More press on Bob Putnam's diversity and social capital paper.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
An important US study shows us that the effects of ethnic diversity can be
read as a challenge, rather than a threat
Madeleine Bunting
Not many thinkers successfully straddle academia and politics, but one of
the few who has managed to do so on both sides of the Atlantic is Robert
Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. You can spot traces of his influence all
over New Labour policy. He was the man who popularised the concept of
social capital - the trust and networks of friendship, neighbourhood and
organisations on which so much of our lives depend - and it has won him the
ear of politicians of all persuasions: Bill Clinton, George Bush, Tony
Blair, Gordon Brown, even, most recently, the Libyan leader, Muammar
Gadafy.
Aware of how his work is used politically, Putnam is understandably nervous
now about how he presents the first findings of the biggest study of social
capital ever undertaken on which he has been working for over five years.
He started out wanting to track social capital over time and in different
communities across the US. What he wasn't expecting to find was a negative
link between ethnic diversity and social capital. Put crudely, the more
ethnically diverse the neighbourhood, the less likely you are to trust your
local shopkeeper, regardless of his or her ethnicity. He warns that,
however uncomfortable this conclusion might be, "progressives can't stick
their head in the sand". But the killer punch of his research is that
diversity not only reduces social capital between ethnic groups but also
within ethnic groups. Diversity leads not so much to bad race relations as
to everyone becoming more isolated and less trustful. In the jargon, it
kills off both the "bridging capital" between different groups and "bonding
capital", which is the connections among people like yourself. Putnam calls
it "hunkering down" as people withdraw from all kinds of connectedness in
their community. And what follows is a long list of negative consequences,
which include less confidence in local government and the media, lower
voting registration (though higher participation in protest), less
volunteering, fewer close friends, lower rates of happiness and perceived
quality of life and more time spent watching television. It affects almost
all our relationships, from the most public to the most intimate.
Putnam and his team are too rigorous for any of the usual objections to
stick. To reach his conclusion, he controlled for a wide range of other
factors including inequality, poverty, residential mobility and education,
to be sure that "hunkering" was really a response to ethnic diversity. He
wasn't going to publish these kinds of explosive findings without being
pretty sure he was right.
What's still not clear to him is what causes the hunkering and whether
social psychology might provide some answers. Certainly social
psychologists are not unfamiliar with the phenomenon. A study of American
schools after desegregation found that children were defining who they
would play with more narrowly than ever - "resegregation" followed lines
not only of ethnicity but also of gender.
What makes Putnam nervous now is how this could be seized upon by rightwing
politicians hostile to immigration. So he insists his research be seen in
the context a) that ethnic diversity is increasing in all modern societies
and is not only inevitable but is also desirable, a proven asset in terms
of creativity and economic growth; and b) that "hunkering" can be short
term and "successful immigrant societies create new forms of social
solidarity".
In conversation, he emphasises the latter, well aware that he is publishing
his findings at a time of intense anxiety over these issues both in the US
(where legislation to legalise some of the estimated 12 million illegal
immigrants just got thrown out of Congress) and in Europe. He doesn't
underestimate the scale of the challenge, particularly in European
countries that, he acknowledges, "haven't been immigrant societies for
1,000 years". He says that the "major social learning process" required is
in the same league as that required by the industrial revolution.
But as he arrives in Manchester at the start of a major comparative project
of social capital between the UK and the US, his big theme is don't panic.
He rattles through US history to offer all kinds of illustrations of how
large-scale migration can be successfully accommodated in a bid to allay
some of the European anxiety, particularly around its Muslim minorities.
Neither the US nor Europe is currently facing the kind of levels of
migration relative to population seen at the turn of the 20th century in
the US. To the argument that the shiploads arriving in Ellis Island were
all Europeans who thus had some common culture, he points out that at the
time there was a rich alarmist literature of how racially distinct the
Jewish or Italian immigrant groups were. The US has had a history of
"exceptionalism" - the line "that past immigration is fine, but current
immigrants present an unprecedented problem" - yet each new wave in turn is
absorbed as successfully as the last.
US history shows that all migrant groups develop an intense religiosity -
Irish, Italian, Jewish, Hispanic. The increasing religious identification
of Muslims in Europe fits neatly into a well-established pattern. As do the
tendencies to marry within ethnic and faith communities, and to maintain
close ties to the country of origin - none of these inhibit integration in
the long term.
You could say that they are part of the pattern of settlement as the first
couple of generations maintain a strong migrant identity - which is,
paradoxically, an important part of their capacity to integrate. A strong
community identity gives them the confidence and self-respect to establish
themselves and get on.
The frequent UK response to the US experience is that it's not relevant
here. The US has a civic nationalism which facilitates the melting pot -
the flags and pledges of allegiance But in fact US civic nationalism was
deliberately invented at the end of the 19th century in the US precisely to
replace an ethno-nationalism challenged by mass immigration. The
implication is quite clear: it's up to the UK to develop a comparable civic
nationalism, a point that has not been lost on any of the protagonists in
the UK debate to whom Putnam has been speaking, from Trevor Phillips to
Ruth Kelly, as their frequent statements about British identity indicate.
If you want to understand what's driving the political establishment, read
Putnam.
The only problem is that they seem to give more prominence to some of his
ideas than others. Too often the public debate is skewed towards getting
"them" to integrate with "us", and conform to "our" norms of dress, culture
and values. When this is allied to an aggressive rhetoric on the war
against terror, it begins to sound like hectoring or some form of
persecution. But Putnam is not talking about a top-down set of instructions
on nationalism, but a much broader social process in which the host country
changes as much as it, changes its new arrivals: through a collaborative
effort of imagination and myriad individual experiences, new solidarity is
forged. It's a message of hope that he keenly hopes doesn't get buried in
sensationalist headlines about the short term cost of "hunkering".
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