THE EQUALITY IMPLICATIONS OF BEING A MIGRANT IN BRITAIN
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Good community relations, integration and citizenship
Faced with a more diverse society and problems of ethnic intolerance, policymakers and social scientists have been increasingly concerned with the issue of good relations between different people and communities in urban and other contexts. However, the definition of good relations is rather vague and refers to several things. This chapter explores various ideas that are involved in different aspects of good relations: living together, mutual respect, mutual recognition, social capital, and intercultural communication. Then the term good relations will be linked to concepts such as community cohesion and integration. 5.1 Living together, respect and good relations According to the French sociologist Alain Touraine, the idea of living together does not only imply tolerance of ‘the other’ but invokes solidarity as the active support for the expression of a multicultural society (Touraine, 2000: 141). As Touraine put it, people from diverse backgrounds can live together only in a context of intercultural communication, and only if they mutually recognise and accept each other in their diversity and see each other as full human beings. Richard Sennett (2003) argued that respect implies mutuality and that treating with respect means taking the needs of others seriously. In contemporary societies we can earn or fail to arouse respect in three ways: through developing abilities and skills; through care of the self; and through giving back to others. Neither Touraine nor Sennett provide empirical examples or practical suggestions, but both say that we establish ‘good relations’ if we share values which do not harm others’ rights and needs, and which recognise all others as full human beings irrespective of differences such as nationality, gender, disability or sexual orientation. At a more practical level, and following the disturbances in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in the summer of 2001, community cohesion emerged as a concept in British public policy discourse in respect of relations between different ethnic and racial groups. In the Cantle report, which was commissioned by the Government to investigate the events in northern England, the concept of community cohesion had a particular relevance. The report argued that, in some parts of the country, educational and residential segregation meant that different communities were in effect living parallel lives (Cantle et al, 2001: 9). Amin’s (2002) analysis of the street riots in 2001 also emphasised the local dimension and argued that ‘inter-ethnic relations are played out as a neighbourhood phenomenon, linked to particular socioeconomic conditions and cultural practices that coalesce into a local way of life’, rather than as part of the national picture of race and ethnicity in Britain. Therefore good relations among diverse groups can develop at a local level and on the basis of what he calls inter-culturalism, in contrast with more formal, national versions of 66