Editorial
MATTHIAS KOENIG University of Bamberg 

With its current thematic issue, the International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), now in its fifth year of existence, not only presents itself in a new format but also opens a new thematic thread by focusing on questions of international migration and integration. Since the post-war period, international migration has become one of the major factors of cultural diversification, even in classical nation-states which did not conventionally describe themselves as “nations of immigrants”. Thus, while it is true that Australia, Canada and the United States took the lead in adopting various forms of “multiculturalism” as a public policy framework for dealing with diversity, governments in Western Europe and Japan have no less recognised the need to respond to cultural diversity in their immigration and integration policies. The importance of cultural aspects of international migration has also been acknowledged in the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1990 and entering into force as recently as 1 July 2003. Whereas previous thematic issues of the IJMS dealt with religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity in general, we therefore considered it appropriate to focus more closely on the specific policy problems related to the integration of migrants.
We start with a thematic issue on multiculturalism and political integration in modern nation-states, guest-edited by Gurharpal Singh and John Rex, which is based on a conference sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘Future Governance’ programme. This issue approaches the governance of cultural diversity in (post-)industrial societies of Western Europe and Japan from an explicitly comparative perspective. Against the background of John Rex’s and Edward Tiryakian’s theoretical analyses of changing models of social and political integration in multicultural societies, the articles investigate the policy responses to cultural diversity in France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. Catherine Withol de Wenden and Hideki Tarumoto argue that immigration and cultural diversity have induced far-reaching transformations of political ideologies and institutions in France and Japan, respectively, while in case studies on Leicester and Frankfurt am Main, Gurharpal Singh and Frank-Olaf Radtke each scrutinise the interplay of policy-making and the collective mobilisation of immigrants at the local level. The articles not only demonstrate that different nation-states, in spite of similar challenges and noticeable trends of policy convergence, continue to follow specific institutional paths of state-formation and nation-building, but also that the adoption of public policies of “multiculturalism” International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 5, No. 1, 2003: 1 - 2 ISSN 1817-4574, www.unesco.org/shs/ijms/vol5/issue1/ed  © UNESCO 
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generates several unintended consequences and hence creates new problems of social and political integration. This certainly is an area in the highly developed field of migration research that merits further attention, particularly from comparative and policy-oriented social science research as promoted by the IJMS.
For that purpose, while a subsequent thematic issue of the IJMS, also edited by Gurharpal Singh and John Rex (Vol. 5, No. 2), addresses the governance of diversity – or pluralism – in post-colonial settings, notably in India, Malaysia, Pakistan and South Africa, other up-coming issues will present recent developments in social science research on multiculturalism in the Asia-Pacific region and will critically investigate the interrelation of policy-making and social science research in the field of migration. As always, readers are invited to contribute to our debate by sending their comments to the mailing list attached to this Journal and/or by submitting articles on related topics.
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