Over the past few months there's been a torrent of speeches from Europe's most high-profile leaders declaring the European 50-year experiment a failure. It started with Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel, who declared in October in a much-anticipated speech that the country's efforts to create a multicultural society where immigrant groups maintained their own identity and culture had "utterly failed". Weeks later, Belgian prime minister Yves Leterme said he agreed with her and the experience in Belgium has been the same.
At the start of this month British prime minister David Cameron picked up the theme while speaking at a security conference in Munich, announcing in a headline speech that "state multiculturalism" in the UK had failed, and that a stronger British identity needed to be forged and passed on to immigrants. Five days later French President Nicolas Sarkozy, responding to a question during a television interview, also condemned multiculturalism. "We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him," he said.
Yesterday the Netherlands became the latest country to join the anti-multiculturalism club, with the leader of the ruling Christian Democrats telling a TV show that the Dutch model of a multicultural society has failed.
