Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt, Les pièges de la culture ; les contradictions démocratiques du multiculturalisme, translated from Danish by Peer Bundgaard, MètisPresses, Geneva, 2012, ISBN : 978-2-940406-47-0, 394 pages, 25 €.

This review is based on the French version of the book whose original Danish title is Adskillelsens politik (2008).

The subject of Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt's book is the concept of multiculturalism and how it relates to organized religions conceived as purveyors of norms in the public sphere.

If, in order to justify this approach, one were to draw a comparison with the famous analytical framework conceived by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, which demonstrated that as from the second half of the 19th century, the economy had striven to absorb society instead of being governed by it, one might ask oneself if the question today is not whether religions are attempting the same endeavour, beyond the secular episode which slowly took shape in Europe until it prevailed in the 20th century, by trying to reverse society's independence from any kind of external metaphysical foundation seeking to encompass it. From this standpoint, the examination of the relationships between Islam and multiculturalism takes up a significant part of the book, precisely because Islam is the only religion that to this day views its sphere of action as encompassing society and as including a proselytic component, an outlook which Christianity and Buddhism would (maybe temporarily) seem to have renounced. One can therefore readily understand the author's chosen angle of approach, which bears for the most part on the place that should be afforded to organized religions, and especially to Islam, in the public sphere of liberal democracies at the highly specific point in their history where collective debate has progressively crystallized around the question of multiculturalism.

The concept of multiculturalism as it is used today attempts to provide an account of the reciprocal relationships that communities of distinct ethnic, linguistic or religious affiliation entertain or should entertain in order to live in mutual harmony in the context of the territorial entities where they are led to come into contact with each other.

Let us state immediately that according to Eriksen and Stjernfelt, although it is indeed true that we are currently experiencing a transition towards an ethnically diversified social structure, multiculturalism is however by no means inevitable, contrary to what the ideology surrounding its use would have us believe, and that the book is to be understood within the context of the current debate concerning how the present or future relationships between individual freedom, religious affiliation and universal law should be construed. According to the authors, in conflating the factual (the highly diversified nature of group affiliation in contemporary liberal societies) and the normative (this state of affairs presented as a standard to which liberal societies should conform), the concept of multiculturalism is in fact based on a concept of culture that has been substituted for the concept of race and that fully retains the latter's fundamentally deterministic value : individuals are determined by their affiliation to communities that encompass them to such an extent as to deprive them of any degree of personal autonomy and to leave their stamp on them once and for all. Originally tied to American scientific anthropology (F. Boas, but mainly R. Benedict), which had inherited the German philosophical concept of culture (Herder, opposing French revolutionary universalism), the concept of multiculturalism has assumed a far greater significance since the 1960s, when it entered the political sphere by becoming the creed of international organizations such UNO or UNESCO. By retracing the genealogy of the concept and of the world-scale ascendancy it now exercises over the debate concerning the status that should be granted to the prescriptions imposed in the public sphere on members of a faith by their religious authorities, the authors endeavour to expose the double game played by the concept of culture as well as the instances of manipulation it makes possible in even the most commonplace of political and ethical vocabulary. When "freedom" is invoked, what is meant is no longer the freedom of the individual, but the freedom that a "cultural" group claims for itself to regulate and possibly oppress its members in the name of an allegedly unquestionable affiliation to the group in question. When "respect" is called for, the issue is no longer the respect due to personal belief, but the tolerance that supposedly should be shown towards the prescriptions imposed upon their members by communities making use of an authority that is entirely self-proclaimed. According to the authors, no group should have a right to a higher degree of reverence, or even to any special reverence awarded on the grounds of its being a group : whether it comprises a handful of individuals or several billion people has no bearing on the fact that in the eyes of the State, only individuals are endowed with legal and moral existence, with the organization of religious communities being both recognized by the State and outside its sphere of jurisdiction. That is why the individual is given the right to criticize and even ridicule any kind of affiliation, whereas the State is not permitted to do so. The philosophical tradition on which the authors base their critique of multiculturalism is that of the Enlightenment, interpreted in its broadest possible meaning (including the more moderate current of Locke and the more radical one of Spinoza, himself re-interpreted by the French pre-revolutionary philosophers). According to the authors, this tradition alone can provide the grounds on which what is contrary to the very idea of a political sphere can be successfully opposed.

Today, the stakes are global, and one of the book's great merits in this regard lies in its envisioning its subject matter within an international political context right from the onset by considering the example of Malaysia, the only country to have included the concept of multiculturalism in its constitution (the chronology of conflictual relations between religions and States between 1971 and 2012 at the end of the volume is also remarkable). By interrogating the various actors of the Malay political sphere and retracing the country's historical evolution since colonial times, the authors provide convincing evidence that the granting of specific rights on grounds of religious affiliation (in this instance to the Sunni Muslim majority) progressively brought into being a political system that provides legal sanction to the oppression of minorities (regarding access to education, credit or civil rights) and that precludes any personal evolution on the part of individuals bound once and for all by group affiliations concerning which their views are never sought. In Malaysia, the adoption of Shariah Law, which punishes apostasy and prohibits interfaith marriage, thus gives rise to many legal difficulties concerning inheritance and personal status, since no one can be regarded as having decided to change faiths or to renounce entirely their affiliation to a religious community of whatever denomination. Furthermore, provisions that were supposed to apply to a particular category of citizens (Muslims) end up overflowing beyond the category in question, since as soon as a Muslim has dealings with non-Muslims - which is the rule in a multicultural society -, Shariah Law applies to him whatever the law applicable to the other party might be, even if the law in question is theoretically recognized by the constitution. The Malay example may be an extreme case, but attempts to establish a multicultural legal system are in progress in Canada, Australia and Great Britain. Yet according to the authors, the political philosophy that has tried to ground the concept of multiculturalism in liberal law has strayed into a dead end : in both its moderate (Will Kymlicka) and its radical versions (Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bahbha, Iris Young), Eriksen and Stjernfelt insist on the fact that by virtue of its own logic, the granting special rights amounts to creating forms of privilege and entrenched advantage that are incompatible with the rule of law. Likewise, concerning symbols of religious affiliation, which have caused such a stir in liberal democracies over the past fifteen years in the case of Muslim religious symbols, the authors subscribe to the thesis that any person acting in an official capacity for the State should acknowledge the latter's neutrality and therefore refrain from displaying any symbol incompatible therewith.

This book by two Danish intellectuals was probably triggered by the controversy surrounding the caricatures of Muhammad published in the Jyllands-Posten in 2005, which they revisit extensively, on the one hand by providing a subtle and original semiotic analysis of the caricatures themselves, and on the other hand by recounting how the issue of the caricatures was blown out of all proportion by a Danish Islamic fundamentalist group that proclaimed itself as the representative of all Danish Muslims - whose views on the matter had of course never been consulted - and, by extension, of Muslims the world over. In both phases of the authors' analysis, it is quite clear that it truly is the obsessive attention paid to symbols that triggers this escalation to extremes, and that only the authority and neutrality of the State can put an end to it by presenting the State from the beginning as a non-player that can remain unaffected by the clash of symbols. But the stakes of the book go far beyond the one-off crisis of the 2005 caricatures, in that it challenges all arguments of the "freedom of expression exists, however…" type. According to the authors, and as demonstrated by the Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen in his analysis of the pronouncements of UNESCO, the "however" in question can only lead to ultimately self-contradictory compromises between the universal legal rights of individuals and the specific traits of communities of affiliation, which multiculturalism dreams of sealing hermetically while making them participate in a kind of parliament of the world's cultures, where debate would be devitalized owing to the impossibility of conflict, each community sticking doggedly to its own cultural positions. According to the authors, the defence of multiculturalism in the context of international organizations thus amounts to a ruse of war on the part of organized religions, and of Islam in particular, since the States' neutral attitude towards organized religions is short-circuited by the supranational authorities that have embraced multiculturalism as their official ideology.

Finally, a few critical observations.

One wishes that the book's relationship to the substance of Enlightenment thought were more explicitly formulated, not for erudition's sake (indeed, many works are cited, in particular those of Jonathan Israel), but on the contrary because the authors define "Enlightenment" only by way of preterition : a 17th-18th Century European school of thought. However, they also grant "Enlightenment" status to 9th and 12th Century Baghdad, as well as to some periods of Chinese history or to 16th Century India, thus making theirs an analysis that was notably developed by Amartya Sen, but without characterizing the historical contexts in question in any further detail except for a rather vague reference to atheism and rationalism. Following this perspective, Enlightenment can certainly no longer be equated with a philosophical school of thought born of the theological-political crisis of 17th and 18th Europe, which suits the authors since they construe it as a mental attitude rather than as a period in the intellectual history of a particular society. But this gives rise to a problem : since the authors do not seem to embrace the ultimately theological solution used by the European Enlightenment, which consisted in postulating a state of nature that was both ahistorical and a source of normativity yielding a number of abiding principles applicable to the present, one is forced to wonder what the historical circumstances favourable to embracing the mental attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment could be. Yet the authors hardly linger on this point, and this for two reasons. Firstly, because they reject absolutely the idea that there could be any connection whatsoever between the mental attitude characteristic of Enlightenment and a specific cultural context (especially, in Europe, in connection with Catholic or Protestant Christianity, which they view as having opposed freedom of thought using all the means at its disposal when it was in a position of power). Secondly, because they refuse any kind of Hegelian dialectic solution establishing a conflictual relationship, inherent and mutually productive, between Enlightenment and what The Phenomenology of Spirit used to call "superstition".

If one takes into account the necessarily historical character of the Enlightenment mental attitude, and even if one broadens the concept of Enlightenment to include other cultural regions, it is not impossible to acknowledge both the necessity of defending it unconditionally and on principle in order to ensure the survival of liberal societies, and the fact that it is an essentially transitional moment in the life of symbols, aiming to dissolve the rigid oppositions that paralyze thought and society but unable to fully sustain itself unaided. The homogenisation of differences that it requires (whether it concerns the disappearance of the distinction between the sacred and the profane or the disappearance of social orders in the political sphere) could indeed prove to be its undoing, as Kolakowski (for instance) tried to demonstrate (by abolishing the distinction between the sacred and the profane, does one achieve a secular society, as the Enlightenment intended… or a society infused with surrogate sacrality ?). In the same line of thought, what is meant by the rights of the "individual" in liberal societies ought to be more precisely defined, for the authors are surprisingly unforthcoming about this concept in spite of its centrality. Indeed, a society is not brought into being by a group of mere isolated individuals driven by their particular well-calculated interests (except if one tailors its definition to suit liberalism's understanding of society), but by selves born into a context of symbolic institutions that precede them, that were never established by any kind of contractual agreement whatsoever yet can always be subjected to critical readjustment. In this regard, if the two authors seek to defend the idea of a kind of balance struck between individuals and the State characteristic of liberal society and resulting from separately identifiable regulatory mechanisms such as science, philosophy or individual rights, then acknowledging the value of this project and fully appreciating its consequences on an international level obviously come across as matters of some urgency.

Finally, it should be stressed that it requires quite some courage to offer an argued criticism of multiculturalism at this particular time, in the wake of the Oslo and Utoya attacks of July 2011, which were perpetrated explicitly in the name of a rejection of multiculturalism. And yet it is events such as these that stress the urgent need to provide a rational account of the concept of multiculturalism in its use as an ideological prop, exempted both from critical appraisal and from attempts to circumscribe its meaning by way of definition. The authors' powerful contribution to this task is not the least of their achievements.

Jean Lassègue

Jean Lassègue
lassegue.net