This article discusses the decline of the multicultural doctrine that has governed Western political philosophy and practice in the last part of the 20th century. This decline is felt in the USA as well as in EU countries and manifests itself in new cultural restrictions on immigration policy, in stricter loyalty tests for immigrants who seek naturalization and in statutes regulating behavior in public places and proscribing deviant acts based on religious tradition. The article surveys the state of multiculturalism in a number of countries and pays special attention to the cases of the USA, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Israel. In all these countries the principal issue is how to tolerate intolerant communities, how to treat religious communities whose tenets clash with the democratic and liberal values of the host country and how to balance the rights of the individual against the rights of the cultural group to which that individual belongs. The author challenges the notion that all cultures are entitled to equal treatment and excludes from this ambit cultures that clash with the values of democracy and human rights. The main brunt of this article is that the norms of democracy, equality, and human rights are not a culture in the ordinary sense of the word, as they are distinct from all traditional cultures and are the result of an intellectual construct founded upon the autonomy of the individual and on a rejection of traditional culture.
