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conclusion: the challenges of multiculturalism? This book began with an account of cultural and ethnic tensions in which, I alleged, the central issue was the trust relations, or the absence thereof, among citizens. I pointed to the debates in Europe about whether to implement citizenship tests for newcomers to establish that they had adopted, or were at least aware of, the norms that are said to define the receiving community ’s public culture. I pointed to anti-Hispanic policies in the United States, many of which ostensibly aim to make the life of illegal migrants more difficult , but which have a tremendously negative impact on Hispanic citizens as well. I pointed to requests made my newcomers to have their children exempted from coed gym classes, and sometimes also music classes, on cultural and religious grounds. I pointed to the disdain directed more generally toward the norms and values that immigrants bring along with them that apparently threaten the “way we do things around here.” I argued these tensions can best be understood by looking at them through the lens of trust, and the book has attempted to justify and account for these initial claims. If we focus our attention on the trust relations at stake, we can see that ethnocultural diversity often does stress trust relations among citizens. The reason we should care about this stress is a democratic one: widespread trust is essential to supporting democratic practice. Without trust, democratic practice is stunted at best and impossible at worst. Moreover, it will prove immensely challenging, if not impossible, to sustain support for the kinds of policies that liberal egalitarians value if trust is not first in place among citizens of a democratic community. I argued that the voluntary compliance on which democracy relies is founded on trust relations, trust relations that extend in two directions: between citizens and their political representa- conclusion || 157 tives and among citizens themselves. Citizens must engage with one another both as political actors and more generally as active participants in a range of social environments. Democracies function only when citizens are willing to comply with rules and regulations without being actively coerced to do so; democracies typically choose to divert their resources away from enforcement and toward providing the benefits that flourishing democracies are able, and expected, to provide. The primary source of trust in democratic political communities is an inclusive public culture composed of the shared values and norms that come over time to define it. The concept is controversial, and it is worth revisiting this controversy by way of conclusion. One central worry about emphasizing the importance of a public culture has to do with the extent to which its content is, in fact, a matter of ongoing debate; recognizing that this is the case is essential to avoiding the worst case scenario, that is, a situation in which a majority culture is imposed on a minority who views the norms and values in question as alienating and marginalizing. I argued that we must emphasize that the public culture in question is, after all, public: its content is determined by all members of the community, and it is our job to ensure that all members are willing and able to contribute. This is considerably easier said than done— but until this condition is met, we cannot be sure that a public culture is genuinely shared. To say that public culture is shared is not to say that all members of the community ascribe to its content in equal measure. Rather, a public culture is characterized by citizens who hold values and norms in common, but to varying degrees (and some will reject them entirely). A public culture that operates as I have described is protected from its critics, since it proves able to produce the trust among community members that enables democratic practice to function smoothly in a nonhomogenizing and nonexclusive way. The calls we now witness for the better integration of minorities—many of whom are minorities—and correspondingly the claim that minorities fail to integrate, are fundamentally anxieties about the decline of the force of a shared public culture and therefore about the decline of widespread trust.1 These calls for better integration are accompanied by proclamations of the death of multiculturalism, which are increasingly widespread. German chancellor Angela Merkel recently declared that attempts to build a truly multicultural community in Germany have “utterly failed,” and British prime minister David Cameron joined her in reporting that British attempts at multiculturalism...

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