Abstract
Contemporary diversity politics is mobilized around debates on the effects of diversity on political community and cohesion. However, social and political theory are deeply divided on the relation between that diversity, liberal–democratic citizenship, multiculturalism and social cohesion. This article argues that a focus on the concept of belonging, which is often employed but rarely examined in detail, illustrates the critical–normative divide between social and political theory. Further, it argues that each has a partial account of belonging that fails to account for the multidimensional and complex nature of diverse belonging today. Instead, it sketches a theory of ‘multicultural-belonging’, which unites the critical and normative approaches and offers key insights going forward in the analysis of diversity, citizenship and multiculturalism.
Keywords
Introduction
Contemporary diversity politics is centred on the viability of political communities and their mechanisms of inclusion. On the one hand, critics of multiculturalism charge that minority recognition and accommodation creates political disunity and separateness, and/or that it fosters majority resentment against minority communities (Uberoi, 2008: 404). On the other hand, critical perspectives reject multicultural responses to diversity, as simply re-packaged forms of liberal neutralism that coerce minority groups (Fleras, 2009; Kymlicka, 2017). Although very differently articulated, these challenges are oriented around social cohesion. Contemporary critics of multiculturalism have shifted the debate to a series of claims that multiculturalism systematically undermines, misunderstands or compels the conditions of political unity in diverse states; that it is both normatively undesirable and sociologically unrealistic (Markus and Kirpitchenko, 2007; Murphy, 2012). 1
This discursive situation is complemented by a conceptual one: the gap between normative and critical literatures, political theory and critical social theory, within their respective normative or explanatory arenas. When they do engage, it has often been unproductive and polemical. There is thus need for an approach that broaches this critical–normative divide. This article argues that, necessary to such an approach is a focus on the concept of belonging, which spans the critical–normative concerns around social cohesion. On the one hand, in political theory, belonging surrounds the ideal model of political membership; how political community should be constructed in light of contemporary diversity, the stress that diversity places on citizenship and the forms of rights and accommodation sought. In critical social theory, belonging concerns how political community is constructed and lived; how power, agency and the ‘the politics of belonging’ affect group belonging, inclusion and exclusion.
Neither approach is sufficient. Critical analyses of belonging offer a dynamic, horizontal understanding of belonging as relational, illuminating the complex politics around political community. However, the emphases on fluidity and control can distract these approaches from the deep symbolic and normative potential of existing forms of belonging (Crowley, 1999). In contrast, normative accounts see belonging as a vertical question of justified membership in political community, illustrating the important connections between belonging and citizenship. However, it is limited in the dynamic and strategic responses to contextual challenges to diverse belonging it can offer and which are required for an ideal of belonging to have normative purchase (Favell, 1999). A theory of belonging must account for both the importance of ideals but also the present challenges to them. It must highlight discursive and symbolic practices that affect how groups construct themselves in relation to diversity and the normative potential of existing and alternative forms. Addressing this nexus of issues around diversity, inclusion and political community thus increasingly requires an interdisciplinary, pluralistic approach, one that works across the critical–normative methodological divide in political and social theory. 2
In the first section, this article examines the question of belonging, introducing and defining the critical and normative approaches. Second section outlines the major debate in liberal political thought over the sources of political belonging in contemporary liberal democracies. The third section offers an account of the ‘politics of belonging’ in critical social thought and its focus on identifying the mutable challenges to inclusive belonging. Final section sketches a theory of ‘multicultural belonging’ that reconciles the strengths of these approaches, offering an initial blueprint for a critical–normative conception of belonging. This offers new possibilities for political community today while illustrating how a pluralistic, critical–normative framework can clarify the concept of belonging in social and political theory.
What is belonging?
Despite belonging occurring in a variety of theoretical and empirical literatures in the social sciences, it is rarely defined generally. In its two major iterations, it is conceived narrowly: either normatively or critically. For our purposes, a more general account will frame these two approaches. Belonging concerns the cognitive and affective attachments to others that cement our various forms of ‘groupness’. This means it is about the idea of a unity or collectively beyond a mere aggregation of individuals. Why and how we belong to any group is about what grounds our inclusion and relations. It is this that leads belonging, often in less clear terms, to be described in terms of safety and familiarity. To belong is to feel natural and unthreatened in a group. It is to understand and be understandable to other members of that group; to be able to recognize and be recognized within. In this sense, belonging is both a status, something held, and a practice, the ability to navigate the symbols, ideas and institutions of a group (Ignatieff, 1993: 10).
This multidimensionality makes belonging substantially overlap with other concepts in social and political theory. Belonging seems to entail recognition in some form. To belong, others in the group must see me as belonging and I must recognize myself as belonging. Similarly, belonging also entails identity. To belong, I must take on the identity of a group to some extent, understanding its general features (contestable though they will be) and my place within them. However, belonging is also complex. The extent and strength of belonging will vary by individual and group. Some individuals will make a particular group-belonging central to their identity, while others will not, and some groups will demand more or less centrality in the self-definition of their members. Finally, belonging occurs in a variety of groups: communities, societies, publics, nations, peoples, etc. In this discussion, the focus is belonging within political community at the level of states. However, such communities are necessarily related to sub- and supra-state communities in many ways, and so a neat division between political and non-political belonging is not feasible (Mason, 2000: 51–54).
Belonging is thus the glue linking individuals to political institutions and community. In this it involves (at least) two dimensions. Vertical belonging concerns the vertical (individual–state) connections; the extent and shape of political inclusion of groups within state institutions. These relations are primarily determined by formal aspects of citizenship. The rights, obligations and entitlements of the citizen shape the vertical relationship of legitimacy between citizen and state by determining the nature of available political integration. In this sense, vertical belonging denotes how the interests, voices, claims and symbolic cultures of a group are included and mediated by the state. Horizontal belonging concerns the relations of mutual identification and recognition amongst various individuals and groups within the state (usually restricted to citizens). Rather than state institutions and formal inclusion, the focus is the practical question of belonging: the horizontal relationship of legitimacy between citizens. This involves not only the actual dialogical and symbolic interactions of citizens (e.g. the discursive practices around political community) but how citizens as groups and citizen interaction are represented by the state (e.g. the symbols and representations of national identity) (Kymlicka, 2017: 141–142). While the vertical and horizontal dimensions of belonging can be distinguished conceptually, they are interdependent in any given context. How a state formally and informally includes diverse groups within various symbolic and actual institutions deeply affects relations amongst citizens. Similarly, the practices of belonging amongst diverse groups, how they practically enact their belonging, affect inclusion and recognition in the state.
Despite this interdependency, normative and critical approaches treat belonging as if its vertical and horizontal dimensions are discrete and then prioritize one when asking the question of belonging. Liberal approaches argue that belonging involves normative claims about what the fair and possible terms of belonging are and what various individuals and groups need to do to belong. In this, they aim at providing normative guidance on the fair terms and appropriate sources of belonging. The latter is key. The normative approach to belonging examines the source and extent of belonging: what features (beliefs, behaviours, identities, etc.) states can reasonably expect citizens to hold (and thus share) and to what degree. This approaches belonging as a normative question of justified membership and looks for horizontal bonds compatible with formal vertical elements of citizenship. Critical social theory argues that belonging involves contextual practical relations between individuals and groups within a political community. Such relations are embedded in complex histories and meanings. They aim at exposing the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in these practices which arise within claims to belong. This approaches belonging as critical question of intersubjective practices and examines how horizontal exclusion undermines vertical elements of citizenship.
Despite their insights, the one-sided nature of these approaches limits them. However, both membership and intersubjective relations – ideals of belonging that justify who is included and what can be expected of them and practices of belonging that contest belonging-claims amongst groups – affect belonging within a contemporary diverse political community. The former clarify the significance of state models of political belonging, while the latter makes clear the complex practices of meaning around social and political membership that raise new opportunities and challenges to diverse belonging. The argument here is that both normative, liberal theory and critical social theory contain an incomplete account of belonging. This is not to say these accounts are not useful; the present engagement assumes they are and that a mutual engagement enriches the belonging question. 3
The ideal of belonging: Values, democracy, and identity
In recent political theory, the question of belonging overlaps with questions of social cohesion. Both issues concern the compatibility of diversity with liberal citizenship: whether ethno-cultural difference undermines vertical and horizontal belonging within liberal states. However, as forecasted above, liberal thought does not understand vertical citizenship and horizontal community equally. It assumes the priority of the former and approaches belonging as a question of the normative value of community. 4 This section examines some of the major liberal conceptions of belonging to illustrate this conception and priority, the insights it offers and the limitations it engenders for thinking belonging.
The sources of belonging
Western liberal–democratic thought has long questioned the nature of political community in modernity: how individuals and groups belong politically given modern social and political conditions. Particularly, liberal political theory has struggled to reconcile the inclusion required by its institutions with the citizen cohesion this necessitates. Historically, the cultural–institutional form of the nation–state has provided this. Nations bond the members of a political community in an identity and narrative that transcends internal divisions and links them to the state. However, this creates its own forms of exclusion, by demanding citizens both prioritize citizenship over other identities and by defining a political culture that links the political community (Taylor, 1998: 147). Liberal–democratic inclusion is thus characterized by a kind of paradox insofar as its forms of inclusion create conditions for political exclusion (Parekh, 2000: 231, 2008: 64).
Due to this paradox, political community has been approached as an instrumental necessity rather than an intrinsic good in many liberal theories. Early liberal arguments for nationalism focused on the benefits for either democratic practice or freedom as the main justification for nation-building (Mill, 2015: 372; Rousseau, 2005: 175). In this manner, the debate has often assumed that national belonging is, at best, a necessary evil or, at worst, incompatible with liberal values. Many contemporary liberals notably ignored belonging until the liberal–communitarian debates and the challenge that ‘the success of free institutions depends crucially on the degree to which citizens are animated by certain dispositions and solidarities’ (Patten, 2001: 295). The latter include the beliefs, virtues, loyalties, etc. needed to ensure commitment to liberal institutions and other citizens. Nonetheless, community remains a secondary good. Liberal theories of citizenship tend to focus on three questions: (1) who counts as a citizen? (the membership question); (2) what rights are they entitled to? (the entitlement question) and (3) what is necessary to bond individuals to the community of citizens? (the belonging question) (Patten, 2001: 282). The former two are formal questions, susceptible to normative solutions and privileged by liberals. In contrast, the latter is a sociological and normative question about what features citizens can reasonably be expected to share.
The character of liberal belonging stems from the prioritization of the former two questions over the latter. For example, John Rawls in Political Liberalism asks, ‘How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?’ (Rawls, 2005: xviii). Rawls (2005) admits that liberal–democratic institutions depend on citizen dispositions. However, he frames the question of belonging as, ‘how much consensus or community spirit does liberal democratic society need in order to establish and maintain the political goods that flow from social co-operation?’ (Ivison, 2000: 123). This assumes the priority of formal citizenship, the rights, obligations and entitlements of the citizen (i.e. vertical relationship belonging) over practical belonging (i.e. horizontal belonging). Political community and citizenship are in tension, and the task is to determine the ideal balance of each good: how to generate a sufficient level of attachment from resources that are neither too thick, as to be oppressive, nor too thin, as to be meaningless? While the exact mix is hotly contested, this thick–thin problematic, a distinction of degree about how much sameness is needed, is assumed (Walzer, 1994). Further, this conception of citizenship assumes that the normative method of contractarian reasoning, so influential in the membership and entitlement questions, is sufficient for belonging. Citizenship is the practice of practical reasoning to elicit a shared ground between citizens and their differences (Ivison, 2000: 126). The belonging dimension of citizenship is the extent of ‘willed sharedness’ (i.e. agreement on cognitive claims) required to facilitate formal political institutions. It is the space of sameness, outside of which there is permitted difference. This is a distinction of kind. Belonging is about uniformity; what is intentionally shared (Baumeister, 2003: 395).
The major positions on belonging in contemporary liberal–normative theory reflect the centrality of the thick–thin logic and uniformity assumption. This debate concerns which source of uniformity shapes the political community in the way most compatible with liberal institutions, by ensuring that the commitment to that community is rational and voluntary without being so substantive as to threaten formal citizenship. Broadly, three major options are present: liberal values, political commitment and culture. 5
Liberal values is the most widely assumed source of belonging because of its centrality in Rawls’ work. The basis of a just liberal political order is the establishment of an overlapping consensus on a political conception of justice, a demarcated sphere of shared political values (e.g. the moral equality of individuals, the commitment to reasonable pluralism, the cooperative nature of political society) demarcated off from thick, comprehensive sets of beliefs. In fact, its very limited nature ensures that it is both reasonably likely to achieve consensus and unlikely to require coercion (Freeman, 2007: chap 9; Rawls, 2005: 156). For Rawls, a shared political conception is all that can and need be shared to ensure the stability of liberal–democratic citizenship in the context of reasonable pluralism.
Political commitment expands the source of belonging. On this argument, belonging requires not only shared political values, but (1) a subjective identification with a constitution and (2) a shared citizen-praxis. The former fosters loyalty to the national political institutions and a symbolic locus for political belonging. This means our belonging not only stems from abstract values but from particular national institutional forms (Mason, 2000). The latter, participation in liberal–democratic procedures, ensures diverse citizens see each other as co-authors of political life. This creates collective ownership and identity amongst diverse participants, suggesting that democratic engagement can contribute to belonging across difference. This emphasizes ‘… the voluntaristic character of a civic nation, the collective identity of which exists neither independent of nor prior to the democratic process from which it springs… democratic citizenship establishes an abstract, legally mediated solidarity between strangers’ (Habermas, 2001: 15–16). Jürgen Habermas’ post-national constitutional patriotism is the archetypal example. Expanding the thinning logic, he challenges the continued relevance of national identities. For him, political belonging and cultural integration are different ends. The former creates a shared political culture, particularized around the constitutional history of the given community (Habermas, 2005: 118, 225–226).
While shared values and political commitment outline important sources of belonging, there are problems in their attempt to thin political community. First, these arguments assume a distinction between political and non-political values, that seems theoretically and practically unrealistic. Rawls’ implicit claim is that he has thinned the necessary shared beliefs to cultural neutrality. Similarly, Habermas conceives belonging only as a vertical, political relation with the state and not a horizontal, cultural relation amongst citizens. Both attempt what Andrew Mason calls a ‘belonging to the polity’ rather than a ‘belonging together’: a form of political belonging focused on vertical relations to the state without a horizontal relation (Mason, 1999: 271, 2000: 127). However, this assumes that vertical, political belonging and horizontal relational belonging are distinct: that they can be neatly separated out into citizenship and political community. If this distinction does not hold, if the forms of horizontal belonging practiced amongst diverse groups can facilitate or undermine vertical belonging (and vice versa), then focusing only on vertical belonging may, at best, be unlikely to marshal the affective motivation necessary for political community or, at worst, actively undermine political community (Modood, 2013: 137, 152–153). There is thus a strong possibility that these accounts require a more robust account of horizontal belonging and the dynamics of identity and recognition it entails.
In this way, these theories miss the cultural–relational dimension of belonging. The culture argument responds to these thinning strategies by arguing for a measured thickening of political belonging capable of incorporating the other sources. The main form this takes is national identity. Liberal nationalists argue that, while pre-political sources of nationhood can have illiberal results, political belonging requires some kind of pre-political base to facilitate the motivation and integration necessary for just, liberal states. Thus, rather than blood or religion, they need a sense of belonging-together founded on the idea of an evolving political community (which can include shared values and political commitment). Liberal belonging weds ‘allegiance to a body of principles embedded in the Constitution, but also includes the more concrete ideas of common membership and shared history that are essential to nationality’ (Kymlicka and Banting, 2017: 19; Miller, 1995: 141–142). Such histories must involve a shared, national and public culture, symbols and practices. This involves a complicated balance. National identity must be thicker than civic commitments, but broad enough to accommodate diversity. For David Miller, the existing and overarching dominant identity has a duty to strip itself of exclusionary elements while recent entrants must shed any conflicting values (Miller, 2001). Essentially, a substantive national identity pushes disparate cultural groups to a shared national centre.
Despite liberal nationalism’s turn towards horizontal belonging, there is ambiguity in its account around how a shared national identity creates belonging amongst diversity. For example, while Miller (2001: 302) argues that ethnic groups may demand symbolic transformations in the identity, how or to what extent that is required for belonging is unclear. 6 The source of this ambiguity is a slippage in his model of common nationality: whether this requires a shared culture that might include beliefs, values, languages, etc. or only common identification. 7 The latter’s focus is not so much a shared set of commonalities but a willed affiliation motivated by an attachment (Abizadeh, 2002: 498). If belonging requires shared nationality to be understood in cultural terms, it requires a substantial set of symbols and meanings associated with political community. However, if the key agent is a willed relationship, then the form of belonging is more open. The issue is not that either option is correct, but that liberal nationalists leave these questions about the shape of national identity open, suggesting they continue to assume a relatively static model. They (1) assume that the model of belonging that can best accommodate diversity is a uniform one; that it will create one uniform set of horizontal and vertical attachments within the political community. They (2) ignore that national belonging not only requires thinning, but a strategic shaping of belonging that provides new pathways for active inclusion by minorities. It requires a loosening of how nations are understood to be symbolically defined and the space they afford for diverse belonging. This is a deeply practical and symbolic project multicultural belonging takes up below.
The liberal debate over belonging focuses on the normative question of justified membership, identifying sources of belonging compatible with the vertical elements of citizenship. This diversity of sources illustrates the multifaceted nature of belonging, i.e. the many ways something shared can be normatively deployed for belonging-claims. In similar ways, liberal values, political commitment and culture are key sites of normative contestation over belonging in contemporary diversity-politics. Liberal values and political commitment are self-evidently relevant amidst public discourse around minorities’ adherence to ‘democratic values’. Similarly, liberal nationalists are right that political belonging requires horizontal attachment amongst citizens, not only bonds with the state. Despite theoretical criticism and global changes, national identity remains the main category minorities seek inclusion to and from which they are excluded. It represents the current horizon of political belonging. Liberal nationalists thus do increase the focus on horizontal belonging and push liberal debates away from solely abstract and principled normative arguments to contextual and sociological questions. However, seeing belonging only in instrumental terms and prioritizing the value of vertical belonging over horizontal, they continue to assume that the operative question is how much community (i.e. how thick) is desirable and that belonging is a consequence of some shared source.
The politics of belonging: Power, fluidity and exclusion
While political theory approaches belonging as a normative guidance question, social theory focuses on the critical question of revealing the complexity of the politics of belonging. The difference between normative and critical can be overdrawn; political theory assumes some sociology (of identity, culture, etc.) and social theory some normative aims. Nonetheless, the latter’s critical constructivist framing emphasizes the dynamic nature of the social realities that structure belonging. It offers both a more context-sensitive understanding of identity and community and more attention to the context of belonging: the practice and politics of belonging. However, there are also limits, the contextualist and critical approach tends to reify change and cast any limits to belonging as assimilatory logics or colonial relations. In this way, this literature undertheorizes the potential of new forms of belonging to meliorate contemporary forms of exclusion.
The practice of belonging?
Social theory’s debate on belonging is both more longstanding and diffuse than political theory’s (Yuval-Davis, 2006: 198, 2011: 11). Nonetheless, while this account is often implicit in the literature, it is possible to distil its distinct sociological conception. Two key points frame this account of belonging. First, it is not simply membership of a group. The idea of membership suggests objectivity. One is a member if ‘objective’ features such as location, language or social networks are present. Such features are relevant, as they constrain belonging-claims. But the concept of belonging isolates the intersubjective character of membership; the ‘reciprocal relations’ between members represented in a body of symbols that enliven social locations, and how they are deployed for inclusion and exclusion (Crowley, 1999: 18, 26). Thus, social theory is not focused on the structures of formal political membership (e.g. citizenship/integration) but the construction of meaning around socio-political membership: the identities, narratives and symbols of political community.
Second, belonging is deeply related to identity. While identity has been widely criticized as too broad and vague, 8 belonging in critical social theory offers a complex and dynamic sense of identity that highlights its discursive, multiple and contested nature. When we make claims to belong, linking our individual and group selves to political community, we do so within a field of identities. This field includes a variety of narratives available for but also attached to identities that must be negotiated. Belonging is thus discursive, interpretive and imaginative; it is the process of narrativizing individual and group connections (Anderson, 2006: 6; Calhoun, 2003; Yuval-Davis, 2006: 202). Belonging is also multiple. Not all national narratives look alike; some are centred on a shared language or religion, others construct belonging through a historical struggle. Similarly, we belong to many different types of groups and communities (e.g. families, linguistic groups, religions, occupations, ideologies and national identities), that overlap and conflict to varying degrees and we often have multiple belongings to the same category, even those that claim exclusivity (e.g. dual nationality) (Martin, 1995: 5–16; Yuval-Davis, 2006: 202). Finally, belonging is practical. When individuals and groups construct relations of belonging, they perform it through a variety of practical and material realities. This involves both tapping into existing meaning, the existing normative and symbolic resources, but also deploying creativity. This means that the normative space of political community, especially national ones, will be structured around certain ideals, symbols and tropes that can be adapted in constructing belonging but must be navigated. The practice of belonging is both constrained and freeing (Bell, 1999; Hussain and Miller, 2006).
In this sense, belonging clarifies identity. Identities are not stable, they are summaries of how we construct belonging to groups, identifying the sharedness that constitutes the community. As a result, the centrality of relations of belonging to identity and community means that neither can be treated as stable, fixed entities either in the moment nor diachronically. Both are complex and dynamic, with significant capacity for contestation. Additionally, the interpretive, variable and contestable nature of belonging means there is an inevitable politics around the construction of belonging. The constitution of groups is always revisable. While belonging can be a strategy for inclusion, it is equally possible to exclude.
The politics of belonging
The politics of belonging is deeply affected by this tension between exclusion and inclusion. Belonging is the ‘dirty work of boundary maintenance’ where citizens contest the narratives, and their various ingredients of belonging to draw the borders of the political community (Crowley, 1999: 30). This entails both that various constructions of belonging will organize the criteria of political community in different ways (e.g. around some combination of values, political commitment and culture), but also that they contest what is involved in belonging itself (e.g. whether shared values, religion, etc. are required). As previously discussed, national belonging is the main discursive level of contemporary political community. Further, it is structured by inequality; a discursive ‘field of power’ where some groups have political belonging and some are denied. Perhaps the most in-depth examination of this comes from Ghassan Hage. Hage (2000) argues that liberal belonging conflates institutional citizenship, as legal status, with national belonging, as inclusion within the symbolic community. This assumes belonging is a formal either/or issue, like citizenship. However, it must be understood sociologically. Belonging is ‘practical nationality’, ‘the practical deployment and significance of nationality in the social – how people experience and deploy their claims to national belonging in everyday life’ (Hage, 2000: 50). Belonging is about the everyday practice of asserting and reacting to belonging-claims. It is the practical capacity to deploy linguistic and social practices that assert and deny belonging within a community. This ‘cultural-national belonging’ is both a matter of degree and is unequal. Minorities often seek to grow resources for belonging, and thus both comparatively assess their belonging against others and are distinctly aware of rejections.
The comparative, cumulative and unequal nature of practical belonging means that it is characterized by a hierarchy, a set of symbols and attributes that constitute the national ideal of what it is to belong. Together, these form the ‘nationally sanctified and valued social and physical cultural styles and dispositions (national culture) adopted by individuals and groups as well as valued characteristics (national types and character) within a national field: looks, accent, demeanour, taste, nationally valued social and cultural preferences and behaviour, etc’ (Hage, 2000: 53). However, the purpose of demonstrating this form of symbolic cultural capital is not simply membership in a community but to assert legitimate national belonging. For Hage (2000), national belonging involves two forms of entitlement. Passive belonging, the weaker, is entitlement to the national community where one ‘expects to have the right to benefit from the nation’s resources, to “fit into it” or “feel at home” within it’ (Hage, 2000: 45). It is passive insofar as it concerns the legitimate enjoyment of benefits. Governmental belonging, the stronger, is an entitlement over the national community. It is the assertion of a legitimate claim to the management of the national community. This is not about formal power. Rather, it is ‘the power to have a legitimate view regarding who should “feel at home” in the nation and how, and who should be in and who should be out, as well as what constitutes “too many”’ (Hage, 2000: 46). Governmental power is not simply a right to inhabit, but to have agency in and ownership over the community, a share in the national will. While some members will only have passive levels of belonging, because of the degree to which they can assert the symbols of belonging, others will have active, governmental belonging over the borders of the community. 9
Hage’s (2000) model illustrates the cultural–symbolic politics of national ownership in a way that reveals the contemporary tensions around diverse belonging and social cohesion. 10 In multicultural societies, the politics of national belonging involves first, second and third generation minorities. For Hage (2000), the latter groups often suffer from over-assimilation. Growing up in these national contexts, speaking the language natively and holding the political values/symbols centrally (often in the context of discourses of inclusion), second and third generation migrants assert passive (enjoyment) and active (agency/ownership) forms of belonging. However, as belonging depends on a national ideal, and the claim that only those who meet the ideal belong, their claims are often met with rejection. Whether through representations of the national ideal in the public sphere or everyday practices, these groups, who are deeply attuned to subtle exclusion, will be ‘mis-interpellated’. They will find their national belonging rejected. Mis-interpellation is exclusion from the ideals and discourses of political community; it occurs in someone asserting belonging who is rebuffed. For Hage (2000), multicultural policies tend to be oriented to institutional forms of exclusion (e. g. employment markets, welfare services, full citizenship, etc.) that affect first generation migrants, ignoring this important form of the politics of belonging and its effects on social cohesion. For him, unless the exclusionary practices of those who inhabit the current ideal are changed, unless they are integrated into a non-exclusionary ideal, mis-interpellation is unlikely to end (Hage, 2008: 503–504, 2010a: 244–246, 2010b). In this way, he illustrates the value of critical, contextually sensitive analyses of the politics of belonging and its effects on social cohesion.
The fluidity and inequality of identity and community is a key feature of the politics of belonging. However, this focus also produces counterproductive tendencies: contestation, the politics of belonging and ‘fluidity’ can be over-emphasized. When flux is analytically prioritized over stability, any structures which inhibit change become oppressive. Understanding citizenship and multiculturalism only as constraining structures, critics like Hage (2000) repeat the logic they criticize, essentializing essentialist structures. The claim that change is more fundamental than stability in identity and community has theoretically essentialist consequences that lead to practical ignorance of the continued relevance and normative appeal of ‘social and political continuities’ (Modood et al., 2004: 12–13; Parekh, 2008: 61). For example, Hage (2000) does not consider the possibility that a national ideal could be reconstructed or otherwise made more inclusive. For him, belonging is an internal struggle of articulation, only available to those already privileged (no matter how inclusive they are) who will never re-codify it in a more inclusive way (Busbridge, 2018: 34, 98; Hage, 2000: 59, 2010a: 242, 251–252).
This limits the normative relevance of this analysis. First, it ignores the mutability of citizenship, belonging and political community. Their form, content and inclusiveness are both open to contestation and take several existing forms. Second, it ignores that, in the politics of belonging, inclusion in citizenship and the political community is still the main goal of many groups. Any analysis of the minority experience of belonging must attend to their goals and the normative value of various forms of inclusion. Finally, it leads to a simplistic account of multiculturalism as, essentially, a form of control defined by the state/majority shaping the values and capacities of minority communities to make them ‘governable’. 11 ‘It is in this sense that multicultural governmentality is a continuation of a colonial logic: there is no space within it for recognizing or valorizing an Other who retains the potential to hurt you. The Other who retains such a capacity becomes by definition ungovernable’ (Day, 2014; Hage, 2010a: 242; Thobani, 2007). Hage claims multiculturalism is colonial because it assumes the basic legitimacy of the broad set of institutions and political community within which it operates. It is very hard to see how any substantive normative response and concrete policy program for diversity could avoid doing so. No set of institutions can simultaneously respond to a problem and keep the conditions of overcoming that problem absolutely open. As Kymlicka (2017: 156) notes, such criticism is not often backed up with an alternative locus of belonging to citizenship.
Multicultural belonging: Vertical and horizontal
Although it has often been under-developed and tangential to the main debates within the literature, multicultural theory contains a model of belonging that speaks to the problem of social cohesion, suggesting new pathways that avoid the problems of liberal and social theory. 12 Although primarily framed within the vocabulary of liberal theory, this model shares important insights with social theory, promising a way forward for a critical–normative conception of belonging. Multicultural belonging is sensitive to the normative dimensions of belonging while avoiding both the thick–thin logic, in significantly rethinking the type and shape of commonality, and the uniformity assumption, by offering differentiated conceptions of social unity. Further, it offers a more dynamic understanding of identity, community and the politics of exclusion, while avoiding reifying change and outstripping its normative potential. It achieves this through a balanced account of belonging as horizontal and vertical and interdependent between these two levels. The following is not an exhaustive account, which is not presently possible, but highlights three key features of this theory: contextualism, reciprocal integration and differentiated unity. The purpose is not to offer a full theory of multicultural belonging, which is not presently possible, but unite the resources and tendencies in the literature that point in a useful direction.
Contextualism
Multicultural belonging innovates in two areas normative theory has been deeply criticized. First, it attempts more complicated sociologies in response to criticisms of its (and liberalism’s generally) understanding of culture, identities and community as: distinct, stable and autonomous (Parvin, 2009). These recognize the ‘overlap, interaction and continuous renegotiation and transformation of cultures by their members’ (Kymlicka, 2015b; Modood, 2013; Patten, 2014; Tully, 2002: 104) and emphasize the inevitable ambiguity of identity, culture and group cohesion. For example, several appeal to Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblances’ to explain the permeability and persistence of ethno-cultural groups. Cultures and communities are not defined by essential traits that provide an unbroken line of continuous identity, but ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’ (Wittgenstein, 1986: paras 81–85). This image emphasizes the dialectic of coherence and change within groups: the way in which they are subject to inevitable change, but change that does not erase the ongoing coherence of the group. As Modood (2013: 88) notes, ‘Family resemblance may be enough to characterize group membership’. For him, the ‘important fact of intra-group difference’, so emphasized by critics of multiculturalism, does not undermine the normative significance of groups, it requires more flexible and dynamic conceptualizations (Modood, 2013: 112). While such identities and cultural groups are never static, stable or singular, neither are they meaningless. They constitute the lived realities of the communities involved, providing both key orientation points within which the matrix of contemporary diversity politics is navigated and real sources of belonging (Carens, 2000: chap 3, 2013: chap 8; Festenstein, 2005: chaps 1–2; Kymlicka and Banting, 2017; Modood, 2013, chap 5; Patten, 2014, chap 2; Tully, 2008: chaps 2, 4). In this way, while multicultural belonging rejects simplistic conceptualizations of culture and community, they equally reject reifications of cultural fluidity.
Second, multicultural belonging embraces contextualist models of normative theorizing. As several commentators have argued, multicultural thought has always been at the forefront of historicist, applied, contextual and constructivist trends (Festenstein, 2005; Modood et al., 2004; Murphy, 2012, chap 9; Owen and Laden, 2007). These reject what James Tully calls ‘monological approaches’ which assume that belonging is both derived from theoretical enquiry into necessary and sufficient conditions and aimed at theoretical finality: definitive solutions discovered in theory and applied in practice, irrespective of context (Tully, 2004: 90–91). This assumes that belonging is justified through abstract normative argument and distributed by states rather than a process including dialogical engagement and citizen-activity. That is, they ignore the agency and activity of the relations amongst citizens and groups, prioritizing vertical over horizontal conceptions of belonging.
Normative and critical enquiry, for contextualist multiculturalists, is at least partially motivated by the discourses and practices of political actors. Modood and Dobbernack (2015: 166) argue that a focus on agency allows a framework that is critical-normative, which ‘identifies and critiques the negative while elaborating the positive in what exists or could be struggling to exist’. Agency exposes the practices and relations of belonging that exclude, while theorizing alternative normative possibilities from practice and relating them to the ideals and principles of theory and state. This perspective also assumes and enacts the interdependency of the vertical and horizontal. It illustrates how belonging is always both limited and liberating, both constrained and containing of deep normative significance and potential. Such a perspective would be critical and constructive: that takes notice of, but does not turn regulatory effects into absolutes… This would be a position that does not just problematize but can articulate and develop further the normative understandings expressed in institutions, by engaging citizens, and among oppositional movements. (Dobbernack and Modood, 2015: 168)
Reciprocal integration
Multicultural belonging frames its account of plural belonging within a revised account of the relation between states, majorities and minorities. It conceives belonging as an ongoing project of reciprocal integration between majority and minority communities. Like multicultural theory in general, it takes inspiration from the liberal nationalist debate around belonging as well as public discourses around diversity which often deploy ideas of integration. However, its conception differs from the assimilationist, civic and cosmopolitan models (Modood, 2013: chap 7; Parekh, 2000: chap 7).
This conception involves explanatory and normative elements. On the one hand, it highlights the operation of integration agendas in existing multicultural states and the way minority claims relate to these frameworks. In this, it examines the integrative frameworks states offer and how these relate to policies and ideas of citizenship. Belonging concerns how states attempt integrating minorities and the demands minorities make for integration, and how these set the terms of political community. For Kymlicka (2001: 153–155), multicultural thought and policy is best conceived as part of the broader integration and nation-building agenda in liberal–democratic states. On the other hand, this also raises the question of the fair terms of integration: the normative basis of diverse belonging. The main object here is reflection on the legitimate demands a state, and the majority political community can make on cultural minorities (i.e. how much integration and of what kind). However, these normative questions require both a sociological understanding of the conditions of immigrant integration, the time required for integration and the changing (e.g. generational) needs of minorities and how the capacity to belong is related to how a group is treated by the majority and the state (i.e. the question of recognition) (Kymlicka, 1995: 88; Taylor, 1994).
Beyond improving material and institutional integration, multicultural belonging argues for significantly transforming national culture. For cultural minorities, polyethnic rights are means to inclusive integration. Such rights clarify the basis of national culture and inclusion; they set the terms of integration while also illustrating how fair integration is constitutive of the community (Kymlicka, 1995: 178–180). Multicultural policies shift the dynamics of belonging. They transform what a political community can claim to share. For example, anti-discrimination legislation removes the capacity of a particular ethno-racial group from claiming sole belonging, affecting the articulation of national identity and political community (Uberoi, 2008: 409). Beyond this, states and majorities (and minorities to a lesser extent) articulate the nature of the relationship to which all members belong. Modood (2013) calls this the ‘macro-symbolic’ level of integration, where a society debates what their society is and what it is to be a member. The belonging of cultural minorities, how it is understood and related to the political community by others, is ultimately dependent on this level (Modood, 2013: 147). Multicultural belonging requires a substantial shift in national culture and the attitudes and motivations articulated there. These must be framed in ways in which the recognition and accommodation of diversity become a contribution, rather than a threat, to this relationship (Kymlicka and Banting, 2017: 23). This means it requires inclusion at the national level through a renegotiation of the national whole. 13
This symbolic renegotiation illustrates that, for this theory, fair integration requires equality. The common institutions of society, those to which minorities are pressured to integrate, must provide the same respect and access to the identities of minorities as the majority. Thus, demand for symbolic renegotiation makes reciprocity between groups central. The unity of diverse groups is not only formal equality within citizenship, but a commitment to a reciprocal set of relations. These relations require reciprocal obligations, gestures of commitment to common belonging made both by majorities (and the state they tend to dominate) and minority communities. Common belonging is a two-way process. Immigrants cannot belong to the society in which they have chosen to settle unless it is prepared to welcome them, and conversely it cannot accept them as full members unless they wish to belong, with all that this entails. Common belonging therefore can only be achieved if each party respects the terms of the relationship and discharges its obligations. (Parekh, 2005: 10 – see also Tully, 1995, 2008)
Differentiated unity
Finally, multicultural belonging rethinks community as differentiated unity. To do so, it challenges the standard liberal account of citizenship of one uniform model that, at some level of thickness and sharedness, bonds diverse citizens. This misses both the multiple nature of belonging, the complex and overlapping relationships and identities it entails, and the way a more pluralist citizenship better fulfils the goal of equality (Carens, 2000: 161–166). Instead, citizenship is pluralist, multilogical and dispersed. It is pluralist insofar as political identity is not mutually exclusive with other forms of social and cultural identity. Rather, such identities are always multiple, overlapping and interrelated. It is multilogical insofar as citizenship always involves competing and complementary self-descriptions. Such ongoing accounts, never final, are part of the core work of citizen activity (see also Tully, 2008: 162). Finally, it is dispersed insofar as this activity happens across formal and informal contexts, without a clear hierarchy (Modood, 2013: 116–117). Thus, plural citizenship highlights the potential of alternative sources of horizontal relations of belonging to the traditional assumptions of shared uniformity.
Drawing on this pluralist conception, a conception of differentiated unity offers different sources of horizontal belonging. Democracy and democratic relations (broadly construed) are one key source, insofar as they can inform different, non-uniform model of belonging. In this, this theory follows the political commitment thesis. However, it also reorients multiculturalism as a normative framework away from its traditional base in liberal theory to a much broader account of democracy (Carens, 2013; Modood, 2013; Parekh, 2000; Tully, 2008). On this account, the dialogical activity of citizen participation is a key resource for diverse belonging. Tully (2008: 160) argues that we need to reimagine belonging within diverse societies to illuminate the ‘role that the democratic freedom of citizen participation plays in engendering a sense of belonging’. In his view, belonging is a product of the active part of citizenship, where we discursively engage in the practice of giving and asking for reasons amongst fellow citizens. This ‘engenders a sense that one is acknowledged and respected by others… and so nurtures a sense of identification with the larger society’ (Tully, 2008: 180). This not only allows us to participate in an existing political identity, but to engage in the ‘on-going contests over how these are to be acknowledged, recognized and accommodated’ (Tully, 2008: 160). By understanding the relation between belonging and democratic contestation, we not only open up existing communities to inclusion, we also open up the mode of belonging itself to reconstruction. Such opening is constitutive of belonging creation and its role in citizenship. All this reveals the relational nature of belonging; that it is fundamentally a product of both our vertical relations with the state and our horizontal within the political community. Along with others, this leads Tully to argue that belonging amongst ethno-cultural diversity requires a substantial democratic ethos of inclusion to facilitate the ongoing acceptance and re-adjustment of the political community this requires. This ethos must be widely distributed, not only encouraging minorities to engage democratically as many critics of diversity emphasize. Rather, it must condition how majorities interact with minorities and restrain them from symbolically and materially excluding them from positions of agency. This means that this ethos, and belonging in general, requires democratic relations on the part of minorities and the majority culture (Carens, 2013: 64; Modood, 2017).
In this manner, democracy highlights the different image of social unity informing multicultural belonging. Rather than framing the sense of sharedness around values, political commitment or culture per se, which remain important normative sources, it derives from a commitment to the relationship between evolving, overlapping and deeply contestable groups as they negotiate the tensions of political community. The democratic ethos is thus an ‘ethos of social membership’ that focuses on locating belonging in the relationship and practice of engaging, contesting and negotiating political identity. Focused on a commitment to democratic, vertical and horizontal belonging promises to facilitate a form of differentiated unity, where belonging is not built on uniformity, as in liberal citizenship, put on differentiated relations to the political community. This entails a framework of political community which celebrates what Charles Taylor called ‘deep diversity’ (Taylor, 1993: 183). This involves recognizing a second-order plurality to the state around belonging, where diverse cultural groups will not all belong to the political community in the same way. In such contexts … cultural groups not only are diverse, but have diverse images of the country as a whole. People not only belong to separate political communities, but also belong in different ways. This means that the members of a polyethnic and multination state must respect not only diversity, but also a diversity of approaches to diversity’. (Kymlicka, 1996: 134) A solidarity-promoting form of multiculturalism would connect it to social membership, enabling immigrants to express their culture and identity as modes of participating and contributing to the national society… [It] would start from the premise that one way to be a proud and loyal Canadian is to be a proud Greek–Canadian or Vietnamese–Canadian, and that the activities of one’s group… are understood as forms of belonging, and of investing in society… even as a form of nation-building. (Kymlicka and Banting, 2017: 31)
Conclusion: Belonging, critical and normative
While liberal–normative approaches and critical approaches are differently oriented to belonging and have often been mutually hostile, there is value in engaging them. Understanding political belonging requires normative analyses of the ideals of existing state practices and minority politics, and the justifications that support them, as well as new forms of identity and community that might facilitate them. Further, it requires critical analyses of the politics of belonging occurring between various groups and the new forms of inclusion and exclusion that emerge. The former will keep the latter honest, by offering new institutional and symbolic forms that (hopefully) speak to the real dynamics of exclusion operating today. And the latter will keep the former relevant, ensuring our normative ideals address real problems. Thus, such a combination is required to fully attend to the complex, multi-dimensional and pressing nature of belonging today.
Multicultural belonging promises a model of vertical and horizontal belonging that rethinks the roles and forms of statehood, citizenship and community. This conception has both critical and normative merits. It is both more compatible with complex images of culture and identity and offers an original normative theory of multicultural citizenship and political community that highlights the cohesion and agency for minority communities that multiculturalism can support. Further, in its emphases on contextualism, reciprocal integration and differentiated unity, it does this while illustrating the importance and interdependence of both vertical and horizontal belonging. Multicultural belonging illustrates the important reciprocal set of connections between citizenship and political community that are often ignored by many liberals and radical critics. Liberal–democracies require both vertical relations of entitlement and obligation between individuals and the state and horizontal relations of community amongst citizens; and these interact in complex ways to produce political belonging. The way we frame these relationships has deep consequences for what states and citizens demand in today’s renewed diversity politics.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This paper benefitted from the hard work of many. It was first presented in Brisbane at the 2018 IPSA/APSA World Congress on the ‘Multiculturalism, National Identity and Majority Cultures’ panel. I would like to thank Geoff Levey, Tariq Modood, Varun Uberoi, Guy Laforest and Glenda Ballantyne for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank the good people of the ‘Reading Group in Political Philosophy’ at Queen’s University (Canada). In particular, Andrew Lister, Eleanor MacDonald and Will Kymlicka gave up far too much of their time providing thoughts on this paper. Finally, I must also thank Rachel Busbridge and Ana Estefanía Carballo for reading early versions and talking through the key points of the argument.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research upon which this article is based was kindly supported by two internal grants from the University of Melbourne: The Early Career Researcher Grant and the Special Studies (Long) Program Grant. They were key to its success.