The Forum on Contemporary Europe
(FCE) is sponsoring long-term research on questions of
European integration. This year FCE has conducted a
series of seminars and international conferences to bring
European authors and policy leaders together with forum
researchers and Stanford centers to investigate the
challenges of social integration. The series has combined
the study of European Union (EU) policy toward its
newest members, East-West and trans-Atlantic relations,
crime and social conflict, and European models of
universal citizenship. The directors of the forum plan
multiple publications. Here is a preview of the forthcoming
anthology on Ethnicity in Today’s Europe
(Stanford University Press) edited and with an introduction
by FCE Assistant Director Roland Hsu.
In periods of EU expansion and economic contraction,
European leaders have been pressed to define the basis for
membership and for accommodating the free movement
of citizens. With the lowering of internal borders,
member nations have asked whether a European passport
is sufficient to integrate mobile populations into local
communities. Addressing the European Parliament on
the eve of the 1994 vote on the European Constitution,
Vaclav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic,
defined national membership in terms of a particular
tradition of civic values:
The European Union is based on a large set of
values, with roots in antiquity and in Christianity,
which over 2,000 years evolved into what we
recognize today as the foundations of modern
democracy, the rule of law and civil society. This
set of values has its own clear moral foundation
and its obvious metaphysical roots, whether
modern man admits it or not.
Havel’s claim for the continuing efficacy of Greco-
Roman and Christian values can be read as a prescription
for founding policy and even sociability. In today’s
multicultural Europe his definition has been repeated,
but also challenged, in debates over the most effective
response to increasing heterogeneity and social conflict.
For those who endorse or reject Havel’s binding moral
roots, this new anthology reveals surprising positions.
The scale of change since Havel’s 1994 speech
challenges confidence in European traditions for new
Europe. During 1995–2005, EU immigration grew at
more than double the annual rate of the previous decade.
European immigrant employment statistics are difficult
to aggregate but show a steep downward trend. EU
Eurostat figures show the Muslim community is the
fastest growing resident minority.
The violence in recent years also presses us to revise
theory and practice. In the east: How will Balkan
communities resume relations after massacres and ethnic
cleansing? Does EU recognition of Kosovo validate claims
for Flanders independence and Basque ethnic heritage?
Can Roma immigrants look to Italian governments to
enforce ethnic safeguards? In the west, the widespread
riots in France in 2005 and 2007 by urban youths of
mainly North and West African descent against military
police have ruptured public security and social cohesion.
France’s official response was aimed more to excise
rather than reintegrate the protesters. In 2005, then
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced “zero
tolerance” for those he termed racaille (scum). The
descriptor was effectively deployed to shape public
opinion and the ministry declared a national state of
emergency, invoking a law dating from the 1954–1962
War of Algerian independence, applied previously only
against ethnic uprisings in French Algeria and New
Caledonia, for searches, detainments, house arrests,
and press censorship without court warrant.
Based on the ministry’s own records, the violence
did not catch the government by complete surprise.
Researchers, including Alec Hargreaves in Ethnicity in
Today’s Europe, have revealed a study conducted in
2004 by the French interior ministry that documented
more than 2 million citizens living in districts of
social alienation, racial discrimination, and poor
community policing. The ministry’s document admits
that youth unemployment in what journalists referred
to as quartiers chauds (neighborhoods boiling over)
surpassed 50 percent. Constitutionally barred from
conducting ethnic surveys, the report nevertheless
acknowledges what most already understood: that the
majority of the unemployed and disenfranchised youth
were French-born whose parents or grandparents were
of African descent.
Post-war era immigration, from the 1950s European
reconstruction through the 1960s and 1970s decolonization,
is best defined as post-colonial migration.
European governments created neighborhoods for
immigrants who moved from periphery to metropole.
The new residents’ education, language, and collective
memory were shaped by colonial administrations, and
that background was roughly familiar to the host
communities. Since 1990, however, based on projections
in this anthology, we have entered a period, for lack of
a better name, of post-post-colonial diaspora.
The peoples immigrating to Europe are increasingly
coming from lands without characteristic European
colonial heritage. While few countries of origin have no
instance of European intervention, the new arrivals are
adding rapidly growing numbers of émigrés of global
diasporas from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and
Israel, as well as the Indonesian archipelago and sub-
Saharan and East Africa. This most recent demographic
trend takes Europe, and the larger trans-Atlantic west,
into an era not well served by existing models.
In this anthology, nine prominent authors substantiate
this shift. The essays create an unusual and productive
dialogue between social scientist modeling and humanist
cultural studies to confront assumptions about immigrant
origin, European identity, and policies of tolerance.
Bassam Tibi (International Relations, University of
Gottingen/Cornell) criticizes European multiculturalism,
which, he argues, inadvertently enables European
Islamist fundamentalism. Tibi’s essay challenges his
fellow Muslim immigrants to embrace traditional
European civic values (which he dates neither from
antiquity nor the Christian era, but rather from the
French Revolution) as the foundation not for multiculturalism,
but for a cultural pluralism that fosters
social integration. The result, in his terms, would replace
Islamist fundamentalism with a Euro-Islam capable
of Euro-integration. Kadar Konuk (German Studies,
University of Michigan) sets Tibi’s insight on European-
Muslim ethnicity into the history of European-Turkish
relations. Readers questioning Turkey’s EU candidacy
will find that the two essays shift the common critique
of Turkish policy toward a more pressing question
of Europe’s social capacity to integrate prospective
Turkish-EU citizens.
Contributions by Alec Hargreaves (French Studies,
Florida State), Rogers Brubaker (Sociology, UCLA), and
Saskia Sassen (Sociology, Columbia) — all leading authors
on European political culture and social theory — rethink
Western European responses to minority integration.
Articles by Carole Fink (History, Ohio State), Leslie
Adelson (German Studies, Cornell), and Salvador Cardús
Ros (Sociology, Autonomous University of Barcelona)
reveal cultural expressions that are often overlooked in
studies of European minority identity. The final article
by Pavle Levi (Art and Art History, Stanford University)
focuses on the case of post-ethnic war Balkans, to test
the ability of mass media and film to influence the
creation of cross-border inclusive cultures.
Ethnicity in Today’s Europe was developed from
the fall 2007 conference on the topic sponsored by FCE
and the Stanford Humanities Center.
To sign up for
upcoming FCE programming, and for an alert from
the Stanford University Press when this anthology
and works on this topic are released, plese visit the Stanford University Press website.
