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Future of Democracy & Multiculturalism

Upon the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dankwart A. Rustow made the following observation:

For centuries, democracy has been struggling against absolute of constitutional monarchy, colonialism, populist dictatorships from Napoleon to Hitler, and the Communist threat. Now for the first time, democracy stands unchallenged as the world's only legitimate form of government.

Yet, today many see a threat to this hegemony, and once more it is a threat from within, though not this time the subversive threat of a foreign ideology as such. One of the current buzzwords in academic circles, and wherever critics of academia gather, is multiculturalism, a term that turns the old idea of the American melting pot on its head. Instead of a melting pot, we now have ethnic and cultural stratification, with each represented culture in American society vying for the right to retain its original character and even to promote it through education to other groups. Much of the argument over this issue takes on the form of near-hysteria about what will happen to democracy if multiculturalism flourishes and about how undemocratic and anti-academic-freedom multiculturalism is. An examination of the future of democracy given this trend is in order.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.also notes the end of the tensions of the cold war era, but he also finds that this does not mean the end of history as has been touted by some. Indeed, we are exchanging one set of hatreds for another, and it seems that there are always new ideologies to challenge democracy, which must continue to prove itself as the "only legitimate form of government," in the words of Rustow. This is evident in portions of Eastern Europe where long dormant ethnic hatreds have surfaced, as in Bosnia:

The disappearance of ideological competition in the third world removes superpower restraints on national and tribal confrontations. As the...

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Future of Democracy & Multiculturalism. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:29, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702467.html