If one were to cite the most successful social democracies, it is a fair bet that the states of Northern Europe -- the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden -- would be high on the list. These societies are all monocultural: their nationhood entails a clear, and single, ethnic identity with a single dominant religion (with their more divergent citizens having tended to emigrate, typically to North America). Is there a link between social democracy and monoculturalism?
Social democracy is the extensive delivery of income, goods and services by the state. It obviously requires high taxation levels. But it also presumes a high degree of efficacy in centralised delivery and direction. This is clearly much easier to do in dealing with a culturally homogeneous population. If people have a fairly similar range of assumptions about how to live, how to act, right and wrong, patterns of life and so on, clearly it is much easier to design rules and centrally deliver services without too much ill-will and suited to the patterns of community life than it is if one is dealing with highly varied outlooks and patterns of life. What's more, given the obvious potential for waste and idleness from government delivery and government income, it is much easier for social pressure to minimise shirking if people speak the same language and share a common outlook. People are also more likely to be comfortable with a "one size fits all" approach, to feel that the officials do actually think like them and will see things in a way they also share. So, a social democratic approach will be much easier to introduce, and to keep going, in a monocultural society.
Once one is dealing with a culturally diverse population, on the other hand, things become much more problematic. People are much more likely to feel that the officials will have a different outlook to their own. There is much more danger of services being seriously out of step with one group or another. There is much more potential for resistance to paying for people more clearly "other" and for arguments about which group is getting what out of the system to become bitter and divisive. Social democracy will be harder to introduce, comfort with what government provides is likely to be lower and problems with what government delivers likely to be greater.
It is noticeable that the Anglomorph countries -- which have always been culturally diverse, starting with the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish of the United Kingdom -- have generally tended to have smaller governments and more liberal economic structures than more culturally homogeneous developed countries (though the immediate postwar UK provides something of an exception: it also produced, in Margaret Thatcher, the first substantive roll-back of "commanding heights" social democracy). The most culturally diverse of the pre-World War One European Great Powers -- Austria-Hungary -- was also notably liberal in its economic policy.
It is very easy to mount an argument than a major reason why socialism, as a sizeable political movement, never took hold in the United States -- the most culturally and religiously diverse of Western societies -- is because it could never break out of particular ethnic associations. Appealing to one group more or less guaranteed a failure to appeal to another. It also seemed to make less sense. Cultural diversity meant it was more socially harmonious to have a relatively simple set of rules and let people get on with it. Conversely, it was harder to build an enduring consensus around intrusive intervention -- indeed, as the US Federal Government's role has expanded, Americans' confidence in it has fallen. The US dealt with the social coherence problems of cultural diversity by fostering an American identity of a lowest common denominator variety rooted in a history conceived as a triumph of certain institutions and principles which left a stronger sense that the pursuit of happiness is a personal responsibility than other Western societies and took it as obvious that one person's meat could be another person's poison.
Australia provides an interesting case. The division between Catholic Irish and Anglo-Protestants certainly provided some difficulties in creating an extensive state (that Australia has one of the strongest private school systems in the developed world was a major consequence of that division). It also showed how religion can be an important part of cultural diversity. Yet Australia did develop its own version of social democracy. This was the Deakin system of White Australia, trade protection, wage arbitration, state paternalism (what Sir Keith Hancock labelled government as a vast utility) and imperial benevolence (Menzies' "great and powerful friends"). Of the various elements, it is safe to say that White Australia was the most strongly based in popular feeling and the least politically contentious -- the ALP's original statement of principles, for example, put the preservation of Australia for the British race as a fundamental aim. We may have been of Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh, or some mixture of same, descent, but we were all White (except, of course, for indigenous Australians): a principle which could be, and was, extended to Europeans of all varieties after the Second World War.
Despite White Australia's popularity, it was the first of the Deakin system's various elements to go. Once substantial numbers of non-British migrants had been successfully accepted, opening up further became easier -- White Australia was breached by the Holt Government and its lingering elements were abolished by the Whitlam Government. The referendum of 1967 abolishing the constitutional exclusion of aborigines from the Census and the Commonwealth's race power, the most consensual political act in our history, also showed that domestic exclusion was no longer acceptable.
The subsequent decay of the Deakin system is generally put down to economic and fiscal causes -- I have written of the fiscal pressure from the expanding welfare state as a fundamental driver of reform -- while the consequences of abolishing White Australia have not been much thought through; presumably because it is so widely seen (including by this writer) as a good thing. It is notable that popular support for high immigration collapsed during the period of the abolition of White Australia, though the entrenchment of unemployment and the shifting of the justification for migration from national interest ("populate or perish") to moral vanity (proof of anti-racist credentials) are also plausible explanatory factors.
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