The other Europeans

pp. 107-125

in: Ian Ward, The margins of European law, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1996

Abstract

Not everybody in "Europe" is a "European", apparently. Millions of people – at a recent count in excess of nine million – live and work in the new Europe, but are denied the status of being "European", normally because of their ethnic antecedents and the colour of their skin (Geddes, 1995, pp. 202–3). Certain antecedents and certain colours, in particular, are deemed to be inappropriate. These are not the sort of people that we want in the new Europe, save, that is, for their potential as immediate and ready candidates for economic exploitation. As Jurgen Habermas has recently emphasised, the marginalisation of groups of individuals, for variously spurious reasons, is the characteristic of the modernism and of the modern polity (Habermas, 1992). Nowhere are the margins of the new Europe more acutely revealed than in the exclusion of those who are defined as non-European. Of course, they are all European, but they are the "other Europeans", those that fail the current political determination of what it is to be "European". What is particularly pertinent for us is the fact that the law plays a critical role in marginalising certain Europeans.