For a while, the two centers of the cultural world have been Brooklyn and Berlin. The latter was called by the New York Times the cultural center of Europe just a few years ago, and after traveling to the city just after the article appeared, I couldn’t argue. And so as Brooklyn became the artistic center of New York City over the past decade, it seemed that between the European artistic capital and the American artistic capital, Berlin got extra points for the E.U. better weathering the recession, and Germany being the economic powerhouse that helped it through. No more.

Over recent months, Berlin’s “multi-kulti” paradigm has fallen by the wayside. Germany has returned to what Jurgen Habermas calls in a recent essay, “a rekindling of controversies of the early 1990s, when thousands of refugees arrived from the former Yugoslavia, setting off a debate on asylum seekers.” Turkish and other Muslim immigrants have been ostracized. And while the Arizona immigration debates have been seriously based on prejudice, they’ve stemmed from the fact that many of the state’s immigrants are illegal. And plus, Arizona is on the other side of the country. Even the Ground Zero Mosque won approval from our President. In Germany, a much smaller country, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that multi-culturalism has failed and that immigrants need to do more to assimilate.

Intolerance is the enemy of creativity. That said, this turn of events gives the crown to Brooklyn to become the Paris of the 21st century.