Multiculturalism and Antidiscrimination Law: Comparing the United States and Western Europe

The relationship between multiculturalism and antidiscrimination is little understood. Contradictory claims and policies to some, they are of the same cloth to others. This article traces overlaps and tensions between both, in a comparison of the United States and Western Europe. Inherent in antidiscrimination is a tension between formal and substantive equality. It is the latter that provides an opening for a multicultural agenda, singling out specific minority groups for protection. In the United States, the domestic race problem has pushed a substantive and hence multicultural understanding of antidiscrimination from early on. By contrast, in Europe, the absence of a victimized minority group largely kept antidiscrimination in a formalistic mode, with an important exception for women. On both sides of the Atlantic, antidiscrimination, as practiced today with respect to racial and immigrant-based diversity, is individualistic and symmetric, and thus averse to multiculturalism. Yet this happened only with a fight in the United States, and quite without one in Europe.