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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.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday May 24 2015, @06:09PM
Especially because in the European examples, immigration is not some ethno-sociological experiment - or some disease these societies attracted through sheer osmosis.
The great migrations are the direct consequence of European and American states late-stage colonial domination of the world, for labour and resource.
Poor students of history are those who credit immigrant migration to the colonial capitals as a sign of the weakness shown by misguided altruistic impulse of the exploitative power. That is self-congratulatory delusion, used to justify subtle hatreds and aggressive domination.
Judeans and Britons and Phrygians all migrated to Rome, in that time. Hittites and Babylonians and Elamites crowded into the Nineveh of the Assyrian despots. No one with any clear interpretation will assign this circumstance to the magnanimity and liberal guiding vision of those powers.
Now, when the compartmentalized colonization and exploitation of the world may occur in such a way as not to intrude on the moderately comfortable lives of the beneficiaries - when this occurs with the technological dominance and industrial scales afforded by our past two centuries of "progress" - of course then, the magnet of the capitals draw their disenfranchised or depleted conquests towards promises of opportunity.
Birds come home to roost.
Great multi-cultural Empires of the past existed - Achaemenid Persia, 2nd Century Rome. They lasted hundreds of years. They were integrative - with organic, bi-directonal flow of culture. One proof is in the existence of a Roman Christianity!
This meta-state, Empire of industrial capital and post-industrial finance colonialism is not "multicultural" - nor has it ever acceded such. The call for a multi-cultural perspective has come from the marginalized and downtrodden, using the rhetoric of the supposedly "enlightened" liberal Empire they must reconcile.
When the feigned sensibilities of these pseudo-tolerant American and European societies are offended - on the verge of being forced to confront the hypocrisy of their creeds - then come the wails: "See, there's no way to accommodate these savages within the scope of civilization." It s a way to maintain cultural and economic dominance. The "free" world was built ENTIRELY on the enslavement of every other people on earth, for which it was practical to do so.
Failing to confront this reality, instead it becomes current to again blame the world's victims for not wholeheartedly embracing the values of those who burned their cities and robbed their well-being and livelihoods for the past three centuries.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Sunday May 24 2015, @09:17PM
I disagree. The cause of immigration isn't colonialism itself but the destructive capitalist desire for lower wages at any shared societal cost. The Great War and World War II destroyed generations of workers that the governments decided to bring in outsiders, in complete disregard to the causes of war in the first place - ethnic strife. In the examples you cite, the immigration was much lower and slower, and thus allowed for assimilation rather than population replacement.
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(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday May 24 2015, @11:57PM
Yet you see hugest influx of economic migrants into the nations which formerly dominated their homes.
Indonesians in Nederland
Nigerians, South Asians in UK
Vietnamese, Cambodians and Philippine in USA
Algerian, sub-Saharan Africa in France, etc.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday May 25 2015, @12:09AM
If you think the world wars were created by "ethnic strife" - not pillage of Capital? There''s no hope for your brainwashed pseudo-intellect. You receive the ideas of others instead of thinking.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday May 24 2015, @09:33PM
It seems to me that you lost site of your point, (as did I) in your headlong rush toward spreading more heat than light.
Regardless historical reasons for the migration to foreign places, the immigrants were expected to, and mostly did, assimilate themselves into the culture of their chosen new country.
Sometimes this was by choice, (they did, after all, in most cases move by choice), and other times by they adopted the new culture as an economic expedient to earning a living. Only in rare instances, where no specific culture held a significant numerical advantage (abandoned colones) did separate and approximately equal cultures live side by side in cooperation.
Multiculturalism urges the hew host country to stop expecting any trend toward assimilation, and encourages the migrants to stop doing that, leaving us in a living Tower of Babel. And this is a relatively new trend and the results a dismal failure, leaving disparate groups living at odds.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @09:54PM
It seems to me that you lost site of your point,
As well as loosing sight of the point of this site! OMG, See what Multiculturalism hath wrought? Our Soylentils cannot spell! This is what comes of mixing the races.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @08:44PM
Was that meant to be ironic?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2015, @07:46AM
Was that meant to be ironic?
Yes! Dear superior being, Yes! Glad someone (this is not frojack posting AC? Didn't think so.) got it. I find that when you assume the grammar Nazi role, it helps to make some further error yourself, so the criticism is more easily accepted. Or not, if no one notices! Of course, if they don't notice, they probably do not understand the correction in the first place. Misxpelling+ Miscegenation! Get it?
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday May 24 2015, @11:59PM
"Multiculturalism urges the hew host country to stop expecting any trend toward assimilation"
There is your strawman. Send for the torches!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday May 25 2015, @12:02AM
Earlier phases of "Multiculturalism" are why you have a German Xmas tree, a "European" Xianity from near east and why you get to have Bing Crosby sing Cole Porter jazz songs about it.
Kindly fuck yourself, and your pitiless ignorant chauvinism.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @01:50AM