World View: 'We are all minorities in Europe." This has been one of Romano Prodi's principal themes as president of the European Commission over the last five years. He has used it effectively to argue for a union of minorities to accommodate diversity, notably in a speech in Brussels last February on anti-Semitism, writes Paul Gillespie
As the row between his successor, Jose Manuel Barroso, and the European Parliament over the appointment of Rocco Buttiglione to the Justice and Home Affairs portfolio shows, the human rights issues are some of the sharpest and most divisive in Europe today.
Prodi spoke of the Jews as "in many ways the first, the oldest Europeans. We, the new Europeans, are just starting to learn the complex art of living with multiple allegiances - allegiance to our home town, to our own region, to our home country, and now to the European Union.
"The Jews have been forced to master this art since antiquity. They were both Jewish and Italian, or Jewish and French, Jewish and Spanish, Jewish and Polish, Jewish and German.
"Proud of their ties with Jewish communities throughout the Continent, and equally proud of their bonds with their own country."
The phrase was quoted by Emmanuel Decaux, professor of public international law in the University of Paris, at a seminar in Paris last weekend on multiculturalism in Ireland and France.
He was making the point that France's efforts to combine human rights universalism and its own cultural exceptionalism are not well understood abroad. France is facing a crisis of identity internally and externally in dealing with its Muslim minorities and defending the French language and culture. The realisation that we are all minorities makes it easier to come to terms with such paradoxes.
The theory, policy and practice of multiculturalism has been developed over the last generation to deal with two major issues: how to protect the rights of long-standing minority, indigenous and lifestyle groups in national settings; and how to integrate immigrants in national communities. It is important to distinguish them.
Immigrant groups are normally not nations trying to set up their own complete societies in a new territory, as was often the case with European colonialism. Even though they may grow into national minorities (as with Muslims in France and Germany or Hispanics in the US) their migration remains voluntary, containing an essential commitment to integrate in the new society, even while maintaining their own cultural and individual rights.
Thus Canada and Switzerland, for example, are multinational states combining several different national groups. By virtue of continuing immigration they are also polyethnic states, containing a wide variety of immigrant communities.
Plurinationality, in which the concept of nationality takes on different meanings in different settings, as with the Jews, may be distinguished from multinationality, which may just refer to the coexistence of two or more sealed national groups within a polity.
The term multiculturalism is commonly used to describe all these conditions - and further to account for a range of marginalised or excluded non-ethnic social groups such as gays and lesbians, the disabled, women or the working class in identity politics.
This over-broad and ambiguous usage is one of the reasons it is losing ground conceptually and in policy-making over recent years. Many countries face these issues in Europe, but not all of them attempt multicultural solutions.
It helps to distinguish assimilationist policies, which set out to make immigrants or minorities the same by persuasion or compulsion, and integrationist ones, which seek to combine these separate parts into a whole.
Policy varies between the more assimilationist French-American model and the German-English integrationist or "multicultural" one. The difference is most clear in their attitudes to religion. Whereas the former drives all of them out of the public and into the private sphere, where they enjoy equal rights, the latter gives minority religions the same public status as majority religions already enjoy.
In Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Austria and Belgium there has been a marked turn in public policy from multicultural to civic integration programmes in dealing with immigrant communities.
The sociologist Christian Joppke argues that this represents a "liberal distemper" over the failure of multicultural policies to achieve integration rather than a new nationalist intolerance. The actual content of the standards insisted upon are a procedural commitment to universal liberal-democratic principles, notably on respect for and toleration of religious diversity, not a new assimilationism. They are enshrined in the values set out in the introduction to the EU's new constitutional treaty to be signed next month in Rome.
The insistence on learning the dominant language is a necessary part of expanded citizenship, he argues. Integration has to be a two-way process. This has a utilitarian function - to prepare host communities for more immigration in the future. It is economically necessary because of the EU's changing demography, however politically difficult it will be to have this reality accepted.
In the Netherlands a left-liberal government changed the country's policies in 1998 to provide for 600 hours of language and civics lessons and resources for newcomers. This was in response to evidence that second- or third-generation Turkish and North African communities had still not learned Dutch and were suffering widespread unemployment and economic marginalisation.
Ireland and France have much to learn from each other's experience in dealing with these issues, as well as from the development of civic integration policies.
Ireland's main debate on them so far has been about policies on asylum admission and labour migration rather than on a citizenship policy based on the assumption that immigrants are here to stay. Polygamy, family law, circumcision, headscarves and educational rights are but some of the issues arising.
In France the existence of separate, disadvantaged communities of Muslim immigrants who cannot assimilate into mainstream society is a standing rebuke to official policy and paradoxically similar to the policy outcomes found in states with multicultural policies. These communities need positive discrimination for civic integration. In both Ireland and France an awareness that we are all minorities can help encourage this.