GMotha said:
I take issue with that, it's as simplistic and inaccurate as idealism.
Multiculturalism works (invisibly) online, it works without riots in a lot of cities like London and New York, it will work in most places eventually. Expressed in simple and purely hopeful terms, multiculturalism is certainly unrealistic. However, it is also inevitable, with all it's attendant troubles, and as such is simultaneously an ideal and a problem. It's going to happen, it just ain't gonna look like this.
Current trends are pointing to borders becoming less relevant. Multiculturalism is an inevitable side effect of globalisation - as I said already, it increases in step with transport and comms. It's already the norm in many large cities, and will spread outward into whole countries as infrastructure becomes more sophisticated. Instead of being geographically separate, cultural territories will increasingly overlap and permeate each other. Polarisation will separate them and send them to war with each other, interaction will promote understanding and lead to the creation of new cultures. Either way, nationalism will never solve another problem again.
Any culture is essentially a giant non-state group - if a state failed, the culture of it's inhabitants would live on. Previously, a culture would be largely confined within national borders. Throughout the 20th century, bleeding across them (sociologically rather than individually) was generally the preserve of terrorist groups, freedom fighters, tribes; generally the most disenfranchised and poorest people on the planet (Gypsies, Kurds, etc). Since the net took off, being a member of a non-state group is not about tribe, violence or crime, and is now open to the most privileged among our species - and I don't mean the wealthy, I mean the whole populaces of first world nations. Non-state groups are emerging in relation to every cultural interest there is, they have massive relevance to the lives of participants, but exist in a space where the state is largely irrelevant. Culture can now occur independently of geography.
The net is a general purpose technology, like steam power, but it's only been around on a large scale for a decade or so. We're only just starting to feel the shockwaves and explore it. It is spreading towards being pervasive, and the new ways we've so far discovered of sorting and sharing information have no historical precedent. They're changing the ways many people think - the world is no longer an impenetrable monolith, it's editable. Collaborative work can be done between people in many different locations. Collaborative social filters simply haven't happened before. People from many cultures are already interacting with each other; they just don't know it most of the time. In games, on the web, wikis, forums, P2P networks, blogs, flickr, etc., all of these cultures are already operating on each other in ways that are largely hidden and impossible to predict, and we've barely seen the beginning.
As soon as cultures are physically together, skin colours, accents, and all sorts of superficial bullsh*t separate them again, but not always. That will fall to an increasing idea of humanness borne from the interactions of an increasingly fluid, physically unconfined world populace.
Cat. Bag. Out of.
Right now it's culture, not policy, that is motivating or has motivated ethnic cleansing in parts of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It's motivated riots in more ordered countries. These things, however, are not an inevitable consequence of cultural mixing, because cultures integrate in the right circumstances. No matter what induces us to fight, we're a social species; altruism and cooperation are in our genes, and will outlive us and whatever cultural values we form. As such, above and beyond conflict we will also exhibit a tendency to settle into cooperation - not because it's idealisitic or utopian, simply because it's a more stable way to exist, aligned with basic human needs. Previously, that's taken centuries to happen. Technology is going to speed it up, if our loutish brains can just keep step.
Edit: I realise that's sounding somewhat utopian again. Things really could and will spiral down the sh*tter in many more locales. For integration to become pervasive and stable, it will need to be nudged continually by culturally tolerant people. Who do actually exist, and can act collectively to change the nature of any culture itself.
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The border needs heat allighned aiming machine guns, not even an animal will get accros.
