Introduction

This series of documents on culture is part of a wider project, enhancing the understanding of culture and learning how to deal with it. The core of this project is the website http://www.culturalcompetence.eu. The website consists of a mind-map with some 100 labels on culture. Each label contains three icons, one with quotes on the topic in question, one with a summary of the literature and one with a self-study exercise.

This document gives an overview of the difficulties of multicultural society and indicates directions of solving them. The picture on the front gives already an indication: not people but their backgrounds differ.

Multicultural society is a strange phenomenon in the sense that it already exists for centuries and at the same time is often considered as one of the major current problems. All states have a population consisting of different ethnic groups with their own cultural characteristics, even if these differences seem to have disappeared below the surface.

After the fall if the Berlin Wall in 1989 some Central and Eastern European countries appeared rather mono-cultural and even xenophobic but once the socialist framework of unity was removed, the groups showed themselves again; my favourite example are the Gagauz. The question of the identity of ethnic groups is even one of the paradoxes of the European Union: the more you integrate, the more you may express your own identity (because of a less urgent need for national unity).

The question is why this centuries old reality ‘all of sudden’ has become a problem. The short answer is that in many states lots of people arrived from other countries within a relatively short period of time and with rather large cultural differences with the host society. This migration changed the composition of a population in terms of ethnic groups but the real problem resulted from the differences in culture and in particular the underlying value patterns.