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Paul Standish, Editorial, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 45, Issue 1, February 2011, Pages i–iii, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2011.00791.x
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Multiculturalism has failed. This was the message given by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a speech to the youth wing of the Christian Democratic Union in Potsdam late last year. The ‘multikulti’ concept, the idea that people from different cultures would live happily side-by-side, did not work, and immigrants needed to do more to integrate. Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, shortly after followed suit (‘My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure’), as have a string of other European leaders, while, in his first speech on radicalisation and the causes of terrorism, David Cameron criticised ‘state multiculturalism’: ‘Frankly, we need less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism.’ Reporting of these speeches was filled out with evidence from a flurry of opinion polls apparently showing that, for example, 30% of Germans believe their country is overrun by foreigners and 59% of people in the UK express concerns about the levels of immigration. Merkel was careful to balance her remarks with the acknowledgement that the country needed skilled labour, and the assurance that there was no suggestion that those who did not speak German immediately were not welcome, while Cameron argued that the UK needed a stronger national identity to stop people turning to extremism. What is not clear is how far the Prime Minister’s speech upstaged the rally of the English Defence League in Luton, which occurred on the same day. And what also is not clear is quite which constituencies Cameron is appealing to in combining this condemnation of multiculturalism with the battle against terrorism. Somewhere here, as David Blunkett quipped, there are questions about how far the right-hand knows what the far-right hand is doing. But there is little doubt, in this conjoining of multiculturalism and terrorism and ‘Islamist extremism’, that some hasty connections are being made.
