Ever since the increase of Muslim violence in Europe, such as the murders in Holland and the terrorist bombing in Britain, Europeans have been trying, with limited success, to comprehend the contours of the multiculturalism that they have valued so much, and to come up with a better way of managing it in the future.
There are many examples of this effort, but one that appeared in the Washington Post today, “Multiculturalisms Many Challenges,” is fairly typical. Its author, Frances Stead Sellers, an assistant editor of the WaPo’s Outlook section, has dual citizenship in Britain and the United States, observes that
multiculturalism means more than better food and brighter festivals. It involves the trickier challenge of building community out of disparate populations with disparate traditions and disparate beliefs, all the while preserving and celebrating those disparities. That’s what European countries are having a hard time coming to grips with — and understandably so, because multiculturalism swept into Europe before its member countries had developed a philosophy to accommodate it….
Unlike America, where every new immigrant can make America more American (as President Bush once argued), and where the founding philosophy and civic rituals were designed to create a citizenry out of the masses, European countries were established less deliberately — largely on shared traditions, shared languages, shared histories and even shared genes.
Unfortunately, Sellers devotes the bulk of the essay to a discussion of “civic rituals” rather than the fundamental, and much more important, point that “multiculturalism swept into Europe before its member countries had developed a philosophy to accommodate it.”
As is so often the case, the American experience was quite different, and that different experience contains lessons that the Europeans, and even we ourselves, would do well to ponder as we all grapple with the current theory and practice of multiculturalism. As I have discussed at much greater length here (scroll down to the section headed “Race and Sects in American History”), perhaps the central theme of American’s colonial experience in the 17th and 18th centuries, and even beyond, was the struggle to create a coherent society out of the multiplicity of conflicting religious sects. Berkeley historian David Hollinger has argued, correctly, that “ethno-racial affiliations have come to play a role similar to that played by religious affiliations at the time of the founding of the republic and throughout most of American history.” That’s true, but for my current point the converse (or is it obverse) is more relevant: that during the colonial period and for much of our history religious sects were the source of the most divisive cultural conflicts in our society, not ethnic groups.
As I argued in the long post linked above, out of that long colonial experience we in fact did develop a “philosophy” to make one out of many and to manage the “disparate populations with disparate traditions and disparate beliefs.” The principle at the core of that new national identity was stated best by Lincoln at Gettysburg: this “new nation,” he said, was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That “proposition” was a terse but profound way of stating that fundamental to American identity is a commitment to the principle that people should be treated without regard to race, creed, or national origin.
That principle has often been better preached than practiced, and over the past generation many Americans have even abandoned the principle itself, attempting futilely to bring about racial equality by treating people differently based on their race. But polling data and actual votes (where politicians have not blocked votes) reveal that most Americans still honor the principle, a principle that has more to teach Europeans than volumes of studies of “civic rituals” and “citizenship ceremonies.”
No dual citizenship. YOu cannot have dual loyalties.
1 was good enough before the 60s. (quelle suprise it was changed then, IIRC.)
The above is also an excellent argument for making English the official language of the U.S.
Multi-lingual nations don’t have a very good track record, generally. And the people most hurt by multilingualism are those who are kept at the margins of american society because they aren’t forced to learn english from childhood.
America neutralized the sectarian conflicts by disestablishing religion. The equivalent today would be to disestablish multiculturalism. This would require the privatization of government schools, since the tenuring of ethnic programs is so pervasive. Establishing a menagerie of sects, but on the basis that each has an equal claim to be established with public funds, is very different from disestablishment. There is either a monoculture to be taught at public expense, or there is a multiculturalism, with all its subsidized attacks on community of values. Officials preach harmony of all the multiculture’s instances, while practicing every method of intensifying hostility between them. They know how unrighteous power is to be won.