Is Multiculturalism Ethnocentric?

Gruntled Center (Beau Weston): Is Multiculturalism Ethnocentric? Beau Weston has a great one-paragraph post.

Randall Collins works through the developments of philosophy in Asia before turning to the post-Greek West in order to show that the same principles, and even the same contents, run through the sociology of all philosophies. He makes the strong claim that there is not an essential East nor and essential West, in philosophy or otherwise. In fact, he claims that treating other cultures as having an enduring essence is just as ethnocentric as thinking that one's own culture does. Multiculturalism, he argues, has become politically correct, but it is just ethnocentrism at one remove.

I hadn't thought about it quite this way, but if you have ever read books like Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, then you know that the normal pattern of human history over the past several millennia across the planet has been constant metamorphous within cultures, as well as the displacement or destruction of some cultures by others. Interesting question.