After Multiculturalism: Where Do We Go From Here?

There is a phrase that keeps resurfacing in public debate. Multiculturalism has failed.

It is said with certainty. With frustration. With a kind of exhausted finality. As if diversity were a grand social experiment that did not work.

But before we dismiss it, we should pause.

Do we even understand what multiculturalism was meant to be? And more importantly, do we understand what was meant to come after it?

Multiculturalism was recognition. It was the acknowledgement that modern nations are not culturally singular. It allowed communities to retain language, faith, cuisine, memory and tradition while participating in public life. It created space.

Pluralism is something else entirely. Pluralism is engagement. It is not living beside one another but living with one another. It is dialogue. It is an exchange. It is friction that produces understanding. It assumes that identities will interact and evolve rather than sit frozen behind glass.

And beyond pluralism lies cohesion. Not assimilation. Not erasure. But a confident shared civic identity, strong enough to hold differences without fearing them.

The problem is that many societies stopped halfway. They created space but did not cultivate engagement. Parallel lives emerged. And parallel lives, left unattended, produce suspicion.

Fear grows where a relationship is absent.

For me, these ideas did not come from policy debates. They came from movement. When you study abroad in Italy and sit at a table of international students, something subtle happens. Faith does not disappear. Culture does not disappear. But survival in a foreign land produces a different kind of identity. You become a traveller first. You bond over dislocation. Over shared confusion. Over navigating systems that are not your own.

In remote parts of Sierra Leone during the Ebola crisis, identity collapsed into something even more fundamental. Survival. Community. Humanity. In the Amazon, distance from the machinery of modern life produces the same effect. You stop categorising people so neatly. You recognise instinctively that cooperation is older than division.

Travel strips identity back to its living core.

Even within countries themselves, you see this constant reshaping. Montenegro carries the memory of kingship, the weight of communism, and the pull of European aspiration. None of these identities neatly replaces one another. They layer. They shift. They coexist in tension.

Across Africa, in Creole traditions shaped by colonial encounter, migration and trade, identity is fluid. It absorbs and reexpresses. What, on the surface, looks like a stable tradition is often the product of centuries of adaptation.

Which brings us to religion.

We often conflate religion with divine permanence. Yet much of what we defend under the banner of faith is cultural inheritance. Ritual, dress, music, social norms, even the way scripture is interpreted, are shaped by geography, politics and history.

Faith may seek the divine. Religion, as it is lived, is shaped by culture. A Sikh household influenced by East Africa will look different from one rooted in Punjab. Islam in Turkey differs from Islam in Indonesia. Christianity in the Philippines carries echoes of Spain. The divine claim may be constant, but the cultural expression is not.

When culture is mistaken for sacred immutability, identity hardens. But if we look honestly at history, civilisation has always advanced through exchange. Ideas travelled. Traders moved. Empires rose and fell. Traditions borrowed from one another. Everything we call heritage today is the result of interaction.

Perhaps pluralism is not a modern experiment at all. Perhaps it is embedded in the human condition. For most of human history, survival required alliance. There was always an external threat. The beast at the gate was real. Identity had to remain flexible because cooperation was necessary.

Today, in many parts of the world, we no longer fear the beast. We are safer than previous generations. And perhaps in the absence of existential threat, meaning becomes the battlefield. Identity sharpens. Divisions deepen. We turn inward. The rise of hard-line nationalism may not signal that pluralism is unnatural. It may signal that we have forgotten that pluralism built us.

The global Indian community illustrates this better than most.

Yes, there is a shared ancestral reference point in the subcontinent. A shared genome pool, if you like. But even within India itself, the diversity is vast. Language, caste, region, faith, philosophy, cuisine. It is impossible to categorise neatly. And once those communities moved to Suriname, South Africa, Malaysia, Canada, East Africa or Britain, identity shifted again. Traditions adapted to new climates, new political systems, new neighbours. A Mauritian of Indian origin is not identical to a Gujarati in London or a Tamil in Durban. Yet there is continuity.

Identity survives by evolving.

What is fascinating now is the subtle shift taking place. For decades, diaspora communities looked primarily toward one another, building horizontal networks of survival. Today, there is a renewed gaze toward India itself, not simply as homeland memory but as an economic and civilisational force. That too reshapes identity. It layers it further. None of this fits neatly into rigid categories.

So where do we go from here? We move beyond slogans. Multiculturalism created recognition. Pluralism demands engagement. Cohesion requires confidence.

We must distinguish between faith and the cultural forms that carry it. We must encourage shared civic spaces where encounter becomes normal rather than exceptional. And we must cultivate identities strong enough to engage without feeling erased.

Civilisation does not advance through uniformity. It advances through adaptation. In every remote village, every university cafeteria, every unexpected conversation across borders, the same truth emerges. Identity is not a fixed monument. It is a living negotiation.

Perhaps multiculturalism did not fail. Perhaps we mistook a beginning for an ending. The real question is not whether diversity works. The question is whether we have the maturity to build with it.