Citizenship beyond Multiculturalism? The Requirements of Social Justice in Diverse Societies

This article proposes a normative perspective that reintroduces social justice considerations more explicitly into debates about the integrative function of democratic citizenship in Europe. Such conceptual adjustments are, I suggest, not achieved by defending multiculturalism or abandoning its key concerns altogether, but by building on the significant contribution the concept has made to our understanding of citizenship while addressing its shortcomings in the light of wider social justice concerns. Key requirements of social justice are (1) the receptiveness to a spectrum of modes of expression and (2) the availability of discursive resources which enable political actors to qualify various experiences of exclusion as unjust, rather than simply as unfortunate. Nancy Fraser's account of social justice offers discursive resources that extend multiculturalism's problematisation of injustice beyond the binaries and boundaries of cultural recognition, while Tariq Modood's agency-centred understanding of citizenship can help to expand public institutions' receptiveness to a variety of modes of expression. Both perspectives are nevertheless not easily combined with each other. An in-depth discussion of their mutual disagreements and tensions thus helps to advance current debates on democracy in diverse societies.