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That's not very progressive of you.
It's entirely progressive. You can be whichever culture you want, as long as it's in benefit to the central authority.
Statistically, no. Homogenous societies are much better off all else being equal. Societies with your approach faced severe internal turmoil compared to ones that blended. The moral/progressive issue will come with how try to you accomplish this.
(Progressives who hold all cultural appropriation is bad are, statistically, wrong - but hardly speak for all progressives.)
Kind of? My impression is that the most successful states historically are those that were able to fold different cultures into itself. The USA being a prime example. Many different cultures that all see themselves as a part of the USA first, secondary culture second. Rome as well was pretty good at that until they got lazy and stopped integrating new areas fully.
It is what France did as well. Very succesfull. Until now that is, as they problems in Paris with new year etc clearly demonstrate.
france should be destroyed for what it did to it's dialects IMO, in ever pdox game I take it appart so at least some of it survives
As long as the economy works and no foreign power is able to interfere and "push" some matters of identity, nationalism and minority rights, multiculturalism seems to work.
USA has no able opponents at the time. If it's economy collapses and other powers get stronger, we'll see what happens.
Sometimes foreign interference creates matters even if they are not really present, do not forget the "move" for an independent Sicily after ww2.
Noone talked for an independent Scotland in 1900, when the empire was in good shape.
Noone could imagine independent Balkan nation states in 1600.
An independence movement for a free Chechnya in 1960?
An independence movement for a free or Mexican Texas in 2019?
As long as the economy works and foreign powers aren't strong enough, people are held together.
USA has no able opponents at the time. If it's economy collapses and other powers get stronger, we'll see what happens.
Sometimes foreign interference creates matters even if they are not really present, do not forget the "move" for an independent Sicily after ww2.
Noone talked for an independent Scotland in 1900, when the empire was in good shape.
Noone could imagine independent Balkan nation states in 1600.
An independence movement for a free Chechnya in 1960?
An independence movement for a free or Mexican Texas in 2019?
As long as the economy works and foreign powers aren't strong enough, people are held together.
In the case of the USA, don't mistake a small recent vocal minority pushing for multiculturalism with the overall experiences and official policies regarding immigrants to the US over the previous 200 years. When it comes to immigrants, the US is very strongly an integrationalist one. It usually takes a couple of generations (about 50 years) for the cultural 'combine' of the US to digest any large batch of immigrants, but digest it does, and by the time the process is over with, the previously 'new and different' group(s) are so thoroughly integrated that their own grandchildren don't even recognize themselves as potentially different. It happened to the Scandanavians in the mid 19th century, the Germans in the late 19th/early 20th century, the Irish and the Poles in the same time frame, the Italians in the mid 20th century, the Vietnamese in the late 20th and early 21st century, and it has already happened to the 'first wave' of Mexican immigrants who came in the period between the 1950's and 1970's.
These are people like my brother in law R. Uribe who won't admit to has mom and other older relatives that he never learned spanish except briefly in high school, and pretends to understand when older family members converse in spanish.
A former Co worker T. Nguyen who went to visit China and Vietnam for business a year ago, and the people there wouldn't believe she couldn't speak the language, and had difficulty getting a translator to believe that she needed help.
The lady from Sri Lanka who used to be Hindu, whose kids now love cheesburgers.
My great grandmother never learned english, despite being in the US for over 80 years and living until the late 1970's and whose younger children never learned arabic (her native language) and couldn't speak to her directly.
Well, in that case it helps a LOT not having neighbour states with people of said cultures.
If Italy was in Toronto and had irredentist claims for the Italians in Vermont, was founding Italian schools there and propagating a future unification with the motherland...
Of course the American model of intergration is MUCH better than anyone elses - but that stems from the fact that there is no dominant native culture.
In Germany there is, in France as well, so it is not easy for migrants there to assimilate.
One other factor contributing to this succes is the economy - a Mexican immigrant is better off in the US than in Mexico (otherwise he would have stayed there).
If US economy collapses and Mexico thrives, there would be many Mexican-Americans asking for a unification of some US sates with the motherland, or claiming Mexican citizenship back.
In Greece there were many Albanian immigrants in the early 90's who lied to the authorities claiming to stem from the Greek minority to get visas, as did many immigrants from the former USSR. Now that the Greek economy lays in ruins and any intergration failed, they are proud not to be Greek (anymore).
If Italy was in Toronto and had irredentist claims for the Italians in Vermont, was founding Italian schools there and propagating a future unification with the motherland...
Of course the American model of intergration is MUCH better than anyone elses - but that stems from the fact that there is no dominant native culture.
In Germany there is, in France as well, so it is not easy for migrants there to assimilate.
One other factor contributing to this succes is the economy - a Mexican immigrant is better off in the US than in Mexico (otherwise he would have stayed there).
If US economy collapses and Mexico thrives, there would be many Mexican-Americans asking for a unification of some US sates with the motherland, or claiming Mexican citizenship back.
In Greece there were many Albanian immigrants in the early 90's who lied to the authorities claiming to stem from the Greek minority to get visas, as did many immigrants from the former USSR. Now that the Greek economy lays in ruins and any intergration failed, they are proud not to be Greek (anymore).
This holds true completely outside of race; people do not like being on a sinking ship - it's frequently why people immigrate in the first place. Prosperity helped cultural assimilation, sure, just as it helped religions, helped conquest, helped centralization, helped infrastructure development...
When you get a bunch of people to share an identity (I don't care about their genes here) the nation does well. Note that this derail about integration sprung from the (true) statement that the various nations who fell behind in the modern era couldn't centralize due to cultural differences. If you look at random parts of the world the story tends towards the same: unified cultures report more happiness and less crime. If you head over to OT the Danes there at least in past years always bleated this fact out.
No dominant native culture? Not at all. The USA has an overwhelmingly dominant native culture. So much so it gets exported outwards and embraced to some extent through no overt pushing from the US. Places like Germany and France don't integrate well because they're not used to it and don't have a culture that really welcomes integration nor structural elements to support it.
Look at how public schools work for a good example. Just about everyone has their kids put into local schooling. In those schools the kids will be used to having outsiders come in. Families move around a lot in the US. There's not nearly the same stigma in moving between states as there is between countries. Might even be some other migrants around too. In the schools everyone speaks the same language and it's structured pretty well to treat students pretty similarly. You'll have some problems with race at times, but overall by the time the kids are out they'll be participating in the local culture. Assuming they stick around their own kids will go through the same process and likely be indistinguishable from non-migrants.
The advent of TV and other visual media only accelerated the process. It might seem silly to say it, but having something like Spongebob around where kids from across the country can relate to is a massive advantage in integrating people. Even moreso if they were watching said show before they came to the US.
If anything I'd think the issue in your example stems from artificial country lines not being good lines of actual culture. I live near Boston, about 1.5 hours north of it. It's another state away and there's a certain noticeable change in some cultural elements between here and Boston. There's bigger differences between me and Texans. The differences are big enough that one could if you wanted to separate me into different cultural groups. Yankee instead of American for example. But I don't tend to care because the differences are there but fairly meaningless in practice.
Compare that to how Europeans seem to care so much about cultural impacts and fighting away other cultures. Really good at keeping themselves separate and separating themselves wherever they can. It's not that some place like Scotland really is culturally different, it's that they see breaking away as being beneficial and justified.
@Conanteacher 's point only holds for native cultures that fiercly resist changing themselves, and make very little effort to aid newcomers in joining it. As @Xeorm points out (and I did sort of) the dominant culture in the USA is exactly the opposite - it adjusts relatively quickly and easily to make 'cultural space' for newcomers. This is seen most obviously in the way that new religions, new holidays, and new types of foods are easily and rapidly integrated into the national 'norms' and some of the older ones are quietly dropped. 75 years ago, German style beer gardens, were all over the US, Irish independence day was a paid day off for many americans, Columbus day usually had major parades, etc. This is no longer true in most of the US, although it's still the case where large numbers of people from these groups still exist. Instead today, Cinco De Mayo and Holi are major holidays, and restaurants have special hours for Ramadan.
It also has a number of mechanisms both overt and implied to speed up assimilation. To top it all off, once a fairly small number of 'core beliefs' are respected, a considerable amount of social and cultural variation is expected and encouraged, so newcomers don't have to make total changes to everything they are and do to fit in reasonably well.
Consistently ever since record keeping began, the portion of the US population born somewhere else has been somewhere around 10%. It was even higher before 1850 since the country was so new. The traditional native cultural way of the USA IS to welcome people from other places. No other place on earth is quite like this.
It also has a number of mechanisms both overt and implied to speed up assimilation. To top it all off, once a fairly small number of 'core beliefs' are respected, a considerable amount of social and cultural variation is expected and encouraged, so newcomers don't have to make total changes to everything they are and do to fit in reasonably well.
Consistently ever since record keeping began, the portion of the US population born somewhere else has been somewhere around 10%. It was even higher before 1850 since the country was so new. The traditional native cultural way of the USA IS to welcome people from other places. No other place on earth is quite like this.
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The big story of that graph is not just the high level of foreign born residents in the 1800s and again since the 2000s but also the out-and-out xenophobia of the 1910s and 1920s which culminated in the various racially motivated exclusion acts and a near total shut down of immigration from most parts of the world for several decades.
Consistently ever since record keeping began, the portion of the US population born somewhere else has been somewhere around 10%. It was even higher before 1850 since the country was so new. The traditional native cultural way of the USA IS to welcome people from other places. No other place on earth is quite like this.
Plenty of countries are right now having similar fits of xenophobia and desire to shut out the "other" in order to build more harmonious societies (or so they claim). I'm not sure whether the US experience with exclusionary policies in the 20th century is really providing a positive example.
US 'Xenophobia' and immigration restrictions didn't become a serious set of policies until the 30's, and It actually dovetails quite nicely with what everyone else in this thread is saying in general. If/when the economic and social conditions of a society are poor (as they were in the US in the great depression) it can loose the conditions required to successfully assimilate other groups. You also have to consider the effects of WWII, which killed a large number of people and/or prevented them from moving around for a considerable amount of time. Immediately after WWII a surge in immigrants took place, but for a long time period roughly from the end of the 1930's until 1947 or so nobody anywhere in the world was going anywhere unless as part of a uniformed armed forces. Simultaniously, about 1/2 the worlds population (China and the Soviet bloc) was banned from travelling anywhere for any reason, and those restrictions didn't end until the 1990's. The 'pressure' of excess population that is now driving immigration to the US from Mexico and Central America didn't even exist until roughly the 1980's, as these countries were rather thinly populated until then.
The # of immigrants entering per year gives a much more nuanced picture. The depression of the 1890's is clearly visible (less people wan tot come when things suck) WW 1 is clearly visible as a downward spike, then the double whammy of the great depression and WWII takes a couple of decades to get itself sorted out. These are the drivers of arrival numbers and policies.
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Interesting opinions, really. Now the "foreign power inteference" factor seems more relevant.
It's all about money, also.
When the EU was prosperous, in the 90's, everyone wanted to assimilate / migrate / travel / form a USE.
When austerity policies kicked in, everyone was "seal the borders or migrants will come and steal our jobs".
When imperialist wars in the M.East and growing troubles in Africa created mass migration waves combined with terror attacks, many ask for a border wall.
Of course in the US the border wall desire has similar roots.
It's all about money, also.
When the EU was prosperous, in the 90's, everyone wanted to assimilate / migrate / travel / form a USE.
When austerity policies kicked in, everyone was "seal the borders or migrants will come and steal our jobs".
When imperialist wars in the M.East and growing troubles in Africa created mass migration waves combined with terror attacks, many ask for a border wall.
Of course in the US the border wall desire has similar roots.
Yes - the parallels with US experience around WWII are very similar. The 'pattern' for the US around WWII is so obvious because it's been the only 'hiccup' in the intake of immigrants in it's national history big enough to show up in a large scale. A graph of inflows and outflows of people for most other countries would look dramtically different, as economic changes and war or threats of war make the countries in question much more, or less attractive to people to come or go. If you look at histories of ancient or medieval societies the parallels are similar, with the addition of various plagues as an additional trigger for instability.
We are very happy, yes. Though I've also heard claims that there might be some genetic variations making one more likely to be happy. No idea if that's true, but it would fit with Robert Molesworth's observations in the 1690s where he criticised the Danes for, among other things, being bad due to the peasants in general being happy as long as they had food and a roof and not caring about how much poverty/filth they were living in and being way too little ambitious in his opinion. (Said book then led to the king of Denmark demanding of the king of England that the book was to be publicly burned and Molesworth punished. The king of England declined.)
And yes, we have low crime, but that more has to do with e.g. having banned guns than being homogeneous. Though, granted, if you're a Dane and you aren't a member of Hell's Angels you're unlikely to be scrutinised by police, whereas if you're of Other Ethnic Descent, especially if you're a young, Other Ethnic male then you might very well get stopped and frisked for looking suspicious. Similarly it's always the immigrant ghettos which get stop and frisk zones and also only them which get the higher punishment zones, i.e. zones where committing a crime carries much higher penalties than committing the same crime elsewhere. So in that sense you could say that it was due to a lack of homogenity in the ghettos, but that's ignoring a lot of socioeconomic factors for why especially Other Ethnic males are statistically likelier to be criminals than Danish males. Looking at things like job availability, mate availability, economic status, etc. means a lot. And then we're back to doing well economically mattering a lot.
So yeah, while homogenity does help, it isn't the entire answer, far from it.
Then it isn't the dominant, native culture succeeding. It's the native culture being slowly supplanted.
And that isn't the natives having to cater to the immigrants, how?
Not saying that it's bad, because it isn't. Just noting that it isn't the dominant culture succeeding, it's the dominant culture bowing to the immigrating cultures.And that isn't assimilation. The US never really has been assimilating immigrants, at least not in the past 150 or so years.
It's a two-way street. The existing population adds a few of the immigrant cultures' items to its list of holidays, food, and clothing (a few of which endure, but most end up forgotten after a few decades), and the immigrants begin to observe the previous populations' customs to an ever-increasing degree. They meet somewhere in the middle. The US certainly isn't the same culturally as it was 50-100 years ago, but the immigrants have "mostly" integrated, even though there's still some residual recognition of one's family heritage.Then it isn't the dominant, native culture succeeding. It's the native culture being slowly supplanted.
And that isn't the natives having to cater to the immigrants, how?
And that isn't assimilation. The US never really has been assimilating immigrants, at least not in the past 150 or so years.
Take me as an example: my great-grandparents came over mostly around 1901-1904, learned just about enough of the basics of the English language to converse in it, and spent most of their lives in a Hungarian "ghetto". Their children spoke English as a primary language, but were still fairly fluent in Hungarian, and my grandmothers both cooked mainly "Hungarian" food with a few American additions. My parents knew only a few phrases and bits and pieces of Hungarian (until my dad took a course in it after retirement), and my mother learned to cook "American" style, with the exception of one or two Hungarian recipes learned in her teens. I learned a few Hungarian words from them, and picked up a few more while visiting the country with my father a couple of decades back, but can't even begin to put a sentence together in the language, and I'll usually just microwave something, eat out, or grab food to go; not much trace of the family culture remains since the passing of the last of the second generation and most of the third. 50 years and the family was more American than Hungarian, and after 100 years, the family name and a few memories are about all that's left.
I remember hearing the Polish polka bands playing on the "poor" side of town, back in the 1960s and even early '70s, but their children listen to American (or British) music, and now the Hispanic bands have taken their place. Another 50 years or so, and those too will have integrated and given way to the next wave of immigrants, or whatever the future holds.
I'd call that "integrating".
Safe for replacing English by Hungarian (and even then...), all that you mention is just a product of generational evolution that can be observed worldwide to various degree and not especially particular to the US of A.
100 years ago microwaving something, eat out or grab food to go wasn't really common either in non-hungarian families in muricah or elsewhere.
100 years ago microwaving something, eat out or grab food to go wasn't really common either in non-hungarian families in muricah or elsewhere.