Definitional Debates, Mechanisms and Canada: Comment on Will Kymlicka’s article: “Solidarity in Diverse Societies”

© L p i Does immigrant-origin diversity undermine states’ willingness to engage in broad social redistribution, from enacting “living” minimum wage laws and progressive taxation, to providing public benefits in order to mitigate economic inequality? In asking this question, Will Kymlicka (2015), one of the staunchest defenders of multiculturalism, takes seriously the question of whether recognition of cultural, ethnic and religious diversity comes at the expense of redistribution. Not surprisingly, Kymlicka makes a strong pitch for a multicultural welfare state, which he distinguishes from neoliberal multiculturalism, exclusionary welfare chauvinism or assimilatory neoliberalism (Kymlicka, 2015). My own normative view – and my empirical research – is in strong support with Kymlicka’s (2015), position on the value of combining recognition and redistribution. I also agree with his skepticism as to whether existing data reveal any evidence that multicultural policies generate or exacerbate welfare state retrenchment, and in his prescription, namely, the construction of multicultural, liberal nationalism (Bloemraad, 2006; Bloemraad, 2012). Multicultural nationalism is presumably distinct from alternative national solidarities around more exclusionary, homogeneous cultural identities, or a neoliberal, cosmopolitan approach to global membership that urges the erasure of nationalism altogether. Given my sympathies, this commentary is not so much a challenge to Kymlicka’s (2015), normative argument as a social scientific appraisal of how he does not go far enough in elaborating the mechanisms presumed to produce the progressive’s dilemma. This is problematic, because it means that Kymlicka also does not theorize sufficiently an answer to the question of why multicultural, liberal nationalism might address the mechanisms that erode the welfare state in a context of diversity. I will attempt to sketch out some possible answers and, in doing so, I will quibble with the terminology of “solidarity” as compared to “social membership,” both terms used by Kymlicka in his article. I engage in this definitional debate not to split hairs, but to elucidate some silences in the redistribution/recognition trade-off that need to be addressed moving forward. I finish by speculating how much experience with the Canadian case, the epitome of solidarity through multicultural nationalism in the global North, shapes (and perhaps blinds) the views of both Kymlicka and myself on what is possible elsewhere.