In his early days Elvis Presley was known as “that white boy that sings rhythm & blues”. Multiculturalism, though it lived under another name, had always been a cardinal principle of American society. Sure, different European cultures were suppose to blend into one, but not cultures from different continents. The Native Americans had their “reservations” and the African Americans had their own very separate communities. In the South and in big cities in the North the latter included their own churches, schools and universities, and everywhere their own way with language, their own folklore and, of course, their own music. Elvis Presley, like his contemporary, President Eisenhower, worked at undermining this American multiculturalism. While Ike was sending troops to Little Rock so that children from the black and white cultures could henceforth be educated in the same schools, Elvis was mixing their music. His first records had hillbilly songs on one side and rhythm & blues on the flipside. But soon he found the courage to blend the one into the other and his legend was born. Meanwhile the American left, both black and white, was taking up the struggle begun by the Republican Eisenhower: to breakdown the institutions that perpetuated American multiculturalism. It was out of this struggle to integrate black and white communities that the New Left was born. But it was only a few years old when signs of its antithesis appeared. First came the emergence of the Black Muslims, and then the mother of all slogans, “Black Power”, that kept white Americans, including members of the New Left, awake at night. The basic idea of the antithesis was “separate but equal”. In the summer of ’66, packed in with many thousands in Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, I heard Stokely Carmichael say, “We (blacks) must cut ourselves off from white people. We must form our own institutions, credit unions, co-ops, political parties, write our own histories.” This was multiculturalism mark-2. It sought to transplant the belief in the equality between races and their cultures, that those continuing the work of Elvis and Ike were spreading, back into the still mostly multiculturally structured society. The following summer, this time in a small smoke-filled room, I heard Eldridge Cleaver, the most prominent of the Black Panthers, say “We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.” This idea of separate but equal and self-determining communities became the defining characteristic of the “multiculturalism” that in the final decades of the 20th century was promulgated in America, the UK and some parts of continental Europe. The Black Power critique of the original New Left was apropos in the historical and geographical context. Black Americans were struggling, both externally and internally, against the stereotype that they could not organize themselves and against the intimidation they felt in the presence of whites, including those committed to the civil rights movement. Therefore all-black projects were deemed essential to the positive redevelopment of “black identity”. On the left this argument carried the day. But what began as a proposition closely and scrupulously argued from a unique set of historical facts was in the years that followed gradually elevated to the status of a universal principle. Moreover it was deemed self-evident, so that the open, critically charged and empirically informed discussion concerning relations between ethnic and racial groups that had informed the rise of multiculturalism mark-2 was for its deployment elsewhere and in other times closed down. Increasingly “multiculturalism” and the cross-cultural realities around it came to live in an intellectual vacuum. That is why the cerebral side of the British polity is gasping for breath in the aftermath of the London bombings. Suddenly neither mark-1 nor mark-2 multiculturalism look to anyone like viable models for 21st century Britain, and the idealism of the 60s New Left looks utopian. Nor do there exist well-defined alternative visions to draw upon. Yet rarely has such vision been so desperately needed. The thinking classes have failed to do their work, and in consequence the nation now faces an intellectual emergency. Here in Britain the discussion of all aspects of relations between culturally different communities must without delay be opened up and grounded in place and time, like it was in the United States in the 60s. It must also be elevated above party politics and the Left / Right divide, which the issue of multiculturalism ultimately transcends. The world cries out for a multiculturalism mark-3, not one that is axiomatic, but that is grounded in the empiricist tradition. Like democracy, this could be not only Britain’s gift to itself but also to the rest of the world (Edward Fullbrook, University of the West of England, is editor of A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics, 2004, Anthem Press)