Diversifying Societies Pose a Challenge for Democracy

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Yascha Mounk, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, is known for his work on the rise of populism. In his new book. The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, he expounds on the current crises facing liberal democracies.

For most of human history, people lived in small bands or tribes. Wide variation in the ethnicities, cultures, languages, and religions within human groups greatly increased with trade, exploration, colonization, and empire building.

The historical experience of diversity varies from one region to the other. In European countries increased diversity is experienced as a relatively new phenomenon.

For more than two centuries, the nation-state paradigm kept to the idea that
cultural homogeneity was good and desirable, and that diversity was a drawback. Only in the past five or six decades have most democracies embraced outsiders as compatriots on a significant scale.

At the end of the Second World War, fewer than one in twenty-five people living in the United Kingdom had been born abroad. Today, it is one in seven. Sweden was one of the most homogeneous countries in the world. Now one in five Swedish residents have foreign roots. Countries from Austria to Australia have undergone similarly rapid changes.

In Germany and Switzerland, it was mostly driven by the need for unskilled labour in the 1950s and 1960s. In France and the United Kingdom, much of it was a consequence of the dissolution of empires. In Denmark and Sweden, generous asylum laws played a significant role.

But all these countries share a key commonality: None of them intentionally chose to turn themselves into diverse democracies, and so none of them ever developed a coherent plan for how to deal with the key challenges they would face.

Diversity often leads to conflict. Democratic institutions frequently aggravate ethnic and religious tensions. So if diverse democracies are to endure, or even thrive, it would be helpful if they could look back at a long history of trying to forge fair and inclusive societies.

Sadly, that is not the case. Most democracies have a long tradition of ethnic and religious exclusion, and so they have little experience with how to handle the diversity of identity groups that is now their reality.

For much of its history, America has also been less open to immigration from outside of Europe. Only in 1965 did the Immigration and Nationality Act begin to remove the strict limits on immigration from outside the Western Hemisphere. Even then, President Lyndon B. Johnson insisted that this “is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives.”

Pessimism about diversity has become the hallmark of right-wing politics, now increasingly dominated by proponents of what has come to be termed the “great replacement.” The term, coined by French nationalist Renaud Camus, was voiced by Valerie Pecresse and Eric Zemmour, two candidates in the recent French presidential election. White replacement dogma has fuelled politics in Canada as well.

Empirically, we know that demographic changes, usually the result of conquest through war, have occurred throughout history. That’s obvious. Turks “replaced” Greeks in Anatolia, Russians “replaced” Tatars in Crimea, Jews “replaced” Arabs in the new Israel, and of course Europeans “replaced” indigenous peoples in most of the Americas. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was reminded of this in Kamloops recently.

What makes this theory different is the assertion that political elites are consciously trying to overwhelm their societies with pliable newcomers who will support far left policies.

In the United States, the percentage of Americans who identified as “white only” declined from 72 to 62 per cent between 2010 and 2020. It is against the backdrop of this demographic change that “great replacement” rhetoric has accelerated. Claims of an orchestrated “immigrant invasion” have gained legitimacy through the endorsement of some elected officials.

An Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research poll released in May found that about one in three U.S. adults believes an effort is underway to replace U.S.-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.

(The survey was conducted from Dec. 1-23, 2021, using a mix of online and telephone interviews. There were 4,173 adult respondents, and the margin of error is +/-1.96 percentage points.)

Can democratic states with large, and largely separate, cultural minorities find a middle path between bitter communal rivalry and complete assimilation? The future of modern liberal societies depends on the answer.