balkans : Message: Book Review: Gundara, Jacobs, Intercultural Europe. Reviewed by Annie Lafontaine

Balkan Academic Book Review 8/2001
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Jagdish Gundara & Sidney Jacobs (eds.), 2000, Intercultural Europe: Diversity and Social Policy. Aldershot: Ashgate. 390 pp., 42.50 GBP, ISBN 1-85742-346-1 (Hardcover).

Reviewed by Annie Lafontaine (Anthropology, University of Montreal), Email: annielafontaine@...
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Intercultural Europe is a collection of 18 articles that address the issue of cultural diversity and social policies in the contemporary European Union member states and in the institutions of the EU as such. Though none of the articles focuses on the Balkan countries, many of them are of interest for those who work on the processes of the Eastern enlargement of the EU, and on the post-1989 migration flows from Eastern to Western Europe. I would suggest to any scholar working on European issues to read most of the articles of this book.

The 18 contributors of this book are professors, lecturers and researchers from universities of the European Union member states. They belong also to a large range of disciplines, from education to political science, sociology, and management. Moreover, they share a general tendency to promote, through their analysis, the development of a more explicit inter-culturalism within the European Union member states and its institutions. The articles are organized around three themes: 1) the assessment of the cultural diversity within the EU countries, 2) the need for the improvement of social policies within the EU states, and 3) the positive results of the Eastern enlargement of the EU in regard to the development of social equity. Such compelling topics tempt then the majority of the contributors to make recommendations for the improvement of social policies within all the countries that will be part of the EU by 2010.

Gundara and Jacobs, the editors of the book, introduce the volume by quoting Hobsbawm's assessment that the movement of people within Europe and towards Europe has restored the ethnic, religious and cultural diversity that existed within the European empires and which have been destroyed by wars, ethnic cleansing and genocides during the two World Wars of the twentieth century. The management of ethnic complexity is more than ever before at the center of now-a-day Europe. According to most of the contributors of this book, the EU main task should therefore focus on the development of social policies taking into account the fact of cultural diversity.
However, few of the articles address the problem of the negation of cultural diversity in the policy making of some European countries. The problems faced by some countries of the Balkans in which dreams of "ethnic purity of territories" still engender conflicts, as it is the case in Yugoslavia for instance, seem to do not be a major issue for the authors. However, it appears to me that the conflicts that are still taking place over there, and that are still generating refugee flows to "European" countries, highlight the crisis faced by the EU member states today. How can they define the modalities by which the populations living and coming to their territories should be integrated, or on the opposite should be contained in their "own" territories? At the center of the problem lies the question of defining a "European identity" that would embrace the reality of cultural diversity, and would therefore be accessible for every segmen! t of the populations living in the EU member states, providing to them equal access to social services and employment. This accessibility was and is still reduced notably by the restricted eligibility to nationality and citizenship in EU countries, which should provide access to the so-called universal welfare regime. The universality of this welfare regime has never been reached. Though today rights seem to be more and more extended to what the authors call "ethnic minorities" (by opposition to immigrants and migrant workers), the process of globalization which create a gap between the state policies and the market rules, produces different "social problems" such as the racial segmentation of employment leading to the economic exploitation of "illegal" migrants (in Southern Europe for instance), the ghettoisation of ethnic minorities in large cities (following in such cases the non-universal American model of welfare regime), the unequal access to social and health services f! or immigrants and migrant workers, and the feminization of poverty.

Most of the contributors, quite optimists, tend to consider that the future integration of East European countries into the European Union, after the harmonization of all states' policies with EU standards, will contribute to resume these social inequalities within the actual and future countries of the European Union. They assess that by pushing further Eastern the European borders, the EU enlargement process would reduce the migration flows towards European Union countries, reducing in this way the "social problems" related to "illegal" border crossing from non-EU countries. This reduction of social problems would be due to the integration within the European Union of populations for which "legal" access to European Union countries have been considerably reduced since the reinforcement of the EU borders in the 1990's and the increase of free movements of people within the EU. The authors consider that the increase of internal mobility (mainly regarding workers' mobility) within a larger European Union, accompanied by a deeper assessment of cultural diversity in the policy making of states, would contribute to reduce the social inequalities that concern mainly immigrants, migrant workers, "ethnic minorities", and mostly "illegal" migrants. However, it is still unclear why these migration flows would be reduced. Larger European borders would not eliminate Westward migration flows from non-European countries.

What remains also unclear is how does cultural diversity could be deeply integrated in order to give equal access to social services and employment to every segment of EU societies, considering that cultural diversity is a deeper phenomenon than merely folkloric diversity. Issues addressed through EU enlargement such as "democratization", "development of human rights", and "development of the market economy" are themselves culturally oriented. Therefore how do the diverse practices and mentalities, social organizations and modalities of social integration of these immigrants, migrant workers and ethnic minorities, can be incorporated within the social policies produced by states for the "majority"? The gap between policies of the EU institutions and of the individual EU member states, and cultural and social realities of the current and future EU states is well addressed by the authors, but maybe in a very idealistic way.

The contributors aim at reducing this gap through recommendations toward a deeper assessment of the positive contribution of migrants and ethnic minorities in the economy and "popular culture" of the EU member states. Through their work, they wish to deconstruct a still deeply hidden form of racism within the European societies that engender social inequities, policies of segregation, poverty, and racial segmentation of employment and health and social services access. They underline many spaces in Europe (trade unions and schools for instance) in which inter-culturalism has improved the social, economic and political conditions of the poorest segments of societies. However, they tend to consider that the integration of Eastern countries in the EU will reproduce social problems that the now-a-day EU states tend to solve, because the Eastern societies would not share yet the same values of "human rights", "equalities" and "democracy" with Western states. Thus, most of the authors assess that the main task of the EU is to promote inter-culturalism within its own institutional apparatus and consequently towards the future EU member states and their societies.

The modalities for the implementation of such a project remains however unclear. Promoting cultural diversity in a non-folkloristic manner would ask for a deeper transformation of the EU member states, the EU institutions, and of the EU societies. This does not seem to be realized yet, or is partly realized only within the future EU countries (through different "development projects" of international organizations and institutions). But the problem seems to stay the same: how can social and cultural diversity be explicitly incorporated within social policies produced by states aside of a globalized economical system?
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This an earlier book reviews are available at: www.seep.ceu.hu/balkans
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� 2001 Balkan Academic News. This review may be distributed and reproduced electronically, if credit is given to Balkan Academic News and the author. For permission for re-printing, contact Balkan Academic News.

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