Where is your line for where a culture starts and stops? Do we really need to be managing some kind of clash/conflict between the Greek suburbs or communities of Melbourne and the Lebanese, Hispanic or Italian ones for their cultures to be considered different?

Because they drive on the left and follow Australian laws have the Chinese population in Sunnybank abandoned their culture because they aren't clashing with the Anglo-australian population?

These communities are speaking their own languages, importing/selling their own ingredients and products, cooking their own foods, watching their own style of entertainment, practicing their own religions, socialising at unique times and locations, listening to their own music and raising their children in a style informed by their community's historical norms.

If you (and GP) formed your opinions outside of the major eastern cities, or haven't really ventured into the outer suburbs I could see how you could arrive at monoculture, but otherwise I think by requiring a "clash" you may be setting too high a bar for your definition of culture.

If you visit Oakleigh (I think Melbourne is still the city with the highest concentration of Greek people outside of Greece) and see the same culture that you see in the Northern Beaches of Sydney, which has the same culture that you see in Mareeba I'd be very interested in hearing more.

The freedom of religion is explicitly within a Western cultural and political framework.

For example, there is a long history of Islamic jurisprudence that also allows for freedom of religion - as long as Islam remains the 'established' religion, and other religions remain on a lesser footing. This is not obviously compatible with the level of separation of church and state in the West - but Muslim immigrants who might prefer a more theocratic system are obviously in the minority.

> have the Chinese population in Sunnybank abandoned their culture because they aren't clashing with the Anglo-australian population

Chinese civilization has had a markedly non-democratic political tradition for a couple thousand years, and many mainland immigrants lack a strong preference for democratic society. Similarly, Thailand has strong lese-majeste laws to protect the dignity of the king and royal family. These political traditions are pretty alien to the modern West, even though Westerners three hundred years ago would have found them utterly normal.

Culture is not just what you eat or where you worship, but encompass habits like 'How do we treat other groups?', 'How should we be ruled?', or even 'Is it morally acceptable to break laws (like evading taxes)?'

Immigrants are only allowed to act out certain cultural beliefs—the ones that don't threaten or conflict with the dominant culture.

This is the first time I've really seen this argument, and it still feels like it depends on a particularly hard-line definition of culture if it asserts that a community has no culture if they aren't attempting to disrupt the equilibrium and establish their own nation-state.

While I can definitely see how political and legal structures can be informed by culture, necessarily including them as essential requirements is definitely not how culture or multicultural societies have been defined in any other interaction I've ever had.

But this strongly conflicted with the nascent notion of the unitary nation-state, much to the Ottoman (and Austrian) Empires' later detriment.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that there aren't multiple cultures in the West - just look at Amish or Hasidic communities as examples - just that they are still forced to abide by majority rules, which necessarily means that their cultures are somewhat abridged and shorn of their full representation. And note how small these communities are compared to the majority.

It's a rather different story in countries with multiple cultural groups with comparable demographic power, such as the former Yugoslavia, which was torn apart by these divisions.

Put under a different perspective, you can make a rather strong case that cities and rural areas are now different cultural zones in the US, and the intractable political conflicts over abortion, marriage, and even tax policy are byproducts.

In my view, culture is pretty fundamental, and when we run across a culture alien to us, it's quite disconcerting. And so a monoculture is one where you never run across any truly "alien" ideas.

You can have kebab shops and Thai restaurants, and churches and mosques and synagogues, and people speaking different languages, but as long as everyone agrees on the fundamental underpinnings of society, it's still a monoculture.

Australian culture is very open to everyone, so long as they are fundamentally Western in terms of their views on democracy, criminal justice, religious tolerance, women's rights, corruption, LGBT rights. That's so ingrained that when you point this out, there's usually a pause, and then an incredulous "well, yeah, both those are the only correct opinions!", or sometimes even a confused query as to whether any other ideas even exist in the modern world. I have the same gut reaction (I mean, obviously democracy is good, right?), but I also know that there are cultures out there with different views.

If Oakleigh has a lot of Greek people in it, you can probably get some rocking moussaka, but that doesn't mean it shares the same culture as modern Greece does. Consider, for example, the large difference in corruption between Greece (and much of the rest of southern Europe) and Australia (and much of northern Europe): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index If that survey was done on Melbourne suburbs, do you think they'd be fairly uniform, or would it look more like the map of Europe?

I get the feeling your sentiment comes from never having lived in an actual monoculture, so what is multicultural just feels normal to you. Krakow and Vienna are very different compared to Berlin and London to name examples.

Dubai perhaps. The clash between the rich, western expat communities, the rich native communities, and the poor mostly Asian labourer communities is severe, and there are actual disagreements about basic norms.

> I get the feeling your sentiment comes from never having lived in an actual monoculture

I have absolutely lived in what you are calling monocultures. I've lived in small rural farming towns with a populations of less than 800.

Where we disagree is in the meaning of culture. Adding a chinese restaurant to a small town doesn't make it more multicultural or diverse in my view.

Except those groups never interact with each other. The implicit statement in a city being multicultural, is that as an inhabitant you will interact with these different cultures. I've never been to Dubai, but I strongly doubt you are going to get close with any Arabs or Asian labourers if you live there. I know someone who moved to Jerusalem, I was thinking maybe you would pick that city as an example, but I've heard that again the different communities live very separate lives, and they actively avoid interacting with each other.