Monoculturalism

Monoculturalism is the practice of actively preserving a national culture via the exclusion of external influences. Japan, China, South Korea, and North Korea are examples of monoculturalism. Usually a monocultural society exists by racial homogeneity, nationalistic tendencies, geographic isolation, or political isolation (sometimes but not always under a totalitarian regime).

Recently, right-wing governments in several European states, notably the Netherlands and Denmark, have reversed the national policy and returned to an official monoculturalism. A similar reversal is the subject of debate in the United Kingdom and others, due to evidence of incipient segregation and anxieties over homegrown terrorism.

Several heads-of-government have expressed doubts about the success of multicultural policies: Former British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy have voiced concerns about the effectiveness of their multicultural policies for integrating immigrants.

Nazi Germany practiced monoculturalism as part of its campaign for Pan-Germanism and German nationalism, but monoculturalism was typical of the era and many European countries were monocultural at that time. Some European countries are still effectively monocultural because of the people's shared culture and ethnicity, like Finland.

The idea of monoculturalism can be expanded to that of ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism being the idea that one's ethnic background is superior to that of others. A feeling of superiority is one that can project mono-cultural ideals in an attempt to justify intrinsic ways of thinking. In Nations with a majority of the population being white, ethnocentrism is blindly put upon those of other cultural backings. The idea of ethnocentrism being combined with monoculturalism yields many examples from history. Most obvious is the Holocaust, but further from that is any instance of genocide or simple racism. In defining genocide you can find the correlation it has with monoculturalism, and how it can be a resultant of mono-cultural, as well as, ethnocentic thinking.

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