What are We?
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200806300103 |
| Author | Robert Latham |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
What are we?
From a multicultural to a multiversal Canada
Samuel Huntington’s most recent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to
America’s National Identity, contends that the future of American democ-
racy rests on the prospect of defending the Anglo-Protestant culture that
has been centre stage in US political history. Many commentators have
rightly questioned the premises of this book. Rather than join in, let me
point your attention to Huntington’s use of the pronoun “who.” It’s a choice
that leaves little option but to do exactly as Huntington wants: to make the
issue of an overarching ethnonational identity the principal problem. The
title of this essay is “What are we?” The simple substitution of “what” for
“who” makes the principal problem our understanding of how what we call
Canada is organized in sociopolitical and ethical terms. Huntington’s for-
mulation takes this for granted: the core issue at play for him is whether the
right “who”—WASP ethnocultural identity—can remain central enough to
support his “what”—the American liberal republic.
Robert Latham is director of the York Centre of International and Security Studies at
York University. The author acknowledges the support of the International
Development Research Centre to conduct this work.
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| Robert Latham |
I have purposefully left in the pronoun “we,” not to sneak in a “who”
but to emphasize two things. First, that when considering ourselves as a
collectivity within the national social space and political community that is
called Canada, we do so in terms of the question of “what we are” as a
Canadian society rather than “who we are” as Canadians. A second—and far
more controversial—reason I keep the “we” is to question the possibility of
some kind of unified, comprehensive understanding of “we” at all. Indeed,
a “what” can be conceived in a highly pluralized and fragmented fashion—
an option not easily available in answers to the question “who we are.” It
may be the case that understandings of what we are splinter along the axes
of a series of “two Canadas” that not only include the one associated with
the worlds of Francophone and Anglophone or First Nations and European
settlers, but also the one that distinguishes people and communities that
are open to the very question of “what we are?”—embracing difference in
an essentially cosmopolitan world view—from another Canada that is
closed to this question and which seeks to protect itself against difference
and cosmopolitanism.
Focusing on a “what” is hardly unusual. Political theorists, at least from
Hobbes onward, have done this ostensibly because principles and logics of
social organization provide a powerful justification for making claims about
how best to order a polity. This tendency is far from just theoretical or aca-
demic: in Canada and elsewhere, those responsible for policy and political
organization justify action based on claims about the nature of social life.
Among the most central understandings of the nature of Canadian society
is that it comprises many cultures and this thereby justifies policies and
laws associated with multiculturalism. I will argue that the concept of mul-
ticulturalism actually does not answer the question of what Canada is, and
as a result we need to consider policies that are better suited to a more accu-
rate understanding of the nature of Canadian society. My overall goal is to
suggest that we can move beyond a multicultural frame and consider the
nature of the social life in the territory we call Canada in all its complexity,
taking account of our far greater awareness of the complex interweave of
forms of life operating at varying scales from neighbourhoods to transbor-
der networks. I believe we can use this very open conception of the social
space we associate and identify as Canada as a basis to build effective poli-
cy. This suggests the possibility of not just adjusting or amending our
understanding and assumptions about multiculturalism, but working with
a different understanding and set of assumptions. My point is not to reject
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| What are we? |
multiculturalism per se, even if it has flaws, but to move beyond it in a pos-
itive sense. If effective and just policy is a more likely outcome when based
on a more accurate model and understanding of society, then it behooves
us to pursue that greater accuracy.
I also want to suggest that what I call multiversal society is something
to be actively supported and advanced by civil society and government. The
existence and recognition of that form of society can be a good in itself. To
this end, I will argue, there are basic policies and commitments, such as the
advancement of multiple citizenship in Canada and worldwide, which can
make a huge difference to the development of a multiversal society (the way
that single national citizenship itself has been so critical to the formation of
nation-states).
The reason to take this task on now is that it is clear that many people
in countries like Canada are increasingly anxious about the difference pro-
duced by widening immigration and transnationalism and intensifying
energies in the assertion of rights in many realms from religion to sexuali-
ty. It is also more readily apparent that the categories we have used to model
difference—such as ethnic culture or majority/minority group—are too
limiting: individuals are increasingly understanding themselves in far more
complex and intersecting ways, involving, for example: class, locale, con-
sumption, political orientation, sexual preference, and religious affiliation.
Rather than be content with using models from an earlier period of politi-
cal development to contend with the politics of difference in the 21st cen-
tury, Canada can innovatively get ahead of the curve and rethink itself as an
open, transnational society.
FROM MULTICULTURALISM TO MULTIVERSALISM
By now many of us concerned with multiculturalism are familiar with the
criticisms that have been levelled against it from both the left and the right.
Criticisms have included the ghettoization of new immigrants; the solidifi-
cation of Anglo-Canadian culture as a norm; the established of a culture
hierarchy; the commodification of—and fixation on—culture; the papering
over of crucial class and general differences and inequalities; and the pur-
suit of a false unity and common Canadian identity.1 Rather than focus on
1 The work associated with these critiques is far too large to list here. Readers inter-
ested in critical and supportive perspectives on multiculturalism will be well served
by the thoughtful and comprehensive discussion in Gerald Kernerman, Multicultural
Nationalism: Civilizing Difference, Constituting Community (Vancouver: UBC Press,
2005).
| International Journal | Winter 2007-08 | 25 |
| Robert Latham |
such critiques I want to make two basic points. First, even if we have con-
cerns about the instrumental uses and sociopolitical effects of multicultur-
alism as an ideology and a policy, we can still acknowledge that Canada is
multicultural and the commitment to multiculturalism put in place in the
early 1970s—while not to everyone’s liking—was an innovation in state-
society relations.2
Second, while we may recognize the truism that Canada is multicul-
tural, many of the criticisms argue directly or suggest indirectly that Canada
is much more than just a multicultural social formation. It is multiracial,
multiclass, multigendered, multisexual, multilocal (from rural to urban,
from North Toronto to Harbourfront Toronto). It is multipolitical, multire-
ligious, multilegal-status, multilingual, multihistorical (within lives and
across communities), and multiprofessional. It is multigenerational, multi-
status (from temporary worker to citizen), and multiscalar (with lives real-
ized at difference scales, some which remain more or less within a single
province, while others reach regularly across borders and oceans). The list
is not exhaustive and perhaps expands far out to the horizon when we con-
sider all the mixed formations, such as hybrid-ethnicities (e.g., Chino-
Latinos) resulting from mixed marriages or hybrid spatial forms growing
out of a mix of urban and suburban in the new “in-between cities” that sur-
round many of Canada’s urban centres.3
2 I am especially aware here of the concerns of people in Québec since 1971 about
dilution along the cultural axis in the move from bi- to multi-cultural. See, for exam-
ple, Richard J.F. Day, Multiculturalism and The History of Candian Diversity (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2002).
3 On mixed marriages, see the recent research by Minelle Mahtani, “Interrogating the
hyphen-nation: Canadian “Mixed race” women and multicultural policy,” in Sean Hier
and B. Singh Bolaria, eds., Identity and Belonging: Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in
Canadian Society (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2007), 124-56. On in-between
spaces, see the work of the city institute at York University at www.yorku.ca.
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| What are we? |
Of course, on one level, there is a cultural dimension to everything I
mentioned.4 Indeed, it certainly helps simplify matters to reduce the over-
whelming array of social domains, identities, and spaces to varieties of cul-
ture. But it is the huge differences and multiplicity implied by the seem-
ingly infinite “everythings” in a society that I want to emphasize should be
taken into account on their own terms when thinking about...
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