Cultural majority rights: Has multiculturalism been turned upside down?

Abstract

Introduction: multiculturalism at fifty In this special issue celebrating the 20 anniversary of the University of Bristol’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, it is opportune to remember another important anniversary. Fifty years ago, in October 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared multiculturalism to be an official policy of the federal government. Australia was the next state to adopt the concept as a label for government policy in 1973. European states followed with considerable delay, with the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK as the only three countries where multiculturalism was officially embraced to some extent in the 1980s and 1990s. Remarkably, all European states have more or less abandoned the concept since, even if few of the policies that were introduced under this label have been reversed. In the early 2000s and in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, several prominent European political leaders – among them those of countries like Germany (Angela Merkel) and France (Nicola Sarkozy) that had never adopted official multiculturalism in the first place – declared the idea dead and policies pursuing it as having failed (see also Triandafyllidou, in this issue). Only Canada still proudly proclaims to be a multicultural nation. Even in Canada, however, the concept was always contested. In Quebec, it was often criticized as a ploy by the Trudeau government to diminish the status of French as a second official language and the claims of Quebec to be a ‘distinct society’ and one of the