After the ‘Failed Experiment’: Intercultural Learning in a Multicultural Crisis

Abstract

In a speech at an international security conference in Munich in February 2011, the British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that ‘multiculturalism’ had failed. In the place of what he characterised as ‘passive tolerance’, something called ‘muscular liberalism’ is instead required, whereby a genuinely liberal country discourages separate cultures from living ‘parallel lives’, and instead ‘believes in certain values and promotes them’. For British Prime Ministers, Munich will always have a special resonance, but the echo sought by Cameron was very recent. In October 2010, and in a context where the publication of Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland schafft sich ab had stoked a public firestorm concerning racism in Germany, Angela Merkel informed a youth conference of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party that multiculturalism had failed in Germany. Developing the point, she argued that ‘…the approach (to build) a multicultural (society) and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other … has failed, utterly failed’.KeywordsIdentity LiberalismRacial HierarchyIntercultural EducationEuropean YouthBritish Prime MinisterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.