Multiculturalism, International Migrations and Inherited Group Identifications: Ethnicity, Race, Sex

Abstract

International migrations are becoming one of the key problems in contemporary integration processes of the European Union. Member States of the EU have different migration policies and different relations towards emigrants and their descendants. Those differences are rooted in the time of liberal policy of the sixties, and they strengthened in the seventies and eighties, in the period after the oil crisis. A good example is Sweden with its multicultural policy. Differences are noticeable above all in the relation towards the inherited group identifications (ethnicity, race, sex). They exhibit on the level of everyday life, in political culture, and in politics in a narrower meaning of the word. The latter is as well connected with the conditions of naturalisation. Sex, race and ethnicity can “operate” separately, but in numerous contexts they cover over each other, which results in intensification of discrimination of the majority environment in relation towards the carrier of “selected cultural/social-political” symbols for such distinguishing among people. Hence it follows, that women – immigrants, members of unwanted races who within that come from the most unwanted ethnic environments – are exposed to the worst discrimination.