The Challenge of the Multiracial Society

In recent years, most European countries have suddenly awoken in the midst of an entirely new form of society — one they could have foreseen twenty years earlier but did not — a form previously thought to be exclusive to the USA: the multiracial society resulting from decolonisation, the immigration of labour, and the differing population growths between North and South. For the first time in its history — at least in the last millennium — Western Europe became a host to Afro-Asian minorities, whose proportion is steadily increasing. The shock is substantial, and it is most pronounced in France. The question of identity is raised with unprecedented brutality and urgency. But this challenge enables Europeans — finally — to become aware of the nature of their own specificity, or at least to contemplate it. Identity, the strength of the sense of belonging, and the meaning of the term ‘citizenship’ obviously rest on a relative ethno-cultural homogeneity of Europeans, and therefore, we must ask about the ‘desirability’ of a multiracial or…