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September 7, 2006
In this chapter from Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire Wendy Brown notes that since the mid-1980s there has been something of a global renaissance in tolerance talk. There has also been, we can add, a strong conservative reaction to to the liberal idea of tolerance.
On the first point Brown says that:
Tolerance surged back into use in the late twentieth century as multiculturalism became a central problematic of liberal democratic citizenship; as Third World immigration threatened the ethnicized identities of Europe, North America, and Australia; as indigenous peoples pursued claims of reparation, belonging, and entitlement; as ethnically coded civil conflict became a critical site of international disorder; and as Islamic religious identity intensified and expanded into a transnational political force. Tolerance talk also became prominent as domestic norms of integration and assimilation gave way to concerns with identity and difference on the left and as the rights claims of various minorities were spurned as "special" rather than universal on the right.
Though tolerance is uncritically promoted across a wide range of venues and for a wide range of purposes it has never enjoyed a unified meaning across the nations and cultures that have valued, practiced, or debated it. It has a variety of historical strands, has been provoked or revoked in relation to diverse conflicts, and has been inflected by distinct political traditions and constitutions.
Brown goes on to say that even within the increasingly politically and economically integrated Euro-Atlantic world, tolerance signifies differently and attaches to different objects in different national contexts:
for example, tolerance is related to but not equivalent to laicite in France, as the recent French debate over the hijab made clear. And practices of tolerance in Holland, England, Canada, Australia, and Germany not only draw on distinct intellectual and political lineages but are focused on different contemporary objects---sexuality, immigrants, or indigenous peoples---that themselves call for different modalities of tolerance. That is, modalities of tolerance talk that have issued from postcolonial encounters with indigenous peoples in settler colonies do not follow the same logics as those that have issued from European encounters with immigrants from its former colonies or those that are centered on patriarchal religious anxieties about insubordinate gender and sexual practices. Similarly, an Islamic state seeking to develop codes of tolerance inflects the term differently than does a Euro-Atlantic political imaginary within which the nation-states of the West are presumed always already tolerant.
A lot of the debates about tolerance in Australia do centre around Australia being a post colonial society.
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