Poppy Coburn: The authoritarian turn of tolerance

Integration cannot succeed without immigration control

Multiculturalism was declared a failure almost immediately after it was first defined as a conscious policy project. The term now enters public parlance almost entirely as a pejorative, or as rhetorical target for politicians to aim at. Identified as a problem as early as the Blair years, multiculturalism now remains an unresolved dilemma.

The ferocity of successive pro-Palestine protests across the country has once again brought multiculturalism and its discontents to the forefront of political debate. Most of the protesters have little to no historic connection to Palestine itself. Whether they are acting  out of a commitment to humanitarian justice in the face of alleged Israeli overreach, pan-Islamic solidarity, or a disdain for Western culture more broadly is up for debate. But the main fallout from these demonstrations may end up being quite contrary to the protestors' aims. For many ordinary onlookers, the behaviour of those celebrating Islamist terror is finally calling our commitment to tolerance and diversity above all else into question. 

To understand why multiculturalism, and the need it brings for proper integration, continues to torment centre-right policymakers, we must turn back to recent history. Mass migration has been a disruptive phenomenon for Western Europe’s society and politics, leading to changes that have proved to be more profound than could have possibly been imagined by governments during the initial post-war migrationary boom.

The Swiss playwright Max Frisch described the mindset of these early post-war governments well: “We wanted workers, but people were arriving”. These people brought with them their own set of cultural norms and values. The naive assumption  that initial migrationary waves were temporary and could be reversed proved untrue as ‘guest workers’ settled permanently with their dependents. Naive too was the belief that the pre-war integration model could operate without modifications given the entirely new scale of movement countries were facing.

It was not long before governments (consciously or otherwise) adopted the model of multiculturalism, spurred on by domestic political crises and a growing realisation that migrationary fluctuations were now morphing into a constant, rising flow. Complete integration, it was understood, would be a slow and painful process, placing enormous burdens on both the state and citizens. 

Such a process would be impossible to formalise, and so an alternative strategy was adopted: multiculturalism, defined as an active tolerance of different norms and cultures living alongside one another, regardless of their compatibility, if not outright relativism. With each new compromise struck in pursuit of social harmony, the credibility of successive UK governments on immigration and integration diminished. National identity had to be redefined to better represent modern society. Processes that tend to antagonise the Right - the over -representation of minorities in media, positive discrimination practices, heavy-handed censorship by the state - end up becoming necessary to make multiculturalism ‘work’.

Nations that implement state multiculturalism paradoxically require constant reactive cycles of integrationist policies as an ongoing process of managed assimilation. Measuring the success of these measures has proved difficult. Culture is not something that can be engineered directly by the state, as it necessitates involvement with concepts that are not explicitly ‘believed’ in, but are often implicit within communities and worldviews. By necessitating integration as a supreme value, homogeneity of thought and expression becomes a conspicuous display of civic engagement with enforcement by the law. "Muscular" integration runs the risk, therefore, of becoming needlessly punitive.

The primacy of 'integrationist' ideology also feeds the ‘charity industrial complex’, opening up lucrative government contracts for third sector bodies claiming expertise in building stronger community relations. These same groups will often agitate for immigration positions contrary to stated government policy, as notably seen from the case of the well funded Refugee Council. This is central to their business model, since it is a high-immigration society that generates the problems they purport to fix. The management of a complex society requires a complex apparatus. This apparatus, for conservatives subscribed to the notion of ‘the blob’, is perceived as being hostile to the Right and in constant pursuit of pro-immigration policies.

Mass migration remains a deeply unpopular policy choice that has been pursued by both major parties for at least three decades. But as with the post-9/11 embrace of ‘muscular liberalism’ on both Left and Right (think back to Blair’s 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Act and David Cameron's creation of Prevent), restrictionist immigration policies are unlikely to follow another push towards better integration. Integration as an agenda cannot stand alone without immigration itself being far lower.

When tolerance is seen as needing muscular enforcement, the pendulum swings back towards a 'communitarian' integrationism, and our discourse may turn against the primacy of the individual. But this is no panacea. Will shutting down a pro-Palestine protest on Remembrance Sunday impress the deep cultural significance of the Cenotaph? Force people to wave flags all you like - if they do not know what they are waving it for, you’ve done nothing more than provide a windfall to the British textile industry.

The rights of individuals have been forcibly weakened in order to better manage the consequences of rapid demographic change. Britain broadly maintained its great traditions of free speech and free association well into the latter half of the 20th century. 

The same cannot be said for today. Our historic model, balancing a strong centralised state with a remarkable degree of individual freedom, has been diminished, with the value of liberty increasingly replaced by the value of tolerance. Faced with the unmanageable task of integrating far too many people from vastly divergent cultures and at too fast a rate, Britain runs the risk of embracing an authoritarian turn. 

To preserve our culture of liberty, 'integrationism' is not enough - we must control immigration itself.

Poppy Coburn is co-editor of The Conservative Reader.