Re: in fact, I find it rather peculiar all the animosity that developed in Yugoslavia after Tito died and that Belgium still is so geographically divided between the Flemish and the Walloons.....as just one of many examples.
Indeed, you find it "peculiar" precisely because you Americans are clueless about true multiculturalism! Serbs, Croats and Bosnians all belong to the same (slavic) race/ethnic group and speak the same language: Serbo-Croat(*) and yet, precisely because they belong to different cultures, they keep vying against each other, sometimes violently. Ditto with Belgium: both Flemings and Walloons are white and mainly Catholic, yet speak different languages and belong to different Kulturs (the Latin Kultur for Walloons and the Germanic one for Flemings).
It's precisely because the US has built up a (multiracial) monoculture that it's impervious to the kind of internecine cultural strifes that roil Europe... However, such a monolithic state of cultural affairs is being challenged by Hispanic immigration and the prospect of turning the US monoculture into a "biculture"....
Just because the European nexus of 25 different cultures is conflictual and fraught with warfare doesn't mean that Europe is not multicultural!!! Actually, the obverse is true: if, like the US, the European white monolith were an uneventful bliss THEN you'd be correct to construe it as a "white monoculture". As for my claim that Europe --as a multicultural white monolith-- is way ahead of the US, just imagine for a moment that the 50 states that make up the United States of America were to each other like the 25 European states are to each other... get the picture? The 50 united states of America would have 50 different languages, 50 different histories, 50 different traditions, 50 different peoples! That's what multiculturalism is all about.
Gus
(*) Ethnic Origin
[...]
Excepting the Albanians (whose genetic origin is essentially Illyrian), it can thus be said that the Slovenes, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Montenegrins, and the Macedonians all share the same principal ethnic origin that goes back to the 7th century migration of the Southern Slavs. The name Yugoslavia meaning "Land of the Southern Slavs" refers to that basic fact.
Language
The Serbs, the Montenegrins, the Bosnians and the Croats share the same language but the Serbs and Montenegrins write it with the Cyrillic alphabet and the Croats use Latin characters. It was called Serbo-Croatian until the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation but the Serbs now call it Serbian, the Croats call it Croatian and the Bosnians call it Bosnian. The Slovene and Macedonian languages are subtle variations of the Slavonic language that all original Southern Slavs spoke. They are closer to Serbo-Croat than Spanish is to French and only a little more different than American is to English.
[snip]
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