"I would lie, if I said integration is a sure-fire success."
("Under one Roof", H. Sußebach, A. Baitar)

Which conditions must be met so that a multicultural society can offer chances and minimize risks?

Maria Fellner - 03.01.2020 @ 21:34

Chances und risks of a multicultural society

by Anastasia Sobol & Marei Behrens, HPS Buxtehude/Germany

“A multicultural society is an illusion made up by intellectuals.” This is a statement made by Helmut Schmidt, a member of the CDU, in 2004. Thereby he points out which conditions must be given to establish a multicultural society. But how do you manage to do something like that? How can we create a multicultural society?

When you look at the chances and especially the risks of such a task, it becomes quite obvious that most of us are not informed well enough to build such a society. Therefore, informing other people about other cultures and habits is important and necessary.

The next step is the active involvement of other social groups with different cultural traditions in our own society. Evidently, it is not enough to just give new groups some space and to hope that they take the initiative themselves. Everyone should participate in this process and make an effort to integrate other cultures!

If you meet this challenge, you instantly become more tolerant and show the needed acceptance towards foreign people and cultures. Furthermore, you have to overcome your fear of changes. You have to try something new and leave your old habits behind. The evolution of humankind, but also our modern times, show that people detest and are averse to what is new and unknown to them. This leads them to try to exclude it from their lives. We have to change that! We have to leave our own comfort zone to achieve something greater.

If both sides approached each other with mutual respect, it would enable us to have a stable foundation for a multicultural society.

Overall, efforts by both sides and the initiative to include other cultures must be taken to create a multicultural society with more chances and less risks. 

https://pixabay.com/de/photos/farbe-schreibtisch-papier-3207345/

Anastasia Sobol - 10.03.2020 @ 15:38

I do agree with most points made in this article. However, I don`t believe that a working multicultural society can be actively formed or founded. I think it happens rather organically, when people from different cultures stop judging each other based on their differences and start seeing one another as individuals rather than faceless particles of one big blob of "unknown".

Forcing people to open their minds always ends up with one group if not all of them feeling rather put out by all this "new" stuff that is "suddenly being imposed upon us". Therefore, yes, information is the way to go. If there’s ways for people to inform themselves about differences, there’s also ways for them to find similarities, and maybe knowing that will help getting away from the mindset of "They are so different from me that I will never understand them anyways, so there’s no need to even try."

Mirjam Kronthaler - 10.04.2020 @ 17:07