The anti-multiculturalism backlash is an economic attack on welfare, not a values debate

Evidence

The backlash against multiculturalism is nowadays often said to be about values; the centrifugal needs of a coherent nation must win out over the centripetal drives of the politics of difference. Yet if we see multiculturalism as, in Talal Asad’s words, part of “the attempt to deal with the practical problems encountered in education and the social services—two major institutions of Britain’s welfare state,” we get a very different view. With this emphasis in mind, the rejection of multiculturalism can be seen less as an expression of concern about integration or “British values” and more as part of the neoliberal attack on the idea of social welfare provision itself. In other words, it is as much an economic objection as a culturalist one. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 148

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on Hamid and Naqvi — the economic-versus-cultural framing of exclusion could parallel how these authors depict their protagonists’ systemic marginalization as classed rather than purely religious. Also echoes Milgrom/Shapiro’s institution-focused reading of how systems re-label economic motives.
• DEFINE: Asad’s pragmatic definition of multiculturalism as welfare-state problem-solving gives a working counter-definition to the ‘values’ rhetoric.