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Europe at the threshold: fairness or fortress?
Funke, Hajo
Funke, Hajo
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dfunke.pdf
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"The Idea of a Free Modern Europe was created by Antifascists some 60 years ago in the dark days of genocidal Nazi Germany waging its racial war of extermination and murdering the European Jews, the gipsies, Slavs and the handicapped. In the vision of survivors the new Europe was conceived as a Union that will forever end the centuries long warmongering, the expansionist nationalism1 and particularly the barbarity of Nazi Germany by overcoming the preconditions that helped to shape it. After 1945, Germany was given the opportunity for democratic change. 60 years later, however, Germany and Europe are facing elements of the spectre of the past. Violent racist attacks on persons of non-German and non-European descent, of gipsies and of the handicapped. Europe has seen genocidal ethnic cleansing of nearly 200 000 Bosnian Muslims without reacting sufficiently. Racism in dominating white Europe was part of the history of colonialism. In the present it is primarily directed against those perceived as weak and alien . Along paranoid racist lines though often in more subtle manifestations those subject to racism are categorised by their very physical and/or cultural appearances they are defamed as a being of lower intelligence, character, allegedly representing all evil of the world. The revival shall adopt the power policies of socialdarwinistic colonial Europe in the 19th century, and the radicalised forms of the paranoic race wars of Nazi Germany in the thirties and forties of the 20th century. Under different historical and political conditions new authoritarian dynamics of racism have to be once more the concern of the European political class. Racial discrimination shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national, or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life. (International Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted and opened for signature and ratification of General Assembly Resolution 2106 of 21 December 1964) (quoted in EUMC, Annual Report 1999, and p.15)."(pg 3)
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2001-09-03
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With permission of the license/copyright holder