Trust, ethno-cultural diversity and multicultural politics.

This paper is concerned with the effects of ethnicity on trust relations in a diverse community. In particular, I am asking if an emphasis on ethnicity, via multicultural politics, has an effect on trust relations, and if so, how that effect manifests itself. I am posing this question in the context of a range of critiques launched at multicultural politics. There are, it seems to me, two general categories of critiques faced by multicultural politics. On the one hand, critics go so far as to accuse multiculturalist politics of creating the problem to begin with. According to these general critiques, diversity is a fact of life, but not a fact that matters all that much to politics, and multiculturalists have created a problem out of, as it were, thin air. In this category of critiques, multiculturalists are accused of creating problems at the social level as well as the political level. On the other hand, multiculturalists are accused of misidentifying the problem faced by diverse communities. Multiculturalists wrongly identify the fact of diversity as a social and political problem that must be dealt with in a concrete way. A variant on this critique suggests that while multiculturalists may indeed have properly identified ethnic and racial diversity as a problem facing contemporary democracies, the solutions they propose – multiculturalist policies – are largely ineffective. In this paper, I consider each of these critiques from the perspective of trust relations; I argue especially that each raises important questions about trust relations in a diverse citizenry. By way of introduction, I explain the import of trust to democratic politics. In the first section of this paper, I outline the critiques launched at multicultural politics in general. In the second section, I argue that ethnicity – as reflected by multiculturalists and their critiques – is a subject that oftentimes must be dealt with in partnership with trust. I hope, ultimately, to show that the critiques launched at multiculturalist politics are wrong-headed, because although they do properly recognise the danger posed by a political and social emphasis on diversity, they do not recognise the trust issues that at the heart of their critiques. When critics argue that emphasis on multiculturalism damages the sense of social solidarity that ought to pervade a polity or the quality of democratic decision-making in a polity, they are correct. They do not recognise, however, that these are all symptoms of damaged trust relations – trust relations damaged by the fact of diversity, not multicultural policies – the solution for which cannot be to ignore the claims by advocates of multiculturalist politics. I propose that any successful multiculturalist policy will include a recognisable trust-building or trust-strengthening component, so that any effective policy will necessarily not have the damaging effects that critics worry about. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]