After Multiculturalism: Response to Anne Sofie Roald

Abstract

Anne Sofie Roald’s critical approach to multiculturalists’ discourse is in many aspects justified. The ‘strong’ version of multiculturalism gets stuck in strange paradoxes: in the name of ‘respect’ and ‘toler-ance’ I defend repression and submission; the ‘weak version of the multiculturalist attitude is in fact a universalist liberalism. But the most relevant political philosophical opposition, I argue, is not the one that Roald defends, namely between (western) ‘freedom’ or ‘autonomy’ and (religious, especially Muslim) tradition and ‘collectivism’. Also in Western democracies freedom is defended out of a particular (collective) horizon. A more honest and more fruitful framing of the problems in multicultural and multi-religious Europe is to describe them in terms of clashes between different cultural prejudices, incarnated meanings and practices.