Marshall is the go to guy for anything about citizenship, but I'm not sure about this "cultural" citizenship.
There's this lingering idea of "universal human rights", but unfortunately there is no such thing.
Human rights are culturally constructed, and once you get into multiculturalism, this becomes apparent.
Gender rights in Arab and African communities stand out.
I'm not saying that we need to invade countries in Africa and Asia where FGM (female genital mutilation) is the rule. That would cause the imposition of our values on them.
The flipside of this though, is that people from these communities in Europe and North America should have no right to expect to be able to continue the practice once they have immigrated. To allow it is an imposition of their values on the country they come to inhabit.
But if we accept this idea of cultural citizenship, then we have to acommodate them. This is a mistake.
Like it or not, multiculturalism of this sort is dangerous, because it undermines the real basis of human rights. I.e. what a society has determined to be the rights of citizens.
There are no universal rights granted by God or nature, only those that societies choose to protect. And when you have cultural pluralism, you have a pluralism of understandings of what human rights are as well.
This is dangerous. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
You make excellent points about cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, and this is very much what the whole debate is about. To what extent should we accommodate other people's religious and cultural practices if they move to a new country? Does it partly depend on why they've moved? eg an asylum seeker who intends to go home once it is safe to do so vs a migrant worker who chooses to settle here.
Certainly practices that we consider to be violations of human rights or of our domestic legislation would not be acceptable in Britain but around that people are allowed to be part of their cultural communities, follow their religion etc - they are not forced to assimilate and be made to lose whatever cultural identity and heritage they carry with them.
But at the same time it is viewed important that people who come to our country understand what our cultural values are - eg around gender roles.
Allowing communities to keep their identities does not mean that segregation is encouraged (in principle). Social cohesion and understanding of diversity and other cultures in promoted but often in practice gehttos develop where asylum seekers or migrants are placed and not given enough access to integrate into the wider community, reinforced by negative attitudes of indigenous populations.
The UK has a fairly long history of diversity and different cultures living alongside each other (not necessarily harmoniously) so the historical context enables the multiculturalism approach to develop here in a way it has not in France or elsewhere. But the whole debate is still very much ongoing and divided. Ad astra per aspera
For example, a few months ago there was some ideas flying past in the Swedish media about abolishing parents' right to have their children exempted from sexual, physical and religious education based on religious/cultural objections. I.e. it can perhaps be said within the Swedish context that there is no cultural right to ignorance. You may keep your culture, but in no way do you have a right to remain ignorant (or enforce ignorance on offspring) on culturally sensitive topics. I don't know what happened with this proposal, if it was brought up in the parliament, voted on, etc.
When this is the case, the truth is relative to where your own position is on the matter. The only way to solve this is by decree: my values are the right ones, because I am the host and the majority. This will lead to revolt, unless such issues are tackled and solved very very early by an immigration policy based on assimilation - at least concerning this kind of conflictual issues. Playing the righteousness card (as in, we're more advanced than you, we know women position in society is a human rights issue, not a cultural one) is probably the worst solution.
It depends on how much those identities differ from the host country's. Russian immigrants to France integrate very easily and the problem (segregation or assimilation) isn't even posed. Migrants can have difficulties to adapt due to lack of enough access opportunities, or locals' negative attitude, but also due to their own lack of understanding, or negative attitude towards local values. Without necessarily assumming ill will from either side , I think the problem must be considered both ways.
I read the abstract (and a little bit more) of a phd thesis in anthropology (or maybe something else) a couple of years ago. The topic was FMG among somali expats in Sweden. As I remember it the conclusions were that there were no documentet or findable cases of FMG in the population, however there was an almost universal belief among somali expats that many other somali families mutilated their daughters. The source of this belief appeared to be the main stream media.
Even more interesting the pressure for mutilation came mostly from the belief that everyone else was doing it, and thus the chances for the daughter to get a good (preferably swedish-somali) husband. In the end adaptation to the mayority community won over the minority community practices as imagined by the MSM in the mayority community.
Just thinking about imposition of values and such.
