# Transcript

The second issue I’d like to address is the one about internal ‘others’. One of the very distinctive things about Europe over the past 200 years is the way nation states across the continent have been formed or there have been attempts to form nation states and that has essentially meant that within one territory a dominant ethnic group, defined by language and culture, has attempted to create a homogenous national state. We have seen this in Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century and this is very much behind a lot of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia which we see today and it is something that we should not neglect that this process of nation building has very distinctive European dimensions and, as a product of European culture.

Robert Bideleux

I would also emphasise that all great civilisations have been multicultural rather than based on a single cultural identifier or marker and the plurality of their culture, their diversity, the fact that they contain substantial minority groups who don’t subscribe to the dominant or majority culture as always being the strength of great civilisations. Civilisations which lack this diversity tend to stagnate. Likewise I would emphasise against those who see Christianity or Christendom as the core of Europe that the Muslims of Albania or Bosnia-Herzegovina or other parts of the Balkans, even Turkey, are as entitled to see themselves as Europeans as are the British or the French or the Germans. Being Muslim doesn’t make you a non-European, and that doesn’t just apply to Bosnians or Albanians, Kosovans; it also applies to the large numbers of Muslim immigrants from outside Europe, from Asia or from parts of Africa.

Hugh Starkey

I would want to remind ourselves of the colonial past of much of Europe and particularly these islands, and the fact that clearly the colonies were perceived as ‘other’, and the European then defined as superior. We then have the German and Nazi Hitler project [sic] of trying to unite Europe under an ideology that was expressly racist and had a hierarchy of human beings. The post-war settlement is then all about creating a consensual and democratic Europe, in which case the ‘other’ becomes the enemy of democracy, and the main enemy of democracy is racism, because racism is the ideology that does not accept that all human beings are equal which is the fundamental underlying tenet of human rights. So I would see this new project of interior ‘other’ which is the forces that actually oppose a democratic project for Europe and particularly racism.