A recent news that is causing controversy is the plan for the Danish government to get rid of the country's ethnic ghettos by more forcefully assimilating its non-white migrant communities. It is just a long line of growing trend of migrant host countries to compel migrants to assimilate faster through political and sometimes legal means. The French bans Muslim headscarves, in plenty of countries (including the US), knowing the national language as a prerequisite for naturalization, and here in Japan, foreigners have to change to a Japanese surname upon becoming a citizen.
The increasing political and legal pressure for migrants to culturally assimilate, by taking up local languages, fashion, and names in order to continue residing in wealthy host societies creates a debacle. Not submitting to the pressure means social marginalization and second-class citizenship. Inability to fit in with the cultural mainstream entails that the whole point of migration, to better fulfill one's fullest potential and to acquire better standards of living in a freer, more prosperous environment, may not be possible. But to submit would mean that the cherished traditions from the homeland gradually disappears.
The debacle might be at an individual level, but the consequence of the choice could be societal and civilizational. For at least the past century, migration for permanent settlement has followed a largely set pattern. The poor countries of the global South send people to the prosperous global North, where many of the migrants become citizens and have offspring who have little firsthand knowledge of their Southern ancestral homelands. As these offspring grow up and have more offspring, their Southern cultural roots are lost, replaced entirely with the values of their Northern countries of abode.
In those Northern countries with a clear cultural and ethnic dominant majority, as is the case for Danmark, France, and Japan, the loss of those Southern roots are even faster. Whereas in countries with a few equally numerous and competing ethnic groups, cultures of those few groups tend to remain distinct and unique over generations, in ones with a clear dominant majority, who controls the socioeconomic institutions and norms by which the society operates, migrants often have little choice but to conform to the majority if they want to make ends meet. The initial hesitance becomes open embrace within a few generations.
Of course, exceptions do exist, but such exceptions may be precisely what the Danes are thinking about when they are pushing for more forceful assimilation. The Muslim and African suburbs of French cities host unintegrated ethnic communities that use their unassimilated nature as a quiet resistance against a state and the French majority that made them second-class citizens. By more stringently tying political status with active individual participation in the cultural assimilation process, the Danes could be pioneering, for a better or worse, a new formula to prevent the use of cultural difference as a political tool by the minorities.
Such political action to enforce assimilation in the global North may spark an existential crisis in the global South. In essence, by tying acquisition of economic and political equality with cultural conformity to the mainstream, Northern leaders are implicitly affirming that the prosperity of their countries come from certain value systems that are present in their countries but not in the Southern ones from where the migrants come from. Hence, for Southern countries to achieve levels of prosperity reached in the North, taking up those Northern values would be inherently necessary.
A few formerly Southern countries have done exactly that. Japan during the Meiji Restoration emulated everything from Europe, from law to architecture to fashion, in its drive to modernity and prosperity. But many other Southern countries are hesitant to follow suit. Many simply do not have the cultural depth that allowed Japan to come out of its Western-inspired modernity drive with many of its traditional foundations remaining strong. And in the age of the globalized Internet, spreading the dynamic cultural norms of the North among the yearning masses of the South has become so much easier and powerfully effective.
If an impoverished Southern country is to go through what Japan had done during the Meiji Restoration today, the results might look like what Danmark is trying with forced assimilation, without the physical presence of the prosperity Northern dominant majority. The desire to live wealthily like the Northerners may drive Southerners to abandon their cultures en masse, both as migrants in the North or prospective migrants still living in the South. The allure of a higher standard of living may cause Southern countries to lose their cultural identities even without direct prompting by Northerners.
The existential crisis in the global South, then, reflects a more moral question. Does a culture deserve to die just because it has failed to create a prosperous society for its practitioners to live in? Surely, wealth comes from a variety of factors, many of which entirely unrelated to cultural norms and values. But as Northerners attribute backwardness with lack of assimilation with Northern values, the blame of underdevelopment on "backward" culture can only intensify. Indigenous cultures of the global South, then, face an enormous challenge to stay relevant in a more globalized world.
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