A broadly liberal, tolerant attitude toward the values, beliefs, and practices of members of different groups, both religious and cultural, is evident among the educated in the modern world. Both the terms “multiculturalism” and “liberalism” capture different dimensions of this broad attitude; hence I will employ the term “multicultural liberalism.” In some sense, the master concept of multicultural liberalism is “tolerance,” proffered as a normative ideal. The educated members of societies throughout the world, from East to West, speak of the importance of the “value of tolerance,” and tend to diagnose cultural conflict in particular as rooted in an absence of it. Indeed, it is clear for example that the educated of Lebanon (the place where I am writing this) regard themselves not only as belonging to a multicultural society, but also as in some sense adopting the standpoint of multicultural liberalism as it is here employed. When something goes wrong and clashes erupt, there is the sense that it is partly due to a lack of tolerance, and a failure in some or all of the communities in question to recognize the importance of a commitment to this value.

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In recent years, questions of values and cultural conflict have frequently occupied the center of public discussion on both sides of the Atlantic, and these debates have taken on varied political shadings. The German discussion of a Leitkultur and, elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, the politicized expectation that immigrant populations acquire some familiarity with the language, culture, and values of the host country have often reflected underlying conservative assumptions. In contrast, in France, the defense of republican values has been more a matter of the Left and its tradition of adamant secularism, while more generally, advocacy on women’s issues and human rights have typically tended to arise on the Left (even if, in an interesting political development, they have begun to slide toward the Right). This political indeterminacy makes the topic all the more interesting. The question of values does not lend itself to easy political categorization. A broader account is called for to explain how Western political cultures—with their own internal range of positions and hardly monolithic—face sets of pressures in the context of globalization: immigration is only one dimension of a framework that includes enhanced international trade, new global media (the internet), and global environment questions, not to mention security and energy policies, even if debates typically erupt most dramatically around immigration-related topics.

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“Makavhotera Papi?” “Where did you place your vote?” Those are the words Zimbabwean voters have heard over and over again from their Head of State and former hero, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, delivered via the lips of chain- and club-wielding militias in the dark of the night. Those are the words that have brought tears, heartbreak, and the chill of terror to many homes. And now, when it’s almost time to place yet another vote, with the question now being “What will the voters do this time?” right there in the middle of everything, the opposition contestant, Morgan Tsvangirai, has announced that he is pulling out of the election and has fled into the Dutch Embassy. To complicate matters even more, the Mugabe government has insisted that the elections will go on as planned, with Tsvangirai’s name on it.

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