Multiversal Can Intl Jrnl Latham

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Robert Latham

What are we?From a multicultural to a multiversal Canada

Samuel Huntingtons most recent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to

Americas National Identity, contends that the future of American democ-

racy rests on the prospect of defending the Anglo-Protestant culture that

has been centre stage in US political history. Many commentators have

rightly questioned the premises of this book. Rather than join in, let me

point your attention to Huntingtons use of the pronoun who. Its a choice

that leaves little option but to do exactly as Huntington wants: to make the

issue of an overarching ethnonational identity the principal problem. The

title of this essay is What are we? The simple substitution of what for

who makes the principal problem our understanding of how what we call

Canada is organized in sociopolitical and ethical terms. Huntingtons for-

mulation takes this for granted: the core issue at play for him is whether the

right whoWASP ethnocultural identitycan remain central enough to

support his whatthe American liberal republic.

Robert Latham is director of the York Centre of International and Security Studies at

York University. The author acknowledges the support of the International

Development Research Centre to conduct this work.

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I have purposefully left in the pronoun we, not to sneak in a who

but to emphasize two things. First, that when considering ourselves as a

collectivity within the national social space and political community that iscalled Canada, we do so in terms of the question of what we are as a

Canadian society rather than who we are as Canadians. A secondand

far more controversialreason I keep the we is to question the possibili-

ty of some kind of unified, comprehensive understanding of we at all.

Indeed, a what can be conceived in a highly pluralized and fragmented

fashionan option not easily available in answers to the question who we

are. It may be the case that understandings of what we are splinter along

the axes of a series of two Canadas that not only include the one associat-

ed with the worlds of Francophone and Anglophone or First Nations and

European settlers, but also the one that distinguishes people and commu-

nities that are open to the very question of what we are?embracing dif-

ference in an essentially cosmopolitan world viewfrom another Canada

that is closed to this question and which seeks to protect itself against dif-

ference and cosmopolitanism.

Focusing on a what is hardly unusual. Political theorists, at least from

Hobbes onward, have done this ostensibly because principles and logics of

social organization provide a powerful justification for making claims abouthow best to order a polity. This tendency is far from just theoretical or aca-

demic: in Canada and elsewhere, those responsible for policy and political

organization justify action based on claims about the nature of social life.

Among the most central understandings of the nature of Canadian society

is that it comprises many cultures and this thereby justifies policies and

laws associated with multiculturalism. I will argue that the concept of mul-

ticulturalism actually does not answer the question of what Canada is, and

as a result we need to consider policies that are better suited to a more accu-rate understanding of the nature of Canadian society. My overall goal is to

suggest that we can move beyond a multicultural frame and consider the

nature of the social life in the territory we call Canada in all its complexity,

taking account of our far greater awareness of the complex interweave of

forms of life operating at varying scales from neighbourhoods to transbor-

der networks. I believe we can use this very open conception of the social

space we associate and identify as Canada as a basis to build effective poli-

cy. This suggests the possibility of not just adjusting or amending our

understanding and assumptions about multiculturalism, but working with

a different understanding and set of assumptions. My point is not to reject

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multiculturalism per se, even if it has flaws, but to move beyond it in a pos-

itive sense. If effective and just policy is a more likely outcome when based

on a more accurate model and understanding of society, then it behoovesus to pursue that greater accuracy.

I also want to suggest that what I call multiversalsociety is something

to be actively supported and advanced by civil society and government. The

existence and recognition of that form of society can be a good in itself. To

this end, I will argue, there are basic policies and commitments, such as the

advancement of multiple citizenship in Canada and worldwide, which can

make a huge difference to the development of a multiversal society (the way

that single national citizenship itself has been so critical to the formation of

nation-states).

The reason to take this task on now is that it is clear that many people

in countries like Canada are increasingly anxious about the difference pro-

duced by widening immigration and transnationalism and intensifying

energies in the assertion of rights in many realms from religion to sexuali-

ty. It is also more readily apparent that the categories we have used to model

differencesuch as ethnic culture or majority/minority groupare too

limiting: individuals are increasingly understanding themselves in far more

complex and intersecting ways, involving, for example: class, locale, con-sumption, political orientation, sexual preference, and religious affiliation.

Rather than be content with using models from an earlier period of politi-

cal development to contend with the politics of difference in the 21st cen-

tury, Canada can innovatively get ahead of the curve and rethink itself as an

open, transnational society.

FROM MULTICULTURALISM TO MULTIVERSALISM

By now many of us concerned with multiculturalism are familiar with thecriticisms that have been levelled against it from both the left and the right.

Criticisms have included the ghettoization of new immigrants; the solidifi-

cation of Anglo-Canadian culture as a norm; the established of a culture

hierarchy; the commodification ofand fixation onculture; the papering

over of crucial class and general differences and inequalities; and the pur-

suit of a false unity and common Canadian identity.1 Rather than focus on

1 The work associated with these critiques is far too large to list here. Readers inter-

ested in critical and supportive perspectives on multiculturalism will be well servedby the thoughtful and comprehensive discussion in Gerald Kernerman, Multicultural

Nationalism: Civilizing Difference, Constituting Community(Vancouver: UBC Press,

2005).

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such critiques I want to make two basic points. First, even if we have con-

cerns about the instrumental uses and sociopolitical effects of multicultur-

alism as an ideology and a policy, we can still acknowledge that Canada ismulticultural and the commitment to multiculturalism put in place in the

early 1970swhile not to everyones likingwas an innovation in state-

society relations.2

Second, while we may recognize the truism that Canada is multicul-

tural, many of the criticisms argue directly or suggest indirectly that Canada

is much more than just a multicultural social formation. It is multiracial,

multiclass, multigendered, multisexual, multilocal (from rural to urban,

from North Toronto to Harbourfront Toronto). It is multipolitical, multire-

ligious, multilegal-status, multilingual, multihistorical (within lives and

across communities), and multiprofessional. It is multigenerational, multi-

status (from temporary worker to citizen), and multiscalar (with lives real-

ized at difference scales, some which remain more or less within a single

province, while others reach regularly across borders and oceans). The list

is not exhaustive and perhaps expands far out to the horizon when we con-

sider all the mixed formations, such as hybrid-ethnicities (e.g., Chino-

Latinos) resulting from mixed marriages or hybrid spatial forms growing

out of a mix of urban and suburban in the new in-between cities that sur-round many of Canadas urban centres.3

2 I am especially aware here of the concerns of people in Qubec since 1971 about

dilution along the cultural axis in the move from bi- to multi-cultural. See, for exam-

ple, Richard J.F. Day, Multiculturalism and The History of Candian Diversity(Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2002).

3 On mixed marriages, see the recent research by Minelle Mahtani, Interrogating the

hyphen-nation: Canadian Mixed race women and multicultural policy, in Sean Hier

and B. Singh Bolaria, eds., Identity and Belonging: Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in

Canadian Society(Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2007), 124-56. On in-between

spaces, see the work of the city institute at York University at www.yorku.ca.


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Of course, on one level, there is a cultural dimension to everything I

mentioned.4 Indeed, it certainly helps simplify matters to reduce the over-

whelming array of social domains, identities, and spaces to varieties of cul-ture. But it is the huge differences and multiplicity implied by the seem-

ingly infinite everythings in a society that I want to emphasize should be

taken into account on their own terms when thinking about the nature of

Canadian society. A small town, for instance, has a culture, but it also has

an economy, political organization, one or more religious communities,

and a particular geography. Each of these many factors may find expression

in the towns culture but what is expressed has its own force and logic.

An important reason not to be satisfied with one single pivot like cul-

ture to anchor the difference and multiplicity that constitutes Canada is that

we can help avoid trying to fit all the complexity and changeability of the life

of individuals that can be identified on one level as Caribbean-Canadian

into an overarching concept like Caribbean-Canadian culture. Not only

might an individual understand his life in Canada through her race, but

also her class, sexuality, neighbourhood, and political connections to the

Caribbean. She might also alter these understandings, positions, and relat-

ed practices throughout her life or even in the same year. The same could

be said for a group within the so-called Caribbean-Canadian community. 5

And while legal frameworks such as the Canadian charter of rights and

freedoms can provide protections and the basis for claims along many vec-

4 See Will Kymlicka, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter 5. This implies that we can

address other dimensions of human experience and society, sexuality, or race,

through the lens of culture. To my mind this is a misguided attempt to preserve theprimacy of multiculturalism as the best approach for dealing with social difference.

Critiques of the attempt to reduce the complexity of societies and identities to culture

have come from varying quarters, including the critical social theorist Shela

Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era(Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2002) as well as the liberal political philosopher Brian

Barry, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism(Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2001).

5 While Kymlicka reads Neil Bissondaths Selling Illusions: The Cult of

Multiculturalism in Canada(Toronto: Penguin Books, 1994), as chiefly complainingabout multiculturalisms ghettoization of immigrant groups, I read him as chiefly

complaining about being forced to live his life through the cultural-ethnic category of

Caribbean-Canadian.

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6 Despite the effort of theorists like Iris Young, Inclusion and Democracy(New York:

Oxford University Press, 2000), to forestall the typical fixity in theorizing, it continues

today in the work, for example, of Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism:

Cultural Diversity and Political Theory(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

7 In this then I agree with social theorists such as Ernesto Laclau, New Reflection on

the Revolution of Our Time(London and New York: Verso, 1990), 8992, who con-

tend that the view of society as an intelligible totality is essentialist and misleading.

This does not mean that we have to agree with Margaret Thatcher when she quipped

there is no such thing as society, meaning to assert that we should worry less about

the welfare of the British people as a collective. My point is that we can understand

this collective in all its difference and multiplicity as multiversal.

tors from sexual preference to disability, charters are not proactive pro-

grammatic policy like the multiculturalism act.

We can shrug our heads and say that taking into account all this com-plexity and multiplicity is too much even to begin to fathom, let alone sort

out as a basis for organizing Canada politically. The first part of this objec-

tion has merit: it is unreasonable to expect a coherent, structured portrait of

society once we open up our frame to take the full range of multiplicity into

account. But I would argue that attempts to create such carefully structured

portraits are really attempts to contain social complexity in some concep-

tion that is only partial at best. Rather than be satisfied with these partial

portraits (a multicultural or a unified Canada) we can just accept that we are

a multiverse made up not just of many identities and perspectives, but also

many specific domains of action and practice from health and education to

the environment, and that all these many universes are changeable to vary-

ing degrees.

If it is true that political theorists and policymakers start with a model

of society that is typically used as a point of reference for building a theory

or policy, what happens if we treat that model of society as an open, variable

conception that always presents itself as ultimately impenetrable? The

question what are we? should be seen as a recurring or even permanentproblem to be addressed, rather than a question to be answered in the inter-

est of moving on with political theorizing or policymaking.6 In this sense I

am asking that we keep the question what are we? in constant motion.

Thus, multiversality is first a claim that no macro-conceptualization can

realistically represent the basic structure of society. The term multiversal

society represents a conceptual place-holder for a complex, overlapping,

inconsistent social formation that we are otherwise often content to call

society or Canada.7

Multiversalism does not try to fix meaning, but to pro-


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8 William James was the first known user of this term to convey the need to under-

stand that the world is made of a plurality of perspectives and subjectivities. See

William James, The one and the many, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old

Ways of Thinking(New York: Longman Green and Co.,1907): 49-63. Since then the

term has been used mostly in natural science to describe a reality composed of mul-

tiple universes andin a similar fashionin science fiction.

9 The notion of multiple public spheres in the same country is developed by NancyFraser, Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually

existing democracy, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109-42.

vide a conceptual frame for individuals and groups to navigate democratic

contestations and life choices. A multiverse is never complete, and is never

knowable or transparent.And yet I have the nerve to ask for government action based on such an

understanding of Canada? Moreover, I am asking people who are living

under the authority of the unified Canadian state, in a distinct, bounded ter-

ritory with national symbols, media, and systems of infrastructure, to rec-

ognize themselves in this disjointed and potentially confusing way. My will-

ingness to ask this of policymakers and publics is not only based on the

belief that this is a more honest and comprehensive understanding of life

in Canada. It also holds the promise of opening the way toward important

social and political innovations that will establish Canada as a global leader

in rethinking how to help organize life in an increasingly transnational 21st

century. In that context, part of the task of the state is to undertake action

that will facilitate complexity and multiplicity.

Before I go on to suggest some steps in that regard, I will first try to

clarify why we need the term multiverse and what are the advantages of

thinking of Canada in a multiversal way. Why bother with the term multi-

verse? I think this somewhat strange and awkward wordas multicultur-

al likely sounded decades agois necessary.8 For some the word diversi-ty might do, given that the term multiversity is quite proximate to the

term diversity. However, while diversity and multiversity have similar

meanings associated with difference along many vectors from class to gen-

der, the word multiverse is more closely related to the world universe, the

point being that the use of the term multiverse is to convey that there are

many universes (understood in this context as, for instance, a domain of

activity like healthcare, a discrete public sphere realized through a busy,

robust internet forum, a locale such as a town, or a form of community thatmight emerge out of a womens rights movement).9 Indeed, in a multiverse

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you do not just have diversity across one universe, but diversity within and

across many overlapping and intersecting universes, so that there are a

seemingly infinite variety of views, life trajectories, and identities.Just as multiculturalism and diversity fail to convey what is meant by

multiversalism, the terms hybridity, pluralism, and cosmopolitanism also

fall short. As indicated above, hybridity implies a mixing and crossing of

various identities and dimensions of lifei.e., working class immigrants

that otherwise hold together as integral on their own terms. In the multi-

versal frame, the point is to allow for both the hybrid and non-hybrid. 10

On one level multiversality is, like multiculturalism, merely one partic-

ular form of or approach within pluralism, the latter being in this funda-

mental sense the basic assumption that any given social and political for-

mation should be thought of in terms of multiplicity and difference. The

problem is that pluralism taken in this sense is far too abstract and gener-

al to convey the specific points about multiversalism I have already made.

Indeed, pluralism typically takes form as a specific theory about the nature

of democratic politics. (Historically, in the US in the 1950s, it focused on

the role of interest groups in politics; in Britain in the first decades of the

20th century, it focused on the power of nonstate social organization. 11)The

ways we might imagine a politics of multiversalism will surely overlap withthe politics of pluralism.

Like the other terms, cosmopolitanism has important affinities with

multiversalism, given that I assume that individuals positively disposed to

the Canadian multiverse will be cosmopolitans. That is, they will be open

and supportive of difference and willing to share social space with groups

and individuals with all sorts of identities and ways of being, if not also will-

ing to participate in and affiliate with their diverse universes.12 However, it


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10 I am using hybrid here to represent social forms where there is a clear identity of

mixture like Latin jazz, Ukrainian-Portuguese, or gay South Asians. I recognize the

point that every form ultimately is hybrid because of historical and concurrent influ-

ences that are not highlighted in an identified mix. A key text on hybridity is Homi K.

Bhabha, The Location of Culture(London, Routledge, 1994).

11 One useful attempt to review the various faces of pluralism is Gregor McLennan,

Pluralism(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

12 See David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism(New York:

Basic Books, 1995) for a statement of the advantages of cosmopolitanism over plu-

ralism and multiculturalism.


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13 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 142, goes as far as to argue that multiplicity is

necessary for democracy.

should be clear that cosmopolitanism represents a perspective, attitude, and

set of practices regarding others and other worlds rather than a framework

for understanding the nature of social life in Canada. Indeed, multiversal-ism, as a very strong version of pluralism, assumes that Canada can include

decidedly non-cosmopolitan perspectives, even if these come at the cost of

hindering the development of policies that encourage multiversity.

It should be clear by now that I believe multiversalism is a good thing.

That belief rests on the near truism that multiplicity and difference across

Canada are necessary for the widest possible development and circulation

of ideas about the organization of social and political life through varied

approaches, critiques, assessments, and proposed alternatives. Democracy

may be valued for many reasons but one of them is the potential for a wide

set of options and thoughtful evaluations regarding public policy and

norms to help make economic life, social welfare, foreign policy, and envi-

ronmental actionto name a few areasbetter.13 The point is that no one

philosophy, approach, individual, or group will have all the wisdom and

effective policy on its side, even if they have much of the power and access.

Therefore, as many relevant perspectives on an issue as are present in the

Canadian multiverse ought to contribute to collective thinking on issues

from lawmaking to diplomacyexpressed through public debate, consulta-tion, and political conflict.

Beyond the advantage of having more perspectives on the nature of

political and social life that can sometimes help us avoid bad decisions and

mistakes or see them when they happen, a multiverse means the existence

and possibility of more choices in the ways and places within which we

might live our livesfrom rural to urban, gay to straight, traditional to

experimental, collective to individualistic. Whatever ones views on the

desirability and difficulty of protecting these forms, facilitating access tothem, or making them more visible, it should be understood that the posi-

tion and perspective from which one criticizes such desirability and difficul-

ty is part of the multiverse. Indeed, one of the advantages of seeing Canada

as a multiverse is that we need not agree on a hierarchy of pivots for under-

standing difference in Canada, including nation, culture, race, class, sexual-

ity, religion, rural/urban, new/old immigrant, language, and disability.

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MULTIVERSALISM AND COMPLEX COEXISTENCE

I realize that the very possibility of protecting difference and facilitating

access to it presupposes a liberal democratic polity within which funda-

mental rights are available, along with space for democratic practices and

expression. But just as multiculturalism helped push the Canadian liberal

polity beyond its mostly individualistic foundation toward the development

of group rights, multiversalism can push it further by emphasizing specif-

ic rights of coexistence not just between identifiable groups and communi-

ties, but also within such groups, as well as within and across spaces, bor-

ders, and spheres of activity (from the factory to the clinic).

Within the context of this essay, I cannot articulate a political theory of

such rights, only suggest some simple starting points for thinking abouthow one might begin to approach such a theory, specifically in the realm of

citizenship. A critical first point is the understanding that to view Canada

as a multiverse, highlighting the profusion of social forms and identities,

does not entail displacing the primacy of the state in political life. On the

contrary, in the Canadian multiverse the states centrality is more visible as

the one set of institutions that is in effect present in every sphere of life.

The nature of its presence can vary from the very constitutor and key agent

in a domain such as education or healthcare, to being one among a num-ber of forces in civic spaces such as a neighbourhood or the media.

One implication of this is that the fear that rights-claiming newcomers-

immigrants will dissipate the political coherence of Canada is unfounded.

Among the many nation-making activities the state undertakes is the con-

stitution and maintenance of borders, territory, national symbols, civic edu-

cation, a common currency, and territory-wide military force. As one coun-

try among many in the wider international system, Canada maintains a

coherence based on these elements that belies concerns with difference andmultiplicity as threats to unity. It is only a challenge like the potential suc-

cession of Qubec that brings the foundations of the Canadian state into

question.

The point is that it is not shared understandings, per se, that make a

polity, but shared institutions, activities, symbols, space, and territory.

While shared understandings can emerge around any of these, or, say, a

humanitarian emergency inside Canada, they are not prerequisite to politi-

cal life. We can think of a family whose members may share a home with

very difference understandings of the space and its purposes. Where spe-

cific rooms are shared, the family needs to ensure that spaces have multi-


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14 On the ways that globalization reinforces states, see Linda Weiss, The Myth of the

Powerless State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Stephen Castles and

Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of

Belonging(London: Macmillan, 2000).

ple meanings and purposes (i.e., a room for music and meditation). The key

to coexistenceor more appropriately, complex coexistenceis how they

contend with the different frames of reference for understanding the roomsand their uses (through intersecting, overlapping, and alternating use).

Multiversal difference reinforces the political robustness of Canada in

that the common element that joins the many spheres associated with soci-

ety is the Canadian state. Similarly, transnational processes involving the

movement of people, images, and goods in and out of Canada can reinforce

the functional integrity of a state that guards its borders and territory and

regulates movement.14 On an experiential level, the very awareness of

transnationality (or perhaps more accurately, translocality) on the part of

someone in movement, or someone observing someone in movement,

rests on their emplacement in a specific territory like Canada and place like

a Vancouver or Windsorthereby reinforcing the integrity of Canada as a

place to be transnational or translocal in or from. In this respect, newcom-

ersand those who repeatedly leave and returnare a part in many differ-

ent ways of the already existing complex fabric of a multiversal Canada.

They reinforce, by their presence and movement, the distinctiveness of the

Canadian political community in local, national, and international contexts,

by raising the very questions of what is that they are part of and on whatterms.

I realize that those Canadians who reject cosmopolitanism are all too

likely to be uninterested in recognizing that Canadian identity rests on any-

thing other than their self-understanding of what it isin national and

local terms. Since we already have a multiversewhether we like it or not

in places like Hrouxville, QCthe question is what are the terms of inter-

section among its many components. One key aspect of this challenge is

dealing with tensions between the many universes inside Canada that comein contact with one another in physical and symbolic terms. The typical lit-

mus test is when one group, established in the country for some time, finds

the actions of newcomers objectionable or repugnant, leading to various

forms of social conflict in terms of a fear of change. The current debate in

Qubec over reasonable accommodation is exactly this, contending with

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15 This is the position so articulately worked out by Will Kymlicka, Multicultural

Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1996).

tensions arising out of overlapping universes. When some self-identified

majority feels they are the predominant shaper of a space and place the

question is why should they make exception for others? Why accommodatewhen you are the chief constitutive power, with the main capacity to shape

spaces not only based on majority numbers and precedent, but control of

government and other institutions?

Returning to my previous analogy of the family home, what happens

when you have two families of very different orientations sharing the same

home, but with one family outnumbering the other, setting up its life first,

and being in legal control of the home? So far, liberalism has suggested that

minority rights to live according to ones cultural norms ought to be pro-

tected as long as they follow the basic laws of the land.15 But no liberal

approach solves common public space issues where universes intersect. To

just admit there is an inherent conflict in such intersection means it is left

essentially to the courts to sort out the logics of harm and benefit (which

they may do poorly). It is also inadequate to call for peaceful coexistence

when the grounds for it are not there.

The question is what is the guiding principle of complex coexistence?

A multiversal frame suggests the possibility of moving beyond the reason-

able accommodation concept that assumes minority/majority duality toarticulate the less presupposing concept of complex coexistence (of space

and particular forms of constitutive power) such that the various domains

(or universes) of practice, institutions, symbols, and meaning overlap and

abound, but, in principle, need not interfere with one another (the halal

Chinese restaurant can be next to a Polish one). We know that many streets

in Canadian cities from Vancouver to Ottawa are like this, as various reli-

gious, political, aesthetic, class, racial, and moral sensibilities (progressive

or conservative) overlap and interweave, along with the regulatory elementsof the state guiding the provision of sidewalks and crosswalk. The members

of various universes as a result can experience the same space differently,

focusing on the elements that make it theirs. When they want to engage or

experience the other overlapping universes about them, they can do so

without having to ask others to alter their practices. Multiversalism further

suggests that these universes are splinted with all sorts of prismatic effects

across generations, genders, classes, philosophies, and types of presence in


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16 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:

Routledge, 1992) uses the term encounter differently but relatedly. She points to the

contact zones that are the spaces of colonial encounters, the space[s] in which

peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other

and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical

inequality, and intractable conflict. My taking the term encounter out of the colonial

context is meant to open the way toward noncoercion, equality, and nonviolent coex-

istence.

17 Much has been made of encounters in cities. See, for example, Erving Goffman,

Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interactions (Indianapolis: Bobbs-

Merrill, 1961). Whileas Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of American Cities (NewYork: Random House, 1961) pointed outsuburbs can limit encounters, it is not nec-

essarily the case that towns limit them, which is one of the reason some Qubcois

are concerned about accommodation.

18 For some early reflections on logics of restrain in encounter, see Edward Ross,

Social Control(New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1901/1970).

Canada (length and nature of time in residence and legal status). That is,

the spaces are experienced differently within and across identity groups.

The notion that they are a them, shaping space in one way with one set ofmeanings, and we are an us, shaping space in one way with one set of

meanings, becomes deeply problematic.

One critical issue is the effects of what is taken by some to be visual

offences (e.g., the miniskirt or the hijab, dark skin, or working-class attire)

that is typically the result of the unanticipated encounter (someone walking

by), where options for structural separations (e.g., clouded glass or fences)

are few. We know that these encounters typically happen in the interstices

between worldsthe places of transit, where ones very presence already

assumes all forms of risk, from crime to accidents to visual offence.16 In

small town the salience of each encounter can be high because of the lower

population density. We know that the option to avoid chance encounters

a key aspect of public spaceis not available to many as they go to jobs,

clinics, and schools.17 A multiversal perspective suggests that in encounter

one is not confronting an ethnic or cultural bloc bursting with multicultur-

al rights, but individuals sorting out their complex experiences of world-

making, expression, difference (class and racial), and their own episodes of

encounter as well. While this recognition will not easily overcome non-cos-mopolitan attitudes, it does underscore that the negotiation of transitory

encounter is possible on an individual or small group basis, rather than an

ethnic bloc basis.18

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19 For a thoughtful discussion of the fear of immigration in liberal democracies, see

Roxanne Lynn Doty, Anti-immigrantism in Western Democracies (New York:

Routledge, 2003).

TOWARD A COMMITMENT TO MULTIVERSAL CITIZENSHIP

Issues of encounter and complex coexistence raise the questions of who is

encountered, why they are encountered, and on what basis do those

encountered have claims and rights to be of and in a particular multiverse.

Lying at the heart of the backlash associated with reasonable accommoda-

tion is the simple query: why are they here in my world? But what do they

or we mean by world? Is it a specific neighbourhood, enclave, town,

province, or national territory? In national terms, there is little opportunity

in contemporary modernitywith its large cities, diverse labour and popu-

lation needs, and transnational, economic, transport, and communication

structuresto live in anything other than a multiverse. Even if one lives in

a small town, the overlaps are many because of travel or spillover at theedges as suburbs come to abut rural towns and labour needs bring in new

residents. There is of course, no shortage of arguments such as

Huntingtons in western democracies against the most visible and charged

source of multiversity, new immigrants.19 They seem to be made as a last

gasp of desperation to save a set of traditions generated by imagined politi-

cal nostalgia in Huntingtons case orfar less ambitiouslyby a nostalgia

for the local world of the everyday (in towns and neighbourhoods) taken to

be threatened by dissolution and loss of predominance. I would argue that,once we stop taking the claims arising in Qubec lately at face value, a more

accurate way to read them are as endeavours to find a secure place in a sea

of multiversity operating within, across, and beyond local, provincial, and

national boundariesespecially because these claims do not come with any

meaningful overarching frame for negotiating the world beyond their local

perch. These efforts at preservation, thus, can be understood as recognition

of multiversity and its force in shaping Canadian social relations on many

geographical scales, from local to global.If we thus can assume modern life is multiversal, and perhaps becom-

ing more so with time, we should at least explore what it means to have an

obligation to ensure fairness and justice to everyone who is part of it and to

think through on what terms those new to it become a part of it (on the

assumption that each newcomer is a test of what we are). Some readers may

believe I am placing too much emphasis on immigrants and diasporas


| Robert Latham |


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secure status in any state in which they are resident. While this view of cit-

izenship may be jarring to our earswhich are so accustomed to the hard,

exclusive citizenship associated with nation-statesit should not be over-looked that more fluid, overlapping forms of membership existed in

empires both ancient (Roman) and modern (British). Now that human

rights-based, non-imperial, transterritorial forms of belonging and mem-

bership are possible (with contemporary developments in global norms,

rights, institutions, communications, and travel), it ought not be labeled as

unfeasible by states protective of their exclusive forms of belonging.

Along those lines, the Canadian government clearly has, in recent

decades, been liberal toward multiple citizenship, a core dimension of mul-

tiversal citizenship. Efforts in the mid-1990s in parliament to contest mul-

tiple citizenship, by forcing those with Canadian citizenship to express pri-

mary allegiance to Canada, were not successful.21 This liberality created

public controversy when Lebanese-Canadians were aided in their effort to

flee an Israeli invasion in 2006. On the other hand, the Canadian state has

strengthened the residency requirementmaking the attainment of a sec-

ond, Canadian, citizenship more difficult.22 In addition, in the post-9/11

security context many multiple citizens from the Middle East and south and

central Asia have found out that they not only may not receive protectionsas Canadians but they can be treated as dangerous suspects who can be

more easily deported than Canadian-only citizens (who would in effect

become stateless).23 Rather than treat the risks associated with multiple cit-

izenship in the current environment as a reason to avoid it, we might con-

sider strengthening the protections associated with having it.

21 See the discussion in Donald Galloway, The dilemmas of Canadian citizenship

law, in T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer, eds., From Migrants to

Citizens: Membership in a Changing World. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment

for International Peace), 82-118.

22 Lloyd Wong, Home away from home? Transnationalism and the Canadian

citizenship regime, in Paul Kennedy & Victor Roudometof, eds., Communities

Across Borders: New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures (London, Routledge,

2002), 169-181.

23 Daiva Stasiulis and Darryl Ross, Security, flexible sovereignty, and the perils ofmultiple citizenship, Citizenship Studies 10, no. 3 (July 2006): 329-48; and Audrey

Macklin, The securitization of dual citizenship, forthcoming in Thomas Faist, ed.,

Dual Citizenship in Global Perspective(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

| Robert Latham |

| 38 | International Journal | Autumn 2007 |


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| What are we? |

On what basis would I ask for multiversal citizenship to be established

as the primary frame for citizenship when the vast majority of Canadians

have single citizenship (and many of this majority are troubled by alterna-tive framings)?24 The easiest answers are probably the least compelling: that

stronger support for multiversal citizenship can enrich the Canadian mul-

tiverse by making multiscalar lives easier, which is a good in itself, as

argued above; and that single citizenship, in a multiverse, is but one type of

status among many, even if it is predominant on a national basis. In other

words, single-state citizens are mulitiversal citizens. Beyond these two

answers are other notable reasons. One is that any single citizen, or her

children and family, are potential multiple citizens. Creating an environ-

ment where multiple citizenship is taken to be the norm strengthens the

possibility of that option for those with single citizenship (who otherwise

might fear loss of Canadian citizenship). Another reason is that a commit-

ment to multiversitymanifest in real terms in part through strong sup-

port for multiple citizenshipcan expand the meaning of Canadian civic

identity that is consistent with its historic identification as a country advanc-

ing multiculturalism and accepting high levels of immigration.

Finally, probably the most important reason is that normalizing multi-

versal citizenship can potentially open the way to a more secure status forthose individuals with precarious status in Canada. The idea is that all res-

idents, regardless of the nature of their status, can be thought of as mutiver-

sal citizens if they are in Canadain that they already have citizenship from

somewhere else and are potential citizens of Canada. In other words, if

multiversal citizenship is the norm, then secure status should be extended

to those who are currently here with precarious status. This extension can

take various forms from a proposed US-style amnesty to the redefinition of

forms of secure status short of permanent residence or full citizenship. Thepossibility of receiving Canadian citizenship should be a normative goal for

all people who reside in Canada, no matter what their current status.

Ultimately, the establishment of norms of multiversal citizenship

require international protections and commitments to multiple citizenship

worldwide. In effect, there should come into being an international regime

24 When thinking about multiple citizenship, it is important not only to consider

immigrants inside Canada but the nearly three million Canadians abroad. See Kenny

Zhang, Mission invisible: Rethinking the Canadian diaspora, Canada-Asia

Commentary46 (September 2007).


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| Robert Latham |


for multiple citizenship. Such a regime should establish the parameters for

one state extending citizenship to the citizens of another state; articulate

protections and rights for citizens of one country who are present and resid-ing in another country without citizenship or permanent residence in that

country; and strengthen the channels and rights for interstate protection of

citizens who are detained in other countrieseven if they are citizens of the

country detaining thembeyond those derived from the Vienna conven-

tion on consular relations.

An international regime for multiple citizenship could help place

understandings and developments of citizenship within the context of the

multiscalar connections between societies and peoples and thereby poten-

tially take it out of the frame of exclusive state formation. 25 It could also help

contend with notions of exclusive loyalties by institutionalizing the possi-

bility of multi-allegiances.

I am not suggesting that the construction of this regime will be easy. In

fact, it will take considerable leadership. This is an ideal opportunity for the

Canadian state to re-establish itself as a primary actor in the international

arena. Difficult issues include how to contend with competing claims by

individuals and governments across jurisdictions; prevent states from

using the regime as a basis for establishing even greater control over bor-ders and human movement; and determine the effects the regime should

have on the openness of borders. Luckily, we already have some precedent

in international instruments, such as the 1997 European convention on cit-

izenship. And there clearly is precedent for the Canadian states exercise of

international leadership in areas such as the international ban on land-

mines and the development of multilateral peacekeeping. Each of these

areas also had difficulties that seemed insurmountable at first. This leader-

ship role could expand Canadian civil identity beyond what would be gainedby a domestic commitment to multiversalism.

25 For a cogent, thorough exploration of the exclusive state formation frame, see

Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1992).


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| What are we? |

CONCLUSION

I am not able to explore here proposals for domestic action advancing mul-

tiversalism or for international action advancing a multiple citizenshipregime. Even without such proposals, readers will likely see that I am ask-

ing a great deal of Canadians: to reframe an important part of Canadian

civic identity regarding difference in Canada (multiculturalism); to confront

head-on yet one more dividethat between cosmopolitans and non-cos-

mopolitansbeyond language, race, and ethnicity; to rethink the meaning

of citizenship and place it within a very transnational frame; and to take

responsibility for leading other countries in sorting through the very diffi-

cult realm of multiple citizenship. My optimism that this call will not be

completely ignored rests on the Canadian history of political and social

innovation.

Documents

Multiversal Can Intl Jrnl Latham