Speaking on German television in 2018, the liberal political scientist Yascha Mounk remarked that Germany was “embarking on a historically unique experiment – that of turning a monoethnic and monocultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one”. He was immediately deluged with emails from far-rightists who felt his comment corroborated their belief in a conspiracy to eradicate the white race. This might have prompted Mounk to reflect that the “experiment” metaphor, which carries certain negative connotations, was perhaps a less than optimal way to characterise mass migration and its consequences. Instead, he went away and wrote an entire 368-page book organised round this very theme.
The Great Experiment promises to show us “how to make diverse democracies work”, but contains very few actual policy proposals. For the most part it’s a mishmash of general principles, political truisms and syrupy platitudes, delivered in a register somewhere between a TED talk and an undergraduate dissertation. Mounk draws on social psychology to tell us what we already know: that, on the one hand, human beings have “a tendency to form in-groups, and discriminate against those who do not belong to them”; on the other, the “intergroup contact hypothesis” suggests people from different backgrounds are more likely to get along if they spend time with one another. The ideal diverse society should be neither “unduly homogenising” nor so fragmentary as to give rise to “cultural separatism”.
These underwhelming insights are interspersed with snippets of recent world history – sectarian terrorist attacks in the Middle East; nativist demagogues winning elections in various countries – to remind us of what is at stake. Mounk also delves further into the past, sometimes to bizarre effect. I’m not sure, for example, that multicultural 21st‑century western nations have much to fear from the example of the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90, or that invoking the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918 – to illustrate the inherent fragility of “multi-ethnic empires” – is particularly pertinent. Raising the spectre of internecine violence and societal collapse feels alarmist.
This brings us to the central paradox at the heart of The Great Experiment. Mounk is broadly in favour of diversity and has no quarrel with it; he knows that, notwithstanding the gains made by populist politicians in many western nations in recent years, the status quo is not under imminent threat and, despite some friction here and there, the social fabric is bearing up. But in order to position his book as an urgent and relevant intervention, he has to play up the scale of demographic change and its potential impact on social cohesion in the longer run. When he solemnly opines on what needs to happen “for the great experiment to succeed”, there’s a strong implication that “failure” – with all that would entail – is not just a possibility but the default likely outcome if preventive measures are not taken. It’s not quite Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood”, but it does skew the discourse to the right.
The author worked for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, so it’s relatively unsurprising that his policy prescriptions are of a distinctly managerial, neoliberal flavour, with an emphasis on equality of opportunity and economic growth. He believes such policies will help us “build a meaningfully shared life”, and thus prevent our descent into racial strife. This is the stuff of election pamphlets. Mounk, who hails from Germany and acquired US citizenship in 2017, cites Barack Obama as his favourite politician, and there is something of Obama’s influence in his airy speechifying: “Much of the world is setting out for uncharted territory”; we need “courage” to “embrace a confident vision of a better future”.
In fairness, he does make some good observations along the way. He stresses the importance of protecting members of tight-knit religious communities from coercion within their group, and advocates cultivating a progressive civic patriotism in order to undercut the appeal of ethnic nationalism. He notes that the marginalisation of minorities can have the result that people “feel that their membership in the only club they have ever known will forever remain conditional” – a point illustrated in recent times by the Windrush scandal. But these are slim pickings.
The defining feature of The Great Experiment is its vagueness. Mounk deems the “experiment” to have begun “in the past five or six decades”, but his focus alternates between Europe and the United States, which has a far longer history of mass migration. He refers to “the problems now plaguing so many diverse democracies”, but does not care to particularise them; they occur “in many cases” and “many parts of the world”. At several points he threatens to say something interesting about critical race theory and the Black Lives Matter movement, but can’t quite follow through, restricting himself to mealy mouthed references to unnamed members of “academic and activist circles”, among whom it is currently “fashionable” to claim “the United States has not made substantive progress towards equality”. The resort to caricature is telling. Barely a single scholar, writer or activist is cited, let alone rigorously engaged with. Why so reticent? Many liberal and leftwing readers would be receptive to a good-faith, nuanced critique of contemporary identity politics, but it’s not forthcoming here.
Who is this book for? Why does it exist? A first-year politics student or Blue Labour thinktanker might conceivably find some use for it, but it has little to offer the informed reader. Publishing houses have been churning out titles on populism ever since the political convulsions of 2016, and not all of them have been illuminating. The better ones have foregrounded the ways in which the nativist surge was bound up in the vagaries of politics and economics – it wasn’t just an inevitable manifestation of primordial chauvinism. Over the past few years it has often been remarked that our so-called culture war is to some extent a publishing phenomenon, driven by clickbait and careerism rather than sincere conviction. This is true, but frothing rightwing columnists aren’t the only ones on the make; liberals, too, are doing their bit to impoverish the discourse.
• The Great Experiment: How to Make Diverse Democracies Work by Yascha Mounk is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
