Multiculturalism

The term multiculturalism refers to the consideration and appreciation of diversity of cultures as additive to and enriching for global humanity and social order. In the broadest sense, the term embraces notions of respect, political sensitivity, and cultural tolerance of people from different cultural groups. Multiculturalism as a social movement gained momentum in the 1970s as a result of the demise of assimilation policies in many Western democratic nation-states. The new social order of multiculturalism was constructed upon cultural fluidity and continuous change in social and community characteristics inherent in cultural beliefs and practices. Since then, multiculturalism has been widely adopted in many areas and has instigated various standards for professional practice and codes of conduct (e.g., the American Psychological Association). A respect for multiculturalism in society has been implemented at national levels in most democratic constitutional legal systems as they have addressed their [Page 989]notions of citizenship and nationality. Multiculturalism as a term evokes social, political, economic, psychological, linguistic, and educational aspects of social engineering.

Multiculturalism embodies macrocultural and micro-cultural engagements. Macrocultures may be conceptualized as broader conglomerates of cultural groups, or those cultures that define global cultures and nationhood (e.g., American, Asian, or European culture). Macrocultures evoke collective identities of nationality and citizenship. At the macrocultural level, social affiliations are overarching systems of justice, equality, and human dignity shared within nation-states. Membership in macrocultural groups raises strong feelings of belonging to an assimilating entity; thus, personal identity is assumed in terms of a broader common identity, such as “being American,” or “being a good citizen.”

There are many understandings of macrocultural affiliation and the ways in which it manifests itself in societies. In many cases, such understandings are ideologically founded and related to power and societal privileges. Faced with great macrocultural diversity, smaller collectives form microcultural entities that advocate influence on the macrocultural order. A group's microcultural affiliation is thus determined by shared internalized values and belief systems as well as morals and standards. For example, “gender” constitutes a socially comparable microcultural cluster, as do “ethnicity,” “language,” and “religious” groupings. Multiculturalism promotes the idea that an individual is, at any one time, a member of many macrocultural and microcultural groups through an evolving interplay of personal identity and nationhood.

On a personal level, multiculturalism promotes the notion that dual or multiple cultural identities are indeed feasible. For example, a migrant's ethnic identity is not in conflict with his or her allegiance to the ethnic identity of the host nation. Individuals may identify themselves equally with both ethnic groups. The generation of young Europeans who have in the past decades faced the many challenges of cultural reimagining in Eastern and Western Europe are indeed open to the defining of the personal identity as dual, since the response that one can be of dual countries was made public by the linguist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas in her interviews with second-generation Finnish migrant youths in Sweden. A multicultural identity has thus recently emerged as a self-defining possibility and one that is embraced by modern thinking about civics and social participation.

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