Sumario: October 12, 2002: Remarks to plenary by John B. Richardson, Head of Delegation (2001-05), Delegation of the European Commission to the United Nations, at the Transatlantic Conference on Race and Xenophobia (October 11-13, 2002) (Chicago)
I stand before you today, not as an expert on racism and xenophobia, like so many among you, but rather as someone involved for many years in the interactions between the evolving European Union and the world community, as an observer of the subsequent interplay of values, and as a father who inevitably spends more and more of his time wondering what sort of world my children are inheriting. So I would like to look a little beyond the horizons of our carefully defined subject.
In and around the United Nations in New York the topic of the moment is Iraq, talk is of weapons of mass destruction and of how best to ensure that Saddam Hussein is brought into compliance with the Security Council resolutions he has ignored for so long. It is in the corridors around the Security Council Chamber that the buzz is loudest, that the latest news, the latest gossip, the latest guesses are being exchanged. But elsewhere in the building work continues as usual, for the United Nations
is more than an organization designed to deal with threats to peace and security.
It is also the forum in which the world community gathers to forge the strategies necessary to deal with the world's agenda. That agenda for the years to come was laid down when heads of state and government gathered in New York in September 2000 at the Millenium Summit. In their declaration they said:
"We believe that the central challenge we face today is to ensure that globalization becomes a positive force for all the world's people. For while globalization offers great opportunities, at present its benefits are very unevenly shared, while its costs are unevenly distributed…., only through broad and sustained efforts to create a shared future, based upon our common humanity in all its diversity, can globalization be made fully inclusive and equitable."
Our leaders went on to set themselves and us a series of goals for development policy. They agreed to, and I quote:
"Spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected."
I am sure you are aware that the UN definition of extreme poverty is to exist on an income of less than a dollar a day, 365 dollars for the whole year. GDP per head in the US is around 32000 dollars.
Because of this the Millenium Declaration sets the world community a set of so-called Millenium Development Goals, the first of which is:
"To halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and, by the same date, to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water."
The list goes on, but I will stop here.
I simply wanted to point out why the UN has a Food program, why it has a population program, why we have launched in the WTO a new round of trade talks under the label of the Doha Development Agenda, why so many of us in New York are trying hard to concentrate on something other than Iraq.
The fact is that our world is in many ways getting smaller as its population gets larger. The pressure on resources is increasing. No wonder we have just held the world's biggest ever conference in Johannesburg on the topic of Sustainable Development. And we are all becoming uncomfortably aware that because of this and because of the interdependence that comes from globalization, no nation can insulate itself from the global challenges faced by the world community, no nation can turn its back
on the world's problems with impunity, no nation will be able to withdraw behind the walls of a national gated community. And the most obvious example of this is surely global climate change.
Let me quote simply from President Bush's report submitted in May of this year to the UN Climate Change Convention, which says:
"Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and sub-surface ocean temperatures to rise."
You should all be aware that this statement means that none of the world's governments now questions that the economic activities of the human race are bringing about global climate change on a massive scale. I do not wish here to put too much emphasis on the fact that the EU is embarked on a program to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases to 8% below their 1990 levels by the year 2012, whereas President Bush's program is designed only to limit US emissions to 30% above 1990 levels by the
same year.
Today I want to emphasize another sentence in the President's report, which says:
"Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century. "
What does this imply?
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 - will lose two - Tuvalu and Kiribati - as these 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. This 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. There 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.
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 the need in Europe, in Japan, and in the US for new hands for manual work, new brains to produce ideas, and new parents to bring forth the next generation is also increasing. The European Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs, Antonio Vitorino expressed it as follows
last month in Brussels:
"The moment has come to acknowledge that we in fact need legal immigration. There is a significant sectoral and regional shortage of manpower in the European Union. In some Member States there is a high demand for highly qualified people in areas such as new technologies and the health sector, in other Member States there are recruitment difficulties in lower skilled sectors (e.g. agriculture, domestic service and the construction industry.)"
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.
(On a personal note….)
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. I want to tell you something today about those policies. But before I do so, let us reflect for a moment on the lessons, which history teaches us about how difficult it is to create and maintain harmonious, multi-cultural societies. It has after all been tried many times.
The first historical 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."
I am quoting here from Neal Ascherson's wonderful book about the Black Sea and its history. He 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.
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. As the multi-ethnicity of all our countries grows, there is, indeed, no other way forward.
You can, of course, argue that the United States has pursued an alternative, in adopting an immigration policy based on the idea of a melting pot, out of which a homogeneous population emerges. I think we Europeans will listen with interest to the Americans in this room to learn to what extent this approach has indeed led to communalities and what divergences remain.
We start off in the European Union from a different point of departure.
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, however, given ground 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.
In Europe this is, however, not just a question of combating racism, for it is not just on the basis of race that European citizens discriminate against each other.
The treaties establishing the European Union were originally based on the idea that common action in the field of economics could gradually bind peoples together, peoples who - let us remember - had a history of going to war with each other.
This has certainly worked. But as our political cohesion has grown the conviction has also grown that we needed a clear statutory base to outlaw not just discrimination on the basis of nationality -which has always been in the treaty - but also racial and ethnic discrimination as well as discrimination for any other reason. In other words, our concept of discrimination has matured as we confronted the reality of our societies with our aspiration for universal human rights within the
Union.
So it is that, since the Amsterdam Treaty, which came into force in 1999, the Union not only has a treaty obligation - let's call it a quasi-constitutional obligation - to achieve for all its citizens "liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law."
Furthermore, "the Council, acting unanimously on a proposal from the Commission and after consulting the European Parliament, may take appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation."
The Commission has not been slow to translate this new provision into action and, based on these powers, the Council adopted two groundbreaking pieces of legislation in 2000. The first is a Directive banning racial discrimination in employment, education, social protection and access to goods and services.
The second is a Directive establishing a general framework for equal treatment in the specific field of employment. Member States must turn these Directives into national law before the end of 2003. The result will be to give victims of direct and indirect discrimination new rights and the means to enforce those rights.
With specific respect to racism our Member States have been cooperating on legal action against racism and xenophobia since a first so-called Joint Action was adopted by the Council of Ministers on 15 July 1996 and a series of actions have followed. Notably in April this year the Justice and Home Affairs Council strongly condemned the racist acts perpetrated in the Union in previous weeks and emphasized the Union's strong commitment to respect the cultural, religious and linguistic diversity as
laid down in Article 22 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
But we know that legal action is not enough, as you too have found in the United States. We also need to develop programs to promote changes in behavior and to deal with issues that cannot be tackled through legislation.
This is the thinking behind the 100 million euro anti-discrimination program that was launched last year. It is designed to be a forum for exchanges of experience and joint action involving a wide range of actors. These include national, regional, and local authorities, business and the labor unions, NGOs, academia, and the media.
Many of these actors have already had the opportunity to come together through 30 transnational exchange actions supported by the program. These projects are looking at issues like community policing, access to local services and the portrayal of minority groups in the media.
Other projects in the pipeline will look at the use of equality clauses in public procurement contracts, awareness-raising seminars for judges and lawyers, and information campaigns to inform citizens about their new rights.
The European Union Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia, under the leadership of Beate Winkler, supports our work by providing data and analysis. It has produced a useful report on Islamophobia and is about to publish one on anti-Semitism. This activity provides us with the means to monitor the success of our activities as we go forward.
So much for the work whose origin is internal. But let me return for a moment to the question of immigration. As Antonio Vitorino has said,
"Given the uncertainties which face our societies today and the insecurity which many of the citizens of Europe now feel, the integration of migrants is the greatest challenge of the common policy on asylum and migration which we are now developing within the Union …Integration is a very emotional issue and it touches upon some very fundamental values within ourselves and in our societies. 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…."
The same approach, 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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