I will talk about the United States, but I will also talk about the globe, the planet. For America is the country that leads us in a “globalizing” direction above all, and to discuss globalization IS to talk about the United States. I want to address a problematic issue: we tend to take sides morally, and correctly so, on the issues of racism and “otherism” and issues of “us” and “them.” But there is a fundamental dilemma, not for liberalism, but for democracy: the dilemma that democracy has serious issues with otherness and with multiculturalism. These issues go to the heart of many of the problems which are being faced today in Europe. The way America has dealt with them may suggest something about how it is possible to deal with multiculturalism in a democracy in Europe and elsewhere.

The dilemma is that in a modernizing, “marketizing”, “multiculturalizing” interdependent world, it is not only nationalism and other forms of traditional association that are being left behind, but democracy itself. In my Jihad and McWorld I suggested that Jihad – traditionalist, fundamentalist ways of thinking, whether fundamentalist Protestantism or fundamentalist Islam or other forms of fundamentalism – were set against an equally antidemocratic way of thinking rooted in economic globalization and aggressive commercialism, in what I called “McWorld.” I want to talk a little bit about this argument and suggest that it is related to the issues we are talking about this evening although unfortunately it is not much debated today. The book was written partly in response to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations which split the world in two and suggested that there were kind of “good guys” in the West and then “the rest” defined back in his time by a weird alliance of the Chinese, the Arabs and the “fifth column” of people of color in the United States who were going to set their faces, as Huntington imagined, against modernity. But Huntington’s fears point to the reality that in the modern, globalized, economic world there is a powerful and welcome spirit of multiculturalism. Consumers have no ethnic identity: money is green, neither black nor white. And the global economy, in fact, supports by its logic – if not its laws – global migration of labor and capital, and is quite happy to see people move around. It doesn’t worry that much about their color. We know the problem of immigration in the United States is not just a problem of people coming across borders looking for jobs, but also a problem of corporate entities inviting those people to take those jobs without pensions and without insurance and at very cheap rates. It is a two-way logic: it is the logic of the logic of the mobility of capital, the mobility of commodities, and, most importantly, the mobility of labor. And it is these issues that create for traditional democratic nations a set of problems that appear to be difficult with respect to law, the laws of democratic states. I always find it curious when people insist that we shouldn’t talk about “illegal immigrants” when quite clearly, they have entered without the proper documentation, and are technically speaking illegal. But ironically, the point is not simply that this denigrates people whose behavior may be technically unlawful but that actually from the point of view of the logic of capitalism they are not illegal, but acting totally within the legal and logical terms associated with free trade and the mobility of global labor. And it is in that sense that they actually should be understood as “undocumented workers” rather than illegal immigrants.

On the other side of modernity – with its interdependence, its transcultural migration of capital and labor, its global markets – stand old democratic nation-states, which for the most part, from the start, have been usefully and even necessarily mono-cultural. Democracy works very well under circumstances of monoculture and for very good reasons: because in the absence of a community of agreement, common values, commune ethnicity, common religion, common language and solidarity it is increasingly hard to get people to agree with one another without turning to violence. All democracies originally were founded on a kind of underlying consensus about certain fundamental identitarian issues you did not have to talk about. When you came to the Athenian Assembly, to the Agora, to the town square, when you came to the parliament, the issues you faced were economic, utilitarian and instrumental issues; some large, like war and peace, some relatively small, to divert a river or not. But all of them remained in the context of people who were alike and agreed on fundamentals: for example, of Gallic catholic men, talking about the problem of whether or not they should go to war; or Frankish men and women who again could count on common language, a common religion, a common background and then take up the differences that separated them and use the devices of democracy to enable them to find ways to live together in peace and comity despite their differences. But the “despite their differences” is a critical phrase and it has weight: it is easy to say “despite their differences” when the differences don’t run to deep and when you agree about most things. But the whole journey and trajectory of modernity has been to complexify, to diversify and to increase the multicultural character of nation-states that were traditionally monocultural. And that has put a tremendous strain not just on liberal tolerance, but also on democracy itself and its capacity to reach a peaceful resolution around differences. Sometimes we forget that the sociology of democracy in the West is and has been for a long time about how you create an underlying Gemeinde, a commune, how to establish solidarity or social cohesion or social capital that permits the society to operate. I am not arguing that multiculturalism makes it impossible, but multiculturalism makes it a whole lot more difficult. Because it is precisely in culture that things that truly differentiate us are found. Marx and others have tried to argue class differences are crucial, but I think that the reality is that, when you look at the history of the world, it is our cultural differences as reflected in competing religions, ethnicities, languages and histories that go to the root of many of the worst conflicts we have had both within and among nations.

We can think about democracy in its original western form in the Athenian polis, where you had a small group of Athenian men who had pretty much the same common interest and were then able to come together and make some fairly prudent decisions about the expansion of the Mediterranean economic empire or whether or not it was a good idea to go to war with Sparta. But within the community itself there weren’t a whole lot of issues likely to tear the fabric of Athenian society apart, although enough even within a common fabric – we know from Greek tragedy – there were plenty of problems not so easy to dispel. What that suggests is – putting aside the pathologies and the illiberal tendencies of how we have responded to multiculturalism (on this score, all the things Seyla Benhabib and Ian Buruma have said are obviously true) – the reality is that multiculturalism is hard for democracy, harder perhaps than we imagine The problems Europe are having – and the reason it is having greater difficulties than the United States– suggest that, despite Europe’s allegedly “common” European culture, the reality is a series of monocultural nations, which only recently have had to tolerate and put up with external cultures from the outside which they don’t really understand, which don’t fit into their way of viewing life, and which seem to fracture the underlying solidarity and consensus around which those democratic societies, when they functioned well, operated. That has created a really difficult problem for them, and while their responses have often been appalling, their dilemmas are real.

Now, having set up the problem in that way, we come to the United States, because the United States both has the problem, but at least also has the hint of a solution. It is an approach that Europe ought to pay careful attention to. Not to say that the deficits and dysfunctions aren’t also here; it is not only Huntington who thinks minorities in America are a “fifth column” likely to ally themselves with the Arabs and the Chinese and destroy America. He made that argument in that an astonishingly popular book, and that popularity indicates the dangers.

Yet Huntington was not alone: in his book The Disuniting of America Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote the following: “the cult of ethnicity has bad consequences and will turn the American melting pot into a tower of Babel. The bonds of national cohesion are fragile enough already.” That’s the “liberal” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., not Samuel Huntington, making the case that even in melting pot America there are limits to how far the compass of multiculturalism can extend. How much difference we can absorb and still remain democratic? Now I myself find that a dangerous and irresponsible statement, but one that suggests that even for a good liberal multiculturalist there is an awareness that every democracy has limits somewhere. And those limits are always being tested.

Here we come to the American solution. There are a host of Americans who have come to the European solution, which is to close the borders, do battle with difference: that is to say, de-multiculturalize your nation. Don’t let any more in and get the ones who are in, out. The problem with that – again putting morals and ethics aside – is that it’s impossible to do in a global economic world of the kind we live in today. It can’t happen, it won’t happen. The many millions who are in the United State “illegally” are not going anywhere. No matter who gets elected. If the most misogynist, dangerous, anti-immigration candidate is elected to the presidency, it can be guaranteed when they are done, four years from now, there will be the name number immigrants in America – and more. They will be there, because in an interdependent world, frontiers and national immigration laws are no longer even capable of controlling the flow of immigrants here or anywhere else in the world. So reactionary exclusion is not only ethically noxious and noxiously racist, it simply isn’t going to work. The strategy of reactionary resistance: “go back in time, recapture the America we are losing,” as the Tea Party says, (and make no mistake, to look at their faces, we see the America they want to recapture – and it is s an America that was primarily Protestant, primarily White and a good deal more rural than urban; it was an America before multiculturalism, an America in which people of color America were invisible. But the real point is they lost the battle long ago. Those demographics are over.

Within 20years, America will be a majority of minorities; in California that is already true today, and in Texas, Florida and New York it will soon be true. Among young people under 16 we are already that” majority of minorities nation.” White America, Protestant America is over. Weep about it or welcome it, that’s the reality. For those who want the old monocultural America back, well one can understand the nostalgia for the familiar, a world in which they could resolve their differences with their neighbors without worrying about underlying religions or races or values being so distinctive. We can understand why they yearn for it. But the politics of fear that they have reverted to in order to politicize their fears cannot win. Indeed the only reason why it has some traction today is that the new demographic isn’t voting. As soon as young people of color, unmarried women, new immigrants, and traditional populations of color start voting in the proportion that older white men vote, our politics will reflect our demographics. Sooner or later it will. Which may not mean much for guys my age, but for the younger people in the audience, you can look forward to a demographic reality in which the politics will match the our newly defining multiculturalism and will be part of the political norm. But when that moment comes there is still the issue both for the US and for other societies of how differentiated and fractured and diverse a society can be with respect to fundamental values? I cannot here debate the cultural dilemmas posed by, for example, clitorectomy and the sorts of practices that seem to defy human rights. But these issues are always there, issues such as the veil, which Seyla talked about. where respect for the cultural practices of others may collide with “liberal values”, as happened in England where the then-Prime Minister argued the hijab and especially the burka was incompatible with open and transparent communication.

Those are issues which in fact do go to the heart of question of just how much difference a society can tolerate and still resolve its political and economic differences without violence. And there, the place to look is the remarkable American experience, because for all our difficulties we were from the beginning a land of immigrants, except for two groups: the indigenous population, which was either run off the land, murdered or put into encampments, reservations, and those who were brought here in chains. But other than those two specially (and deeply troubling) cases, every other American comes from somewhere else by choice. So we are to begin with a nation of immigrants. And even at the founding, the diversity was quite astounding by the measure of the European countries from which the founding generation came – not just England but Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany as well as France, Spain and Portugal. And today we remain a nation of immigrants, which means we have to deal with democracy multiculturally. We have no choice. And what we have done (and this is a rich history I’ll just allude to, and maybe we can talk more about it) is to invent a civil religion – an understanding of citizenship, which is organized not around identity and ethnicity and group politics, but organized around certain common historical stories and myths: many of them invented, whether they’re historical or not, whether it’s the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s inaugural speeches, the Gettysburg speech, whether it’s Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, whether even President Obama’s speech on race will now join and become part of that secular liturgy. Such stories become a liturgy that every American from any background can subscribe to and feel they have things in common and find a type of artificial but real solidarity in those common beliefs. Secular beliefs, civic beliefs, republican beliefs that allow us to forge an identity around a synthesized but real and rewarding sense of commonality that is civic in nature. The real secret of the success of American multicultural democracy has been the notion of the citizen. Not the citizen as a Frenchman or a German or a Swede – in our terms, a WASP – but the citizen as somebody from somewhere else whose background is irrelevant, whose race is irrelevant, whose religion is irrelevant, but who in coming to America subscribes to certain common, often mythic, values and beliefs that are centered in this civic liturgy, this civil religion.

One of the sad things about the Europe Union’s failure to develop a European citizenship and the idea of a civic European (and to focus instead on the Euro) is that it has completely missed the opportunity to create a European civic religion. Thus when the time came for a European constitution, all they could think of is whether or not to insert the word Christian in or not. That seemed like the only question of identity worth asking. But the idea that European citizenship, what it meant to be a European across borders, might itself contain the terms of a new sense of identity that would allow people from Turkey and Tunisia and Morocco and Pakistan and Indonesia to feel, not that they were not Germans or French or Dutch, but Europeans. The fact that Europe put a wall up, not just around those countries, but around Europe itself when it came to the question of who would and would not be a European forfeited a major opportunity.

In summary, then the bad news is that democracy is going to have, for very good reasons, serious problems with multiculturalism. To survive, it will have to come to terms with the difference that marks the modern, interdependent world. But it cannot do so by pretending there is no problem, or that the problem lies entirely with racism and reactionary politics. This is why the notion of a civil religion, the idea of common secular and civic beliefs that bind people together, can make a difference. Why the American experience of common work, and a common history we have made for ourselves (not the history that defines our identities but the history they makes us one people) holds a clue to some possibilities for living democratically in spite of the difficulties of multiculturalism.

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Benjamin Barber is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, as well as president and director of the international NGO CivWorld, and its annual Interdependence Day event.