Original scientific paper
IDENTITY AS A POWER APPARATUS: THE END OF IDEOLOGY OR POLITICS OF MULTICULTURALISM?
Žarko Paić
; Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The article deals with the analysis of multiculturalism as an ideology of political
integration in modern pluralistic societies of liberal democracy. The author develops
the thesis that the self-proclaimed end of the policy of multiculturalism
in European integration should not be considered the end of multiculturalism
as a failed policy of “cultural differences”, but quite the opposite: the essence
of the ideology of liberal multiculturalism in general – the ideology of political
integration. Since the existence of parallel societies and politics in Western societies
under rule of technocracy elite has been explained by the reasons of cultural
distances and the dialogue of cultures, the need arises to review the entire
legacy of political theories and models of multiculturalism in a situation when
it comes to the destruction of the very concept of society in a globalized neo-
-liberal project of economics, politics and culture. The author has reviewed the
case of two paradigms – the political liberalism of Rawls and Habermas, and
the politics of identity as difference of Young and Kymlicka – and argues that
the way out of the vicious circle of political universalism without the protection
of minorities and cultural particularism without belonging to the “new” political
community and society can have no credibility without a radical deconstruction
of culture as ideology. The question of identity is no longer a question of
preserving cultural values at the time of dissolution of social structures of the
global era, but a question turned to the power apparatus as identity.
Keywords
identity; apparatus; multiculturalism; ideology; culture; , politics of difference
Hrčak ID:
81914
URI
Publication date:
14.5.2012.
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