While changes at the macrolevel of politics and economics can, in some conditions, come about very quickly (eg: Revolutions and coup d'etat that can bring about regime change and political transformation almost overnight), changes that happen in the microlevel (ie: Psychosocial transformation) are often much slower. The difference in the pace of changes came from in part through the influence of subtle cultural carriers (ie: The means by which styles of social thinking and doing are sustained and passed on from generation to generation), while the difficulty of achieving rapid identification shifts from smaller to larger groups can best be understood in evolutionary context, which would be elaborated further as follows:
The lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors were spent in small bands, and the earliest settled communities consisted of relatively small populations. Although bipedalism began among our ancestors over 5 million years ago, it is only in the past few thousand years that settlements, nations, and empires with large populations have emerged. Thus, our evolutionary history has almost exclusively involved identifications with smaller groups. The shift to identification with groups numbering more than a few hundred is very recent when considered on the timescale of animal and human evolution, therefore due to this remnants of evolutionary experience, people often have a tendency to resist identification with a larger groups.
Thus, in order to successfully introduce democracy in societies with very different cultures (ie: Different from western cultures), traditional ideas of democracy must be developed into Contextualized Democracy (ie. The use of local cultural symbols and meaning systems as a way of strengthening democratic trends and bringing into place a democratic state), in other words, there must be considerable flexibility in how democracy takes shape in different societies. Mixing the culture of western societies embodied in the idea of democracy with the ideas from a very different culture to form an efficient democratic multicultural society which does not breach the said core of democracy in order to ensure that a society is not a democracy in name only (eg: Democratic Republic Of Korea a.k.a North Korea) and with this Contextualized Democracy, it enables the people to adjust with the change and identity shifts at their own pace.
In conclusion, the results of successful implementation of multiculturalism through mindful restrictions of cultural (and in some case religious) practice from transforming into hard multiculturalism from soft multiculturalism in western societies and both mindful restrictions and contextual democracy in societies with a very different culture from western societies will result in not only a likely stronger democracy but also a better, tolerant and more interesting world with great diversity.
References:
- Moghaddan, Fathali M. Multiculturalism and Intergroup Relations: Psychological Implications for Democracy in Global Context. Maple-Vail: New York. 2008
- Collins, Patricia H. & Solomons, John. The Sage Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies. Sage: New Delhi. 2010
- Betts, Katherine. The Great Divide. Immigration Politics in Australia. Duffy and Snellgrove: Sydney. 1999
- Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 1999
- Alesina et al. Harvard Institute of Economic Research Discussion Paper Number 1959 : Fractionalization. Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. 2002
- Andrew Guild, "The Menace of Multiculturalism: Dangerous, Divisive and Disatrous ( A-Summary), http://www.ironbarkresources.com/mc/index.html /Accessed on 29 October 2017.