We have made ourselves into Americans. It’s no surprise that we should experience all the miserable problems of the U.S.A., from drugs to the mafia, “fast food” and the proliferation of ethnicities. For example, though Italy and Spain are Americanized on the surface and even to a fairly significant depth, they are not ethnically mixed. In that sense, they remain more characteristically European (just as Algeria is North African). Here [in France] we have the problems of America without having its strength. It is not guaranteed that the American “melting-pot” will continue to function much longer (with the “Chicanos”, for example, who speak a different language). But it is absolutely certain that it can’t for a moment function here.
Guy Debord, “The Immigrant Question” (1985).