Understanding 'Death of Multiculturalism' discourse means understanding multiculturalism

摘要

Marinus Ossewaarde looks at some 'death of multiculturalism' discourses in Western Europe (specifically in the Netherlands, Germany and Britain) in some newspapers in a recent eight month period (Ossewaarde 2014). His project is structured around certain distinctions. For example, he is mindful of national distinctiveness and makes a distinction between at least two types of newspapers (liberal-conservative newspapers and tabloids). Yet, this is combined with a puzzling lack of distinction in relation to politicians. His concern with emphasising the commonalities amongst people he disapproves of is such that it leaves him analysing Geert Wilders, the founding leader of the populist, Party for Freedom, and David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party as variants on a common theme. Of course he is aware that Wilders has compared the Quran to Hitler's Mein Kampf and called for a cessation of Muslim migration to the Netherlands and that Cameron would never do anything similar. But he sees opinion-formers like the latter as simply being moderate versions of what Wilders stand for, perhaps as being dupes or 'useful idiots' to the extremists. The positing of such a relationship is not of course new. One thinks of how, for example, cold war warriors used to characterise social democrats in relation to communists. Or, indeed, coming close to Ossewarde's subject, how Islamophobes characterise Muslims as basically a mild or extreme versions of the same pathology.