The discourse of multiculturalism, often regarded as characteristically American, has in recent years steadily gained ground in Europe. This can be seen as a belated response to the often striking transformation of the metropolitan Lebenswelt by the inflow of millions from Asia, Africa, the Antilles and the Middle East. Decades of friction between majorities and minorities in the streets, on the labour market, in public housing, over access to welfare and in schools have thrown up fractured ethno-landscapes all across the continent. At a time when the orthodoxies of the market have all but eliminated any alternatives from the political field, both admirers and detractors of multiculturalism insist on the increasing centrality of a new axis of group differentiation and the problems that it poses to inherited conceptions of national identity. The presence of large immigrant communities in the EU, often dating from the twilight era of colonialism, acquires a more pregnant significance—it is often felt—in an era of globalization, as the main vectors of economic development, geopolitics and mass culture all seem to point to a featureless horizon beyond the nation-state. Immigrants from the non-European world appear to introduce an extra element of uncertainty into this transition, perhaps threatening to derail the train to Euroland altogether.

In Rethinking Multiculturalism the eminently establishment figure of Bhikhu Parekh—Vice-Chancellor of Baroda University, Deputy Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality in the UK, and peer in the British House of Lords—attempts to relate such European issues to North American and Indian experiences. His aim is to propose a comprehensive normative framework for addressing ethno-religious and racial conflicts in liberal democracies. The practical objective of securing a peaceful and inclusive civic life overrides any temptation on Parekh’s part to dwell at length on incommensurable values. His construction of multiculturalism eschews any deep theory of culture, using the term to refer simply to communal modes of being in the world that generate complex but manageable problems of inter-group communication and cohabitation. The communal cultures he discusses usually emerge out of a fusion of ethnicity and religion. Loyalty to the way of life they prescribe is represented not as an adhesion to transcendental imperatives, but rather as the expression of an irreplaceable quotidian experience.

But if such cultures are rich in themselves, they are also multistranded, like pieces of rope, and by weaving together certain strands from each, a durable and colourful fabric of society can be made. Since cultures of this sort tend to be most palpable when they exclude outsiders, it might be objected that multiculturalism—however good for keeping the peace—is unlikely to be quite so good for the integrity of the cultures themselves. But Parekh is confident that an open-minded dialogue between majorities and minorities will not only preserve, but refine the ethno-religious traditions of each. Conceding that too much mixing might dilute what is valuable in any particular culture, he insists that doctrinaire universalism and its opposite, chauvinistic culturalism are worse. By way of demonstration, he takes the reader on a flat-footed tour through the gallery of Great Philosophers—from Plato to Rawls—stopping here and there to explain to what degree a given thinker failed to grasp the mellow verities of the middle ground, either because he leaned too far in the direction of universalistic monism, or alternately too far in the direction of relativism.