MULTICULTURALISM
MYTH OR REALITY?

Multiculturalism is in vogue today among politicians, media and academicians. Perhaps we as a society aspire to pluralism. But sociologists identify cultural diversity as a universal source of social conflict. This document seeks to find some of the origins of multicultural societies,and to provide an adequate answer to Lord Norman Trebbitt's statement:
"Multiculturalism is a divisive force. One cannot uphold two sets of ethics or be loyal to two nations, any more than a man can have two masters."
Multiculturalism encompasses more than a diverse set of perspectives or ideas about the world that is sometimes construed in a mono-cultural vacuum among societies.This paper begins with a real life experience which function both as an extension of the multicultural concept and as resource that provides a link between practice and theory. Additionally, it emphasizes the different meanings we have for this concept and the different discourses that exist in society.

1. CREATING DISCOURSES ABOUT MULTICULTURALISM.

One friend of mine said that for her "multiculturalism has been politicized in this country." She explained that growing up in a culturally diverse community such as Switzerland, provided her with the opportunity to live a multicultural life style in a broad sense of the concept. When she came to London, her perception of multiculturalism in this context was distinctly different from most students as a result of her personal experiences with a multiethnic group in Switzerland. She told us that Swiss peoples accepted the fact that everyone is very different from each other and it is a very accepted idea that each culture contributes to the overall Swiss mainstream culture.
On the one hand, discourses about multiculturalism have sometimes polarized societies' political differences. On the other hand, the multiple discourses have also created the environment for which to increase intellectual dialogues.

2. THE ROLE OF CULTURES.

Cultures include learned patterns of behaviour, socially acquired traditions, repetitive ways of thinking and acting, attitudes, values and morals. It standardizes perceptions. It also defines attitudes for intra group relationships and for dealing with non members. And it sets the institutional parameters that condition human behaviour and stabilize social system. Culture standardizes relationships, so that people need not to be constantly mindful of the implications of their behaviour. They can make reasonably confident assumptions about the reactions of those with whom they interact. There are many dimensions of culture, but race, religion, ethnicity and language are the principal source of diversity. When societies are multicultural the previously listed ethnocentric differences, lead to enmity. Social psychologies have proved that group loyalty is widespread and lead to favouritism within the group and discrimination against those outside the group.

3. TWO DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES

The western economies have been in the centre of the cultural conflict, because with more opportunities to offer. Partly the process of absorption of the alien cultures has been managed thanks to the institutions, protecting individual rights. Partly, tension has been reduced by efforts to homogenize immigrants into the dominant culture. The number of the immigrations has increased sharply since the 1950s. Those countries did very well when the number of the immigrants was small, but since 1960 the number has swelled, and now immigrants are ghettoised in Europe as in America. And Europe more than the States is in a quandary about what to do if immigrants from the former socialist bloc nations flee west.

A fair reading of history reveals that civil and politic freedom arose in a homogeneous culture in Britain. Common law is very old, probably arising in Ireland in the fifth century. When Normans conquered England in 1066 they allowed common law as the law of the land, since they had no alternative legal system. Common law was institutionalized between 1154 and 1307, under the kings from Henry II to Edward I. Thus, judge-made rule of law was a feature of the English system before the Industrial Revolution. Until the end of colonialism, there was no threat that immigration would undermine the dominant culture. A few immigrants, mainly educated ones and rich, looked upon as curiosities. After that, for shortages of unskilled labour, significant numbers of foreigners arrived in Britain, France, Germany and other nations. There are Indian, Pakistan and African ghettos in London and other cities. Even if most of the immigrants to Britain speak English and aspire to the British way of life, they are not well absorbed, and many feel they are victims of abuse and discrimination. The ethnic rioting in London, Liverpool and Manchester in 1981 was reminiscent of the urban riots in America in 1967. But while United States responded with the Civil Rights Act and group entitlements for minorities, the British responded by passing the Nationality Bill, which severely restricts further immigration from the former colonies, particularly India. Britain felt threats to the dominant culture from further immigration. Their reaction has been to curtail Third World immigrations.

The first settlers in the United States were almost all expatriate Englishmen and thus adopted English institutions. Being short of workers, they had a very liberal immigration policy. Yet immigration was a two-edged sword. They needed workers for the many farms and factories, but they ran out of Anglo-Saxons. Consequently, Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Italian, Greeks and other Europeans went there by tens of thousands. Each had its own culture, some elements of which were thought to be inconsistent with American values. Part of the impetus for free public schooling in the United States, which began in the 1830, was the desire to educate the immigrants and their children in American values and institutions. They sought to homogenize immigrants, to make them speak English and disabuse them of radical political beliefs. In this regard they were successful. But the desire to associate with one's own kind dies hard. Many immigrants naturally segregated themselves (or were segregated) into areas with others of their own ethnic group. It is no by accident that certain states have a predominant ethnic group or that large cities have ethnic neighbourhoods. In recent years it has become fashionable to cherish cultural differences, to teach the immigrants' children in their native tongues and to withhold criticism of different cultural values. Pluralism in today's America assumes that all cultural values are equally valid. It should not be a surprise that America has become a Tower of Babel.

4. WHAT'S THE POINT?

Generally we distinguish between civil and political liberty. Civil liberty means the protection of individual rights. While political liberty means the right for the people to choose who rules them, and gets to use the coercive power of the State. In fact there are not real democracies.

Historical and naive is the paradigm that British foreign-policy community insist on applying to internal conflicts. But guided by the faith of a conservative tradition and by mechanistic notions, it might be attempted to say that a community is built by balancing competing interests, foreign-policy experts urge societies riven by conflicts to avoid "winner takes all" politics and to guarantee that regardless of election results, the weaker groups, too, will have a voice in national political and cultural affairs. To accomplish this coalition government, the guaranteed division of key offices, and a system of reciprocal vetoes are recommended. These devices, will ameliorate ethnic, nationalist, and religious divisions. And the experts agree that those divisions will be less likely to erupt in violent conflict if divided societies elevate tolerance and unity above ethnic, nationalist, or religious domination as their organizing principles. All these measures may seem reasonable enough. But they depend upon a host of faulty assumptions, perhaps the most important being that the strongest group in a divided society will be willing to make major concessions. Concessions that in fact jeopardize its preponderant position. But as the English historian Lewis Namier wrote in his discussion of nationalism in nineteenth- century in Europe: " States are not created or destroyed, and frontiers redrawn or obliterated, by argument and majority votes; nations are freed, united, or broken by blood and iron, and not by a generous application of liberty." Despite the historical failure of reason and compromise in such situations, foreign-policy experts and officials continue to place great stock in reasonable solutions. Their ideas about settling internal conflicts are fundamentally distorted by their idealized view of Britain's own history and development.

There has been a big change in the way Britain has dealt with the absorption of different cultures. The intellectual roots of the cultural diversities can be traced by four wise persons: Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Mead and Benjamin Spock. Einstein taught us that our fixity in time and space is an illusion. Matter, time and space are relative, not absolute concepts. Freud said that our personalities are creatures of our desires and civilizations attempt to suppress them. Thus, there is no such thing as free will, individual responsibility or an absolute norm of desirable civility. For M.Mead, one culture is good as another, and we cannot assert the superiority of Western cultures to that of, say, African tribes that behead their enemies and mutilate their young women. Dr. Spock teaching was that any infantile behaviour in children is acceptable by the society. Thus, we as a society have lost confidence in asserting absolute standards of conduct.

CONCLUSION

At the end of a long reading, followed by an equally long discussion with Mick Miller, I came up with three main points, which are briefly listed below:

1. We get the world wrong, because we get ourselves wrong.
2. Multiculturalism needs some directions.
3. In a democratic society all competing groups must have the opportunity to share total equality with the dominant group, and to make themselves heard.