Seyran Ates, thank you for critiquing multiculturalism. Next time, can you please critique it with specific references to the Canadian context? We are badly in need of your scathing social commentary.
The Legacy of Indifference: Interview with Seyran Ateş
Feminist, lawyer and women’s rights campaigner Seyran Ateş, author of The Multicultural Fallacy (Der Multikulti-Irrtum, Berlin, Ullstein Verlag, 2007) and the autobiography Große Reise ins Feuer (Berlin, Rowohlt Verlag, 2006, henceforth Ateş) has written fearlessly and eloquently about the problems of radicalisation of young Muslims, integration, the desperate isolation in which many Muslim women live, their oppression and social separatism (on both sides of the ethnic divide) in her home country, Germany, all of which are only too familiar in France and Britain as well.
From an early age, her language skills meant that she was expected to accompany adults on administrative business: "At offices and in doctors’ surgeries I noticed how awful it was if you couldn’t communicate properly. The staff were unfriendly as a general rule and completely devoid of any willingness to help. They sneered at the people for whom I was acting as interpreter and adopted a very curt tone. To start off with they frightened me with their loud and overbearing voices and their self confident manner, but as time went by I grew accustomed to it. As long as you stuck to their rules they left you more or less in peace or behaved as if you weren’t even there. Which at any rate was more pleasant than being bellowed at" (Ateş, p57).
Before addressing the issues at stake, she first defines the terms in which her argument will be presented: “By feminism, I mean the belief that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognised as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can. Multiculturalism is harder to pin down, but the particular aspect that concerns me here is the claim, made in the context of basically liberal democracies, that minority cultures or ways of life are not sufficiently protected by the practice of ensuring the individual rights of their members, and as a consequence these should be protected through special group rights or privileges (…) In other cases, groups have claimed rights to govern themselves, to have guaranteed political representation, or to be exempt from certain generally applicable laws” (pp10-11, emphasis in original).
Individual and group rights may be discordant: “Suppose, the, that a culture endorses and facilitates the control of men over women in various ways (even if informally, in the private sphere of domestic life). Suppose, too, that there are fairly clear disparities in power between the sexes, such that the more powerful, male members are those who are generally in a position to determine and articulate the group’s beliefs, practices, and interests. Under such conditions, group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist. They substantially limit the capacities of women and girls of that culture to live with human dignity equal to that of men and boys, and to live as freely chosen lives as they can. Advocates of group rights for minorities within liberal states have not adequately addressed this simple critique of group rights, for at least two reasons. First, they tend to treat cultural groups as monoliths – to pay more attention to differences between and among groups than to differences within them. Specifically, they accord little or no recognition to the fact that minority cultural groups, like the societies in which they exist (though to a greater or lesser extent), are themselves gendered, with substantial differences in power and advantage between men and women. Second, advocates of group rights pay little or no attention to the private sphere. Some of the most persuasive liberal defences of group rights urge that individuals need ‘a culture of their own’ and that only within such a culture can people develop a sense of self-esteem or self-respect, as well as the capacity to decide what kind of life is good for them. But such arguments typically neglect both the different roles that cultural groups impose on their members and the context in which persons’ sense of themselves and their capacities are first formed and in which culture is first transmitted – the realm of domestic or family life” (p12, emphasis in original).
The potentially adverse impact of setting aside a space within which group rights take precedence will be disproportionately greater for women: “First, the sphere of personal, sexual, and reproductive life functions as a central focus of most cultures, a dominant theme in cultural practices and rules. Religious or cultural groups often are particularly concerned with ‘personal law’ – the laws of marriage, divorce, child custody, division and control of family property, and inheritance. As a rule, then, the defence of ‘cultural practices’ is likely to have a much greater impact on the lives of women and girls than on those of men and boys, since far more of women’s time and energy goes into preserving and maintaining the personal, familial, and reproductive side of life. Obviously, culture is not only about domestic arrangements, but they do provide a major focus of most contemporary cultures. Home is, after all, where much of culture is practices, preserved, and transmitted to the young. On the other hand, the distribution of responsibilities and power at home has a major impact on who can participate in and influence the more public parts of the cultural life, where rules and regulations about both public and private life are made. The more a culture requires or expects of women in the domestic sphere, the less opportunity they have of achieving equality with men in either sphere” (pp12-13).
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