super.bueno Posted January 15, 2014 Posted January 15, 2014 Normative multiculturalism, or strong multiculturalism, born in the 1970s and further developed over the 1980s, is rooted in a rigid conception of cultures as objective, immutable, and reified. This perspective freezes differences and imprisons its members within rigid collective identities. It assumes that cultures can be univocally defined and its members have identical forms of belonging within them; such multiculturalism has been used by conservatives to highlight a civilization clash and to emphasize the need to protect national cultures from a dangerous tainting caused by incoming migrant cultures. In the public sphere, this multiculturalism entails concessions, grants, and privileges to safeguard minority cultures in various sectors (health, religion, welfare, political representation, etc.), and to protect traditional languages, religious habits and customs. It is an institutional multiculturalism, requiring political initiative based on a cultural interpretation of the public sphere. However, what is important to remember is that what is happening now is a most serious backlash to multiculturalism in the European Union, and if one were to consider some of the most strident cases of anti-multicultural public policies -- such as Arizona's anti-immigrant law -- then the same can be said about the United States. Multiculturalism is the struggle to incorporate diversity that emerged as a response to conflicts within 20th century inter-group relations and addressed the challenges of integration. It is fully ingrained in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, as well as the New Civil Right Movement of the 21st Century.
zippert Posted January 15, 2014 Posted January 15, 2014 It is not dead. This view is still hold by many political parties, also in the EU. But it was never mainstream and never hold by a majority. The immigration laws are a reaction to the mentioned backlash. They are not critical to multiculturalism, because the foreign cultures are already established and the growth is executed by birth rates, not by immigration. So nothing really changed over the last 40 years, it is just a further stage of the process.
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