basis for political life, or define a concept of Judeo-Christian civilization as the basis of western identity, the liberal discourse of integration emphasizes the Enlightenment and its legacy of secularism, individualism and freedom of expression. This liberal discourse has displaced an older conservative nationalism and does the same work of marking out racial difference, now through a notion of British values counterposed to a Muslim communal identity.

The conservative discursive move from biological notions of ‘race’ to ‘race as culture’ has been well-documented by, among others, Barker (1981), Balibar and Wallerstein (1991) and Stolcke (1995). These critiques are important because they overcame the difficulty of recognizing the existence of racism in new forms. Do we face the same challenge again today? I would suggest that we do, as what has occurred over the last decade or so is a further shift in this discursive transition from biology to culture: the conservative idea of ‘race’ as cultural identity is now accompanied by a liberal idea of racialized superior values. Whereas the focus of conservative discourses of cultural difference is on ‘ethnicity’, the focus of liberal discourses of ‘values’ difference is on ‘religion’ – in particular, Islam. While the context of conservative cultural racism in Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s was the political assertion of South Asian and African-Caribbean communities against worsening institutional racism, the context of liberal ‘values’ racism since the early 1990s has been the political assertion of European Muslims against empire and exclusion.

What conservatives had interpreted as a problem of the ethnic difference of Asians or North Africans, etc. is taken by liberals to be a problem of the different values of Muslims. However, to be ‘Muslim’ in this discourse is to belong to a group with common origins, a shared culture and a monolithic identity that can be held collectively responsible for the failure of European multiculturalism. The much-vaunted distinction between ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ Muslims is perfectly consistent with such a position: it is precisely the ‘moderates’ who are held responsible for their failure to stop the ‘extremists’. This failure of the ‘moderates’, then, is taken to be proof of the general failure of Muslims to adjust to modernity. ‘Muslimness’ is racialized into what is, in effect, an ethnicity rather than a group sharing a religion (Roy, 2004). At the same time, liberal anti-Muslim sentiment rationalizes itself as no more than criticism of an alien belief system – hostility to religious beliefs rather than to a racial group – and therefore entirely distinct from racism. However, such distinctions are undermined by the fact that religious belonging has come to act as a symbol of racial difference. An exaggerated dividing line between an ‘alien’ non-western identity and liberal Europe serves as the basis for dividing populations into fixed, immutable ‘natural’ identities: the hallmarks of a process of racism. That the solution to the problem of these alien values is always found to lie in the use of coercion by the state indicates that they have been made into symbols of racial difference, and that those groups who are perceived as holding them are not being accorded their own rationality and citizenship.

How else are we to explain the kinds of statements frequently made nowadays by liberals who are not advocates of racial supremacy in any conventional sense, but nevertheless argue, with Observer journalist Andrew Anthony (2007), that British culture has tended ‘over the centuries’ towards valuing ‘certain rights, liberties, responsibilities, protections and opportunities’ (2007: 123), while ‘many traditional cultures in the Third World’ value ‘petty corruption, sexism, homophobia, tribalism and patriarchal authoritarianism’ (2007: 124)? Anthony (2007) only finds it necessary to cite two examples: voting fraud in Birmingham and rigged exams in an Indian university. However, mounting an empirical argument is not the point, for Anthony has drawn the battlelines already in his liberal version of the clash of civilizations: on the one side, the western Enlightenment, and on the other, what he calls the ‘Endarkenment’ of the Islamic world. The Arab world, says Anthony, suffers from a ‘lack of intellectual curiosity’ and ‘self-willed ignorance’ (2007: 234). Its cultural failure to produce rational, independent thinking implies that western liberals must not shy away from imposing their own superior values.

Similar thoughts occur to Martin Amis in The Second Plane (2008), a collection of writings on 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’. He writes of ‘the dependent mind’ of ‘the Muslim male’. Moreover, in what has become a repeated theme of liberal integrationist discourse, Amis takes supposed cultural differences with regard to gender and sexuality to be the root cause of the ‘Muslim problem’. Thus, he speculates that the anti-western anger in the Islamist writings of Sayyid Qutb stems from his lack of success with women during his stay in the USA in the 1950s. He imagines that suicide bombers are the product of sexual frustration or male impotence. And he finds male impotence to lie behind the practice of torture in Arab police cells. Thus the pathological hatred and violence of the enemy in the ‘War on Terror’ is presented as the product of a culture that unhealthily represses or misdirects male sexual desire: a culture that is implicitly contrasted with a post-1960s western culture of sexual freedom and openness. The covering of women’s bodies through various kinds of veil is, then, the ultimate rejection of this European sexual openness – or more precisely, the prescription that ‘femininity be exhibited’ (Badiou, 2006: 103; emphasis in original).

Amis also worries about the potency of Muslim reproduction. He endorses Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone (2006), which argues that within a few decades, Europe will succumb to a demographic takeover by Muslims with higher rates of reproduction. Noting that ‘not a single West European country is procreating at the “replacement rate” of 2.1 births per woman’ (2008: 154), Amis adds: ‘A depopulated and simplified Europe might be tenable in a world without enmity and predation. And that is not our world. The birth rate is 6.76 in Somalia, 6.69 in Afghanistan and 6.58 in Yemen’ (2008: 154–155). For Amis, Europe’s valuing of women’s autonomy in sexual reproduction disadvantages the continent in its ‘demographic war’ against immigrants from Muslim countries, because women choose to have fewer children (Hari, 2008). Thus, behind both the anxiety about Muslim sexual repression as well as the fear of Muslim fecundity lies the question of cultural differences on matters of sexuality and gender: for Amis, what makes Muslims a threat is ultimately their rejection of European gender and sexual relations. He states, ‘Geopolitics may not be my natural subject but masculinity is’ (2008: x), implying that, in explaining Muslim political violence, geopolitics is of less relevance than a culture that perverts masculinity and is now infiltrating Europe. Thus, Amis knits together a number of liberal and conservative themes, all of which lead to familiar anxieties about the infiltration of ‘alien cultures’.

The argument that a European liberal lifestyle is threatened by an intrusion of alien values today runs right through the political culture, from London think tanks and the racist blogosphere to the political rhetoric of new far-Right organizations such as the English Defence League (which has had no trouble adopting the liberal distinction between ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ Muslims). In addition, it is an argument that goes hand-in-hand with a set of conservative and liberal policies that have been brought in over the last 10 years by governments across Europe. On the one hand, the conservative discourse of civilizations tends to regard Muslims in Europe as basically unassimilable except in small numbers, and therefore favours anti-Muslim immigration controls and indirect or direct expulsion of Muslims. On the other hand, the liberal discourse that sees European Enlightenment values as under threat tends to put more faith in the state’s ability to mould its subjects who, through various mechanisms, can be guided towards forms of identity deemed appropriate. European states have pursued both of these approaches simultaneously and enthusiastically. Increasingly restrictive immigration controls, removals and extraditions have focused on those nationalities perceived to be Muslim (Fekete, 2006). At the same time, state-led production of Muslim subjects with the correct moral identity is reflected in various policies: values tests and oaths of allegiance for would-be migrants and citizens, the recruitment of ‘moderate Muslims’ as state-sponsored role models and community leaders, formal and informal restrictions on the expression of ‘extremist’ views, and so forth.

The underlying assumption of such policies – that Muslims are inherently at odds with western values, into which they need to be forcibly integrated – is not restricted to the domestic sphere, but also runs through the liberal justifications of foreign policy in the ‘War on Terror’. In a series of foreign policy speeches that prime minister Tony Blair made in 2006, he argued that ‘whereas the economics of globalization are well matured, the politics of globalization are not’, and western governments need a ‘global policy based on common values’ (Blair, 2006a) to be promoted worldwide by interventions ‘military and otherwise’ that ‘were not just about changing regimes but changing the values systems governing the nations concerned’ (Blair, 2006b). Wars fought with the aim of ‘values change’ are effectively the application of a liberal integrationist discourse to foreign policy. Thus the idea of liberal values serves as a useful politics of globalization that legitimizes a new form of western imperialism.

Of course, the conjunction of liberalism and imperialism is not entirely new (Mehta, 1999). This suggests that we see the conceits of liberal integrationism as a new chapter in a much longer history of attempts to divide populations into those who are true citizens, and those who need to be made ready for citizenship through a ‘civilizing process’ that refashions their values. Examining the history of colonialism in Ireland, McVeigh and Rolston write that:

[C]ivilisation is not a state but a process – the practice of rendering colonial subjects fit for imperial purpose. It involves the creation of what Foucault called ‘docile and useful bodies’. A civilizing process involves first the transformation of resisting natives into unresisting subjects and then their recruitment as actively co-opted citizens. (2009: 3; emphasis in original)

The political techniques promoted by liberal integrationists to produce ‘co-opted’ citizens – oaths of allegiance, requirements to declare one’s rejection of extremist ideas, swearing loyalty to a set of national values, tests of ‘values’ acquisition, the erasure of one’s own experience and history in favour of the public celebration of national history – all have a long history in colonialism, and amount to what McVeigh and Rolston call ‘rituals of humiliation’ (2009: 22).

Conclusion

In embracing integrationism, liberalism necessarily undergoes an illiberal transformation. For most of the 20th century, liberals borrowed from the Left’s ideological ‘basket’ and absorbed ideas of social equality and welfare rights to fill the void in their social philosophy: liberalism’s fundamental belief in individualism renders it unable to conceptualize or generate social bonds (De Tocqueville, 1998). What has changed in recent years is that liberals increasingly look to the Right rather than the Left to find ways of filling this void. For integrationist liberals, the glue that will hold society together is increasingly national, cultural or civilizational. At the same time, nation, culture and civilization are being reinterpreted as essentially liberal entities. In their definitions of Britishness, integrationist liberals do not emphasize, with conservatives, a tradition of civility; rather, a tradition of individual freedom. Moreover, while conservatives see the state as reflecting the inherited habits of a people’s cultural life, integrationist liberals see the state as actively producing the kinds of liberal subjects that an open society requires. Such state intervention is deemed necessary because the normal transmission of national identity from generation to generation has been thrown into crisis by excessive multiculturalism. As Muir notes, this ‘new identity politics’ of liberal values-based nationalism marks ‘an important turning point in British political and policy discourse about identity’ (2007: 4).

However, liberalism has problems in this embrace of national identity. Liberal integrationists want to conflate liberalism with Britishness and make both the markers of civilization, but precisely because liberal values are ostensibly universal, they are poor foundations for the construction of national or civilizational difference. Strictly speaking, the (universal) Enlightenment principle of rejecting all authority that stands in the way of freely reasoning, equal individuals is incompatible with the civilizing mission of liberal integrationism. Conversely, the (particular) European historical experience of ‘enlightened’ individuals freeing themselves from an oppressive religious tradition is more amenable to being recast as an integrationist theme (and is, incidentally, a biographical reality for many 1960s liberals themselves). When Enlightenment values are held up as the non-negotiable core of Europe’s political identity, what liberals have in mind is that Muslims should repeat Europe’s historical rejection of organized Christianity. Yet today’s demand that others follow Europe’s historical path is a crude transposition: Islam has no church. As such, the renewed attack on religion cannot be seen as a revival of Enlightenment principles, particularly if directed against minority religious communities which have hardly a shred of influence over state power.

Moreover, the techniques that liberalism uses to impart its values to particular populations necessarily degrade those liberal values. The attempt to produce a population of ‘moderate Muslims’, for example, requires state instrumentalization of religion in ways that run counter to the secular principles of liberalism. The British government’s Preventing Violent Extremism programme, with a budget in 2008/09 of £140m, aims to foster opposition to ‘the ideology behind violent extremism’ (HM Government, 2009: 6). Every local authority with more than 2000 resident Muslims has received funding to carry out this work. As home secretary Jacqui Smith (2008) explained, the aim is to challenge ‘that misreading of Islam and view of history and contemporary politics which justifies terrorism’. Hence the government is backing ‘leading Muslim scholars and opinion formers here to talk about extremist ideology at roadshows across the country’ and linking up with ‘prominent institutes in Muslim majority countries’. Thus a nominally secular state is promoting what is implicitly an official reading of Islamic texts as against the extremists’ ‘bad’ reading. As Roy (2007) notes, this is not the liberal separation of church and state, but the Kemalist model of state intervention into matters of religious dogma.

While integrationist liberals have borrowed a conservative identity politics, conservatives themselves are taking liberal values increasingly to be icons of western supremacism, giving rise to a new convergence between liberals and conservatives in the name of ‘western values’. This convergence is evident most clearly in the work of the liberal conservative think tank, Policy Exchange, which has had a considerable influence on the Conservative Party under prime minister David Cameron. Writers associated with Policy Exchange have specialized in calling for a Cold War-style struggle to defend liberal values against Islamism, which is seen as a new totalitarian threat to the very survival of the West (see for example, Gove, 2006). With this formula of the ‘defence of the liberal West against the Islamists’, Policy Exchange has been able to give a liberal face to a hardline neo-conservative position on national security issues.

Ultimately, the liberal embrace of discourses of national culture and civilization is a response to political conflict. The fear is that without summoning such notions, western liberal democracy will prove too flaccid and agnostic towards ‘a full-bloodedly metaphysical enemy’ (Eagleton, 2009: 10). The liberal integrationist discourse is a demand for allegiance to the prevailing European political order at a time when that order is suffering a crisis of vulnerability, which appears to both liberals and conservatives as a crisis of multiculturalism. As Brown (2008) has argued, the fantasy of national purity that is invoked by this discourse aims to literally screen out a confrontation with structural inequalities and deny the dependency of the privileged on that structure: ‘Rich and poor, colonizer and native, first world and third, live virtually and actually in ever greater proximity’ in ‘a world of extreme and intimately lived inequality, deprived of strong legitimating discourses’. Because anxieties about ‘values’ difference are symptoms of this deeper political conflict, difference comes to be feared as inherently conflictual – and so cultural sameness and ‘shared values’ seem to be the only guarantees of social peace, while ‘multiculturalism’ becomes a threat to national security. The demand for spectacular declarations of allegiance signifies, then, not the hegemony of European values; rather, their being forced to confront the realities of other histories and experiences in the context of the shifting political geography of neoliberal globalization. Thus liberal integrationism is an attempt to construct a homogenous ‘us’ at the very moment when global capitalism ‘threatens to loosen the hold of the nation-state over its subjects’ (Eagleton, 2009: 11).