Anti-Racist Movements in the EU

Between Europeanisation and National Trajectories

Stefano Fella, Carlo Ruzza

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230290907
• eBook ISBN: 9781137284662
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Based on extensive primary research, including interviews with movement and policy actors across six European countries, this book examines anti-racist movements throughout Europe, focusing on how they influence culture and government policy at national and EU level, shedding light on the nature of racism and responses to it across Europe.

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Introduction: Anti-Racist Movements in the European Union: Between National Specificity and Europeanisation

Stefano Fella and Carlo Ruzza

The Treaty of Amsterdam, agreed to by the European Union (EU) heads of government in June 1997, provided the EU with a new common framework for combating racial discrimination within its borders. The European directives that were subsequently adopted in 2000¹ under this framework have required the adoption of new national legislation across the EU Member States, linking the national and European policy-making spheres in a new way. In some cases Member States have implemented specific legislation and policy to combat racial discrimination for the first time. The new policy-making environment has also impacted on associations and organisations which have developed to oppose and combat racism and racial discrimination or defend the rights and interests of groups, such as migrants, that are vulnerable to racism. This altered environment has created new opportunities for such associations and organisations to influence policy-making. Nevertheless, the common overarching policy framework provided by the EU needs to be set against the backdrop of stark differences in terms of the national policy framework in which the directives have been implemented and in which anti-racist movements operate. These differences are related to the level of development, sophistication and institutionalisation of existing national policy and legislation to combat racism and racial discrimination, the nature and level of racism and discrimination in the Member State concerned, and the way in which racism manifests itself, and public attitudes to the issue as well as the attitude of government actors and political parties. More broadly, the political, socio-economic and cultural contexts in which policies and movements emerge vary considerably. Indeed, differing national contexts are highly significant in understanding the nature and level of sophistication of the anti-racist movement across the Member States. Furthermore, a key variable in understanding the degree of development of both official anti-racist policy and the movement sector is the existence and nature of particular national or ethnic minority and migrant populations within the state concerned. This book aims to provide an understanding of the different national contexts in which anti-racist movements operate in the EU on the basis of six national case studies of EU Member States, reflecting both the north–south and east–west divide in terms of national policy contexts.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the context in which anti-racist movements operate in Europe, identifying common traits and axes of variation within the movements discussed in the subsequent chapters. We will first consider the changing historical, political and geographical context of racism in Europe, and then identify groups particularly vulnerable to racism in Europe, exploring the impact of international migration and reactions to it in relation to this, before identifying key facets of anti-racist mobilisation in Europe today.

The historical and geographical context of racism in Europe

Racism has manifested itself in different ways across Europe and over time. Classical biological theories of racism were generally discredited in the wake of the Second World War. Such theories, based on notions of biological differences between distinct racial groups and a hierarchy between them, were in the past used to justify imperialism, slavery, racial laws and the Holocaust (Bell 2009). In recent decades attention has focused on notions of cultural racism – based not on hierarchies between races but on ‘cultural difference’ between different ethnic groups. The notion of ‘cultural difference’ and the need to protect the cultural cohesion of communities (viewed as necessary for social cohesion) by keeping people from different cultures in their respective homelands was associated with French Nouvelle Droite thinking and has been appropriated by the extreme and populist right across Europe (Rydgren 2005), but has also found its way into ‘mainstream’ political discussion. The notion of cultural difference has been particularly emphasised in debates concerning Muslim migration and the presence of sizeable and growing Muslim minority populations in European nations. Aspects of this debate have been denounced as Islamophobic by anti-racist and pro-migrant activists across the EU.

A European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) report on the experience of Muslims in the EU in 2006 estimated the Muslim population in the EU at around 13 million, including 3.5 million in France, 3.4 million in Germany, 1.6 million in the United Kingdom and just over one million in Spain. Most of these were recent migrants (since the 1950s) and their descendants, although there were also small and long-standing Muslim communities in different parts of Europe stretching back centuries (EUMC 2006). The report noted that Muslims ‘experience various levels of discrimination and marginalisation in employment, education and housing, and are also victims of negative stereotyping and prejudicial attitudes … vulnerable to discrimination and manifestations of Islamophobia in the form of anything from verbal threats through to physical attacks on people and property’. It also noted that racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia are mutually reinforcing phenomena and that ‘hostility against Muslims should thus be seen in the context of a more general climate of hostility towards migrants and ethnic minorities’ (EUMC 2006: 108). However, as with racism aimed at other minorities, there is a general problem in terms of consistency and effectiveness of data collection across the EU as regards incidents of Islamophobia.

Since the attacks of 11 September 2001 in particular, European governments have, often acting under the cloak of EU-level agreements, tightened security policies which have, according to some critics, targeted Muslim communities in a discriminatory fashion, exacerbating a climate of increasing public hostility towards them (Fekete 2009). More generally, EU states have, over the last decade and often within the framework of EU-level agreements, institutionalised stricter border controls, making entry more difficult for third-country nationals seeking asylum on the grounds of persecution in their own country, a right to asylum ostensibly guaranteed under the 1951 United Nations (UN) Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Moreover, even where asylum seekers have managed to reach the EU, their rights have been increasingly curtailed by national legislation which restricts their freedom of movement and their entitlement to welfare benefits. This has happened within a climate of media and wider public hostility, whereby asylum seekers are characterised as ‘bogus’ – seeking entry for economic reasons rather than persecution in their home country (as if the desire for a better life itself should be treated as a crime). Fekete refers to a demonisation of the people that the capitalist Western world is seeking to exclude, and uses the definition of ‘xeno-racism’ offered by Sivanandan to denounce the treatment of migrants of all ethnic groups:

It is a racism that is not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted, who are beating at western Europe’s doors … . It is a racism, that is, that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well, and passed off as xenophobia, a ‘natural’ fear of strangers. But in the way in which it denigrates and reifies people before segregating and/or expelling them, it is a xenophobia that bears all the marks of the old racism. It is racism in substance, but ‘xeno’ in form. It is a racism meted out to impoverished strangers even if they are white. It is xeno-racism.

(Sivanandan 2001, cited in Fekete 2009: 19–20)

Nevertheless, racism and discrimination in Europe are directed not just against newcomers, but against settled communities of migrants and their descendants, sometimes of several generations standing, and in some cases against historic ‘minorities’ who have been present on the territory for centuries. In the latter category are the Roma, the presence of whom in Europe can be traced back to migration from the Indian subcontinent between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. They are a particularly sizeable minority in some of the Central and Eastern European countries that have joined the EU since 2004, numbering between eight and 10 million in these states (Geddes 2003: 6). Freedom of movement within the EU has led to significant movement of Roma from these states after 2004 to some of the older EU states (for example, significant numbers of Roma have migrated from Romania to Italy, which already had a smaller historic Roma community of its own). Another longer-established minority that has faced discrimination of extreme proportions is the Jewish one. There is a long ignoble history of anti-Semitism in Europe which also shaped earlier debates on anti-racism. Whilst anti-Semitism appeared to have declined in the aftermath of the Second World War, it has remained integral for some extremist neo-Nazi groups, while the conflict in the Middle East has also led to the blurring of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in some instances and increasing incidences of the latter. Eastern enlargement of the EU brought into the fold countries such as Poland where anti-Semitism was still a major cause of concern within the anti-racism sector, as the chapter on Poland in this book will show.

International migration and its impact on Europe

The focus of anti-racist policy and activism in most EU states (particularly the EU15 prior to the eastwards enlargement of 2004) relates to the treatment of new immigrant communities in the decades since the Second World War. There were different phases of immigration, impacting differently across these states and with different origins. Three distinct periods of immigration can be identified (Geddes 2003: 17–19). The first period was one of primary labour immigration, generally to northern Europe, occurring between the 1950s and mid-1970s (the end of the post-war economic boom). In countries such as Britain, France and the Netherlands with a colonial past, this involved mass immigration from the former colonies. Other countries such as Germany invited ‘guest workers’, often through labour migration agreements with third countries such as Turkey. In this period, southern European countries such as Italy, Portugal and Spain remained countries of emigration, with large numbers moving from these countries to find work in northern Europe (many also migrating from the south to the north within Italy). The second period followed the cessation of labour immigration recruitment in the mid-1970s. Most states ceased to permit immigration for labour purposes (except for highly skilled migrants), but immigration continued due to family reunion, while migrant communities expanded to include the children of migrants born in the host country.

A third wave of migration began after the Cold War, with the collapse of the Communist bloc making transit easier and a number of military conflicts also causing large population movements. This has led to both a diversification of the countries of origin of migrants to Europe and a widening of the destination countries. In this period, southern European countries, including Spain, Italy and Greece, have also become countries of mass immigration. While much of this migration has come through the asylum route – impacting across the EU and causing controversy in countries such as the United Kingdom which had progressively closed down other routes of migration – this migration has also been characterised by its irregular nature. Large numbers have entered through clandestine routes, often taking advantage of long and not particularly well-monitored borders along the southern European coastline. Given that many migrants entering this way have northern European countries as their ultimate desired destination, at a time when the EU (since the 1980s) has moved to reduce its own internal borders, this has led to pressure from northern European governments on their southern European counterparts to implement stricter immigration and border controls. A significant share of the regular immigrant presence in these countries has developed via the route of migrants entering the country irregularly and then being ‘regularised’ through a government amnesty of irregular migrants.

The third wave of migration identified above, characterised particularly by irregular entry routes from the south and east, has contributed to pressures for European coordination of immigration and asylum policies, characterised by critics as a ‘Fortress Europe’ approach and denounced variously as racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic or xeno-racist by some. The ‘Fortress Europe’ approach was also applied in the context of the eastern enlargement of the EU in 2004 (Geddes 2003: 179–180). The new Members States of central and eastern Europe were obliged to tighten their own external borders as part of the transitional process to membership, while most of the existing EU Member States imposed transitional controls to prevent the citizens of these countries from taking advantage of the EU ‘right’ to freedom of movement in order to migrate westwards.

According to figures from Eurostat, in 2010 there were 32.5 million persons living in the 27 EU states who were not citizens of the state in which they resided (6.5 per cent of the population); 12.3 million of these were citizens of another EU state, while 20.2 million were citizens of non-EU states. Seventy-five per cent of the ‘foreign’ population resided in five EU states: Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy and France (Eurostat 2011). The total figure for foreign-born residents was actually higher at 47.3 million (9.4 per cent of the total population). Many of these persons would have acquired the citizenship of the host state and would no longer be classed as ‘foreign’ citizens. However, this does not necessarily give them an escape from being on the receiving end of racist or discriminatory behaviour in their new home countries.

Despite the transitional controls imposed by some states, internal migration within the EU (by citizens of one EU state to another) appeared to significantly increase following the 2004 enlargement to the East. For example, over 500,000 Poles migrated to the United Kingdom (which did not impose any transitional arrangements preventing migration from the new states) following the Polish accession to the EU in 2004. Romanians living in Italy number close to one million,² although many of these migrated before the Romanian accession to the EU in 2007 (a similar number of Romanians have migrated to Spain). According to the Eurostat data cited above, over a quarter of foreign nationals living in the EU states come from Turkey, Romania, Morocco and Poland. That the largest ‘national groups’ from outside of the EU are also predominantly Muslim and between them number around four million is also notable.

The strengthening of Europe’s external borders has come hand in hand with a process of dismantling of internal borders between EU states (with the latter making the former more necessary in the eyes of many policy-makers). Measures to facilitate the free movement of European nationals were given impetus initially by the Single European Act (SEA) in 1985 and then by the Treaty on European Union (TEU) of 1992 which established the concept of EU citizenship (bestowed automatically on citizens of EU Member States). This left third-country nationals with legal residence rights within a Member State, but not with citizenship of that state, with a ‘second class’ status as they could not access this right to free movement. In relation to this point, the differing national policy traditions as regards access to citizenship are noteworthy. These differing traditions have wider implications in terms of the integration of immigration and patterns of discrimination within these countries. In the United Kingdom, post-war immigrants from the former colonies initially arrived as carriers of UK passports, and their descendants born on UK soil automatically acquired UK citizenship. Prior to independence in 1962, Algeria was considered part of France and Algerians could move there freely. Even after independence and as in other former colonies, those born in Algeri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Anti-Racist Movements in the European Union: Between National Specificity and Europeanisation
• 2. Anti-Racism at the EU Level
• 3. Fighting Racism in the United Kingdom: A Multicultural Legacy and a Multi-Faceted Movement
• 4. The Politicisation of Immigration and Race in France: Towards a Process of Racialisation?
• 5. The Impact of Corporatism and Quasi-Civil Society on Anti-Racial Discrimination Law and Policy in Germany
• 6. Pro-Immigrant Associations and Anti-Racism in Italy: Conflict and Cooperation in the Front Line
• 7. Fighting Denial: New Anti-Racist Mobilisation in Spain
• 8. Civil Society and Anti-Discrimination Policy in a Homogeneous Country: The Case of Poland
• 9. Conclusion: Understanding European Anti-Racisms
• Index