Lessons in tolerance are far better than learning the language of rights

MANY people’s reaction to Morning Ireland’s report last Monday about a new road safety scheme specifically targeted at citizens from eastern Europe would have been “not a moment too soon”.

Although the Road Safety Authority doesn’t keep statistics on background, they agreed that most east Europeans living here — usually young and male — fit into the classic profile of those most likely to commit traffic offences. The anecdotal evidence would suggest some didn’t just bring their rye bread with them from the Baltic region but their drink-driving culture as well.

If you switched frequencies that morning, you could hear Trevor Phillips, the head of Britain’s new Equality and Human Rights Agency, attacking “politically correct” critics of traditional Christmas festivities for undermining diversity in society and condemning attempts to “brush Christmas under the carpet” for fear of offending other religions.

Citing cases such as schools scrapping nativity plays, he says that being oversensitive to minority views can lead to pointless embarrassment. He went on to claim that many of the efforts to downplay Christmas were not done at religious minorities’ behest but in pursuance of other, more sinister agendas. The effect, he claimed, was to make minorities more aware of their difference, not less.

Two related but distinct societies, two radically different approaches to the challenge of migration. In Ireland, there is an expectation that newcomers will try to conform to certain norms of behaviour. In Britain, over-sensitivity to the feelings of minorities has become such a problem that the (Afro-Caribbean, Labour Party-supporting) man charged with defending them feels obliged to stand up for the majority culture. So too does John Sentamu, the Uganda-born Archbishop of York.

As Conor Lenihan, the minister with special responsibility for integration policy, prepares for his own Christmas break, he would do well to read a new book by Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks.Entitled The Home We Build Together, Sacks makes an impassioned defence of tolerance and liberal democracy over the claims of a rights-based culture.

Tolerance, as Sacks concedes, is a very difficult concept to define: it is very easily confused with many others, including multiculturalism. But at its most basic, a tolerant society is one that ignores difference, while a multicultural society is one that makes an issue of differences at almost every point. Tolerance creates integration; multiculturalism risks creating a society of conflicting ghettoes. A tolerant society is one held together by a strong civil society and a shared set of values. A multicultural society is one in which there is no dominant culture and where a multiplicity of cultures compete for attention. And when you are competing for attention in today’s media, the loudest voice wins.

According to Sacks, the result is that civil society becomes an arena of conflicting interest groups in which neutral spaces are politicised and become, in effect, surrogate conflict zones in which the concept of the common good becomes attenuated and may eventually die. That is no small claim coming from the leading representative of a community that has suffered more than most from prejudice and discrimination.

There are many reasons for this politicisation of schools, universities, charities and membership organisations, but one is worth singling out.

Most European nation states, including the Free State which became the Republic, were born in the late 19th century and early 20th century. More often than not they were the product of war, but also of communications technology, the technology of print but specifically of newspapers. As the philosopher Hegel put it, “modern man has taken to reading newspaper as a substitute for morning prayer”.

The nation state is being deconstructed by another revolution in communications technology, the whole infrastructure of international global instantaneous communications. Tempting as it is to believe, immigration to Ireland did not begin in the 1990s: it’s just the scale that is different. Even non-European immigration has a long history. The first Indians arrived more than 200 years ago, never forget.

In those days, however, migration was not something to be considered lightly. The Huguenots, for example, who are fully assimilated nowadays, had a very clear sense of leaving one culture, one identity and moving to another.

Modern communications, though, allow migrants to be physically in one place but emotionally and intellectually in another. Migrants nowadays can keep closely in touch with home by watching satellite TV, reading newspapers written in their mother tongue (not least on the internet), chatting with family and friends for a few cent a minute, and travelling back to their country of origin as cheaply as taking a train from Dublin to Cork.

In many ways, this is one of globalisation’s upsides. The downside is that coming here no longer means really leaving there. We can sometimes be closer to people thousands of miles away than we are to our next door neighbour. That is fragmenting the nation state deeply. It would be fine if we had a substitute for the nation state, but we don’t and, therefore, it is not fine.

And what we have seen recently — the teddy bear episode in the Sudan being just the latest — is that conflicts can go global almost instantly. The result is that local politics where issues can be dealt with by people who know one other, who know the issues, who know the sensitivities and the personalities, all of a sudden andincreasingly run out of control. The issue as to whether Sikhs in the gardaí should be allowed to wear turbans on duty was just a first taste of this.

WHAT’S to be done in a situation like this? One suggestion is that we must somehow reassert western European countries’ Christian roots. John Bruton’s notion that the (now restyled) European constitution make explicit reference to religion would have been a step along that path. Still, it’s pretty hard to go back to the past.

Reactionary politics — as we know to our cost from the experience of Northern Ireland — is not going to help one bit.

Sacks’s alternative is to engage in society building. Diverse societies are exciting and creative, but they need something that holds them together: a national narrative, national moments of celebration, thinking about citizenship in far broader terms than merely the language of rights.

Currently, those who are not of Irish descent can become Irish citizens by virtue of residence or marriage. There is no requirement to be able to speak one of the official languages or to know anything about Irish history, institutions and ways of doing things.

Citizenship ‘tests’ have been ridiculed in some other countries because many native-born citizens cannot answer all, or even most, of the questions. It’s a fair point, but some kind of test would send a signal, at least, that migrants are expected not merely to reside in Ireland without breaking the law, but to participate positively in Irish society. I suspect we will hear more about this from Conor Lenihan in 2008.