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English to Chinese: ‘Speaking with one voice’? Member states’ approaches to multiculturality General field: Social Sciences Detailed field: International Org/Dev/Coop
Source text - English
While the EU has been able to speak with ‘one voice’ on issues of human rights on numerous occasions, it has been less articulate on the specifics of minority rights. EU member states hold distinctive positions on questions of multiculturality and how to interpret minority rights more specifically, both in their own domestic politics and in their external relations. The reason for this is that these questions are closely linked to concepts of citizenship, nationhood and history. The multicultural composition of countries like Britain (with a large South Asian component) and France (with a significant North African population) reflects to a large extent their particular histories as former imperial powers. The cultural and ethnic diversity in a country like Sweden, on the other hand, is a more recent phenomenon and largely a consequence of an internationalist foreign policy in which the right to asylum has played an important part. Similarly, member states in southern Europe, such as Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal, have only recently changed from being sources of mass emigration to countries of immigration. As for the new member states which joined in the ‘Big Bang’ enlargement of 2004–2007, their problems of minority rights have long historical roots, only some of which are affected by new flows of migration.
Yet despite this diversity, the fact that EU member states share one and the same external border, given the freedom of movement within the EU itself, means that there are now strong incentives to address what are increasingly perceived as common problems. Consequently, agreement among EU member states in the Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997 to develop a common immigration policy was followed two years later by the creation of a European area of ‘freedom, security and justice’, developing out of the Treaty of Maastricht’s original ‘Justice and Home Affairs’ pillar. This led to a significantly increased role for the European Commission in shaping the policy preferences of EU member states on immigration.
Hence, in addressing the challenges of an increasingly multicultural Europe, both the ‘logic of diversity’ and the ‘logic of integration’ are at play. Member states are still intent on retaining considerable national control of this process, and indeed seek to address the problem of integration and the emergence of ‘parallel societies’ with references to a strengthened civic sense of national identity. But given that past models of integration increasingly are discredited, the search for new models through which to handle the dual goals of cooperation and autonomy is also now being pursued at the European level.
The purpose of this section of the article is to examine the different logics before moving on in the following section to consider the implications of these dynamics for foreign policy in general, and EU foreign policy specifically.
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