In a speech at a security conference in Munich on Saturday, David Cameron said that the decades-old multiculturalism policy in the U.K. was a failure because it encouraged segregated communicates where Islam extremism could thrive.
Last October 17, Angela Merkel, in a speech in Potsdam, declared that multiculturalism had “utterly failed.” She did not base her position on the threat of extremism but was entering a heated debate that had been going on all summer about the danger certain groups of immigrants allegedly posed to the nature of the society, on many levels. The chancellor’s main point was that Germany needed immigrants but they had to make an effort to have society accept them. Existing policies did not work.
The United States and Canada were populated by immigrants. For that reason, the nature of the problem of integration is different on this continent. In the U.S., immigration is a hot topic everywhere but multiculturalism in the European and Canadian sense is not a subject of debate. Tolerance is built in. In certain areas in southern California, for example, street names are in Spanish and English. Nobody makes a fuss about it.
Official multiculturalism came to Canada in the seventies, at the same time as in the U.K., but unofficially it had existed from the beginning. Much of this had to do with Quebec. If the English majority was to grant certain cultural rights to the French minority, it had to give at least some rights to other minorities. Moreover, it had been recognized long before the sixties that the preservation of ancient traditions enriched the entire society. Long before 1971 when Pierre Trudeau built multiculturalism into the Charter of Rights and long before 1988 when Parliament, under his guidance, passed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, ethnic and aboriginal institutions were subsidized by the federal government.
In recent years, critical voices have been raised. Kenneth McRoberts believes that the extension from biculturalism to multiculturalism was disastrous for Canadian nationalism, as it offended the Québécois and their dualistic vision of Canada as a bilingual and bicultural society. To Neil Bissoondath, the government view of cultures as being about festivals and cuisine was a crude oversimplification that led to easy stereotyping. Daniel Stoffman raised concern about the number of recent immigrants who were not being integrated into Canada linguistically (i.e., not learning either English or French), and stressed that multiculturalism worked better in theory than in practice. Mark Steyn claimed that while Canada and Europe were losing their core values, like freedom of speech, to Islamism, the U.S. stood alone in the struggle for Western family values.
These are isolated voices. By now, multicultural institutions and habits have become solidly entrenched. Canadian diversity is much praised internationally as unique and exemplary.
The time is fast approaching when it will no longer be necessary to subsidize multiculturalism with public funds. But we may have to wait for some time for a government that has the courage to withdraw them.
It will have to be a majority government.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
[In the U.S.] “Tolerance is built in.” ??? Not so much! Public opinion in Arizona, for example, reflected in its state government, is pushing pretty hard against its immigrants from Mexico. Within the last couple of days, I heard an interview on CBC with a member of the Arizona state senate who is proposing a bill which challenges the citizenship of children born in the U.S. of illegal-alien parents. (This despite the fact that the U.S. constitution says pretty clearly that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen.) The point of pushing the bill, he says, is to get the U.S. Supreme Court to rule. He’s unlikely to get the Supremes to rule as he would like, of course, but in that unlikely event there would be legal grounds for deporting an awful lot of people. And in the meantime, it’s not exactly evidence of tolerance, built-in or otherwise!
Alright, Curmudgeon. The interesting question is why “multiculturalism” is a policy in Europe and Canada but not in the U.S.? My answer – that tolerance in the U.S. is built in – is admittedly too shallow and too glib, and far too generous, considering Arizona, etc. But what IS the reason? Built-in, until recently built-in institutionalized, race prejudice? (No need to answer.)
The U.K and Europe were and are built on the premise of an aristocratic landed class as the governing force. Hence a mistrust of encouraging meritocracy (and its cousins ingenuity and hard work), especially from those coming from OUTSIDE.
I doubt that the use of Spanish place names in the south west reflects a built-in US tolerance, as opposed to an acceptance of the status quo. It must be remembered that the area was taken by the US from Spanish-speaking Mexico. The fact that many immigrants do not know or learn either of the official languages should be a matter of little concern. Their children and grandchildren will be English speaking.
It is always wise to tolerate the status quo.
Erich -
I am shocked at the breadth and depth of your almost bizarre idea that somehow or other the United States has what you call “built-in” tolerance for cultural diversity. My experience would indicate precisely the opposite. From earliest days in America, the country was built as a ‘white, anglo-saxon, protestant’ society. Roosevelt put it this way…”Jews and Catholics are here on sufferance”. Aboriginals were the “redmen” who deserved to be exterminated. Later on the Patriot Act made diversity the next thing to a crime. My view is that there’s a long list of items like these…..
It is always pleasant to be chastized for being bizarrely generous.
No one has mentioned the shorthand phrase used to characterize the polyglot U.S. society through most of the 20th century – “the melting pot”. Seems to me that is still valid.
You are absolutely right. I should have thought of that. Multiculturalism and the melting pot are incompatible.
This is what happens when the host country stops having children. Welcome to your future U.K. rip.
“Long before 1971 when Pierre Trudeau built multiculturalism into the Charter of Rights…”
Say what?! The Charter was enacted in nineteen EIGHTY-TWO.
Multiculturalism never really existed in any way, shape, or form, until PET promoted it as ‘Canadian’ policy, and Mulroney pushed it as a sop for ethnic bloc-voters. And mass immigration never had anything to do with actuarial, or labour needs. Rather, the Chartered Banks and real estate lobby (REITs, developers) pushed for the massive increase in the warm body intake, in order to boost housing demand. And the old, sickly family reunification cases making up much of the immigration intake are clobbering the healthcare system.
Canadians have to stop drinking the Trudeaupian-Mulroneyist Kool-Aid–which Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney have now been serving–that there was ever anything fundamentally ‘Canadian’ about multiculturalism. And, contrary to the Steynians’ assertions, Canada’s staggeringly high immigration intake has nothing to do with either offsetting supposedly non-replaceable birthrates, or the actuarial needs of the social-welfare system. Rather, it was a scam foisted on Canada by real estate-financial lobbies intent on keeping the housing bubble endlessly inflated.