ABSTRACT
Today small nations must deal with a typical “dual challenge”: on the one hand, for all sorts of socio-economic and humanitarian reasons, they seek to welcome newcomers within their borders and, on the other hand, they fear that doing so contributes to minimising what makes them “distinct societies” and that they may soon be destined for a quiet, yet inevitable disintegration. More accurately, the (perceived) mismanagement of newcomers’ integration within the host society fuels a certain “identity malaise.” As a result, many small nations have rejected the paradigm multiculturalism in order to reflect and act upon the desired dynamics to be established between members of the historical and cultural majority and those who come from a more or less recent immigration. Since they seemingly cannot avoid dealing with the first part of the aforementioned “dual challenge” and focus solely on the second, if small nations wish to distance themselves from multiculturalism and still hold onto the principle of pluralism, they must draw inspiration from another model. This chapter argues that small nations should take inspiration in what has come to be known in Quebec as the model of “interculturalism.”
