Summary: November 21, 2002: Remarks by John B. Richardson, Head of Delegation (2001-05), Delegation of the European Commission to the United Nations. "Arts as a Mediator of Tolerance", "Cultural Diversity: Problem or Asset?" at the Guggenheim Museum (New York)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
From the beginning of recorded history multiethnic communities have existed. The first record of such communities and the questions to which they give rise refers to the establishment by the Ionian Greeks of communities round the shores of the Black Sea in the 7th century BC. They "began as Greek colonies but survived until the end of the Soviet period as sites where people of many different languages, religions, trades, and descents lived together."
Neal Ascherson's wonderful book about the Black Sea and its history describes such a community as follows:
"The title of supreme ruler might belong to a man or woman whose family origins were among pastoral steppe nomads, Turkic or Iranian or Mongol. Local governments and regulations of the economy might be left to Greek, Jewish, Italian or Armenian merchants. The soldiery, usually a hired force, could be Scythian or Sarmatian, Caucasian or Gothic, Viking or Anglo-Saxon, French or German. The craftsmen, often local people who had adopted Greek language and customs, had their own rights."
It sounds picturesque, and it often worked for long periods. But Ascherson goes on to point out:
"Necessity, and sometimes fear, binds such communities together. But within that binding-strap they remain a bundle of disparate groups - not a helpful model for the 'multi-ethnic society' of our hopes and dreams. It is true that communal savagery - pogroms, 'ethnic cleansing' in the name of some fantasy of national unity, genocide - has usually reached the Black Sea communities from elsewhere, an import from the interior. But when it arrives the apparent solidarity of centuries can dissolve
within days or hours. The poison, upwelling from the depths, is absorbed by a single breath."
None of you can fail to see how true this has been in the cases of the breakup of multiethnic Yugoslavia or of the dreadful genocide of Rwanda. At first sight therefore multi-ethnicity does not look like a recipe for peace and harmony. Yet despite these sobering historical failures the world community is intent on finding solutions to the challenges of finding ways and means of bringing peace and prosperity to multi-ethnic societies as diverse as Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Afghanistan,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, South Africa, and the Middle East.
Why is this? Well, as the multi-ethnicity of all our countries grows, there is, indeed, no other way forward. The pressures towards multi-ethnicity are powerful and various.
By 2020 Jamaica's two international airports are expected to be under water. Around the same time the United Nations, which has just gained two members - Switzerland and East Timor - may lose two or more as some of the more insubstantial Pacific archipelagoes disappear under the rising waters.
But global climate change is not just a question of rising sea levels. The last decade has seen five storms of hurricane force in my own country, the United Kingdom, where they had previously been unknown. Last summer brought to Central Europe the worst flooding it has ever known. The sands of the Sahara have been creeping south into the Sahel for decades now and their rate of advance is increasing. The frequency of tropical storms on the eastern seaboard of the US is rising, as is the
frequency of El Nino. The Mid-West must be beginning to wonder whether drought is really a temporary emergency or rather a fundamental change of climate.
The fact is that this century seems likely to bring unprecedented change in regional weather patterns, those patterns on the basis of which the current pattern of human settlement has developed. The recent climate change conference in New Delhi recognized that high priority must now be given to adapting to the impacts of climate change as well as continuing to try to slow it down. What does seem likely is that one result will be massive displacements of population, a new wave of
Voelkerwanderungen on our planet.
We already have other forces driving an increase in migration.
The many areas of conflict - usually ethnic conflict - around the world have led to considerable increases in flows of refugees over the last decade, usually seeking asylum or simply refuge in the rich countries of the west.
Mounting poverty also provides an ever-increasing economic incentive to search for a better future in our prosperous societies.
Of the 175 million persons, who currently reside in a country other than where they were born, 56 million are in Europe. In the EU it is now largely immigration flows which sustain population growth, And, of course, as birth rates continue to fall, as our population grows older, as a smaller and smaller proportion of our population is economically active and producing the goods and services, which are consumed by all, so our need for new hands for manual work, new brains to produce ideas, and
new parents to bring forth the next generation is also increasing.
The plain fact is that in Europe, as well as in the United States, we are seeing our populations becoming increasingly multi-ethnic. This change has been underway for some time now, although there was for a long time a reluctance to accept it as a permanent rather than a transitory phenomenon. Sweden, that land of blond Vikings now has its first black Member of parliament, the United Kingdom has large minorities of citizens whose parents came from the Indian sub-continent or the Caribbean,
France has a large minority of ethnic Moroccans or Algerians, Germany has millions of inhabitants with origins in Turkey.
So Europe is now learning to recognize and accept this phenomenon, as the United States has long done, and to develop policies to deal with it.
It has been apparent since the beginning of the European integration process that any attempt to apply a melting-pot approach to Europe with the aim of creating a European national identity replacing national identities was doomed to failure - even if it remained for some time the secret dream of many of those involved in the construction of Europe.
Over time it has given way to a quite different conception of integration, which accepts that the aim is to give the EU the capacity for effective action in pursuit of its goals by sharing sovereignty, but also while preserving those elements of national, regional, or ethnic identity which are so essential to the well-being of its citizens. If we wish to do this we cannot allow discrimination based on ethnicity or culture. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the European Union has been to move
in the space of a half-century from a continent whose ethnically distinct nation states had made war on each other with depressing regularity for hundreds of years to one in which it is no longer differences between each other which give rise to major social tensions but rather distinctions between ethnic Europeans and immigrants from outside our continent.
And we can surely build on the techniques we have used over the last fifty years to deal with that challenge, too.
As Antonio Vitorino, our Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs, has said,
"I believe that integration is something that happens inside a person. It is a feeling of belonging, a feeling of being accepted and of being a part of society. But integration is also a process. It is a dynamic and two-way process that places demands on both the host societies and the individuals concerned………Immigrants must be prepared to adapt - without having to lose their own cultural identity - to the lifestyle of the host society, understanding our norms and core constitutional values as
enshrined in the European Charter of Human Rights. The host society must on the other hand welcome and respect greater diversity…."
This is why in the EU we have a quasi-constitutional obligation to respect cultural, religious and linguistic diversity. That is why the EC Treaty gives us the task of contributing to the flowering of the cultures of our member States. That is why we have been active since 1983 in supporting regional and minority languages. It is our belief that helping our citizens to retain these elements of their identity is the key to gaining their acceptance of the processes of European integration and of
worldwide globalization, and thus maintaining social harmony.
The same balance between the need for migrants to accept certain fundamental values of the society to which they move and the need for the society to embrace its increasing cultural diversity is evident in the evolution of the world community's approach to dealing with multi-ethnicity around the world.
On the one hand we have the development of a set of norms for human behavior enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the subsequent conventions based upon it.
Together these instruments give expression to the consensus, which has been developed through the world community, operating through the United Nations system.
On the other hand we have the United Nations' Dialogue among Civilizations, which:
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