To: LV who wrote (2429 ) 7/20/2001 5:53:44 AM From: GUSTAVE JAEGER Read Replies (1) | Respond to Re: Seems like Europeans (and many others) are much more chauvinistic than Americans. Probably has to do with your idea of nation-states in Europe as opposed to the US being a sanctuary for refugees from all over the world. ethnic monolith , a minority-free environment. Hence they've devised their political institutions as a one-size-fits-all framework... Most Europeans don't consider (ethnic, religious, linguistic,...) minorities as a propitious fact of life, that is, an inevitable pattern of modern societies. For Republicanism's fundamentalists such as French politician J-P Chevènement and his followers, there's only one, eternal, indivisible France into which all past and present minorities should merge --lest they might be viewed as enemies within... So, for Europeans, the problem to tackle is the minority itself, not unsuited political institutions! Therefore the whole thrust of Europe's policymakers will be aimed at adapting newcomers and fringe groups to allegedly perfect institutions. Indeed, minorities should not be tolerated, in the European view, because they stand as a blatant failure to build an egalitarian fairyland.... Accordingly, liberal, left-wing politicians end up in a surrealist denial about the actual nature of the body social: they claim that there're no black French, Arab French, Muslim French, Chinese French, Jewish French... There're only Frenchmen, whatever their backgrounds. The foreseeable result is that high-school girls from North Africa are denied the right to wear a scarf or to dress in accordance with Islam during gymnastics; it also lead German policymakers to sermonize their Turkish immigrants about their poor taking on German habits and language, etc.Vlaams Blok 's agenda all about: not only does the far right agree with mainstream softliners on the noxiousness of unsuitable minorities, but they don't even want a melting pot altogether. Their worldview boils down to a master/slave paradigm wherein the slave peoples should not mix with the masters...
