Date and Time
April 13, 2009
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Khaled Fouad Allam - Professor, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Trieste.

The issue of multiculturalism is crucial to all European societies. Global migration has brought to Europe new communities, such as Muslim populations or those of Asian origins, which are culturally very different from the traditionally European communities. As a direct result of colonization, some of these communities can boast an historic presence in Europe, such as the Arabs and Muslims in France, or those of indo-pakistan origins as in the case of Britain. Integration of old and new communities into European societies is a long and extremely difficult process due to a number of reasons. The first is that the genesis of the state in Europe, contrary to what has happened in the United States, did not rely on cultural diversity but on the close relationship between identity and territory, hence the debate, still very much open today, over the definition of a “European cultural identity.”  The second reason is to be found in the erroneous approach to multiculturalism in Europe, which confuses individual and community. The third is the sheer weakness of European integration policies.  Such policies are troubled both by an essentialist view of cultures and by the creation of symbolic borders defined on the basis of social and cultural issues.  This latter approach, in particular, runs against what many scholars - both in the French and in the English-speaking worlds – indicate, i.e., the need think of and take European geopolitics beyond cultural issues.