I think
@InSight is talking about multiculturalism in a broader sense, for example a town, county or country rather than isolated examples.
Put two masses of different cultures together and it's unlikely you'll get "multiculturalism". You'll get some intermarriage, but this isn't indicative of multiculturalism. Some
slave owners chose their slaves as wives - but that doesn't mean multiculturalism was proven.
Granted, mixed marriage is much more common now (mixed race is the fastest growing ethnicity in UK) but I'm not sure it proves multiculturalism is succeeding.
Of course I forgot that every time my family attempts to join society we get shunned for being unnatural!
As for an analogy based on slave owners who chose slaves as wives, yes that's wonderfully analogous and not even remotely related to forced marriage at all.
What I do find interesting in a claim that multiculturalism can't/doesn't work and/or is not natural and/or must be forced, is that most seem to forget that culture doesn't end at race or religion, but covers the entire socio-economic scale as well as being regional. Given that if multiculturalism doesn't work I'm at a loss to understand how society manages to function at all.
My wife's cultural background is a good example of this, being Anglo-Indian,a culture that is by origin multicultural, and far beyond just English and Indian. Its a culture that also sees very few AI to AI relationships (in my wife's very, very large extended family I can only think of one), and as such continues to absorb and integrate new cultures and influences.
Now that's not to say that its either easy or straightforward, and the more common ground two cultures share the easier it is for them to accept and absorb from each other, and the reverse is of course true. It also requires a degree of acceptance, understanding, compromise and work on all sides. It is however demonstrably untrue to say that different cultures can't live together and work to accept elements of each other, does it work every time? No of course not, but at the other end of the scale neither has it failed at every turn.
The single biggest cultural 'jar' that my wife and I cause in Western European society not that we are in a mixed race/religious background/culture relationship, with 'brown' babies, but rather that we have been married for over twenty years. A point that also highlights that cultures do not (and never have) remain static, and even without outside influences will change anyway.
Western European culture only a few decades ago was very different from how it is today even without looking at influences directly from 'outside' cultures. People married for life as divorce was a cultural taboo to a very large degree, everyone wore hats and everyday wear was formal (unless you were working class scum in origin - just like me), single mothers got the kids taken away and shipped off to nice church run care homes (and how nice they were). All of these things have changed, culture is fluid and always has been, with and without the influences of outside cultures (which are also fluid).
I would argue that given the fluid nature of culture that it is also changing and evolving driven by both internal and external forces) and is never fixed and naturally and permanently in a state of being many cultures at once. It is in essence, and in my view, multicultural at its core.
Those that try and hold onto some perceived historic cultural value will almost away be holding onto an ideal that either didn't actually exist or has long since passed, with the Daily Mail's seeming longing for a '50s style British culture being a prime example.
I'm quite sure that many will disagree with the above, quite frankly I don't give a hoot about that, I see the evidence for cultural change and shift in almost every part of everyday life and the birth of the internet has only driven that faster. Is it always easy? No. Does it always work? No. Does that mean it never works and is unnatural? No.
