WHAT CREED IN EUROPE? SOCIAL EXCLUSION, CITIZENSHIP, AND A CHANGING EU POLICY AGENDA

Abstract

During the last decade of the Twentieth Century the advanced North Atlantic economies performed in a markedly profitable way seen from the perspective of corporate business. This has neither led, however, to the impediment of a deepening social crisis, nor to the arrest of a crisis for liberal political values and norms of citizenship. On the contrary social exclusion was exacerbated, increasingly racialized and associated with immigrants and new visible ethnic minorities. A perhaps more conspicuous, but closely related, manifestation of this crisis of welfare and political values has, within the European Union, been the upturn of new nationalist, racist-populist political movements centered on the “problem of immigration.” This change of the political spectrum, brought about by the new right nationalist-populist upsurge, may eventually jeopardize the whole project of European integration, and the current tightening up of European regimes of both immigration and the societal incorporation of immigrants obviously reflects such worries. Simultaneously, however, influential employers, politicians and public servants have, time after time, cried out for the need for continued and increased large-scale import of low- as well as high-skilled migrant labor, seen as a remedy to Europe’s imminent “demographic crisis.”

Citation

Schierup, C.-U. (2003), "WHAT CREED IN EUROPE? SOCIAL EXCLUSION, CITIZENSHIP, AND A CHANGING EU POLICY AGENDA", Brochmann, G. (Ed.) Multicultural Challenge (Comparative Social Research, Vol. 22), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 205-244. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0195-6310(03)22008-1