Multiculturalism and Egalitarianism

This essay examines the links between Canadian multiculturalism and racism and presents a critical account of its historical transformation over the last forty years. To this end, the essay discusses the role of multicultural ideology in the formation of the postwar hegemonic historic bloc in which a new national identity emerged out of the ruins of the British Empire and through the passage to U.S. global paramountcy. The essay explores the contradictions of this postwar nationalism and examines its crisis, providing an account of the structural transformation underway of both racism and multiculturalist ideology as the Harper Conservatives seek to establish a new historic bloc in the face of the deep crisis of U.S. global hegemony. The essay argues for the importance of understanding how the Utopianism of multiculturalism depends on the revitalization of an egalitarian counter-environment to the republic of property and its world system of nation-states.