Societies are not more diverse than ever, one migration researcher argues
At the start of the twentieth century, 14.7 percent of the United States population were immigrants, roughly the same share as at the start of the twenty-first. The migration researcher Hein de Haas calls it a myth that today's societies are uniquely diverse, arguing that the idea depends on forgetting how mixed earlier ones were.
Multiculturalism, in everyday use, means several ethnic and cultural groups living within one society, sometimes pictured as a salad bowl or mosaic rather than a melting pot. In political science the term describes how well a state handles cultural plurality inside its borders, and as a philosophy it covers a wide range of policies. Scholars such as Ibrahim Menek trace multicultural states back to antiquity. The Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great incorporated and tolerated many cultures, and a relief of Darius shows envoys from 28 subject peoples carrying his throne.
Europe was once far more varied than its map of nation-states suggested, with each region and town keeping its own dialect and customs. The Habsburg monarchy, which lasted from 1282 to 1918, held together a mosaic of languages and religions that resisted the trend toward uniform nations, and its diversity shaped the theories of many thinkers who lived there. From the sixteenth century, and especially after the French Revolution, larger nation-states pushed the other way.
Governments deliberately made their populations more alike through schooling, military conscription and standard national languages. In France, promoting French eroded Breton, Occitan and Catalan. After the First World War, nationalism erased much of the old ethnic patchwork of the former Habsburg lands. In the nineteenth century, meanwhile, millions of Irish, Italian, Chinese, German and Jewish migrants reached the United States, often greeted at first as threats to national identity.
Global culture has flattened differences further. A shared youth culture emerged in the 1920s and accelerated after the 1950s, and travel, television, the internet, Hollywood films, fast food and English as a world language all supplied common reference points. The loss of minority languages is one of the clearest signs of this trend: by one estimate, a language falls silent with its last speaker every two weeks.
Source: Multiculturalism
