ABSTRACT
The idea of community has been transformed by multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a recent development but diversity is as old as human societies. The paradigmatic model of monoculturalism is the French republican tradition in which multiculturalism is confined to the private sphere. Multiculturalism in many cases was shaped by earlier traditions of cultural policy. Liberal communitarian multiculturalism has been a product of settler societies, such as Canada. In recent years, in particular since the mid-1980s, multiculturalism has taken a radical turn around a new politics of cultural difference. The postmodern model of multiculturalism is close to the pluralist model, but is more radical in that it is ultimately a theory of cultural plurality that goes beyond all traditional understandings of multiculturalism. Western multiculturalism rested on the assumption that diversity lay primarily on the level of cultural identity, and that this was shaped by the ethnic values of relatively homogeneous groups of immigrants who were quite separate from the dominant, national society.
