Social Values, Prejudice and Solidarity in the European Union

Abstract

According to the UNO forecasts, the EU will have to receive 1.3 million immigrants each year, the equivalent to 32,5 million immigrants in the next 25 years, if it wants to maintain its economic growth and its welfare system. Even if the forecasts of international agencies regarding labour requirements are excessive, the number of new immigrants that Europe will take in should necessarily remain high. Will Europeans be open to take in these new immigrants and to help them integrate into the European society? A number of findings lead us to believe that, nowadays, open prejudice is perceived as anti-normative in Europe. 1 In fact, the end of the Second World War and the unveiling of the horrors of a racist state, the Human Rights Declaration (1948), the UNESCO Declaration on Race (1951), social movements of various kinds in Europe, the civil rights movement of the African-Americans and the African liberation movements set in motion a process which gradually made racial discrimination illegal and racial beliefs anti-normative. But although racism became anti-normative, negative beliefs in relation to immigrants and towards people seen as belonging to different races or cultures still persist. According to the Eurobarometer n° 47.1 (Ben Brika, Lemaine &Jackson, 1997; Deschamps & Lemaine, 2001), and a survey carried out by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (Thalhammer, Zucha, Enzenhofer, Salfinger &