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Multicultural Dilemma (Attempted Conceptual Thinking)
PhDr. Petr Nesvadba, CSc., Faculty of Security Management PA Czech Republic in Prague, Department of Social Sciences
The article is intended to be a contribution to the current professional and public debate on multiculturalism. In the first part the author poses a question of what the term denotes, and presents several variants of interpretation. Only after the basic conceptual definition he approaches to the cardinal issue of whether (and if so, in what sense) increasingly spreading assertion that “multiculturalism has failed” is true; in the interest of fairness the author presents a major contention of selected supporters as well as critics of multiculturalism. In the third part the author justifies his belief in the danger of fanatic fundamentalism of all kinds, and the need to avoid tendencies to “replace” a variant of Islamist fundamentalism with the variant of “Western” fundamentalism. The last part of the article suggests readers to try to understand the crisis of multiculturalism as a call for the formation of a new type of Euro-American rationality, and presents several striking contemporary personalities whose work in this direction is indubitable inspiration (Lévinas, Waldenfels, Welsch, Derrida and Habermas).
Key words: Fanaticism, fundamentalism, multiculturalism, Western thinking.