Multiculturalism as a word can be a misnomer. It is applied popularly in the current climate when talking specifically of majority versus minority interaction in nation states and is thus, more complex than you could possibly imagine. It conjures up the idea that the cultures we know of today have existed since the dawn of time, unchanging and eternal, and this is facile thinking. We are, in essence, all multi-cultural.
Since antiquity you would be hard-pressed to find mono-cultural people who had had no contact with others. Ideas have been shared since hunter-gatherer times and over the centuries of human history, even before the written word, cultures have borrowed from each other. Differences in thinking have produced multiple variables of the same idea and these have branched further, morphing into the current religious, political and ideological divides we see around the world today.
This is where the particular idea of multiculturalism, borne out of the globalisation movement, gets a bit murkier to explain. When you take an idea as complex as this and apply it to as basic a function as talking about majority versus minority relations, you will find it difficult to come up with answers as to why this ideal seems to be failing. Similarily, in an interview in Newsweek Malek Chebel, an Algerian-born French academic has for example spoken about France’s failure to integrate Islamic culture in the country. He is quoted as saying: “France no longer just wants integration, it wants assimilation and that’s just not acceptable.”
— The reader is an Irish journalism graduate based in Dublin, Ireland
