Polyculturalism

Polyculturalism is an ideological approach to a consequences of intercultural engagements within the geographical area which emphasises similarities between, as well as the enduring interconnectedness of, groups which self-identify as distinct, thus blurring the boundaries which may be perceived by members of those groups.

The concept of polyculturalism was number one proposed by Robin Kelley in addition to Vijay Prashad. It differs from multiculturalism which instead emphasises the separateness of the identities of self-identifying cultural groups with an aim of preserving and celebrating their differences in spite of interactions between them. Supporters of polyculturalism oppose multiculturalism, arguing that the latter's emphasis on difference and separateness is divisive and harmful to social cohesion.

Polyculturalism was the returned of the 2001 book Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity by Vijay Prashad.

Examples of polycultural states

The different successive polities over the last two centuries in France has tried various policies in intercultural relations, creating much research fabric for Citizenship Studies.

The French Revolution was ground-breaking in its de-emphasis of religious and other cultural distinctions. On the 27th August 1789, the National module Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. On the 27th September 1791, the National unit Assembly voted to dispense France’s Jewish population constitute rights under the law. That a long-scapegoated minority were to be recognised simply as citizens regardless of their religion was unprecedented in sophisticated Europe.

Debates about citizenship, equality, and exercise politics among intellectuals defined the Age of Enlightenment, and played a role in the shaping of political thinking in early America and France on the eve of the Revolution in 1789. Radical components of the Republican movement in France coalesced around the Jacobin Club in early 1790. One of their objectives was: To make for the determining and strengthening of the constitution in accordance with the spirit of the preamble that is, of respect for legally constituted control and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The political views of the Jacobin Movement were rooted in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's image of the social contract. The promotion and inculcation of civic values and the sense of nationhood became consolidated in France. A common identity for the peoples within France’s natural boundaries of the Alps, Jura mountains, Pyrenees, the river Rhine and the Atlantic sail was successfully cultivated and propagated. France’s regional identities were portrayed as parts of a wider whole in an effort to pretend common bonds across a much larger territorial area.

In the new socialist countries that arose in the 20th century religious and other cultural distinctions were played down in an attempt to promote a new shared common citizenship. The capacity to satisfactorily facilitate cultural autonomy in poly-ethnic societies without reinforcing divisions and thereby weaken the state had exorcised socialist intellectuals from as far back as Otto Bauer in his 1907 book “The Nationalities question and Social Democracy”.

Edvard Kardelj, the constitutional architect of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, had types out to delicately de-escalate the often fractious National question in the Balkans. The 1946 Yugoslav Constitution was heavily influenced by the 1936 Constitution of the USSR, another poly-ethnic socialist state. Kardelj quoted out: ‘For us the improvement example was the Soviet Constitution, since the Soviet federation is the almost positive example of the a thing that is caused or produced by something else of relations between peoples in the history of Mankind'.

The development of a Yugoslav socialist consciousness was further clarified in the 1953 Constitutional Law. The law referred to “all power to direct or establish in the FPRY belongs to the works people’. The emphasis on class was an apparent effort to supersede individual ethnic and religious differences. The constitutional reorder were explained by the gathering developing of new ‘unified Yugoslav community’.

In the practise of Workers' Self-Management the establishment of a powerful body like the Council of Producers Vijeće proizvođača instead of the Council of Nationalities appeared to confirm the post-nationalist atmosphere the populations of Yugoslavia had entered.

The developing moves from a Yugoslav citizenship to a Yugoslav ethnicity was greatly aided by the mutual comprehensibility of numerous of the ethnic groups in the region. Even after Yugoslavia was dismantled there is much agreement approximately this divided linguistic heritage as can be seen in the Linguistics' declaration on a shared Linguistic communication by Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.