Ethnicity, Identity and Public Policy: Critical Perspectives on Multiculturalism by David Bromell Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, 2008.

AuthorBaehler, Karen
PositionBook review

"New Zealand is demographically multicultural, formally bicultural, and with few exceptions, institutionally monocuitural." Associate Professor James Liu, School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington (Liu 2007)

Competing approaches to population diversity are not unique to New Zealand, and wherever they are found in contemporary societies they raise difficult normative questions: Are our cultural arrangements fair and just? What criteria of fairness and justice should we use to evaluate them? If these arrangements fall short of our standards, how should they be changed? When is multiculturalism, biculturalism, or monoculturalism appropriate, if ever? Rapid global trends towards population heterogeneity have propelled the search for theoretical principles and practical programmes that can settle group-based disputes, guide social policy, and resolve once and for all the seemingly endless debates between biculturalists, multiculturalists, and advocates of a unitary national identity. Personal and political slogans--such as "I heart cultural diversity" (Shying 2008) or "Put the brakes on immigration" (Peters 2002)--try to fill this niche, but they tend to fuel conflict rather than dampening it. A new book by David Bromell, Ethnicity, Identity and Public Policy: Critical Perspectives on Multiculturalism (hereafter EIPP) offers a welcome alternative to the slogans and sound-bite wars.

The purpose of EIPP, according to its author, is to promote "reasoned thoughtfulness" about the public policy implications of cultural pluralism by gathering intellectual resources relevant to the debates. Towards that end, Bromell canvasses and critiques theories developed by seven political theorists on the subject of population diversity and legitimate state responses to it. He then applies the lessons learned from these theories to New Zealand. The seven theorists (Brian Barry, Ghassan Hage, Will Kymlicka, Bhikhu Parekh, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Iris Marion Young) are well chosen to cover a variety of more-or-less philosophical perspectives within the general category of democratic liberalism, and a range of national settings within the general category of English-speaking, immigrant-receiving OECD countries. Other theorists and commentators are employed as needed. Bromell treats his subjects with care and respect, presenting their main ideas fairly while rigorously identifying both strengths and weaknesses in their arguments.

The final result is a jam-packed introduction to a sprawling topic that has attracted so much attention from political theorists over the past few decades that it now qualifies as its own subfield. Several large themes thread their way through the EIPP story and help give it some shape. Chief among these is the tension between two fundamental values: the right, meaning protection of individual civil liberties such as equal treatment under the law and freedom of speech and religion, and the good, meaning shared pursuit of commonly held values such as economic growth, social justice, or environmental preservation. A hypothetical policy designed to support an indigenous people's language, to take one example, would seek to further a public good in the form of cultural survival, but in the process might violate some citizens' rights to equal treatment under the law because all minority languages cannot be equally supported by government. Such a...

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