All Cultures Are Not Equal
All cultures are not equal.
Depending on your worldview, that sentence is either an obvious statement of fact or an expression of outright bigotry.
That reaction is revealing.
It exposes one of the deepest divides in the modern West.
One side sees culture primarily as a collection of food, festivals, clothing and traditions that people are free to exchange without fundamentally changing the society around them.
The other sees culture as something far deeper: the set of values, beliefs and assumptions that ultimately shape the kind of civilisation a society becomes.
Europe is increasingly becoming the place where these two visions collide.
The events in Ceuta are merely the latest manifestation of that divide.
Ceuta Was Never Just About Immigration
Pedro Sánchez is facing fierce backlash over the situation in Ceuta, Spain’s small North African enclave.
At the end of July 2026, thousands of Moroccan illegal migrants came streaming ashore. The footage was extraordinary. A tangle of running bodies, punctuated by jeering, laughter and celebration, surged across the beaches. It genuinely looked like an invasion.
Those who defend illegal migration often point to women and children as evidence that the issue is purely humanitarian, suggesting that anyone who objects must simply lack compassion. That argument becomes much harder to sustain when confronted with the reality of Ceuta.
The overwhelming majority were young, healthy, military-aged men.
Morocco is approximately 99% Muslim. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the overwhelming majority of those arriving shared not only a nationality, but a common religious and cultural background.
That matters because culture is not value-neutral. It shapes how societies understand everything from religious freedom to the role of women.
If culture influences the kind of society people build—as I believe it does—then it is entirely reasonable to ask what effect large-scale migration from one civilisation may have on another.
Nor did this happen in a vacuum.
Earlier this year, Sánchez announced plans to regularise hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants already living in Spain. More than one million applications followed. Predictably, the policy was defended using familiar language: compassion, multiculturalism and openness.
But governments do not simply respond to incentives; they create them.
How could policies signalling that illegal entry may ultimately lead to legal status fail to encourage others to attempt the same journey?
Ceuta is not merely a border crisis.
It is a symptom of a much larger civilisational debate.
Culture Shapes Society
Culture is the backbone of society.
By culture, I do not simply mean food, music or national customs. I mean the deeper beliefs that shape how a society understands freedom, justice, family, authority and human dignity.
It is the accumulated inheritance of history, language, religion and philosophy—the story a civilisation tells itself about who it is and what it values.
Culture determines what is admired and what is condemned. It influences how strangers treat one another, how families raise children, what laws are written and what behaviours are tolerated. It creates the invisible assumptions that make societies function long before governments intervene.
It is, in many ways, the operating system beneath politics.
For much of the Western world, that operating system emerged from Christianity and Greek rationality.
Our understanding of justice, the intrinsic dignity of every human being, compassion, forgiveness and equality before the law did not appear by accident. They developed over centuries within a particular civilisational tradition. Even many of those who reject Christianity today continue to live within a moral framework that Christianity helped build.
Immigration Is a Civilisational Question
Leaders like Pedro Sánchez—and many across Europe and North America—tend to approach this question almost exclusively through an economic lens.
“Diversity is our strength.”
Migrants fill labour shortages. They offset declining birth rates. They contribute to economic growth. Refugees deserve protection.
These arguments focus almost entirely on short-term material concerns. Within that framework, opposition to migration is often dismissed as irrational fear or xenophobia.
But many of us are asking a different question altogether.
We are viewing migration—particularly from Islamic societies—not primarily through economics, but through the long-term lens of civilisation.
The issue is not whether individual migrants can contribute positively to society.
Many do.
The question is whether cultures consistently produce different social outcomes—and whether importing large populations from societies built upon fundamentally different values eventually changes the society receiving them.
That is a far more important question.
It is also the one Europe increasingly finds itself answering.
A Civilisation Without Confidence
The modern West has become remarkably uncertain of its own identity. It constantly interrogates its own history, often reducing it to a catalogue of oppression and injustice. Patriotism is viewed with suspicion. National identity is treated as something embarrassing rather than something worth preserving.
Islamic civilisation, by contrast, largely does not.
It believes its moral claims are universal. Its scriptures present Islam as the final revelation, not simply another tradition among many. Throughout history, that certainty has often been accompanied by expansion, conquest and the belief that every society ought to submit to Islamic law. Even today, some of the world’s deadliest terrorist organisations draw both their justification and their willingness to die from that same worldview.
When these two outlooks meet, the result is predictable. Islam encounters a civilisation so tolerant that it often defends intolerance in the name of tolerance.
It encounters people willing to condemn the civilisation that produced their freedoms while hesitating to criticise those who reject them—like Islam.
And among those Westerners who have come to despise their own inheritance, it often finds willing allies. Or as some would say: “Useful idiots”.
The Contradictions of Multiculturalism
Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in discussions surrounding women.
It is remarkable how often self-described feminists remain silent about the treatment of women throughout much of the Muslim world.
More remarkable still is their reluctance to confront similar realities emerging within parallel societies across Europe.
Women and girls living in Western countries are, in some communities, pressured to cover their hair, their bodies and sometimes even their faces. The pressure to conform to Islamic norms within these communities can be every bit as powerful as in the countries from which those traditions originated.
Yet criticism is frequently dismissed with a single defence:
“It is their culture.”
Ironically, the very people who insist that all cultures deserve equal respect often leave vulnerable women trapped within cultures they would never tolerate for themselves.
In the name of multiculturalism, they become unwilling to defend the very liberal values they claim to champion.
The Paradox of Tolerance
This leads to a question the West has spent decades trying to avoid.
Should tolerant societies tolerate intolerant ideologies?
Karl Popper famously described this as the paradox of tolerance. A society that extends unlimited tolerance to movements fundamentally opposed to tolerance eventually creates the conditions for its own destruction.
The issue, then, is not whether the West should become intolerant.
It is whether it should become unapologetically intolerant towards intolerance itself.
That may include restricting migration from regions where intolerant ideologies remain deeply embedded—not because people belong to a particular ethnicity, but because ideas have consequences, cultures matter, and societies have both the right and the responsibility to preserve the conditions that made them free.
Europe Is Already Showing the Consequences
This is why I believe migration is ultimately a civilisational question.
Europe is already beginning to demonstrate what happens when these concerns are ignored.
Sweden, once regarded as one of the safest countries in the world, now struggles with gang violence and terrorism. Germany fortifies Christmas markets against vehicle attacks carried out in the name of Allah. France, the United Kingdom and Italy face many of the same tensions. Even countries as geographically distant as Finland are beginning to display early signs of similar challenges, albeit on a much smaller scale.
By contrast, countries that have severely restricted large-scale migration—Poland being one notable example—have largely avoided many of these problems.
These comparisons deserve honest discussion rather than immediate dismissal.
Some Cultures Produce Better Societies
This is ultimately why the opening sentence matters.
Some cultures—and the stories they tell themselves—produce societies more conducive to human flourishing than others.
That does not mean every individual within one culture is morally superior to every individual within another. Nor does it mean societies cannot reform or improve.
It simply recognises an obvious reality: ideas shape cultures, cultures shape institutions, and institutions shape the lives people are able to live.
If we refuse to acknowledge that some cultural foundations are better at protecting liberty, equality before the law, freedom of conscience and the dignity of the individual, then we lose any meaningful reason to preserve those foundations ourselves.
The freedoms enjoyed throughout much of the Western world remain remarkably rare in human history.
They did not emerge by accident.
They were built over centuries, inherited by successive generations, and entrusted to us.
If we believe all cultures are equally capable of producing the same society, we lose any reason to preserve the one that gave us liberty, equality before the law, freedom of conscience and the dignity of the individual in the first place.
Those freedoms are not merely achievements of the past. They are an inheritance—one I hope to pass on to my children, and to the countless generations that come long after I’m gone.
Migration is not merely an economic question.
It is not merely a humanitarian question.
It is a civilisational one.
So no.
All cultures are not equal.