Multi-cultural Europe today...

...is a chaotic cauldron, simmering with resentment and anger. Europe appears to labour under an inheritance of pseudo-guilt; guilt at being in the forefront of Western values and Western civilisation. According to this article, Europe today inhabits a despondent vacuum, a trough of cultural cringing inspired and instilled in Europeans by an arrogant liberal left mindset. Future generations may come to see the elitist left as flawed multi-cultural idealists; an aberrant clique devoted to instilling self hatred, in the guise of tolerance, who despise their own society and exist as nihilistic traitors to their own heritage... Fear masquerading as tolerance...

...The European obsession with third world ‘‘causes’’ was a function of Europe’s new, guilt-based moral order. Immigrants and their children were at liberty to express politically their wishes as a people in a way that European natives were not. Grim-faced censure was always at the ready for Europeans who indulged in the merest nostalgic buffoonery, like that of the UK Independence party, which favoured nothing more radical than pulling Britain out of the EU. The only national claims that could be made without provoking accusations of nationalism, racism, or xenophobia were those of foreigners. Where it interacted with immigration, there was an illogic at the heart of diversity. If diversity ‘‘enriched’’ and ‘‘strengthened’’ nations as much as everyone claimed, why would any nation ever want its immigrants to integrate into the broader society? That would be drawing down the nation’s valuable fund of diversity. In this regard Ethiopians are for serving Ethiopian food, and helping substantiate the boasts of suburban school administrators that ‘‘our students speak 170 languages in the home’’—not for taking jobs as marketing managers and dental hygienists. Or was the supply of diversity meant to remain—via immigration—permanently on tap? No European public wanted that. So European leaders defended mass immigration in one breath by saying it would make their countries different (through diversity), and in the next by saying it would leave them the same (through integration...
...Gordon Brown has suggested that his countrymen be more explicit about the values and customs that everyone in society ought to respect, no matter what their background. But it is late in the day to make such a suggestion. The old religion-based cultures of Europe performed just the function Brown describes until challenged in the 1960s and 1970s, in the name of personal liberation and autonomy, and then repudiated in the 1980s and 1990s, in the name of making Europe more friendly to minorities. How can Brown now expect immigrants and their children to help revive a culture that natives and their children have done little but snicker at? ) ...more from Prospect online, here...