The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britian

Kundnani, Arun. (2007). London & Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.

Kundnani's case study of multiculturalism in Britain provides keen insight into evaluating multiculturalism policies within the North American context. Kundnani argues that the discourses of globalization and the war on terror have brought British multiculturalism under attack as fostering separatism. Central to this attack, however, is not multiculturalism itself, but integration policies inscribed in it. Kundnani notes that this attach singled out young Muslims after 9/11 and demanded them to subsume their cultural differences within Britishness in the process of their integration. According to Kundnani, this demand for 'integration' is in fact 'assimilation' because it is grounded in the idea that Muslims are inherently at odd with modern values and thus needed to be forcibly integrated.

Kundnani contests that this 'bogus integrationism' along with the state's drive for 'community cohesion' signaled the death of multiculturalism and the rise of managed migration as immigration policy: regulating the supply of disposable migrant workers into the country while recruiting skilled workers abroad to supplement national shortage.

Through managed migration together with community cohesion, Kundnani maintains, a state is emerging that "fuses absolute powers and absolute fear, in order to create absolute conformity" (p. 8). Arguing that universal human rights are undermined as a consequence of this conformity, Kundnani calls for fresh debate on multiculturalism.