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172 Citizenship

importance of a sense of commonality amongst Americans, but critical
voices have grown louder since the attacks on New York. Especially in
Europe, critics of multiculturalism link it to the involvement of young
Muslims in terrorist networks, arguing that – ironically, given the liberal
roots of multiculturalism – it fails to foster a political culture in which
toleration and respect for different ways of life are valued. Instead, mul-
ticulturalism is seen as promoting what is effectively community segrega-
tion as different ethnic and religious groups live together in the same
districts, speaking their own languages, and often maintaining close links
with “ home ” through minority media and social and religions organiza-
tions. Multicultural policies, it is argued, have failed to bring immigrant
groups into mainstream society and they have therefore given support to
extremists to whom that society is anathema. The fact that three of the
young Muslim men who carried out the bombings in London in 2005
were born and brought up in Britain is taken as evidence of the failure of
multiculturalism to create a society in which diversity is valued rather
than hated and feared.
These criticisms do not only come from the Right. Some critics on the
Left go further still in their arguments that multiculturalism undermines
social cohesion. In a magazine article that was very much debated in
Britain, David Goodhart argued that the more diverse a population is in

terms of religion and ethnicity, the more difficult it becomes to build and
sustain national solidarity. This has serious consequences for security, as
community segregation leads to racial violence, the growth of racist right
wing political parties and riots by disaffected young people who see no
future for themselves in Western societies. But it also has serious conse-
quences for the quality of citizenship itself. In particular, Goodhart sees
diversity as undermining the grounds on which the redistributive policies
of the welfare state were founded, as a sense of belonging together and
sharing a common fate associated with nationalism is eroded (Goodhart,
2006 ). A parallel argument is that of Nancy Fraser, who has argued that
the focus on the Left with cultural recognition has tended to lead to the
neglect of concerns with redistribution. Fraser is not against multicultural-
ism as such, but she does see it as limited in comparison with the anti -
essentialist transformations that are needed to cultural identities as well
as in patterns of inequality if society is to become more egalitarian.
Multiculturalism is not an end in itself, she argues: the politics of recogni-
tion should not lead to neglect of commitments to the politics of redistri-
bution (Fraser, 1997, 2008 ).
However, it is concerns with social cohesion that now dominate debates

over multiculturalism in the twenty - first century, whilst questions of