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Lauren Stokes, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History, German History, Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2018, Pages 494–496, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghy022
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Extract
In her new book, Rita Chin uses historical scholarship to make a timely intervention into the ongoing debate about the place of immigration in European politics. If her historiographical claim is that it is ‘no longer possible to pretend that immigrants and ethnic diversity were irrelevant, or even external, to European history’ (p. 3), her larger political claim is that the popular narrative of the ‘failure’ of an ostensible policy called ‘multiculturalism’ should not be taken at face value. For Chin, the current polarization of the debate on immigration in Europe is in fact the result of decades during which European leaders have consistently chosen policies of deterrence and disavowal.
The Crisis of Multiculturalism is a synthetic work that compares three national cases: Great Britain, France and West Germany. Chin also takes occasional glances into parallel developments in the Netherlands—a post-colonial foil to the more familiar cases of Great Britain and France—and Switzerland—the first country to rely extensively on the labour of ‘guest workers’, which has resonances for the more widely studied case of West Germany.
