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

AuthorMacpherson, Cluny
PositionBook review

Ethnicity. Identity and Public Policy: Critical Perspectives on Multiculturalism, by David Bromell, outlines ways in which moral and political philosophy may inform debate on, and policy responses to, the growing ethno-cultural diversity of New Zealand society, and the issues of social cohesion and national identity that arise from the increasing number and range of ethno-cultural groups' competing claims. The book reviews a range of options in the literature to provide the basis for a broader, better-informed and more principled consideration of policy options than currently occurs.

The book's structure works well. For a start, the introduction provides a lexicon for the debate. This is valuable because it sets out and clarifies differences between variant forms of concepts that are routinely used, in both popular and academic debate, as though they have a singular meaning. The book then explores the local historical context and provides a clear argument for addressing the issues of the growing diversity of the New Zealand population and the importance of addressing this in ways that recognise and address the tensions between liberalism, which prioritises individuals' rights, and multiculturalism, which recognises and prioritises the rights of groups.

The book then reviews, in three sections (each with its own introduction), seven authors' contributions to the debate on multiculturalism. The contributions have been selected from debates in nations that share some historical, demographic and political features with New Zealand. The selection acknowledges the fact that normative theory is always "situated" and that theory generated in similar socio-political situations is more likely to provide ideas that can usefully frame the local debate. The first section focuses on two communitarian responses to liberalism: Michael Sandel's "Civic republicanism" and Charles Taylor's "Politics of recognition". The second section focuses on variants of multiculturalism, exemplified in Will Kymlicka's "Multicultural citizenship" and Bhikhu Parekh's "Common citizenship in a multicultural society". The third section explores the critiques of multiculturalism exemplified in the writing of Iris Marion Young's "A politics of difference", Ghassan Hage's, "Against white paranoid nationalism", and Brian Barry's "Egalitarian liberalism". Each chapter focuses on political philosophy, but throughout these, in a series of footnotes, the author signals the local...

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