What happens when societies stop sharing a common culture?
On a Friday evening on London’s Jubilee line, you can travel across the entire cultural landscape of 21st-century Western Europe in just a few stops. Arab families, Nigerian Christians, Polish workers, French financial analysts, Pakistani students, and young British professionals sit in the same carriage. Yet, it is becoming less and less clear whether they still belong to the same society.
For many years, the Western European migration debate unfolded in a climate of moral optimism. Much of the political elite, academia, and the mainstream media assumed that globalisation, mass migration, and cultural diversity were not only inevitable, but historically desirable. Immigration was seen at once as an economic necessity, a humanitarian duty, and a source of cultural enrichment.
For a long time, the debate was framed mainly as a moral question: how to make migration more humane and European societies more open.
Far less attention was given to another question. What happens if migration does not simply bring new people into Europe, but gradually reshapes social cohesion itself?
Today, that question can no longer be avoided.
In many major Western European cities, society no longer feels like a single political and cultural community. Instead, different social worlds increasingly exist side by side. Multiculturalism originally promised a shared society. In many places, however, it has produced parallel societies instead.
Multiculturalism as a moral project
Europe’s political elite gradually moved toward a universalist, post-national identity, where openness became a moral value in itself. Multiculturalism slowly turned from a political idea into a moral one.
The core assumption seemed simple: communities with different cultural backgrounds could live together within the same democratic framework, while eventually developing a shared political identity.
Europe’s great port cities, London, Rotterdam, Marseille, had functioned as cultural meeting points for centuries, and Western democracies had successfully integrated earlier waves of immigrants.
But it was not only the scale of migration that changed. Its speed, cultural character, and technological environment changed as well. The classic mechanisms of assimilation weakened. An immigrant arriving in the 1960s depended far more heavily on adapting to the norms of the host society – its language, institutions, and cultural habits.
Today, transnational networks and social media allow people to live physically in Europe, while remaining only partially connected to the society around them.
The original multicultural model assumed that cultural differences would gradually fade. In many Western European cities, the opposite happened instead: identities did not dissolve. They became socially and politically stronger.
The reality of parallel societies
For a long time, the term “parallel society” was considered exaggerated or politically dangerous in Western Europe.
The issue is not simply that immigrant communities exist in Europe. The real question is whether certain neighbourhoods have developed their own social environments, with separate norms, cultural rules, and partly distinct political logic.
In France, the banlieues have long symbolised more than social problems. They became symbols of the crisis of the French integration model itself.
The French Republic traditionally relied on a strong assimilationist identity. In theory, the state turns everyone into part of the same political community. In practice, however, maintaining this universalist model has become increasingly difficult in an environment where religious and cultural identities have grown stronger again.
In Belgium, Molenbeek became symbolic after the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. Yet the issue was never only about security. How could a social environment emerge in the political heart of Europe that remained so weakly connected to the wider national community?
Sweden long viewed itself as a moral example of humanitarian openness. In recent years, however, Swedish politics has also been forced to reconsider earlier assumptions. Segregation and social separation are no longer topics discussed only by the radical right. They have become part of mainstream political debate.
In Malmö and parts of Stockholm, there is now open discussion about whether the state’s ability to integrate certain areas has weakened.
Similar patterns can be seen in parts of Berlin and some cities in Germany’s Ruhr region. In the Netherlands, the murder of Theo van Gogh forced Dutch society to speak far more realistically about the failures of integration than it did twenty years ago.
Separation today is also easier to maintain than before. Cultural isolation no longer requires physical isolation. A digital environment is enough.
This does not automatically lead to conflict. But it gradually weakens the feeling of a shared society.
The separation of the big cities
Migration has also become tied to another major Western European divide: the conflict between globalised metropolitan centres and societies pushed toward the periphery.
London, Brussels, Berlin, and Amsterdam increasingly function as post-national spaces. In these cities, much of the economic elite, the media, universities, and cultural institutions think in global rather than national terms. National traditions often become secondary.
For metropolitan elites, migration is often viewed as a natural part of modernity. In many places, cultural diversity became not only a reality, but also an identity and a status symbol, while national attachment slowly faded into the background.
In many cases, the people celebrating openness most enthusiastically were also those least exposed to its social consequences.
Smaller towns and rural societies often experience the same process very differently.
For them, migration is not an abstract moral issue. It is the feeling that society is changing too quickly around them. Shared language, familiar norms, and known cultural surroundings gradually weaken.
David Goodhart described this divide as the conflict between the “Somewheres” and the “Anywheres.” For the former, identity is rooted in place, history, and cultural continuity. For the latter, mobility and universalism are the defining values.
It is no coincidence that Brexit, the French sovereigntist wave, and political shifts in the Netherlands were all driven partly by the same experience: many voters felt that the cultural transformation of their own countries had taken place without their consent.
For years, political systems tended to treat this anxiety as a moral problem, as if delegitimising uncomfortable concerns could solve them.
The crisis of integration and Europe’s loss of confidence
One rarely discussed aspect of the integration debate is Europe’s cultural self-confidence.
After the Second World War, Western Europe became deeply critical of its own historical traditions. Following the traumas of nationalism, colonialism, and totalitarianism, political elites gradually grew suspicious of any strong form of cultural self-definition.
Europe often defends the identities of other cultures with great sensitivity, while speaking uncertainly about its own cultural heritage. Yet no society can successfully integrate others unless it knows which norms and cultural frameworks it wants to preserve.
For years, Western European elites tried to build multicultural societies while slowly dismantling the language of shared cultural norms. In many places, the idea of assimilation itself became almost taboo, while people spoke less and less about what immigrants were actually expected to integrate into.
Every successful integration model in history relied on some dominant cultural framework. The American melting pot and the French republican tradition were never based on cultural neutrality.
Yet today, Western Europe often seems unable to define even its own cultural minimum.
Years ago, Trevor Phillips warned that Britain was “sleepwalking into segregation.” At the time, many considered the phrase exaggerated. Today, in parts of Western Europe, it feels increasingly like an everyday reality.
Democratic coexistence cannot survive without shared cultural trust.
The price of political self-censorship
For many years, the deepest problem in Western Europe was not migration itself, but the limits placed on discussing it openly.
Large parts of the political and media establishment treated open discussion of social tensions as more dangerous than the tensions themselves. People who spoke about the failures of integration often faced immediate moral suspicion.
In the short term, this reflex may have seemed politically convenient. In the long term, however, it created a profound crisis of trust.
When people feel they cannot speak honestly about their own experiences, they gradually lose confidence in official institutions.
Western Europe’s populist wave grew partly from this silence, not only from economic dissatisfaction. It grew from the feeling that political systems were unwilling to speak honestly about the consequences of social transformation.
Yet democratic stability depends on a society’s ability to speak truthfully about itself.
Even when the truth is uncomfortable.
The question of a shared political culture
The stability of liberal democracies has always depended on more than institutions alone. Behind them existed some shared understanding of who “we” are, which norms we live by, and what binds us together as a political community.
This is why the migration debate in Western Europe is ultimately not only about ethnicity or religion. It is about how long a democracy can remain stable if the shared political culture holding it together gradually weakens.
A society can live with different religions, ethnicities, and lifestyles – as long as there remains a common political and cultural language connecting them.
But when that common framework weakens, politics slowly turns into competition between identity blocs.
Social trust declines. Shared historical narratives fragment. The state struggles more and more to enforce common norms. Democratic systems may formally survive while the cultural cohesion beneath them slowly erodes.
This process is rarely dramatic. It does not happen overnight. Societies often realise too late how deeply the cultural trust holding them together has weakened.
Europe’s dilemma
For years, Western European debate moved between two oversimplified narratives. One claimed migration brings only enrichment. The other claimed it inevitably leads to civilisational collapse. Both views are simplistic.
Europe’s history is indeed a history of cultural encounters. But it is equally true that every stable political community requires some level of cultural cohesion.
The real question is not whether pluralism can exist, but how much of it a society can sustain, and under what structure.
The essential question, then, is not whether diverse societies can function. It is what kind of shared historical, cultural, and political minimum still has the power to hold that diversity together.
Western Europe now stands in the middle of a historical transition whose depth it long refused to recognise. Migration was often treated as an administrative or moral issue, while in reality a deeper transformation of society’s cultural structure was taking place.
These processes do not mean the end of Europe.
But neither is it possible to maintain the illusion that they can continue without consequences.
Can a shared political culture truly survive in societies changing faster than people themselves can adapt to that change?
Levente Antal is a Europe-based independent writer focusing on geopolitics, political culture, and the civilizational transformations shaping contemporary Europe.
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