Ethnic integration and postindustrial society

Abstract

Contemporary liberal democratic culture is based on multicultural imperatives underpinned both by values and interests. Multiculturalism is perceived as a kind of corollary to the freedom and the faculty of doing and believing, with the sole limit of not causing material harm to others.

In some cases multiculturalism comes across as a pure and simple consolatory ideology, or a rhetorical expedient. In this case the multicultural message tends to conceal certain specific aspects of the meeting/ clash of cultures; or else tries to pass for ajust-round4 the-corner perspective, or even to disguise interests (which at times proclaim to be radically, and by definition, antagonistic to any possible perspective of the exclusion of diversity) which radically obstruct the process of integration between cultures.