Multiculturalism

The first decade of the twenty-first century in the West has been marked by a profound re-evaluation of multiculturalism as a prescription for living together in complex, postcolonial, multiethnic societies. Paradoxically, globalisation" the spread of the neoliberal economic doctrine around the world" while certainly resulting in increased cultural diversity, has often been met with a retreat into a narrow, ethnoracial nationalism that eschews the inevitability of hybridisation. In Europe, since 2004 in particular, states such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark, once advocates of multicultural policy, have declared multiculturalism to be "in crisis." They now espouse the integration of "national values" to replace what is seen to be the permissiveness of multiculturalism past which, according to Trevor Phillips, resulted in societies "sleepwalking into segregation."