‘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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