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posted by n1 on Sunday May 24 2015, @04:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the RTFA dept.

When we hear the word "multiculturalism," some imagine people of all races and creeds holding hands, others imagine a clash of disparate cultures that cannot co-exist. There are many more nuanced definitions in between.

In the world of mainstream politics, there is now widespread acknowledgment that the failure of immigrants to properly integrate into the culture of their host nations is causing a lot more harm that good. The backlash against multiculturalism has begun to manifest itself as a rise of nationalist parties such as England's UKIP and France's National Front gaining more support from disillusioned countrymen.

In 2010 German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that,

" This [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed," Merkel told the meeting in Potsdam, west of Berlin, yesterday. "

Merkel also suggested that the onus was on immigrants to do more to integrate into German society, and late last year the European Court of Justice ruled that EU citizens who move to another member state "solely in order to obtain social assistance" may be excluded from receiving that assistance, an acknowledgement that multiculturalism's side effects are causing more harm than good.

Those interested in this topic should read Foreign Affairs' excellent article The Failure of Multiculturalism.

As a political tool, multiculturalism has functioned as not merely a response to diversity but also a means of constraining it. And that insight reveals a paradox. Multicultural policies accept as a given that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. They seek to institutionalize diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes—into a singular, homogeneous Muslim community, for example—and defining their needs and rights accordingly. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions they were meant to manage.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday May 24 2015, @05:58PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 24 2015, @05:58PM (#187219)

    Aside from arbitrary lines on a map, I think its more instructive to look at economic level. Its hard to find a wealthy area, Manhattan Island, City of London, maybe SFO, where people are so rich they don't care who their neighbors are, plus gated communities, such that "it works if people are distracted enough by rolling around in stinking piles of money".

    Then again, try the rest of the world. Places that aren't so rich. Alabama, Iraq, the ghettos in France, Germany in the 20s and 30s, hmmm not quite such a multicultural success story, eh? In fact it seems almost universal, if you don't have a Nordstroms or a Saks you probably don't have the piles of cash to be successfully multicultural.

    To some extent multiculturalism is the ultimate 1%er dog whistle, where you get to brag about how wealthy your community is without actually stating you're rich.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @09:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @09:19PM (#187348)

    In such a case of Nordstroms or Saks then that becomes your culture and thus multiculturalism still fails. 1%ers all around the world share a very homogenous monoculture compared to the rest of us.