The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History

by Rita Chin

A history of modern European cultural pluralism, its current crisis, and its uncertain future

In 2010, the leaders of Germany, Britain, and France each declared that multiculturalism had failed in their countries. Over the past decade, a growing consensus in Europe has voiced similar decrees. But what do these ominous proclamations, from across the political spectrum, mean? From the influx of immigrants in the 1950s to contemporary worries about refugees and terrorism , The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe examines the historical development of multiculturalism on the Continent. Rita Chin argues that there were few efforts to institute state-sponsored policies of multiculturalism, and those that emerged were pronounced failures virtually from their inception. She shows that today's crisis of support for cultural pluralism isn't new but actually has its roots in the 1980s.

Chin looks at the touchstones of European multiculturalism, from the urgent need for laborers after World War II to the public furor over the publication of The Satanic Verses and the question of French girls wearing headscarves to school. While many Muslim immigrants had lived in Europe for decades, in the 1980s they came to be defined by their religion and the public's preoccupation with gender relations. Acceptance of sexual equality became the critical gauge of Muslims' compatibility with Western values. The convergence of left and right around the defense of such personal freedoms against a putatively illiberal Islam has threatened to undermine commitment to pluralism as a core ideal. Chin contends that renouncing the principles of diversity brings social costs, particularly for the left, and she considers how Europe might construct an effective political engagement with its varied population.

Challenging the mounting opposition to a diverse society, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe presents a historical investigation into one continent's troubled relationship with cultural difference.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, European History

384 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2017

Reviews

[Jeanette · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is her opinion and little more. All the redefinitions and supposition theory is basically circular. Some of her facts are also wrong. She knows far less about national identity than she does about magical levels of interaction that she believes exist. She has many politico words of value while the real integration of physical location and association of immigrants as lived? This reads like a dissertation but without a core thesis issue. Using female gender equality as the litmus test and some of her pivotal assumptions in her concepts of "democracy"? Some is not all. I don't see much correlation to real assimilation as a common unit of identity building either. Mostly dry history with 4 countries as Europe? It actually seems to counter logic for practical applications that might be optimal for possible cohesion as "one entity". This is written for other academics to assure and explain why a square is really a circle.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I oppose the theory and practice of Euro-multiculturalism as both stupid and suicidal. Thus, when I read Pankaj Mishra’s recent review of Rita Chin’s book in “The New York Times,” it struck me that, in order to be fair, I should read it. All work and no play makes Jack a dull and narrow boy, after all. I was not a fan of the most recent pro-multicultural book I read, James Kirchik’s “The End of Europe,” but I figured that maybe the second time would be a charm. It was not, but this book was interesting, and not dreadful, which is really all one can ask of any pro-multicultural book, since it necessarily has to fight an uphill battle against facts and reason.

Mishra, the author of the also-not-bad “Age of Anger,” lauded this book and bitterly denounced another recent book, Douglas Murray’s “The Strange Death of Europe.” Mishra didn’t say all that much specific about Chin’s book—his review was mostly about how awesome Pankaj Mishra is, and how important it is that Chin’s book recognizes that Europe has always only been about “domination and exclusion,” for which it can only atone by acknowledging that multiculturalism, i.e., the destruction of European civilization, has no limits and no end. So one down vote for Mishra. But let’s take Chin’s book on its own merits.

From its title, we learn that this book’s focus is on an admitted crisis of multiculturalism in Europe. This crisis, we find inside the book, is not one that Chin necessarily sees as real—instead, it is the crisis declared in 2010 by Angela Merkel and David Cameron, echoed by other European leaders, which followed sixty years of increasing immigration into Europe. From its subtitle, we further learn that this is “A History,” which is quite true. There is little analysis here, and not all that much commentary. Thus, while this book serves pretty well as a history of the precise arc of formal, public political action as it relates to immigration into four European countries (Germany, France, the UK, and the Netherlands) between 1950 and 2010, that is all it is. It ignores all other countries; it ignores anything not part of formal political action; and it ignores everything that has happened since 2010. On the other hand, as we’ll see, it does offer one startling and highly relevant insight, so perhaps that alone is worth the price of admission.

Chin is an academic, and she directs her book primarily at academics. But it’s still readable, if dry. The book starts off pretty peppy, though, managing to violate Godwin’s Law by page two, explicitly linking any “collective anxieties about internal ‘others’ ” with necessarily wanting to kill Jews. (Mishra pulls the same dullard routine in his review, equating Murray to Anders Breivik—after all, they are both “surprisingly literate” and don’t see mass immigration as a joy, so they must be the same person—analysis complete!) The academic nature of Chin’s book shows up in the fairly frequent reflexive use of today’s academic cant, especially the term “diversity,” which is nowhere defined or even parameterized, merely used as an upgraded Philosopher’s Stone, turning everything it touches to something better than gold. In the view from Chin’s ivory tower, any immigration, great or small, legal or illegal, from any place or people, creates “diversity,” which “enriches,” though it is never explained in the slightest why or how. Chin’s book is not a book of cost-benefit analysis—costs are never mentioned at all. Those opposed to immigration are merely “antagonistic to diversity,” which is obviously evil. Nothing more. She does say once that “It was only in the process of debating multiculturalism that Europeans began to formulate the first affirmative arguments for social diversity as a core value and policy issue.” But we are never offered a glimpse of even one of those affirmative arguments; like a will-o'-the-wisp they are vaguely seen and then fade away.

The book begins with “The Birth of Multicultural Europe,” which the author locates in the immediate postwar rebuilding period. While Chin only talks with any substance about her four countries of focus, the same story was true throughout Europe, and I think nobody would disagree. Western Europe needed low-skilled, low-cost labor, so workers were imported from countries with an excess of such—both poorer European countries, such as Italy and Yugoslavia, and also Muslim countries, especially Turkey. Immigration was further swelled by the end of colonialism, as former colonial subjects “returned” to the motherland, whether Algerians to France, or Africans, West Asians and East Indians to the UK, or those from Indonesia to Holland. Colonial immigrants, of course, were expected to stay, but were relatively small in number—we forget, in these days when Angela Merkel invites millions of migrants to flood Europe, that Enoch Powell’s fear, ridiculed as overblown, was that the immense sum of 50,000 immigrants per year would be allowed to enter Britain. All this immigration was a new thing—despite attempts by confused people like Mishra, who claims with a straight face that “Persian, Arab and Chinese” influences are just as important to European history as “Greek, Roman, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon,” both mass immigration and any immigration by alien cultures were wholly new in these countries. They did have national minorities of various kinds, but Chin, at least, acknowledges modern immigration was unprecedented in quantity and quality.

The author spends quite a bit of time delineating the specifics of each country’s approach to this torrent. Much of this is technical, throwing around acronyms representing various government bureaus, but her key point is that at no point was there any public declaration by any branch of government, anywhere on the political spectrum, in favor of immigration on principle. Quite the contrary—in every country, “guest workers” were always formally and explicitly expected by those in charge to be temporary inhabitants, though for the most part not only did none leave, they were allowed to, and did, summon their families and relations as well. Furthermore, except in France, immigrants were explicitly expected to acculturate, or at least conform to the local culture; there was no concept that immigrant cultures were in any way something desirable to preserve or that could add value to Europe. These approaches continued through the 1960s—even as anti-immigrant feeling grew in some areas, governments had no interest in dialing back immigration, for various interlocking reasons that ranged from simple economic expediency to not wanting to anger the immigrants’ countries of origin.

And why was restricting immigration not acceptable to the elite, even after the early 1970s, when colonial immigration had ended and all agreed there was no further need for guest workers, so that ideally they should all go home immediately? Chin, logically enough, ascribes it in Germany to the ideology of anti-racism that took hold after World War II, with somewhat weaker analogues in other countries. In France, she ascribes it to similar ideological reasons on the left, and on a desire to encourage immigrant communities to go home, to make which possible they should not assimilate, on the right. Whatever the reason, in each of her four countries, the reaction by those in power, left or right, was to increasingly vigorously endorse some variation of a policy of strong “multiculturalism”—celebrating immigrant cultures as necessarily no worse than the culture of the country into which they had been invited, if not better, and abandoning any effort to make immigrants conform to the local culture. And they permitted more and more immigrants in, while publicly talking about the need to restrict further immigration. Not surprisingly, in both Germany and France, any actual attempt to restrict immigration by the legislature was immediately ended by the courts, who invented new rights belonging to immigrants, such as the German Federal Constitutional Court ruling that immigrants had a brand new “reliance right” that enabled them to stay as long as they cared to, and ruling this a “human right.”

Beneath Chin’s narrative, though, the reader can sense strange, unacknowledged currents, gurgling like running water under thin ice. Thus, when discussing attempts from the early 1970s onward to create a new dogma of multiculturalism, Chin says “Fewer [government officials] still were willing to discuss openly how the protracted residence of multiethnic labor forces might impact or even alter their societies. Indeed, the government officials who addressed the various policy issues generated by the inflow of foreign workers operated almost entirely behind the scenes, striving to make their initiatives largely opaque to ordinary citizens. Above all, European leaders did not want these initial efforts at multicultural management to draw the notice of curious journalists or become targets of public scrutiny.” Such a profoundly anti-democratic approach should occasion question and comment, you would think, from an author purportedly wholly committed to liberal democracy. Nope. This, of course, is the usual “democracy” in “liberal democracy”—the people get what they want, except when it is deemed not be to be acceptable by the elite. In fact, Chin later in the book explicitly demands less democracy—“It is simply irresponsible for European states to allow significant segments of their population to be driven by nostalgia for homogeneity.” Off to the re-education camps!

So, why the elite should want to conceal their actions goes totally unaddressed. In a similar vein, Chin notes in passing something that Murray makes much more explicit—at all times since at least 1960, very substantial majorities in every European country have vigorously supported sharp restrictions on immigration, and they have always been ignored by their political leaders. Enoch Powell was hugely popular, by far the most popular Conservative politician in the country, yet was forced to retire when he dared speak. It is not a coincidence that the only two people named in this book as robustly opposing immigration, Powell and Ray Honeyford, were both immediately and permanently silenced. Sometimes, politicians paid lip service to their constituents’ desires, but in practice always did the opposite, in every country. In combination with the concealment, the only logical conclusion is that the elites wanted to force on the rest of their countries more immigration for some other reason.

And what could that reason be? Again, Chin ignores this question, but Murray parses this closely, adducing several drivers of this elite push for ever-greater immigration. These are claims that immigrants are good for the economies of their target countries; that immigrants are necessary to maintain the welfare state because Europeans have stopped having children; and that there is some moral or cultural imperative to accept immigrants. The first is silly, as Murray shows. The second is actually true, though Murray tries to deny it. The third is roughly the same as Chin’s contention that diversity is inherently wonderful, and to the extent there is any discourse on this issue, is the argument used by the pro-multicultural side, because its protean nature makes it impossible to counter, and because it allows the advocate to scream “racist” in substitution of reasoning. But in this book, none of these arguments are even outlined.

Chin next offers two long, tedious chapters viewing Euro-multiculturalism through the lens of oppression theory, in which any opposition is always a “backlash,” and diversity spreads a diffuse golden dust over any possible problems resulting from immigration. Margaret Thatcher—racist. Any talk of national decline—racist. The Falklands War—racist. Any criticism of Islam—racist. Any talk of national culture—racist. Suggesting Muslims were mean to Salman Rushdie—racist. The Rushdie affair, according to Chin, was also the time in modern Europe when the “backlash” against multiculturalism went mainstream, because it was followed by demands in France that Muslim women not wear the headscarf (racist) and that Muslim women have equal rights (racist to suggest they do not in Islam, and don’t you know that not all women “experience subjugation” the same way, racist? Modern European women are all oppressed by the white patriarchy; Muslim women cannot be oppressed by Muslims, because all Muslims are victims.) And so on, until the reader nods off entirely (kept awake for a few minutes by chuckling at Chin’s accounts of leftists attacking leftists for ideological failures, in a chaotic hell of Trotskyite purging).

But then the reader jerks awake, because Chin finally scores a relevant insight at the core of all this. Namely, that Europeans, in their “backlash” against multiculturalism, didn’t rise up to support the glory and grandeur that made Europe the originator of everything good in modern life, from electricity to the rule of law. Quite the contrary. Instead, they formed as their idol a corrosive ethic of total sexual freedom, and then used that as the new touchstone of whether any particular immigrant community should be accepted. Chin refers to this as “the epitome of democracy itself, as democracy writ large,” and she is very much of mixed mind about it—cognitive dissonance would not be too strong a term. Like all of her class and politics, she worships total sexual autonomy, but she also sees how it is used to hold immigrants, that is, Muslim immigrants, to a standard they have no wish to meet, and since Muslims are a victim class, Chin recoils from any suggestion that they be forced to adhere to anything.

Thus, the Dutch require devout Muslims, as a condition of citizenship, to watch films celebrating homosexuality and public nudity. Chin refers to this sort of thing as a “use of sexual democracy to construct a positive notion of national belonging.” My bet is devout Muslims don’t see it that way (nor do devout Christians). She cites a political theorist, “sexual freedom becomes the form of freedom that comes to stand for all.” She notes “this particular model of democratic governance replaces—or even trumps—other freedoms and foundational principles.” In other words, you can have democracy, but only as long as it is directed at total sexual autonomy, otherwise the state will stamp on you. A shorter, and older, term for all this would be “moral decay and decadence.”

So we are left with a Europe where multiculturalism and unlimited immigration is not opposed by promoting what made Europe great, but rather by promoting liquid modernity, with the only objection to immigrants being that they might place some brake on the total autonomy of the individual. This aligns closely with one of Ryszard Legutko’s complaints about so-called liberal democracy, so it is not original to Chin, but I have never seen it made by someone on the Left. (It would have been interesting had Mishra addressed this part of Chin’s book, but he was too busy stroking his beard and trying to look super-intelligent.) Chin furthermore correctly notes that many so-called conservatives have, explicitly or in effect, adopted this use of sexual autonomy as a touchstone, because, afraid of being called racist, they see no other coherent way to oppose immigration on principle. This leads to such loathsome scenes as Sarkozy celebrating abortion as a human right, in order to beat immigrants around the head with their failure to be adequately French. A man from 1950 granted a vision of this modern scene would immediately check himself into an asylum, thinking it an insane dystopia.

Finally, Chin notes the dissonance all this caused on the Left, as those committed for decades to “cultural relativism and pluralism” found that, after all, not all cultures are equal—if emancipation and autonomy are everything, it must be true that any culture not devoted to total emancipation and autonomy is inferior. That pop-pop-pop sound you hear is the heads of leftist thinkers exploding all over Europe. Chin herself draws no firm conclusions (although she nods in the direction of restricting sexual freedom to give more power to immigrants), because she can’t. Not even God can square a circle, and the Left is trapped in a hell of their own creation, into which they have dragged the rest of Europe.

At the end of the day, though, Chin herself denies there is any crisis of multiculturalism. The 2010 pronouncements of Merkel and Cameron notwithstanding, Muslim immigration has hugely expanded since then, at the deliberate wish and with the open encouragement of all the European elites. For reasons I cannot fathom, Chin mentions events since 2010 in only one bland sentence, even though they definitively prove both a continuation and an expansion of the past sixty years of European government policies. Chin’s point seems to be “nothing should be done, and anyway, nothing can be done, so let’s celebrate!” And she’s right, of course—short of massive violence, nothing can be done. Sometimes, there is no solution. Certainly, if the people who will defend the actual bases of European civilization, Christianity most of all, are reduced to a tiny number, and the titanic struggle is between two giants, one a bundle of contradictions with no core belief other than total sexual autonomy, shrinking every day as it kills its children, and the other giant is retrograde but growing, muscular, and self-confident, we might as well write off the continent, for there is no future for the rest of the world there.

[John Plowright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notwithstanding Macron’s defeat of Le Pen in the French Presidential election, Mark Rutte besting Geert Wilders in the Dutch general election and Alexander Van der Bellen beating Norbert Hofer to become Austrian President, there are many respected commentators, like Niall Ferguson, who argue that Europe is experiencing a major political realignment in which the centre-left has imploded and social democracy is in terminal decline, as the old coalition between progressive elites and the proletariat has been sundered.

According to this analysis the wedge that has driven these two apart is the issue of national identity, with centre-left elites too liberal on immigration and too much in love with multiculturalism, whilst their erstwhile working-class supporters revile both. Multiculturalism certainly tends to be a very dirty word on the Right, as illustrated by Allison Pearson’s 17 May 2017 ‘Daily Telegraph’ article about the Rochdale child-grooming scandal, headed ‘Poor white girls were sacrificed for multiculturalism’.

Angela Merkel has done more than anyone else to focus attention on these questions both by her 2010 Potsdam speech which declared that the attempt to build a multicultural society in Germany had “utterly failed”, and by her 2015 open-door policy towards immigrants fleeing Middle Eastern war zones.

Rita Chin’s ‘The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe’ is thus a very timely book and one of its strengths is that it provides a very clear pathway through the various meanings that have been attached over the years to the terms ‘multicultural’ and ‘multiculturalism’. This requires her tracing the origins of these concepts to the United States. She makes a mistake, however, in stating that the ‘Manchester Guardian’ was the first European publication to refer to multiculturalism, as the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ awards that honour to the ‘Stornoway Gazette’ in 1973 – a mistake which is all the more surprising given that Chin has clearly consulted the OED.

Chin’s primary focus is on Great Britain, France and Germany, with Switzerland and the Netherlands sometimes being drawn into the discussion to illustrate or support her argument. Her aim is to chart the history of “the migration of non-Europeans to Europe after World War II and the massive upheavals … that accompanied that process.” This is certainly ambitious but shouldn’t any study of multiculturalism in Europe also take some account of the substantial transfers of population that occurred within Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War Two? After all, it was this refugee crisis that helped shape the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees. It’s true that Chin briefly mentions internal “others” but this part of the story of multiculturalism deserves somewhat greater attention.

Chin is herself a first generation immigrant to the U.S. and her heart is clearly in the right place in seeing diversity as enriching and lamenting the way in which immigrants are routinely demonized. She also has interesting things to say about topics such as the way in which Islam has come to be widely regarded as the principal obstacle to the acceptance of other cultures, with elements on the Right sometimes even appealing to gender (presenting the veil as an instrument of oppression) in order to mask their own intolerance.

In short, there’s much of interest in Chin’s analysis but it does suffer from occasional errors (such as claiming that all 7/7 bombers were “British born sons of Pakistani immigrants”) and surprising blind spots. It certainly seems odd that a book so much concerned with open doors and open borders never once refers by name to the 1985 Schengen Agreement, let alone the transitional arrangements regarding free movement of workers from Romania and Bulgaria following their accession to the EU on 1 January 2007.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Across much of the West there is growing discontent about borders, immigration, and multiculturalism. Turmoil and unrest have driven thousands upon thousands away from their homelands. Some in the West want to welcome refugees and asylum-seekers with open arms but this influx is opposed by others who question why the West is obligated to aid people demanding to come into the country. Even those who come here legally, such as international students, are witnessing their ability to study in the West curbed by more restrictions.

In The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History Rita Chin chronicles multiculturalism in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and to lesser extents, in Switzerland and the Netherlands, beginning in the post-World War II era up to 2010. As other reviewers have complained already, the book’s structure is frustrating as Chin jumps from country to country throughout and within the chapters; I wish she had arranged the book so that each chapter was dedicated to one country as this would have made it much easier to follow.

In the aftermath of World War II, Europe began to import thousands of guest workers not only from other European countries but also from across the globe and often from former colonies. This was a “reversal” of the preceding order of things, where (at least in the British case):

since the slave trade, the movement of people had been based on a racial separation between European metropole and empire. Black and Asian people were seen as belonging to the empire, but not Britain. While British leaders understood the empire (and later the Commonwealth) to be multiracial, they most certainly did not view their own domestic or social worlds this way (p. 34).

Officials naively believed that these guest workers would temporarily fill in a labour shortage and then, once they had earned enough money, return to their homelands. Chin explains “From a purely economic perspective, the guest worker model appeared beneficial to all parties. Recruiting states obtained desperately needed manpower, but without the social problems associated with integrating foreign populations. Sending countries alleviated high levels of unemployment in their own economies. And guest workers earned better wages in a stronger currency and were able to build a nest egg for financial security upon their return home” (p. 51).

But the guest workers did not return home. Instead, many of them eventually sent for their families to join them. Chin recounts that:

In retrospect, the mid-1970s should have been a collective moment of European reckoning. The nearly twenty-five-year scramble to procure foreign workers had resulted in the permanent settlement of transient labour that was increasingly nonwhite, non-Christian, and non-European. Temporary guest work…now began to resemble long-term immigration (p. 82).

Much of the saga that Chin records is of these countries’ attempts to integrate new ethnic minorities into their populaces while also wrestling with just how much they should expect minorities to conform to the national culture.

One of the more interesting models was the Dutch strategy of “pillarization.” Chin relates that:

According to the original model, each religious (Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish) and ideological (socialist, liberal, humanist) community or “pillar” had its own set of institutions: schools, hospitals, social welfare agencies, trade unions, political parties, media outlets, voluntary associations, and leisure organizations. As a rule, the state did not interfere with the institutions of the “pillars,” giving communities free reign to cultivate their particular identities and address their specific needs. The state’s position, moreover, was unaligned: it was supposed to treat all communities in precisely the same ways; and its policies were to be religiously and socially neutral in order to be acceptable to all pillars. Unity and cohesion within this system of “institutionalized diversity” emerged through regular meetings of the pillars’ elites - meetings designed to discuss issues of common concern and build coalitions for decisions affecting the whole (pp. 109-110).

Chin credits the conservative German politician Alfred Dregger in 1982 with being the figure to use religion “to define an entire national group within European political discourse” when he declared that the growing numbers of Turkish immigrants were fundamentally incompatible with German culture because of the Turks’ strong adherence to Islam (p. 158-160). This wariness - even hostility - towards Muslims in Europe became even more widespread following the 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and most of Chin’s attention becomes fixated on Muslim immigrants after this point. When Rushdie's novel was released, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a "fatwa" against the author, calling for his death. Demonstrations were held against the novel and two of the novels' translators were attacked, including the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi who was murdered in 1991. Chin writes:

the Rushdie affair introduced a number of important wrinkles to the national conversations on postwar immigration. For many Western Europeans, this was the moment when Muslim immigrants with diverse national origins merged into a single, distinctive category. This was also the moment when Islam was first identified as unbending, an intolerant religion that explained Muslim immigrants’ failure to properly integrate. One might argue, in fact, that this was the pivotal juncture when Islam itself came to be seen as a central threat to “liberal values,” not just in Britain, but across all the major Western European powers (p. 190).

Europeans on both the left and the right came to fear that practicing Muslims in Europe would inherently disavow individual autonomy and “sexual democracy,” along with other values and virtues that had only been garnered by the Enlightenment. Islam was viewed as backwards and oppressive towards women, with headscarves becoming a major battlefront in the culture war (even when Muslim women affirmed their own decision to wear a headscarf). Curiously, even some conservative politicians were so strident in their anti-Muslim rhetoric that they were willing to laud a woman’s right to choose an abortion as superior to Islamic teachings on womanhood. Islam was also rebuked for its opposition to homosexuality and other non-heteronormative expressions of sexuality (again, some conservatives appeared to side with the LGBTQ+ community over practicing Muslims in this case; indeed, the pundit Douglas Murray, himself a gay man, is demonstrative of this). Chin states:

For critics on the left…championing sexual democracy led in some strange and unexpected directions. Most notably…it led growing numbers of self-identified left liberals to turn away from the older ideals of cultural relativism and pluralism….Where older forms of political allegiance had often divided along the lines of individualism versus pluralism (or inclusion versus exclusion), the European left’s emphatic commitment to defending individual freedoms at the expense of immigrant tolerance threatened to scramble, or at least complicate, the older political calculus…as the twentieth century came to a close, an increasing number of leftist commentators found themselves in an unexpected position of championing notions of freedom by ascribing illiberal behaviors to entire groups of people. Except that in this case, the characteristics now deemed illiberal seemed to derive from gender, sexuality, and religion, as opposed to the older biological essences that had previously served as the political weaponry of the right. And this reliance on cultural arguments to mark fundamental differences between Europeans and Muslim immigrants made leftists less self-conscious of how close to the right they had moved (pp. 235-236).

Chin’s book is rather dry at times, as well as being repetitive. Although it is clear that she is supportive of multiculturalism, it is odd that the voices of ethnic minorities are rarely heard in this book. The vast majority of her analysis is on political operatives and while she does spend some time giving figures like Kenan Malik and Ambalavaner Sivanandan space to critique aspects of multiculturalism, one doesn’t find too many conservative Muslim Europeans in Chin’s work.

I wish that there was more diversity in Chin’s selection of European countries to assess. Certainly, the UK, France, and Germany are major nations but to me it would have been more interesting - and even constructive - if she had compared and contrasted these Western European countries with those that for decades were behind the Iron Curtain. Indeed, for a book that explores multiculturalism in Europe at length, the reader is left without any knowledge of how Eastern European countries managed immigration and multiculturalism both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As well, due to sheer geography, the UK, France, and Germany are less at risk for the mass arrival of fleeing foreigners but their larger populations also mean that immigrants are less likely to impact national culture. Western liberals criticize Viktor Orban for his strict stance on refugees but Hungary is much closer to the Middle East than the UK, France, and Germany; Hungary’s population of 9.59 million would be more affected by the arrival of, say, 200,000 migrants compared to the UK (68.35 million), France (68.29 million), and Germany (83.28 million).

Chin’s book is informative, though it could have been more concise and certainly structured in a clearer, less convoluted way.

[The Schmollands · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rita Chin's work unpacks myriad issues with both the phenomenon and labeling of said phenomenon. It's a well-researched and reasonably-presented history, just as its title proclaims. But in utilizing such a loaded term ("crisis"), Chin left me waiting for the entirety of the book for at least some approach toward such a characterization. It's clear by her research and presentation that she believes the multicultural label is only as impactful as its context. But to have seemingly no thesis as to the value of multiculturalism in the various contexts she presents. I did appreciate, however, her approach in revealing the complicated history of both ends of the political spectrum and their own characterizations of multiculturalism. At best, it seems both progressives and conservatives are always a step behind, unable to truly appreciate what the impact of their respective efforts are in approaching multiculturalism. It simply felt that with so much of her effort into unpacking this difficult and complex history, Chin would have helped her readers with a thesis or some insight into the enterprise in the future.

[Lara Hoffmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides an interesting overview of developments with regard to migration in - certainly not Europe- but four European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands). I found that the clear distinction between the differences in how these countries approached and approach migration is the most interesting aspect of the book. However, it mostly reads as a retelling of event and hardly even mentions anything that happens after 2010.

[Marcus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Entirely unrelated to any political opinion, I found this book structured in a really frustrating way. Information would be repeated between chapters, the timeline jumped around, and I found it difficult to follow a consistent throughline. There's a lot of interesting stuff here, but I can't help but feel the same information may be found elsewhere in a better package.

[Jaylani Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really respect her work on this topic but I wish she could really pay attention to some detail, for example, she said that Aftab Ali was Pakistani, but in fact he was a Bangladeshi.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great historical and contemporary commentary.

[Marie · Rating 1 out of 5]

There has never been a moment in which Europeans did not define themselves against some group perceived as 'other'.