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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: 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...