critical theory with slavoj zizek: Angela Merkel, declared at a meeting of young members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union: “This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other, has failed. Utterly failed.” With this, she was echoing the debate about Leitkultur (the dominant culture) from a couple of years ago, when conservatives insisted that every state was based on a predominant cultural space which the members of other cultures who live in the same space should respect. Instead of bemoaning the newly emerging racist Europe, such statements announce, we should be self-critical, asking to what extent our own abstract multiculturalism contributed to this sad state of things. If all sides do not share or respect the same civility, then multiculturalism turns into legally regulated mutual ignorance or hatred