In 1903 a bronze plaque was mounted inside the pedestal of New York’s Statue of Liberty. Engraved upon it was Emma Lazarus’s sonnet ‘The New Colossus’, which includes what is probably history’s most famous invitation: ‘Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’ The expected treatment of those entrusted to Liberty’s care was explained in a hit play, The Melting Pot , premiered in Washington just five years later: ‘America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! … Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God.’
The millions of immigrants who flooded into the USA in the early decades of the 20th century were given little choice but to submerge themselves in the melting pot triumphantly proclaimed by the play’s author, Israel Zangwill. At this time it was generally taken for granted that the various incoming ethnic groups would undergo a process of integration – ‘Americanization’ – in which their diverse customs and identities would be absorbed into the existing and dominant American culture. At the same time, however, a radically different attitude to the issue was being articulated by an immigrant university lecturer and philosopher, Horace Kallen. He argued that an America in which ethnic, cultural and religious diversity was retained and celebrated would thereby be both enriched and strengthened.
‘E pluribus unum “Out of many [comes] one”’
Motto on the Seal of the United States
Initially a minority view, what Kallen called ‘cultural pluralism’ gathered support as the century wore on, and by the 1960s his approach had become established as the orthodox position within the USA. The image of the melting pot was increasingly replaced by other metaphors, such as a mosaic or (humorously) a salad bowl, in which the overall effect is achieved by parts or ingredients that retain their original character or flavour. The debate over the scope and desirability of cultural pluralism – or ‘multiculturalism’, as it is now generally known – has since developed into one of the most pressing issues of our age.
‘Understand that America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians – into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.’
Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 1908
Imperial imperatives Today, the social challenges which multiculturalism is supposed to address are due mainly to human migration, often economically motivated, but throughout history essentially the same issues have been raised by conquest and the needs of imperial control. Pioneers and unrivalled masters of the assimilationist approach were the Romans, who would move swiftly from a phase of military oppression to the process of Romanization: urban settlements, fitted out with baths and the other trappings of the Roman way of life, were built so that the conquered peoples could live and grow accustomed both to the joys of pax Romana and to its less palatable aspects, such as imperial taxes. The process of assimilation was so successful that, famously, the provincials tended to become more Roman than the Romans themselves – to such an extent that some have argued that the Roman empire did not so much fall as dissolve. A rather different approach, in which different cultures were tolerated and allowed to persist alongside the dominant (conquerors’) culture, was seen in the seventh-century Arab conquests of Syria and Egypt, where the victors did not require the conquered peoples to convert to Islam but allowed both Christians and Jews to retain their faiths – provided they paid a special discriminatory tax.
‘When you live in France, you respect the rules. You don’t have lots of wives, you don’t circumcise your daughters, and you don’t use your bath to slaughter sheep in.’
Nicolas Sarkozy, 2006
Out of the melting pot … Both assimilation and multiculturalism, as responses to ethnic diversity, are based on theoretically liberal principles but differ in their interpretation of equality and how it can and should be realized. Assimilation, as its name suggests, is founded on the notion of equality as sameness. Social justice demands that everyone enjoys the same rights and opportunities; no discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin or culture should be allowed; and so the means by which rights are conferred and protected – citizenship – should be the same for all. This model has been most exhaustively elaborated in France, where the ideal of universal citizenship has been taken to imply that manifestations of ethnic (and other) differences should be suppressed, at least in the public domain. A frequent criticism of the French model is that it assumes that ethnicity and culture are contingent and detachable aspects of a person’s or group’s identity, and that political concepts such as citizenship can somehow remain neutral in the matter of colour and culture. Some object that such a neutral political domain is a myth, and that immigrants are being asked in effect to suppress their own culture and to conform to the dominant values of the host nation. The criticism is given weight by the depth and persistence of social discord among France’s ethnic minorities and by the rhetoric of the French political right (echoed by Nicolas Sarkozy, the president elected in 2007), which habitually invites immigrants ‘to love France or leave it’.
Multiculturalism, too, has grown from liberal roots: it maintains that a plurality of different ways of life should be tolerated or even encouraged, provided they do not adversely affect or interfere with other people. But it has decisively rejected the assimilationist view of equality as sameness. Instead, multiculturalism has taken its lead from the so-called ‘identity politics’ that have transformed other areas of political activism. Just as gays and feminists, for instance, no longer see equality with (respectively) heterosexuals and men as the criterion of success, in a similar way ethnic minorities, including immigrants, are now demanding that their native cultures and values are given equal recognition and allowed to express themselves in their own right and in their own terms. Again, however, this raises doubts over the liberal host society’s role as a neutral matrix into which alien mores can be embedded. At the very least the host must display a degree of toleration that some of the newcomers might wish to deny. And if multiculturalism implies a level of cultural relativism that precludes judgement of minority practices, the liberal host may find itself called upon to protect a range of customs, illiberal by its own lights, such as forced marriage and female genital mutilation. Such tensions at the heart of liberalism are certain to generate alarms and anxieties between the elements that make up a modern multicultural society.
the condensed idea
Melting pot or salad bowl?