Abstract:

Whether it is accepted, challenged or rejected, multiculturalism has imposed itself as an historic concept of changing both the institutions and the political standards in the Western democracies. It may be regarded as a – pragmatic or ideological – response to the management of diversity that is specific to any industrial society and to the ways and means of integrating it in the political community. Its application is at the heart of the interactions between immigrant or minority populations and States, leading the latter to conduct «identity negotiations» on either side. Seen from this perspective, multiculturalism could constitute a theory that allows Nation-States to strike a new balance between emerging community structures and national institutions. The same question arises in the context of the building of Europe: multiculturalism, a fact due ori-ginally to the diverse identities of the Nation-States of which Europe is made up, could be analyzed as a founding theory of a European identity.


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