Patterns of Multicultural and Intercultural Practice: East and West

Abstract

In this article, the patterns of multiethnic cohabitation encountered in selected societies in Western and Eastern Europe will be put into context and compared. This will involve consideration of the institutional as well as the grass-roots dimension of these societies’ multicultural experience. Reference will be made to the cases of Britain and France, on the one hand, while the experiences of Vojvodina in Serbia and Transylvania in Romania will be highlighted, on the other. Another aim of this article will be to assess the applicability of Western models for managing ethnic relations in East European societies. What will be demonstrated is that while in the West multiculturalism functions as an institutional practice, built upon the premises of segregation, in certain East European societies intercultural (as opposed to multicultural) cohabitation is experienced as a bottom-up mass phenomenon. Western multicultural models can therefore offer partial answers to ‘Eastern’ questions but can not be applied in their totality within East European contexts.