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1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney

Coming to Grips with the Implications of Multiculturalism: Civic Pluralism, Renewing Australia's Social Contract

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Changing Private Lives

We live in an environment where subcultural differences, differences of identity and affiliation, are becoming more and more significant. Gender, ethnicity, religion, generation and sexual orientation are just a few of the words that are used to describe these differences. Young people identify themselves as members of finely differentiated "scenes".

To those who yearn for "standards", this appears as evidence of distressing fragmentation of the social fabric. Indeed, in one sense it is just this, an historical shift in which singular national cultures have less hold than they once did. And there are profound structural reasons for this change. To cite one example, one of the ironies of less regulated, multi-channel media systems is that they undermine the concept of collective audience and common culture. They promote the opposite: an increasing range of accessible subcultural options and the growing divergence of specialist and subcultural discourses. This spells the definitive end of "the public", that homogeneous imagined community of modern mass-democratic nation states.

The challenge is to make space available so that different lifeworlds can flourish, to create and allow spaces where local and specific meanings can be made. The new multimedia and hypermedia channels provide subcultural identities a new opportunity to find their own voices. These technologies have the potential to enable greater autonomy for different lifeworlds.

Yet, the more diverse and vibrant these lifeworlds become and the greater the range of the differences, the less clearly bounded the differences appear to be. The word "community" is often used to describe the differences that are now so critical, the "Italian-Australian" community, the "gay community", the "business community", and so on, as if each of these communities had neat boundaries. As lifeworlds become more divergent in the new public spaces of civic pluralism, their boundaries become more evidently complex and overlapping. The irony of the increasing divergence of lifeworlds and the growing importance of differences is the blurring of their boundaries.

As people are simultaneously the members of multiple lifeworlds, so their identities have multiple layers, each layer in complex relation to the others. No person is a member of a singular community. Rather, people are always members of multiple, simultaneous and overlapping communities, communities of work, of interest and affiliation, of ethnicity, of gender, and so on.

We have to develop a special kind of competence in order to be able to negotiate these many lifeworlds, the many lifeworlds each of us inhabit, and the many lifeworlds we encounter in our everyday lives.

3. Australia is particularly well-suited to meeting the challenges of the new global environment.

In a world where cultural and national differences are increasingly becoming a life and death issue, managing diversity is an Australian "success story".

The crossing of borders and the movement of people from nation to nation is a phenomenon of increasing significance all over the world. From London, to Los Angeles, and even from Athens to Tokyo, cultural and linguistic diversity is increasingly a feature of the peoples who populate the streets, the schools and businesses. Those nations that are able to adapt and facilitate these differences are the ones that will go forward without blood on the streets. Those nations that have strategies for dealing with diversity will survive as productive and cohesive places. Traditional notions of nation which assume that it is ideally homogeneous cannot meet this challenge. Notions of nation that construct national homogeneity by suppressing varieties of language and custom are no longer relevant and can only be maintained with repressive laws and unacceptable, anti-democratic levels of enforcement.

Australia represents an advanced case of actively breaking down the distinctions between the local and global, and of making virtue of the inevitability and necessity of diversity. This is how Australia, the most diverse country in the world, has avoided the holocaust that engulfs so much of the rest of the world, the conflict over competing identities.

In this, Australia has five principle virtues. These are the products of historical contingency, related to the country's local, national and global context.

The first advantage has been Australia's weak sense of traditional nationalism. Neither the imaginings of the British Empire in its most distant outpost nor the frontier legends have ever worked as convincingly as a narrative as many other world nationalisms have. Our sense of community without xenophobic nationalism is an asset in this world-historic moment.

The second is the way we have managed the world's second largest immigration program and our internationally unique policy of multiculturalism. Australian policies in this area have been in a state of continual change over the past half century. They are also the products of a state which has been actively and creatively involved in redesigning its relationship to civil society, moving from a principle of nation based on closed borders, to assimilation policy, and now towards that I have called civic pluralism.

The third is Australia's vulnerability as an exporting economy, which has forced us to be outward-looking, economically and culturally. A critical dimension of this has been Australia's changing markets, particularly its focus on Asian region links.

The fourth is that after centuries of neglect, Australia is now recognising that its cultural and economic integrity cannot be achieved without negotiating unfinished business with indigenous peoples. The tardiness in tending to this business means that the negotiation is going on in a context that has to regard self determination seriously.

Finally, there is Australia's political commitment to social equity: access to the nation's symbols, wealth and power. Governments of all political persuasions have managed to sustain social policies with an explicit emphasis on equity and access over the last five decades.

These are five practical respects in which the local, the national and the global are powerfully and productively inter-related in Australia's efforts to negotiate diversity.

No country in the world can avoid having to deal with diversity. Massive human movement is a feature of our epoch. All of a sudden, the local seems distant. The Australian streetscape has become an ethnic kaleidoscope. At the same time, the globalisation of markets and improved and cheaper communications make the distant seem local. These are the paradoxes of cultural difference; paradoxes faced with increasing intensity in every place on earth; paradoxes which all too many countries are just not coping with.

In moving towards civic pluralism, Australia leads the world with a practical case study of how to manage issues that are now so burning all around the world. Civic pluralism is Australia's dramatic possibility. But being on the verge of something also produces anxiety; the stronger the possibility presents itself, the more vociferous the speakers of commonsense will become, "diversity and social cohesion don't go together"; "multiculturalism is divisive"; "we're giving away too much of our local identity in the rush to globalise".

4. What needs to be done: key structures to facilitate changes and key forms of competence for citizens and workers.

Civic pluralism is a means to the equitable distribution of resources. It also challenges the dominant group to learn the ways of so called minorities. No longer is it a one way imperative, become "like us". Instead, every citizen will need to become a multilingual and multicultural subject. This will require a very different epistemology of being. In other words, people will need to develop new senses of themselves, together with some very practical skills to deal with a wider range of expectations and aspirations. The new citizen of the new state will be a person of multiple citizenship and multiple identities.

Civic pluralism is not a recipe for social disruption or for the so called "tribalisms" that haunt so many parts of the world at the moment, as the critics of multiculturalism often cry. There is nothing genetically murderous about the Bosnians; there is nothing inherently aggressive about the Irish. The reason groups of people end up in horrendous circumstances is because there is a breakdown in the distribution of symbolic representation, political participation, work and social services. These are circumstances where there is no mechanism for deciding which language to use in schools, who is eligible for government, who can live where, and so on.

A new possibility is emerging in Australia. This is the possibility of a paradoxical new universal in which negotiating differences becomes the national essence. Nation in the sense of jealously-guarded boundaries and internal homogeneity no longer exists in a meaningful or at all productive way. Instead, the new nation must be founded upon a postnationalist sense of common purpose. The national ethos must be based on the creative and productive virtues of internal diversity and an outward-looking internationalism.

This means that new forms of civic competence are now needed:

  • the ability to engage in the difficult dialogues that are an inevitable part of negotiating diversity;
  • the morality of compromise in which parties to negotiations are willing to meet on ground which they do not necessarily share in common;
  • multiple citizenship in both the literal sense of being a participating member of more than one nation-state and the metaphorical sense of participating in a range of public and community forums;
  • an ability to express and represent multi-layered identity appropriate to the different lifeworlds, civic spaces and work contexts that all citizens encounter; the extension of cultural repertoires appropriate to the range of contexts where difference has to be negotiated;
  • a capacity to engage in collaborative politics which matches differences in relationships of complementarity; and
  • dexterity with systems devolved according to the principle of federalism, where different lifeworlds and devolved community and work activities are the social core and the "central" or the "federal" is subsidiary to these, rather than the other way round.

Above all, civic competence, local and global, involves cultural understanding and practical skills for negotiating differences.

5. The new citizens and the new state will be very different from the citizens and states of our recent past.

Local diversity and global connectedness both demand that the social is rethought. And central to this rethinking is the question of the relation of the citizen to the state. What I will call "civic pluralism" presents the possibility of establishing a new relationship between the citizen and the state.

Negotiating diversity is now the only way to produce social cohesion. Pluralistic citizenship is the most effective way of holding things together; and an outward-looking, internationalist approach to the world is now the only way to maintain the national interest. To achieve these ends, however, Australian multiculturalism needs to develop into a fuller civic pluralism, one which heralds the possibility of developing a genuinely post-nationalist sense of common purpose. This won't happen automatically. Indeed, it might not happen at all. But it is something that needs to be imagined as a possibility, an ideal for which we can strive.

By moving in the direction of civic pluralism, we are in fact making a new social contract, a social contract which addresses some of the fundamental global issues of our time.

The state in the future will have a dual task: to develop community whilst securing diversity, and so create pathways for all whilst respecting differences. To do this it will have to remake itself. It will have to develop a new "mainstream" in which diversity is a core feature. To achieve this it will have to strip "ethnicity" from the public realm but nurture it and mediate it at the local level.

Australia is a nation where it is already almost possible to conceptualise the public realm as one that facilitates and negotiates diversity in such a way that groups can self-determine in significant ways at the local and personal level. Of course, this requires that we reconceptualise the functions of the state and the relationship groups and individuals to resources that the state regulates. It also means that we have to rethink the epistemology of being that it promotes through educational institutions, arts policies, media policies and the other critical symbolic interventions that the state is always making.

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