The year 2016 didn’t begin with a bang for multi-culturism. In fact, it managed to make the biggest dent, in decades, in the very idea of a multicultural society. Gangs of young men of ‘Arab or North African appearance’ assaulted women gathered at Cologne’s central railway station, in Germany, to celebrate New Year’s Eve. At least 600 women have filed complaints in Cologne, of petty crime, sexual molestation and assault.
Anyone, and here I include myself, who has lived in the Arab world will tell you that the night of December 31 in Cologne, is by no means a racist conspiracy against the tide of refugees coming to Germany. Sadly, for many Middle East men, women in the public space, and even in their own private space, are fair game to be approached in malls, taxis or just on the street (a practice called kerb-crawling) for sexual favours, to have telephone numbers and requests for sex written on paper and thrown at them, to have lewd comments made about their bodies and clothes, to be brushed against, to be pinched and to be groped. The air-conditioned walls of offices fare little better. If you work for a small office with no safeguards, chances are you will be propositioned if not molested. And if you happen to work as a maid, life is almost certainly intolerable.
These cultural norms are at odds with western society. Not that there aren’t lecherous men in western societies but there, a woman can walk the streets without fear of being groped. Her public space is protected by equality laws and the general understanding that her body is hers alone unless she consents to having it touched. Is it really possible then, to build a multi-cultural society when customs, values and ideologies are so dramatically different?
The very idea of multi-cultural societies, in the western world, is a relatively new one. Colonialism might have thrown different races together, but the implications of that experiment were very clear: indigenous populations were coolies, savages, delinquents and feckless layabouts whose only salvation was the civilising hand of empire and its ‘benevolent paternalism.’
With the collapse of European empires, at least France and Britain were forced to absorb previously colonised people into their populations. When Africans, West Indians and Asians first started settling in Britain, it was expected they would conform to the norms of a largely homogenised population. It was only later than new ideas on how societies can function were introduced by seminal thinkers such as Labour MP Roy Jenkins, who in 1966, proposed not ‘a flattening process of assimilation’ but equal opportunity, cultural diversity and mutual tolerance.
That ‘cultural diversity’ seemed to work all through the ‘Eighties and ‘Nineties, not because a liberal utopia of tolerance had been engendered but rather because a very illiberal version of society had been created instead; one that could live in disparate, mini-worlds of their own, untouched by interaction. Different values regarding gender equality, homosexuality, sexual liberty, religiosity, democracy, food habits and even clothing could co-exist because beyond office hours, the streets darkened and everyone retreated into their own habitats. This was a society undisturbed by their neighbours’ language, creed, customs or basic needs.
Today, the shattered shards of multiculturalism lie scattered all across Europe. The rise of right-wing movements such as Pegida in Germany, Britain First in the UK and the National Front in France grow ever shrill in their calls for nativist ‘Christian values.’ Even mainstream political parties are in a foul mood. Just this month, British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced the possibility of deportation if Muslim women fail an English language test, after being in the country for two years. Cameron has also vowed his support to institutions which ban the veil.
It is important to address these issues. Not being able to speak English alienates women from society. Being veiled, being accompanied by a male, being chaste, being dutiful, these are all contrary to the values of gender equality and independence. It subjects women to a lifetime of missed opportunities and discrimination.
But words like Christian, western, liberal and secular, disturbingly harken back to that old imperial hubris of everything non-European being unclean and uncivilized. It assumes there is nothing to be learned from other societies. What we need instead is governments talking of universal values.
We live in a small theatre now; the distance between us reduced by social media. We are forced to acknowledge other lives, different from our own. We are more aware of what feels instinctively to be more moral, more just, more deserving as being upheld as a value. We know there is no room in our world for women to lead degraded lives, for homosexuals to be put to death, for poets and philosophers and apostates to be tortured, for child brides, for genital mutilation, for racial inequality or caste discrimination.
The traditional idea of a multi-cultural society where everyone led their own life, sheltered from change and confrontation is truly dead. What needs to emerge in its place is a new society that talks to each other and finds ways of defining a universal morality.
Selma Carvalho is the author of A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865 - 1980. Between 2011 - 2014, she headed the Oral Histories of British Goans project in London
