Even when a platform for national welfare is already in place, if leaders and citizens succumb to the maladies of unhealthy competition and power struggles driven by ambitions to control the state, appropriate the fruits of justice and welfare, and plunder the collective prosperity of the people the ethno-religious foundation becomes volatile and dangerously fragile. The dominance of interests by a specific ethno-religious group threatens to undermine efforts to build a cohesive nation-state both internally and externally as witnessed in the aftermath of Indonesia’s 1998 Reformasi (Reform Era). The nation-state foundation, which had remained solid for 53 years, was suddenly called into question following conflicts and violence within civil society. This context gave rise to the concept of "multicultural citizenship" a proposal envisioning a civil society order that plays a greater role in managing diversity based on culture, religion, ethnicity, gender, and other social ideologies, thereby transforming this diversity into social and cultural capital for the realization of democracy.
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