John Simon Mccoy

University of Alberta Xenoracism and the Crisis of Multiculturalism: Is Canada Exempt? by John Simon McCoy A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science ©John Simon McCoy Spring 2014 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. Abstract “Multiculturalism” is in crisis, or so we are told by some of the world’s most powerful political leaders. According to the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, multiculturalism has “failed utterly”; for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, the “doctrine of state multiculturalism” has not only failed as public policy but has also opened a space in which extremism can flourish among minority communities. Alana Lentin & Gavin Titley (2011) have described this narrative as the “crisis of multiculturalism”; Paul Ryan (2010) as “multicultiphobia”; Ben Pitcher (2009), Geoffrey Levey and Tariq Modood (2009) have carried out similar studies. According to Liz Fekete (2009) and her associate Ambalavaner Sivanandan of the London based Institute of Race Relations, such narratives are “shot through” with institutionalized racism – or, as they have conceptualized it - xenoracism. It is a form of racism situated in what is presented publically as concerns over public security and the social threat of non-integrated minorities. In this ideology newcomers and even long-standing residents are portrayed as “the enemy within”, under the re-imagined “monocultural” state. To date, a majority of the scholarly work in this area has taken place in the context of Europe. Recognizing the potential interconnection between xenoracism that targets Muslim communities and the crisis of multiculturalism narrative, this dissertation will seek to critically examine these trends in the state that first adopted state multiculturalism – Canada. The dissertation will explore the life experiences of the primary target of xenoracism - Muslims - and through doing so critically examine what has been portrayed as the relative success of the Canadian model of state multiculturalism. It will pose the following question: Is xenoracism that targets Muslims present in Canada, and what can the life experiences of Canadian Muslims tell us about the relative success of state multiculturalism in Canada? Acknowledgments The University of Alberta has been kind to me in that it has provided a venue through which I have developed a series of rewarding professional and personal relationships. I have enjoyed a long and rewarding scholarly relationship with my supervisor Dr. W. Andy Knight. I am eternally grateful for his guidance over the past years; this work and indeed my research agenda as a whole would not have come to fruition without his profound influence. I am also thankful to the inter-disciplinary partners with whom I have been involved during my doctoral research and employment as a research assistant – in particular Dr. Ingrid Johnston and Dr. Anna Kirova. Dr. Bruce White, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Doshisha and Director of the Organization for Intra-Cultural Development, has also been a valuable resource. His anthropological approach and focus on intra-cultural research helped me to re-frame some of my own ideas. Finally, I would like to thank my most long standing intellectual influence in my life, my mother, Jane McCoy. Table of Contents Chapters: Chapter 1: Introduction p.1 Chapter 2: Race and Racism p.37 Chapter 3: Xenoracism p.67 Chapter 4: Canadian Muslims and Xenoracism p.101 Chapter 5: The Crisis of Multiculturalism: The Canadian Exception? P.140 Chapter 6: Integration p.191 Chapter 7: Security p.230 Chapter 8: Conclusion p.268 Tables: Table 1: Categories of Racism and Xenoracism p.96 Table 2: Experiences with Discrimination among Religious Communities p.134 Table 3: Feeling Uncomfortable or Out of Place because of Religion p.135 Table 4: Worries about Hate Crimes p.136 Table 5: Life Satisfaction among Muslims and Non-Muslims p.223 Table 6: Sense of Belonging among Religious Communities p.224 Table 7: Voting in Elections Muslims and Non-Muslims p.225 Chapter 1: Introduction 1 The worldwide hegemony of Orientalism and all it stands for can now be challenged, if we can benefit properly from the general twentieth-century rise to political and historical awareness of so many of the earth’s Peoples - Edward Said, 1979, Orientalism. Multiculturalism, we are told, is in crisis; it has “failed”, it is to blame for a host of social, economic and political ills. We are told this by those who hold political power in Western European states. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, has attacked “state multiculturalism”; Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, has publicly stated that multiculturalism has “failed utterly” in Germany; Dutch Vice President of the Council of State, Piet Hein Donner, has stated, “The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people.”1 For many these statements were a stunning declaration. Centrist political parties of Europe had rejected multiculturalism, not only as public policy, but also as an image of society: they had blamed immigrants and minorities for their social and economic ills – they had become the new nativists of Europe. In Europe the crisis of multiculturalism has been accompanied by the rise of the political far- right who actively propagate racism as a means of mobilizing increasingly polarized voters and achieving electoral gain. The specter of economic and demographic crisis has acted to draw together concerns over the economy and immigration and deflected blame from increasingly impotent political elites who have proven unable to manage the effects of globalization. The National Front in France, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the True Finns and Norway’s Progress Party are just a few examples of newly emboldened far-right parties in Europe. In Greece, arguably the heart of the European economic and supranational crisis, the Golden Dawn party, whose party flag displays a swastika-like symbol and whose members engage in Nazi style salutes and torch lit- parades, won 6.9 percent of the national vote and 18 parliamentary seats in June of 2012.2 For the far-right the ills of a continent can be traced to the social and economic impositions of newcomers 2 and the non-integrated “other”. Racism has penetrated the political discourse in Europe. For noted migration scholars Stephen Castles and Mark Miller, these trends are significant concerns for liberal democratic societies: “Racism is a threat, not only to immigrants themselves, but also to democratic institutions and social order. Analysis of the causes and effects of racism must therefore take a central place in any discussion of international migration and its effects on society.”3 Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds have sought to deconstruct and decode these trends. Alana Lentin & Gavin Titley (2011) have analyzed what they refer to as the “crisis of multiculturalism”; Paul Ryan (2010) has deconstructed what he calls “multicultiphobia”; Ben Pitcher (2009), Geoffrey Levey and Tariq Modood (2009) have examined the role of racism in multicultural politics. Collectively their analyses have found that what lies behind the narrative is complex: the “crisis” analogy cannot be taken at face value as it conceals a series of politicized messages that can be linked, among other things, to the inability of politicians to effectively manage both the economic and migratory effects of globalization and a continuing “neoliberal” assault on the welfare state. Moreover, what is presented as “rehabilitative action” needed to fix the damage wrought by multiculturalism in effect contains ideologies of racism.4 Thus, for social scientists, these trends raise a critical question: what has caused such a dramatic reversal in decades of multicultural policy? For part of the answer to this question we can look at some of the comments that Ms. Merkel made when she declared multiculturalism a failure: “We kidded ourselves a while, we said, ‘They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone.’ But this isn’t reality.”5 This comment betrays two readily apparent observations. First, Germany was never a state committed to multiculturalism as public policy: it was a state built on the model of the guest worker. The “they”, the minority non-German of whom Turkish peoples have been the most demonized in that country, were not supposed to 3 stay.6 “They” were supposed to fulfill their economic role and go back where they came from. Second, the culpability for the failure of whatever form of token multicultural policy Germany ascribed to, can be placed not on the German host culture but rather on those who were never welcome in the first place, at least not for very long. As observed by Alana Lentin, what Merkel and others have presented is really quite a basic argument: “Immigration societies have been too tolerant of minority cultures. Minorities have been allowed too much leeway to practice their own traditions at the expense of integration with the wider community.”7 However, it is not necessarily all newcomers and minorities that are being singled out in the crisis narrative.

Load more