Multiculturalism greatly facilitates advancement and progress

by advancing cultural exchange in both products and ideas.

This happens because multiculturalism renders the various features of different cultures
accessible to the whole population of the state. Since people are living close by, they are often
strongly economically and socially incentivized to fill empty niches in the market by introducing
features of their own cultures into the market.
This enables the people to interchange various elements of their cultures and in turn it renders
them capable to get services that they enjoy and would not otherwise be able to get: The Eastern
cultures can avail of the Western medicine, modern technology and scholarship while the
Western cultures are able to make use of the Eastern food, arts and literature, for example.
Moreover, this import extends to the academia and ideas too since the scholars of different
cultures are able to due to their knowledge of the cultures and incentivized by means of sense of
achievement, scholarly recognition and economic motives to introduce different concepts from
their cultures to the academic debate. This is very beneficial in light of the fact in man's search for
truth an exposure to as a wide a range of ideas as possible is essential. Multiculturalism provides
just the right conditions for that to happen and often these ideas have immense consequences for
science, politics and society.
In summary therefore, multiculturalism greatly facilitates the exchange of ideas and products
between cultures due to economic, social and other incentives that this introduction entails and
this has positive consequences to the state and its people.

Multiculturalism promotes more tolerant societies

We believe that almost all conflicts within the multicultural communities emerge because of
misunderstanding, suspicion and lack of confidence. Lots of people with different cultural
backgrounds tend to misinterpret or do not realize the essence of foreign traditions, religious
beliefs and attitude towards various things. Often, what is considered to be perfectly normal in
one culture, may be seen as completely ridicilous or even offensive in another. For example,
critizining religion can be fully understandable in Europe but completely innapropriate in the
Islamic world- controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad was supposed to be a Danish
political joke, however for Muslims it was humiliation of their faith and they way to discredit their
communities. As the result, it creates a social precipice which takes away most of the possibilities
to live and cooperate peacefully and leads to automatic violence, anger and tension. For
example, a suicide bomber inspired by other insulting drawings of Muhammad attacked a busy
shopping street in Stockholm and a court in Copenhagen sentenced a Somali man to nine years
in prison for attempting to kill Kurt Westergaard.
We argue that sustainable multiculturalism policy is specifically aimed at helping people with
different cultural backgrounds to understand that their cultures do not contradict but contribute to
each other by encouraging them to interact and get involved into various cultural activities,
perceive the origins of their local values and traditions. We see it as a starting point of shaping a
critical thinking and creating an open- mindedness society since it gives people the incentive to
question widely accepted prejudices, search for reasons and get a lot more diversed experience.
For example, in Canada the multiculturalism policy was adopted in 1971 and is thought to be
successful - it recognizes Aboriginal rights, minority rights and equality rights regardless of color,
religion and culture.

Multiculturalism is morally justified

Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "Everyone has the right to
seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." However, UDHR does not state
that there are obligations for well-developed countries to provide one. Country willing to accept
refugees encounters at least many economic problems like provision of food and shelter,
financing integration programmes, etc. Yet, there are countries still willing to do so. Lets take the
examples of Georgia or Libya. People from all over the world were scared of events happening in
those countries and trying to help suffering people living there by providing food, medication,
even coming themselves as volunteers to the hot spots. It comes quite naturally that people tend
to do things that brings them pleasure and benefits to themselves. In this case, providing
humanitarian aid or even accepting people from different culture comes easier since people doing
a good job are proud of themselves and tend to accept new culture easier than in any other
circumstances. In addition, people are not unfamiliar with mixing of cultures. From the ancient
times, it was acceptable to get married with another person from a royal family or to run away
from war in your home land. Even in middle ages it was morally accepted to leave your land and
ask for asylum in a church. To sum up, many refugees were accepted to the countries meaning
one thing: people tend to help others in pain and suffering no matter what their religion,
education, and skin colour is. Therefore, this type of multiculturalism is common and morally
acceptable.

Multiculturalism promotes healthier new generations

Every human being has unique appearance. However, we all have genetically encoded
features such as as skin, hair, eye color, etc. Furthermore, in a certain region a certain
gene pool is shared between the individuals. Therefore, we can easily identify if a person
is African, Asian or European just by looking at their features. For example, only
approximately 1 to 2% of the human population has red hair while about 40% of Scottish
carries the recessive redhead gene. This is so because this population has lived in the
same region for a long time and has not mixed with other races a lot, so they have kept
this gene.
The issue here is that we not only share features but we also share inheritable diseases
that are influenced by genes, as well. For instance, 44% of Japanese adults have
Myopia (an inherited eyesight defect). And if both: the father and the mother have this
Myopia gene there is a probability that their children will have the same eyesight
defect. However, if a person that carries this gene has children with a person that does
not, the chance that a child will have Myopia is reduced to 1/4. The put this very simply,
the good gene acts like a backup, effectively preventing disease the bad gene might
have caused. And the chances of a bad gene meeting a bad gene increases along
with the amount of time it has spent circulating the gene pool of a certain region.
To sum up, the more diverse the genes of the father and the mother are, the healthier
the child will be. And the multicultural society is the best possible medium for such
marriages of two individuals with the completely different sets of genes to appear,
resulting healthier new generations.

Summary
The main contention of the proposition in this debate is that multiculturalism is a
very succesful policy because it promotes the well-being of a society by
facilitating advancement and progress by advancing cultural exchange in both
products and ideas, by increasing the tolerance in societies and by promoting
healthy new generations.
The opposition stated that problems of discrimination or language barriers will be
the basic obstacles to implement such policy. However, we believe that
discrimination level at work depends on how much people educated and tolerant
are and the problem of language barrier is not sufficient enough to reject all the
benefits that we get. Multiculturalism policy is exactly aimed at reducing
discrimination and promoting open-mindness thinking.
The opposition stated that multiculturalism is fundamentally incompatible with the
idea of liberal democracies. However, we tackle this argument by stating quite
the opposite: multiculturalism is in fact essential for the development of a liberal
democracy because it makes people constantly question, adapt and change their
values as well as accept new values which is what the definition of a liberal
democracy entails in the first place.
While we acknowledge that there might be a clash of different values, we say
that this clash is fundamentally solvable because as members of different
cultures interact with the society, they also tend to change shift some of their own
values and adapt new ones.
Finally, the opposition stated that if this happens, it is a bad thing because
cultural values are universal and they should be preserved but we do not agree
with this contention. We submit that all cultural values are means to an end and
while cultural values might not be "universally bad", cultures might outgrow some
of their own values and change them and if this happens, this is a positive thing.

1) The opposition asserts that liberal democracies cannot co-exist with

multiculturalism because they have completely incompatible values and
that Britain is a good example of how multiculturalism is a failing policy.
First, it is not true that liberal democracies and the cultures of the world have
completely incompatible values. There is a certain basis of values that all of the
cultures share. For example, murder, slavery or theft are universally prohibited
everywhere and they are part of the core of the liberal democratic values too.
Second, even if there is some point of conflict between the values of a liberal
democracy and the values of different cultures, this conflict is not a bad thing
because it enables the liberal democracy to constantly reinforce and adapt their
values, and it helps the cultures mitigate and reconcile some of theirs.
Multiculturalism is essential in strengthening liberal democracies because it
makes people constantly question, tolerate and accept new values which is equal
to reinforcing the values of a liberal democracy itself. Otherwise certain ideas
would become dominant and this is contrary to the point of liberal democracy
itself.
Second, multiculturalism allows people to reconcile their own values to adapt to
those of the liberal democracy. E.g. most of the African immigrants in Europe do
not follow traditional practices of female genital population not because these are
banned by law but because the immigrants themselves have a mindset change.
People from different cultures are exposed to the values of multiculturalism such
as freedom of speech, religion, physical integrity, etc. and it helps them reconcile
their traditional cultural practices with those of a liberal democracy to make the
two more compatible with each other.
The multiculturalism policy in Britain is but a bad example because Britain
undertook separation and not multiculturalism as they encouraged different
cultures to live separate lives.

2) The opposition's argument suggests that cultures would lose their diversity
and that this is necessarily a bad thing. Both of these premises are illfounded right from the beginning.
First of all, there is a premise that the cultural values of all of the different cultures
would have to be either suppressed or removed. This does not have to be true.
While cultures do at times relax some of their practices, there are a lot of cases
where later they turn back on their traditions and even strengthen them.
An example is the Irish language which was close to extinction due to the British
rule in the 19th century but is currently the official language of Ireland. Another
example is the traditional Pagan religion in Lithuania which is being revived
despite ages of Christianity. In fact, the Internet, mass-communication and massmedia often facilitate the revival and fostering of cultural traditions.
Second of all, even if we accept the opposition's argument on face value, the
other premise that they rely on is that all of the cultural values are worth saving.
This premise is in not only in direct conflict with the opposition's previous
argument where they stated practices of female genital mutilation undesirable but
it is not factual either.
We say that some cultural practices are indeed not worth saving but not because
they are bad but because some cultures have outgrown their own practices and
need new ones. It is true that there might be situations where a language gets
used less than it used to be but we fail to see how this is bad if it actually helps
members of that culture communicate and trade and by so doing increases their
well-being.
In other words, the opposition is promoting cultural practices as ends in
themselves where we submit cultural practices are often means to achieving

those ends and sometimes it is better for cultures to change those values not
because they are intrinsically bad but just because the culture has outgrown their
own values