Increasing global migration has led to almost all Western industrialized countries, including Norway, have evolved to become multi-cultural society. International exchange is an educational tool that has a long history of supporting the development of positive attitudes toward strangers and different nations (Fennes & Hapgood, 1997), and has its roots in the post-war peace building in which the young should be equipped with the ability to create peace (Otten 2009). The learning goals focused on the youth to develop an unprejudiced mind by discovering similarities between countries and cultures, and this educational approach was labeled international understanding (Roth 1999). From the mid-1990s, with the emergence of a multicultural Europe, the concept of international understanding was replaced by the concept of intercultural learning as a new keyword for learning activities in international youth work. Intercultural learning is like international understanding oriented towards developing an understanding of and solidarity with others, but does also focus on developing young people's tolerance for ambiguity and difference (Titley, 2008; Esser-Noethlichs, 2011). However in a recently published report by the Council of Europe, it is claimed that there are still old ideas from the post-war period that dominate the European intercultural youth work today (Ramberg 2009). The report calls for new ways of thinking and acting in line with the challenges young people face today when it comes to issues of cultural difference and diversity (Ramberg 2009, Gomes 2009). In this paper, I ask how young people can learn to deal with differences and why this is important for young people in a globalized world were we all seem to be similar.

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