Multicultural Nations: Issues of Race and National Identity in Britain and Canada

Nations remain the primary means of categorising people, despite talk of their demise in the globalised world. Taking as its premise that all nations are “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1991) this paper examines how two particular nation-states, Britain and Canada, have dealt with the challenges posed to their traditional national self-definitions by the increased influx of ethnoracial groups. Through key informant interviews with members of the state government in both countries and examination of the theoretical literature, this paper compares the means by which the state reimagines the nation, managing ethnoracial diversity to include or exclude these new members. This paper takes the position that fundamentally these two nations direct their nation-building project in a similar way, that at heart both nations retain their white cultural hegemony, various policies of multiculturalism existing as a means of controlling ethnoracial groups rather than creating a truly inclusionary framework.