Bristol, 2014. Flickr/ Evgeni. Some rights reserved.Tariq Modood, Bhikhu Parekh, Nasar Meer and Varun Uberoi and other scholars associated with the University of Bristol’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship represent a distinctive and important school of multicultural political thought. Thanks go to Sage Journal ‘Ethnicities’ for giving us three months’ access to this background account of the ‘Bristol school of multiculturalism’ by Geoffrey Brahm Levey, which situates the Bristol school in the British context in which it arose, outlines its distinctive approach and principles and critically assesses its positions on liberalism and national identity. Levey explains how the school challenges the liberal biases of much of the corpus of multicultural political thinking and the nostrums of British and other western democracies regarding the status of the majority culture as well as of cultural minorities.
There is a lot of nationalism about today. So, Rosemary Bechler is doing us an important service in raising the question of monocultural nationalism in the openDemocracy debate about the rise of the hard right in liberal democracies.
Yet, what is often described as ‘a new nationalism’ arguably looks like the old nationalism. What is emerging as genuinely new are the identity-based nationalisms of the centre-left, sometimes called ‘liberal nationalism’ or ‘progressive patriotism’. I want to tell you about one such progressive view, what I call multicultural nationalism.
