What are the main threats to diverse societies and why is the timely recognition of these threats more important in liberal democracies? Can we or should we overcome the framework of methodological nationalism when we talk about the future of diverse democracies? Is the nation-state still the optimal scale for political action? How can diverse societies coexist with democratic institutions and governance structures on both the subnational and the supernational scales? How can the metaphor of the public park apply to diverse democracies of today?
Guests featured in this episode:
Yascha Mounk, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and also professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. As a public intellectual, he is widely known for his work on the crisis of democracy and the defense of liberalism. He is a regular contributor to The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Foreign Affairs. Yascha is also the author of 4 books, the autobiographically inspired Stranger in My Own Country, The Age of Responsibility – Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State, The People versus Democracy – Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, and most recently, The Great Experiment – Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, published earlier this year.
GLOSSARY
What is the Replacement Theory?
(00:3:20 or p.1 in the transcript)
A demographic conspiracy theory popular among white nationalists in the United States and Europe that speculates that falling birthrates among white, native-born Christians, together with a growing population of nonwhite, non-Christian immigrants, whose arrival is believed to be encouraged or orchestrated by globalist elites with the goal of undermining national identities, will, if unchecked, result in the decline of white European culture or its dominance. First recorded in 1900–05 as a medical term; current sense dates to 2015–20; partly based on L’Abécédaire de l’in-nocence (The Abecedarium of No-Harm, 2010) and Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement, 2011), books by Renaud Camus, French novelist, white nationalist, and conspiracy theorist. Source:
What are the salad bowl and melting pot theory?
(00:37:33 or p.10 in the transcript)
The salad bowl model is a metaphor for an inclusive, multicultural society. The idea of a melting pot is a popular metaphor, but it emphasizes the unification of parts into a single whole. The salad bowl concept focuses on individual cultures and proposes a society with many distinct identities. The salad bowl model is the most common concept in Canada and suggests that the country is becoming more cosmopolitan as more people migrate to the country. However, unlike the concept of a melting pot, the salad bowl concept is not homogenous. The concept is more politically correct, and it promotes a society that has many pure cultures rather than a single, unified one. The salad bowl concept also suggests cultural integration. While the melting pot concept promotes a multicultural society, the salad bowl model encourages different cultures to coexist. It juxtaposes the various American cultures, instead of blending them into a single, homogeneous culture. This model emphasizes the need for shared culture and is more politically correct than the melting pot model, which implies that ethnic groups might lose their culture. Source:
Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:
• Central European University: CEU
• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD
• The Podcast Company: Novel
Follow us on social media!
• Central European University: @CEU
• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @AHDCentre
Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks!
S.R: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges that democracies around the world are facing today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of the Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
I'm really pleased to welcome today, Yascha Mounk, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Professor of Practice at Johns Hopkins University; a regular contributor to "The Atlantic," "The New York Times," and "Foreign Affairs," he's also a fellow podcaster and a public intellectual well-known for his work on the crises of democracy and his defense of liberalism.
Yascha is the author of several books, among which I'd like to just mention a couple here, "The People vs. Democracy," with an interesting subtitle, "Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It", and most recently, "The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure" . That's the book published earlier this year that makes a strong case for embracing diversity despite all the difficulties that this could entail and that is the book which will be the focus of our conversation.
We seem to be standing at a historical juncture when the progress many democracies have made in embracing diversity over the course of the last several decades may easily unravel. The Great Experiment, as Yascha will explain, is not inevitably destined to succeed, but pessimism regarding its future is politically fraught with risk.
What are the main threats to diverse societies, and why is the timely recognition of these even more important in liberal democracies? I would also like to discuss Yascha's critical analysis of some fashionable radical leftist positions from the normative perspective of engaged, empathetic universalism. Can we, or should we, overcome the framework of methodological nationalism when we talk about the future of diverse democracies?
So, is the nation-state still the optimal scale for political action? How can diverse societies coexist with democratic institutions and governance structures on both the subnational, as well as the supernational scales? Welcome, Yascha. It's a great pleasure having you on the podcast with me today.
Y.M: Thank you so much. I really look forward to this conversation even more after getting this little preview of what you'll push me on.
S. R: So, your new book makes a passionate plea for not only embracing but also defending the diversity of democracies. Your definition of diverse democracies, and I'll come back on this, focuses primarily on the rapid changes in the ethnic and religious composition of various societies, for which you use the shorthand term, The Great Experiment, to emphasize that these demographic transformations the world over have not been consciously designed by anybody, unlike the discourse of the far-right on the Great Replacement, for example.
But these demographic transformations are unforeseen, maybe even unintended consequences, of a wide range of historically and locally quite specific policies. So, let's first talk a little bit about what you see as the main pitfalls of these democracies. Where does the danger lie? Because as we know, there is a fiction of homogeneity about the nation-state and of the national polity, which is a fiction nurtured by many, not only far-right discourses, but also quite mainstream political discourses, which presuppose a permanent division between outsiders and insiders, however, we may want to define these two categories. And so, let's begin with your diagnosis of where the problems could lie.
Y.M: Thank you so much for setting out sort of the key premise of the book. There are some democracies that have been very diverse since the founding and which are in many ways premised on trying to manage ethnic and particularly religious diversity from the start, India comes to mind. But most democracies in the world were founded in one of two ways, either they were founded at a moment when they were more homogeneous than at most junctures in the history, and in which they define themselves by that homogeneity.
Germany, where I grew up, in many ways, Austria, where your wonderful university is now located are examples of that. There's another kind of set of democracies, like one from which I'm speaking today, the United States, which have always been diverse. At the moment of the founding of the American Republic, there was, of course, a great variety of people in the country, including Native Americans and enslaved African Americans. But those groups were not fully part of American democracy because they were excluded and subjugated in at times, in extreme ways.
And so, what’s new in most democracies in the world today is a situation in which you have deep ethnic and religious diversity. And we are at least trying to treat members of all these different groups as full citizens and as true equals. Thus, I call it The Great Experiment because there's very little historical precedent for that. You know, I think the temptation is to say this shouldn't be so difficult. Why is it so hard not to be a vegan, not to hate your neighbor, not to reject somebody because they have a different religion or a different color of skin?
But I think when you look seriously at social science and when you look seriously at history, you recognize that these forms of ethnic and religious diversity do pose a very significant challenge. And that's the case for three reasons. The first is a psychological instinct, that most human beings have an instinct to form groups and to favor the members of those groups over outsiders, over anybody who does not belong to that group.
The second difficulty is that in most of history, of course, the thing that activated this in-group favoritism, did tend to fall along a number of lines of ascriptive identity. Not every single time, but many of the worst crimes in human history, many of the worst forms of pogroms and intercommunal violence, of war, and civil war, of genocide and ethnic cleansing did pit the members of one ethnic or racial group, of one religion, sometimes of one culture, or nation, or a language group against another.
And so, we see that in the annals of history, this kind of in-group mechanism in the context of the sort of ethnic and religious diversity that is now so common in our democracies has particular potential for conflict. I'm a great believer in democracy. I was tempted to think that democratic institutions could help us solve these problems. And in certain respects, when you understand democratic institutions in the right way, I think they can, but there's also a respect in which the basic democratic mechanism actually makes it harder to keep ethnically and religiously diverse democracies together.
Because if you're living in a monarchy or in an empire, then you don't have any political power. I don't have any political power. And so, if your group has more children or more immigrants who look like you or grows in other ways, it doesn't really affect my political standing in an immediate sense. I just have to continue trusting the monarch. And if I do, it doesn't matter. A democracy is always a search for majorities.
And so, these fears that we've seen rise on the far-right in the most extreme way with this terrible conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement are in some ways driven by the democratic mechanism because it's the democratic mechanism which makes it tempting to think, "Hang on a second, I used to be in the majority that gave me a certain amount of power and influence in society and so on. And if this other group suddenly is growing demographically, perhaps everything will change and that might be terrible."
And so democratic institutions, if not designed in the right way, can actually exacerbate the challenge. And so, this is why we have to take the difficulty of building diverse democracies seriously. This is not a trivial undertaking.
S.R: So Yascha, let's begin by acknowledging what you just pointed out, the heavy burden of historical legacies. Throughout the book, one senses however, a constant tension between the pessimistic lessons one could derive from the past histories and your optimistic faith in the chances of the great experiment in diversity and diverse democracies to succeed in the future. In affirming this optimism of the will, you seem to be fighting a [00:09:30] two-pronged battle.
The pessimism is not limited to racist, xenophobic, ethnonationalists of the right-wing populist kind who are questioning whether a diverse society and a diverse polity can be held together at all. But you seem to be equally concerned about the pessimism that pervades large sections of the left, who are supporters of diversity and yet often refuse to see [00:10:00] any signs of progress when it comes to, for example, in the U.S. on issues of racial hierarchy, who feel that as far as structural racism is concerned, socioeconomic inequalities are concerned, the effects of past oppression, African Americans are where they were a century ago.
And you are calling here for self-reflexive universalism in the face of what you see as the centrifugal forces of rigid identity [00:10:30] politics on both sides. So, could you elaborate on why you consider the pessimism of the left to be so dangerous? I think the pessimism on the right is evident to most people, but why is it that the pessimism of the left is such a political risk?
Y.M: So, there is a tension between pessimism and optimism, both in my book and in the broader discussion. The way I tend to think about it now is that most people start thinking, you know, it should be easy to build these diverse democracies, that this isn't hard. And yet when you look at reality, you see all of these problems and injustices. And so that should make us really pessimistic. It should make us very depressed about what we've achieved so far, and it should make us very skeptical that we should be able to do better in the future.
Because if we keep failing at a simple task, then there's very little reason to think that we might learn to do better in the coming decades. So, it's tempting to move from what I would call a naive optimism to a pretty deep fatalism. The sort of arc of my argument in this book is the inverse of that. I think that when you look seriously at the history of diverse democracies, and when you look at many diverse societies in the world today, that gives you a lot of reason for pessimism or at least for recognizing just how difficult an undertaking this is.
But that, in turn, allows us to look back at most developed democracies today and actually be quite proud of what they've accomplished, recognize the ways in which for all the real problems and injustices they do have, they are much better societies to live in for the vast majority of their citizens than they were 100 or 50 or even 25 years ago. And that, in turn, can give us a hard-won confidence that it is at least possible to continue to make progress along those lines.
Now there is a deep pessimism on the right. There is a set of arguments, especially on the far-right, which essentially say that the only reason for the historical success of countries like Austria or the United Kingdom or the United States or Australia is the ethnic or perhaps cultural group, which has historically made up those societies, and that immigration from other countries and demographic change is therefore going to erode the preconditions of that success.
We know that pessimism, and I assume that most listeners to this podcast don't share it, but there is a weird echo of that pessimism on the left, which rightly rejects the idea that there's anything inferior about the immigrants coming into these societies, for example, but which actually says that they're not succeeding because of the amount of discrimination they face, for example. And I think when you look at sociological studies, it turns out that this tends to be wrong.
So, let's take something as simple as language. Many people on the far-right fear that in a country like the United States, immigrants from Mexico will never really acquire the English language or that immigrants from China may start to build enclaves in which they just speak Mandarin or another Sinitic language. And there are some voices on the left who say that's a good thing, that actually we shouldn't have a joint language. That asking people to assimilate even in the most basic ways like for acquisition of language is somehow an unfair imposition.
If you actually look at sociology, this debate simply misses the real-world processes, because what we see in real life is that the first generation sometimes struggles to learn the language. If you come to a new country in your 20s or 30s or 40s, and you didn't have a chance to get a very good education in your own country and so on, you may find it very hard to acquire that language. And some people struggle.
The children are invariably very good in both languages. They often speak the language of origin of their parents, but the majority of them prefer to speak English in this case with the siblings, with their cousins, with other people of a similar background of migration. And by the third generation, which might even be a little bit of a melancholic finding, only about 1% of people still retain any fluency in the language of their ancestors.
So, these fears about lack of integration over fantasies in parts of the left that it's wonderful though we're no longer gonna have a joint language, simply miss the sociological reality of how effective these processes of integration turn out to be. And so, this proves that these racist ideas on the right are obviously wrong, but it also shows that the extent of pessimism on the left is wrong. But despite real discrimination and real injustices that these immigrants face, they are actually succeeding to a remarkable extent. And so, I think that we are here in the danger of adopting a set of positions, which are very common on the left and if we want to build diverse societies that are successful, we really have to reject those.
S.R: So, let me pick up two questions based on what you just said. And I'm wondering, Yascha, on the one hand, if this idea of diverse democracies is very American in its rather culturalist emphasis because in a sense, what it does is to focus much more on differences of cultures, but also differences on the centrality of race, ethnicity as the salient ascriptive categories, which may make or break the future of diverse democracies.
And my question to you here would be, don't you think one of the things which may make or break the future of diverse or not so diverse democracies may be the whole question of inequality and of patriarchy? So, what is the relationship of questions of gender and class to these ascriptive categories of race, ethnicity which are very easily coded in culturalist terms?
Y.M: Yeah, I think that there is a big connection between those topics. And one of the problems is that they can be rival in the way we talk about things. And that, I think, can be very problematic. Let me start with class. And then the case of gender is, I think, a little bit more complicated in certain respects. So, on the issue of class, we've seen a big historical transformation that Thomas Piketty and others have chronicled in the nature of the left in the United States and across the Western world, at least.
And that is then, of course, the traditional demographic marker of whoever somebody was on the left was that class standing for. If you were working class, you were much more likely to vote for the SPD in Germany, for the Labor Party in Britain, or for the Democrats in the United States than if you were a member of the upper-middle class. Today, we see that it is much harder to predict who somebody is voting for on the basis of class.
That at least among the White working-class in many countries, the biggest party is no longer the traditional left-wing parties like Social Democrats, but often far-right parties. And that many left-wing movements now have the core base in the highly educated urban electorate, which makes up the upwardly mobile upper-middle-class of cities from Vienna to Paris, to London, to New York and LA, and so on.
I think today, a much better way of predicting whether somebody's voting for the left or the right would not be to ask about their wealth state, it would be to ask something like, you know, on the whole, do you think increased immigration would be an opportunity or a danger for your country? Something along those lines. And if people say that it's an opportunity, would then be left-wing. But you could substitute that question with any number of social or cultural questions.
When I think of gender, that is a very important issue and we can discuss it in greater detail. There's obviously been a big cultural shift in the last years, which has allowed women to become much more powerful in society and much more fully participatory in the economy. In fact, according to many of the statistics about undergraduate education in a large number of countries, women are now significantly outcompeting men with very interesting sociological [00:19:30] ramifications.
One reason why I don't focus as much on gender in this book, as I do on questions of ethnic or religious diversity is that we have, of course, always had men and women in our society. That that form of diversity has always existed and that because men and women still very often live together in households and as members of the same nuclear family, it doesn't tend to lead to the same kinds of party-political divisions.
And now we're seeing young women in a number of Western countries being significantly more left-leaning than young men on many important issues, including, for example, abortion rights where the division in society is much more ideological than it is along the lines of gender. And so, when you're thinking about sort of the lines along which diverse societies have historically fallen apart, or the lines along which you might have significant political or civic conflict in the future, I tend to think that for all of its importance, gender is less likely than class, but perhaps, particularly within ethnicity or religion.
S. R: So, what about the urban-rural divide, Yascha? That could be a very, very significant fault line as we've seen both in the Brexit referendum, but we also saw in the votes cast for Trump in both elections. So, it's not just along ethnic or racial lines, but very much along education and along urban-rural divide.
Y.M: Yeah. That I think is true, and those two things go together. One of the reasons why the urban-rural divide is so much bigger now than it used to be is that economic opportunity is so much more concentrated in urban areas than it used to be. If you were making a decision about where [00:21:30] to build your life in the United States in the 1970s, it's really not obvious whether you would've chosen to go to a mid-sized town in Michigan or in Oregon, or if you would've chosen to go to New York City. Today, it is absolutely clear that you would have much more economic opportunity in New York than you would have in any of those kinds of towns.
And so, the vote for populists is concentrated, I believe among people who feel distant from power, and there's a rural-urban dimension to that, and among people who are pessimistic about the future, not just pessimistic about their own future. I think when you look at measures of individual income, there isn't a very clear pattern, but people who are pessimistic about the future of their communities who think, "I really don't know that my kids are gonna do well, and if they do, then they really need to move. They can't stay around here."
And if that's how you feel about the world, you're much more likely to vote forpopulists. So, the urban-rural divide is important, but it is driven in good part by the deep political divide between people who are optimistic about their future, the future of their children, the future of their communities and the people who are deeply pessimistic about those things.
S.R: So, let me take you away from the U.S. for a moment because I think one could raise the question about the scales of possibility and the feasibility for the success of The Great Experiment in the U.S., primarily in a nation-state framework much more easily because it's the country too, which people have immigrated and there is little outmigration. On the other hand, if you want to think about some of your policy prescriptions, which are primarily limited to the political-economic framework of the nation-state, and I agree with you entirely that security of economic prospects, prosperity, universal solidarity, inclusive institutions, they all make perfect sense within nation-state national administrative boundaries.
The question here for me would be, are these prescriptions not far too concentrated on the nation-state as the privileged unit of analysis, both for the governance of diverse democracies, as well as for policymaking? That's why I want to draw you to Europe and say there would be two counter examples. One would be something which you do talk about in the book. And those are multi-ethnic empires in which religious minorities and ethnic groups were actually not doing so badly. And the other experiment would be a supernational political unit, and this is where the European Union comes to mind.
Would other kinds of polities be more suited to fostering a diverse polity than just a nation-state?
Y.M: So, let's take these two questions in turn, but they're both very interesting challenges. I do think that there's something about multi-ethnic empires that makes it somewhat easier to deal with a certain kind of diversity. At least it's striking that many of the diverse societies in the history of the world would have succeeded the best despite very real ways in which they were unjust with those kinds of multi-ethnic empires from Baghdad in the 9th century to Vienna in the 19th century. But this is not a realistic prescription for the present for a number of reasons. One of which is empirical. These multi-ethnic empires don't currently exist with perhaps one or two examples I'm not thinking of, but certainly not at any significant scale. And I think it would be quite a quixotic crusade to try and recreate them. And one that would only be accomplished in extremely cruel and unjust ways.
And secondly, that, of course, we have reasons to want to live in democracy that go beyond the question of ethnic or religious diversity. We don't want to give up on the prospect of self-government. And if you add to our institutions of democratic self-government, some core institutions, which guarantee individual rights in the philosophical tradition, it makes it much easier to deal with that kind of diversity. And so that's why multi-ethnic empires, I think, for both empirical and normative reasons aren't the answer we're looking for here.
On supernational institutions, I am very sympathetic to them. I am a deep believer in the European Project. In fact, I was in part educated by the European Project. I did the last two years of my high school schooling at a European school. And I think that the European Union is an important experiment in governance.
Where I'm very skeptical is that the EU can supplement for a national identity. I think the moment that you give people in Europe a choice and say, "You are going to be either Austrian or European, you're going to be either Italian or European," they are going quite resoundingly to choose the national option, at least, you know, for the foreseeable future. I don't wanna speculate about what it'll look like in 200 years, but I think over the course of our lifetimes, that will continue to be the case.
Now, if you recognize that one of the wonderful things about identity is the way in which human beings can have multiple identities at the same time, the way in which they can say, "I'm a proud citizen of Rome, and I am a proud Italian, and I am a proud Catholic, and I'm also a proud European," then I think Europe can be an important part of the answer to how this particular continent governs itself.
But I do think it is a mistake to put the European identity in competition with a national identity. And let me, perhaps, because this was all a little bit abstract, also make a personal observation. You know, I'm a German Jew, so nationalism certainly does not come naturally to me. And I'm somebody like you, and I imagine many of the listeners to this podcast, who's lived in many different countries. I was raised in Germany. My parents are originally from Poland. I have lived in Italy and France, gone to college in the United Kingdom, and now live in the United States. And I love all of those countries. And that is one of the wonderful things about multiple identities. I can have a real sense of connection to each of those places, but they're very different from each other it turns out. The culture of Germany continues to be very different from the culture of France. And the culture of France continues to be very different from the culture of the United Kingdom. And we can try to ignore that driven by some kind of abstract conception of the kinds of countries you want to live in. But in reality, that is very important. And I think it can be a positive thing.
I actually think that many of these countries are building an inclusive form of patriotism based in part in civic values, but in part also on those forms of cultural belonging, on a sense of what it means to be German, or Italian, or French, that is influenced in good part by the contributions of immigrants from all over the world. And that can be an important resource in building the kinds of diverse democracies we're talking about.
S. R: So, let me pick up exactly that idea of yours, which in the book you use the notion of cultural patriotism drawing on my discipline of cultural anthropology. You framed it at the moment very much in national terms by talking about national cultures. And I want to draw you out on this by asking you whether you think some of these notions of cultural patriotism that you're imagining, would they not be easier if one were to think about them as working in more local spaces, even neighborhood spaces? So that in a city like Berlin or London, it's not so much about national culture as about diversity of local cultures and that people don't really care so much about abstract political constitutional principles, but about what you call, and I quote you, "everyday sights, smells, sounds, and tastes," which are not uniform across the nation. And so that this kind of rich sensorium of cultural patriotism may not necessarily be national, although it may be the cornerstone of sustaining a lot of everyday diversity and everyday life.
Y.M: So, I think we're agreed on a lot there, but it'll be interesting to focus on the disagreement. So, I think the agreement we have, first of all, unspoken because it's so obvious is that we don't believe in forms of ethnic nationalism. The second I surmise from your question is that we share a certain skepticism of the extent to which civic patriotism is a sufficient account of what it means to love a country. But I'd like to draw that out. So, I think civic patriotism is an important element of help for patriotism. In particular, because it allows us to explain why it's perfectly possible to have a deep attachment to a country and yet criticize it. Why I think some of the most patriotic people I've seen in the last months are those few but very brave Russians who have been protesting against Vladimir Putin's terrible war in Ukraine saying, "Not in our name, not in the name of our nation."
But there are two problems with civic accounts of patriotism that I always get stuck on. The first is philosophical, which is that patriotism is always the love of something specific or particular. It doesn't have to mean that you dislike anything else, but it means that you have a special relationship to your own country in the same way in which you can be in love with your romantic partner without therefore disliking any other human being. You just have a special concern for that person. But the civic values of different democracies are actually quite similar to each other. And even their constitutions don't differ that drastically.
And yet, let's say, an Indian patriot is not going to suddenly become an Australian or American patriot just because Australia or America might decide to adopt word for word the Indian constitution. We all know that makes no sense. So, I think philosophically, civic patriotism has trouble explaining the specificity of that sentiment. And then sociologically, if you like, I think it simply builds an illusion about how most people feel and act.
Most people just don't care that much about politics as we would like to think. And so, the idea that when you ask why they love a country, they would respond by saying the Constitution of the United States or the Declaration of independence simply isn't quite realistic. So as somebody who nevertheless thinks that it is important to have some connective tissue and to emphasize some of the ways in which we are connected to each other at the national level precisely, also to help us have something beyond the subnational level that can expand and draw out our circle of sympathy, which can inspire solidarity for each other, it's important to find something else. And for me, that lies in cultural patriotism. And I agree with you that it is perfectly acceptable and wonderful to have a local patriotism as well, to say that you are somebody who was born and raised in Clapham, and you have a deep affection for that part of the world, and that can inspire in you special forms of solidarity.
So ultimately, it becomes an empirical question. And I do think that national differences continue to be bigger than people recognize that especially very diverse nations, geographically diverse nations as well, tend to underestimate how much they have in common compared to neighboring countries. For all of the differences within the United Kingdom, the UK is, in fact, a very different country from Italy, which also has deep geographic diversity. And yet, you know, you put an Italian from anywhere and a Brit from anywhere in a third country and the Italians will feel a certain kind of kinship, and the Brits will feel a certain kind of kinship.
And so, I think the way that I have thought about the world and experienced the world and read about the world, I've come to the conclusion that for now, at least, nations do continue to set the culture of countries to a remarkable extent, and that therefore, most people do actually continue to feel a real connection to nations at that level.
S. R: Yascha, let me turn to another key conceptual innovation in the book, which I found quite striking, and that's the metaphor of the public park as you use it. So, transcending the conventional metaphors of the melting pot with all its connotations of uniformity, assimilation, but also not using the metaphor of the salad bowl for the communitarian, multicultural societies, which may, like ingredients of the salad bowl, fall apart into fragments, you draw on your own personal experience of public parks which are open to everyone. They are free spaces. They give various different options for using them, and they certainly create a vibrant space for encounters of all kinds. It's a catchy metaphor.
The question I have for you is, how does one translate this spatial context of the metaphor and the scale of the park into actual sociopolitical practices on a much larger scale? That is, what would be the infrastructural underpinnings, the preconditions necessary for the public park for it to work better? So, on the one hand, it would mean common land, which is not divided up into private property, or a beach, which is also not turned into private property. Also, it would need surveillance or disciplinary infrastructure in terms of policing of public space. And I say this as a woman who is wary of public spaces, parks at night.
Can you say something about your use of the metaphor and how you think about the kinds of preconditions it would need for this to be the innovative way to think about the project?
Y.M: There's, you know, this competition of metaphors for what a diverse society and the society of immigration should look like. There's "The Melting Pot," which when you go back to read the original play by Israel Zangwill, which inspired this idea, actually has a real moral force because it is asking people to leave behind even the most violent and bloody historical animosities in a truly inspiring way. I don't know if that is a literary beautiful play, but it is actually a very interesting one. I encourage everybody to go and read it if you like. You can find it on the internet.
But "The Melting Pot" has historically come to stand for a model of society in which people have to give up their local specificities or their ancestral specificities in which what it means to become a true member of a new nation is to give up any meaningful heritage that you have from your parents or grandparents and their culture or religion. And that I think is obviously a mistake.
Then a lot of sociologists and academics embraced a counter model, that of a salad bowl or of a mosaic. And that I think gave up too much on the need for some form of connective tissue. It essentially ended up implying that we are just going to have these groups living in parallel with each other without any real connections between them. And I think you can see from countries like Lebanon, what kind of danger ensues when connective tissue between different, considered member communities within a state erodes to such an extent when people are just defined by the membership in some subnational group, rather than a shared sense of citizenship as well.
And so that's what motivates this metaphor of a public park for me. Because the striking thing about a public park is that Shalini, if we were in the same place, sadly we're not, we're recording this remotely, we could, after this conversation, go to a park and continue the conversation and saying, we are in the middle of trying to hash these questions out and we don't really want to talk to anybody else. Or we might go and start chatting with people who are sitting next to us and build that kind of connection. And those are two freedoms that the citizens of diverse societies also need to have. They need to have the right to say, "The most important thing to me is the group of which I'm already a part, for example, the cultural or religious group in which I grew up," but they also need to have the ability to go and connect with other people, to build that connective tissue, to build new friendships, to strike out on a new kind of path.
And even though both of these freedoms are important and both of these choices are perfectly legitimate, we can look at this from the outside and say a public park in which people never come into conversation with each other is a little bit sad, and one in which people strike up new friendships and where social interactions happen, that's the kind of space that we want to encourage, and the same goes for a diverse society. We need a minimum of connection between different people. But as you're saying, that needs a certain number of preconditions. So first, there have to be opportunities for people to actually meet. Some of those opportunities, as the metaphor implies, are physical ones, right? They're actual public parks and squares and so on which facilitate that kind of encounter. And there's a whole field of urban design, which is formed intelligently about what it means to build cities, and spaces, and institutions where that exists.
But it goes not just for physical space, it's also a question of what kind of educational and even commercial institutions we need for people to be able to connect to each other in those kinds of ways. How do you run a university in ways that encourage people from different national, cultural backgrounds, class backgrounds, religions, to actually learn together and build relationships with each other, rather than sort of sitting next to each other in certain classes, but basically ignoring each other?
What does it mean in terms of a vibrant network of associations that actually attracts people of different walks of life? I think all of those are really important questions for the success of diverse democracies. And then finally, you're right, and I emphasize this in the book, that there are certain preconditions. If you want people in a park to be open to new encounters, then you also need a police force, which ensures that if somebody tries to steal your wallet] or to harm you physically, or if somebody tells you how you're supposed to behave in the park without having a good reason to be able to demand that, then you need to be able to have redress. So, we also have to set very clear background conditions, which facilitate the confidence and the safety for people to then have those encounters.
S.R: So I think you're making a very, very important point, Yascha, because I think it's really, the public infrastructure, which is not just public parks, but as you very rightly point out, playgrounds, public schools, public libraries, swimming pools, infrastructure, which is accessible to all, which is one of the infrastructural preconditions for flourishing, thriving democracies.
So, I was wondering when I was reading the book, you choose to focus on affluent, not just stable, mature democracies, established democracies, which can also experience a lot of backsliding as we are witnessing in both the United Kingdom and the U.S. these days, but you choose to focus on affluent democracies.
And I asked myself, what kind of success of The Great Experiment in diversity would we be thinking about if we were to expand the geographical remit of your argument and transpose it to India, for example? But we could transpose it to other parts of the world in which austerity politics has really whittled down all of this public infrastructure. And therefore, the larger political economic question for me would be, can we sustain these diverse liberal democracies in a world in which there is so much inequality and unevenness?
Y.M: So, I'm going to give a very simple answer, which is you need a sense that you can fully participate in society, and you need optimism about the future. You need to have a sense that you can build a better life and your children are going to be able to build a better life. And so, you know, I worry about inequality, but I worry even more about sustaining that sense that you can get a fair shake from life and the children are going to do better.
Those questions are empirically related, of course, because if all the gains from economic growth go to the very top, then you're not going to have real improvements in living standards. But I am less worried about how much money the very richest in society have than I am about the stagnation of living standards for about half of people in many developed democracies over the last 50 years.
S.R: So, thank you very much, Yascha, for this really fascinating conversation around the complex arguments, which your book is making on the need to think about how best we can preserve, not only liberal democracies, but liberal democracies in diverse societies.
Y.M: Thank you so much. Really loved this conversation.
S.R: So let me wrap up. We stand at historical crossroad. The progress that many democracies have made in accommodating ethnic, racial and religious diversity – may easily be undone. A homogenous nation-state was never a reality anywhere in the world, at any time. It always was and is a fiction, one, however, that is successfully been pushed forward by the populist right-wing leaders and movements all over the world. Many mainstream political discourses have also adopted the idea of a permanent division between “us” and “them”, so-called outsiders and favored insiders defined by race, religion or ethnicity. These discourses claim, that only these insiders truly belong to the nation and therefore the nation only really belongs to these majority groups. At the founding moment of American democracy for example, not only were enslaved African Americans but also native Americans excluded from the polity. If democratic institutions are not designed in the right way, they can continue to pose a challenge that will be unable to correct this historical injustice. It is not only the xenophobic right-wing populists who pose a problem for American democracy, but also those on the left who undermine its very real achievements by denying them not to be enough. This leads to a lack of confidence in what has been already accomplished in terms of racial or economic equality within the United States. Despite all difficulties that they have to overcome we should remember that immigrants are succeeding in the United States and inclusive form of patriotism helps build strong civic identities and forms of cultural belonging that are necessary for a democracy to thrive. That is why democracies need public infrastructure: public libraries, public parks, public schools, spaces that are accessible to all, spaces of shared interaction across diverse groups and communities.
This was the final episode of season four, thank you very much for listening. We will be coming back soon with the first episode of season five. My guest will be Mary Kaldor, Professor at the London School of Economics and I will discuss the whole question of human security rather than thinking of security only in terms of military security with her, based on her latest policy brief written for the NATO. Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed and of course let your friends know about this podcast if you are enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.