“The Multicultural Welfare State”

The session of November 28, 2007 was devoted to the presentation by the philosopher Will Kymlicka (Queen’s University) of a text entitled “ The Multicultural Welfare State », Which synthesizes and prolongs reflections engaged in its penultimate collective work, Multiculturalism and the welfare state: Recognition and redistribution in Contemporary Democracies (with Keith Banting ; Oxford University Press, 2006). He formulates a criticism, empirically supported, of theses according to which the ethnic heterogeneity of the population of a State, on the one hand, the adoption by the public authorities of a policy of promotion and valuation of cultural diversity which would be the corollary, on the other hand, would both contribute to the foundations of the providence state by making the development or the preservation of the feeling of common identity and national solidarity that the latter’s legitimacy would require. To believe it, the dilemma-should we favor the redistribution of economic resources or rather the recognition of cultural minorities, the second being able, in the long term, to operate only at the expense of the first ? – would not resist the examination of the facts.

The first of the two aforementioned theses, of course, has appeared validated by a certain number of studies on countries in sub-Saharan Africa, on the one hand, on the United States, on the other. But these two cases remain quite singular, due to the structural weakness of state institutions, in the first, the stigma of the black population resulting from slavery, in the second, and other studies allow to show that the results obtained concerning them do not indicate the existence of a pattern more general. When the ethnic diversity observed is the result of immigration and affects more anciently constituted providence regimes – in particular European states – the negative correlation between this form of heterogeneity and the level of social benefits disappears (even if, it is true, the increase on the part of social benefits in the GDP is the weakest where immigration is strongest). The same is true when the minorities considered are national minorities or aboriginal populations.

In the same vein, if the proportion of minorities visible at the local level, in the United States and elsewhere, does indeed have a negative impact on the level of trust necessary for the members of the majority group to invest in the associative life of their district-and on the social capital accumulated at the end of these investments-, this second variable itself is not correlated with the degree of support which the providence from the national scale benefits.

As for the arguments relating to the negative impact of multiculturalist orientation policies on the feeling of belonging to the same national community-itself conceived as the main condition of legitimacy of the welfare state-, they remain essentially of purely speculative nature and do not take into account cases-like Canada-where multiculturalism appears on the contrary as a constitutive dimension of national identity.

Introduced by Daniel Sabbagh, the discussion focused in particular on the limiting effects of multiculturalist ideology on devices for reducing inequalities in countries like the United States where, in fact, “ diversity Today constitutes the only value in the name of which positive discrimination policies can be deemed legally eligible. It ended with a question as to the possible need, as soon as we adopt an empirical approach examining the effects of multiculturalist policies on the welfare state, to disintegrate the “ multiculturalism In question by considering the different policies likely to be gathered in this category separately that can be held excessively encompassing.