Opinion: I always like those between-wars novels set in Europe with dodgy characters of many nationalities all rubbing up against each other: Romanians, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Poles, Belgians, Bulgars - and, of course, Jews.
Sometimes they're hurtling across international frontiers - Graham Greene's Stamboul Train - so you'd expect the dramatis personae to be of many lands. But pick up an early Maigret and even in a parochial police procedural you'll find mysterious Turks and Greeks turning up.
Don't read novels? Rent a movie. Look at how many Hollywood A-list stars of the Golden Age were foreigners: Claudette Colbert, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Paul Henreid, Greta Garbo, Bela Lugosi, Hedy Lamarr, Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman. And so many of the second rank, the great characters who make the silliest formulaic filler of the day so watchable: Adolphe Menjou, Conrad Veidt, S Z Sakall, Peter Lorre, Akim Tamiroff.
And I haven't even mentioned the Brits - Ronald Colman, David Niven, Cary Grant, Sir C Aubrey Smith, etc.
Where are the Hollywood foreigners today? Oh sure, there's still a couple of imports from the British empire here and there: Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron. But every time they land a big movie role the first thing they have to do is submerge their accents.
They're never allowed to be as deliciously foreign as Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon. Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the script and lyrics for Gigi, once told me about the first run-through of Thank Heaven For Little Girls. At the end, a worried Maurice Chevalier turned to Lerner for reassurance: "How was I?" "Perfect," said Alan, looking at it from the songwriter's point of view. "I could understand every word." "No, no," said Chevalier. "Did I sound French enough?"
No one ever worries about whether Charlize Theron sounds South African enough. She and Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett are the high octoroons of the movie scene, passing for Boston brahmins or southern trailer trash as required. And don't say, well, what about all the Hollywood Hispanics? That's a domestic constituency now, and growing so fast that poor old Cate and Charlize and Nicole will be talking like Carmen Miranda by the time they're 50.
Another small example: There used to be an entire category of songs written in "franglais" - "Darling, je vous aime beaucoup/Je ne sais pas what to do", as Nat King Cole so sagely observed. A lot of foreign songs were convincingly anglicised but many more retained their continental character and still became monster hits: La Vie En Rose, C'est Si Bon, "Volare, Granada. Their foreignness was their appeal.
All gone now. The allegedly bland white-bread picket-fence nuclear-family of Eisenhower's America of the 1950s was a non-stop fiesta of diversity compared to the dreary parochialism of Hollywood entertainment today. After 30 years of immersion in the virtues of multiculturalism, US popular culture has never been more unicultural. If MGM remade Grand Hotel, they'd set it in Cleveland.
In other words, if "multiculturalism" is intended to impart any facts about other cultures - the capital city of Malaysia; the principal exports of South Africa, apart from Charlize Theron - or even a vague curiosity about other cultures, then clearly it's a spectacular failure.
If you were to compare 2004's output from Hollywood with 1944's, you'd think a once-thriving culture engaged with the world had suddenly developed a total aversion to foreigners. So obviously an interest in many cultures can't have been the objective of "multiculturalism". What then was its real point? To the academy, multiculturalism was a way of intellectually dignifying what would otherwise be regarded as a psychologically unhealthy cultural self-loathing, and in that sense it's been incredibly successful, as anybody who spends 10 minutes on an US, Canadian or British university campus will know.
To the American left, multiculturalism was embraced as a philosophical escape hatch from the election results: if all your ideas are unpopular with the majority of people within your jurisdiction, then it makes sense to argue that they're so universal they need to be introduced transnationally, where tiresome concepts like popular will don't come into it.
Hence, the chatter among American "progressives" about UN-imposed anti-smoking bans, UN-imposed gun control, and no doubt UN taxes sooner or later. Few of us would willingly be ruled by an unaccountable, unremovable, unrepresentative club of elite bossy-boots, but multiculturalism gives the racket an appealing fig leaf: one reason why it polls better in surveys than it should is because if you say "United Nations" to folks they don't think of Kofi Annan and his dodgy son or the Sudanese member of the Human Rights Commission but Audrey Hepburn or Peter Ustinov at a Unesco gala surrounded by children of many lands - ie, a multicultural rather than a geopolitical image.
But saddest of all are those who drank so much of the multicultural Perrier they began to believe it. For three decades, most western nations trumpeted as a virtue what was, in fact, a profound weakness. In bragging about the numbers of Sikhs and Muslims, Africans and Arabs adding hitherto unprecedented vibrancy to the restaurant scene in Malmo and Winnipeg, western governments made multiculturalism an indispensable part of their sense of their own goodness. In reality, Canada and western Europe needed immigrants because of their own terrible combination of unsustainable welfare systems and deathbed demographics. As China and India follow South Korea and Taiwan, and Iraq and Ukraine follow China and India, immigrants will stop coming.
One day soon, Europeans may well become the emigrants, deciding there are better opportunities in India and Taiwan: the present trickle out of Holland could become a continent-wide version of what happened to crime-ridden American cities in the 1970s - "white flight", a middle-class stampede to less comprehensively wrecked neighbourhoods.
Multiculturalism is a meaningless pose for Hollywood, a lucrative fraud for the American academy, a sleight of hand for the political left. But for much of the advanced world it's a suicide cult. It would make a great movie - if only there were any bankable foreigners to put in it.