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Friday, 18 February 2011

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‘Multi-culturalism’ at cross roads!

When David Cameron recently announced at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that his country’s ‘longstanding policy on multi-culturalism has failed’ he was airing the views of Britain and its Western allies who now have a 66 year first hand experience of how world affairs have been adrift against the post World War universal paradigms. The British Prime Minister’s statement also echoed similar sentiments expressed by his German counterpart, Angela Merkel last year sparking a controversy that ‘Germany had not devoted enough attention to the integration of immigrants’.

The devastation of the Second World Wars made the very nations who fought the wars reflect on the future of mankind in the light of man’s avarice and ego-centric selfishness depicted during those wars. This required the world bodies to promulgate new universal paradigms to ensure peace and stability in a future world.

Colonial epicentre

Ushering of these new paradigms however required the ex-colonial powers, particularly Britain to oblige those who migrated from colonies to their one time colonial


David Cameron


Angela Merkel


Kevin Rudd

 epicentre. Although those who sought refuge in Britain from ex-colonies were mostly culturally adopted their presence diluted the ‘Britishness’ of a white Britain. Yet the British took pride in that, as an inevitability of their ‘glorious history’ and London was more or less like the ‘capital of the world’ with its diversity of races and vividness in skin colour.

However after seven decades, perceptions are certainly beginning to change with Britain and its European allies losing the grip in controlling world affairs. Diversity in multi-culturallism is ‘acceptable’ as long as it is under control. Hence the limits of diversity in any nation are whether that diversity is within and could be assimilated to the main stream.

Two years ago even the former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd showed signs of exasperation when he threw a tantrum saying that ‘those who did not believe in Christian values are free to leave Australia’. “We did not invite you here but now that you have come on your own you have the choice of either assimilating in or quitting”, he maintained making it very clear as to where the Australian Government’s policy stood in minority assimilation.

These pronouncements thus signal a marked change in Western and particularly British policy towards ethnic and religious minorities where more emphasis will be placed in future on a course of ‘more active muscular liberalism’. “A passively tolerant society says to its citizens: as long as you obey the law we will leave you alone. Such thinking stands neutral between different values and all this has left some young Muslims in Britain rootless” the British Prime Minister added further in spelling out this policy change.

National values

Thus big players in world politics who fashioned world affairs after World War II are now beginning to question their own values in the light of underground subway attack in London that killed 52 civilians in 2005 and the famous 9 - 11 that killed 3,000 people bringing the two WTC towers down to the ground in New York. Hence we see that wisdom has dawn on the leaders of ‘big nations’ at least late, of the reality in nation building; that in practice nation building is all about getting different cultures and religions to assimilate into a set of common national values cohesively so that that nation charters a common course that is beneficial to itself in keeping with universally accepted world values.

This however is a realization, the hard way, for the big powers who hitherto did not expect their nations to be vulnerable to undercurrent of national alienation. When a nation state is a big player in the world with security and an economy to back its values and stands, the minorities within that nation are less likely to assert their dissentions. But on the other hand when nations are small with dependence on big powers for their defence and economy, they become increasingly vulnerable to disunity and dissention within themselves as they are less likely to be internally cohesive in the face of external influences.

Colonial quest

Hence the question then is; how reasonable and empathic it is, for the big nations to sit in judgment and condemn small and vulnerable nations for ‘inadequacy in accommodating dissentions and minority aspirations’ whenever dissention manifests in such nation states? And still the empathetic evaluation by big powers of such differences become all the more relevant in the context of world history where belligerence within small States often is the results of years of colonialism by big powers.

They fanned on, and even spawned, such differences in their years of colonial quest.

Yet contrastingly, the lamentations of powerful States like Britain is when they have to contend with differences in just ‘values’ and religion whereas small States like Sri Lanka have to grapple with a more complex range of issues starting from the language.

Britain has not recognized a single foreign language within its soil even though persons who speaks different dialects have made Britain their home and worst still America which is a ‘traditional no man’s land’ have not recognized the language rights of Spanish speaking people that constitute more than 30 percent of its national population.

It is in his context that big nations have to view the problems of small nations in ensuring national integration for peace within nations and hence this ‘active and muscular efforts’ advocated by powerful nations for their own national assimilation should not be construed as ‘hegemonistic’ when it comes to small States. World need peace among nations and the nations in turn need peace among its own communities.

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