Search for scapegoats.

In 1980, there were only 600,000 refugees in all of Europe; today, there are close to four million. With dwindling resources and fewer jobs, European governments have rushed to close the door. But in clamping down hard on refugees and illegals, and introducing harsh immigration laws, they have added to racial intolerance. The atmosphere supports right-wing politicians such as Austria's staunchly anti-immigration Jorg Haider and France's Jean-Marie Le Pen 

In 1994, the Centre for Turkish Studies at Essen University, a Turkish-German research body, said racism had reached alarming proportions throughout the whole of Europe.

The '90s were turning out to be good years for right-wing extremists. They made strong gains in local elections in Belgium with the anti-immigrant Vlaams Blok nearly doubling its seats in the major part of Antwerp in 1994.

In a government survey in France in 1990, three out of four French people said there were too many Arabs in France, while one out of two said there were too many blacks. More than 90% also agreed that racism is widespread in France. It is directed not only at the 8% of the population (about 4.5 million people) who are legal immigrants, but also at growing numbers of illegal migrants from the Arab world and Africa.

SOS Racism, where young lawyers donate time to confront racial troubles in France, started in 1984. It included a dozen university students who were worried about a series of racist killings and attacks and about the growth of the National Front, a far-right group which preaches that France is for the French. By 1990, SOS Racism had 17,000 registered members and 350 chapters.

Meanwhile, the Front was calling for a crusade on racial purity. It wanted immigrants to be reduced to second-class status: deprived of social security, restricted to two years residence, and forbidden to bring their families.

Nationwide, France's National Front nearly tripled its total of city council seats in municipal elections in June 1995. Many saw the far right's success as an alarming sign of rising xenophobia (hatred of foreigners). The country's far-right leader is Jean-Marie Le Pen; he captured 15% of the presidential vote in April 1995. He says the party's mayors will pursue a policy of "national preference" by "choosing French people in stead of foreigners every time it is possible" for such things as municipal jobs, low-income housing, and welfare benefits. A spokesman for France's immigrants said, "We can imagine monstrous things stemming from a desire to harm foreigners."

A year earlier, in 1994, far-right leader Jorg Haider and his Freedom Party won 22.6% of the vote in a general election in Austria, opening the door to 42 of his deputies in the 183seat parliament. In 1986, the party held only 78% of popular support. But, recent polls rank the Freedom Party the second strongest in the country with close to 24%. The ruling Social Democrats hold only 35% in Austria's five-party system. Riding a wave of anti-foreigner sentiment, Mr. Haider hopes to become prime minister in 1998.

Mr. Haider's party originated in 1949 as a group that included thousands of former Nazis barred from the first election after Austria's liberation. Mr. Haider stresses that the Freedom Party is striving for a more moderate stance and discarding its commitment to Austria's German ethnic identity. Nevertheless, in 1993, 400,000 people signed a national petition he launched to have immigration banned. The government subsequently changed its immigration policy. It set strict quotas on the number of foreigners allowed in each province and beefed up military personnel along its borders.

By 1991, there was so much violence against foreign workers in the German city of Dresden that non-Europeans were afraid to walk the streets even in daylight. While Dresden had become the country's most notorious city for neo-Nazis, nearly all sizeable towns contain cells of youths who prowl the streets at night looking for foreigners to assault. According to the newsmagazine Der Spiegel of Hamburg, the New Right is organizing openly among the poor neighbourhoods of the former East Germany. Willing recruits are found among those who are frustrated with unemployment and the increasing poverty in eastern Germany. In April 1991, gangs of neo-Nazis rampaged through the streets of Frankfurt. It was the day that the Polish-German border was first open to unrestricted travel; teenage skinheads yelled racist slogans and threw stones at Polish tourists.

A year earlier, in December 1990, about 7% of eastern Germany's 18- to 25-year-olds had voted for western Germany's right-wing Republican Party.

By 1994, the liberal weekly Die Zeit reported that right-wing extremists had compiled a list of 250 potential targets-politicians, lawyers, journalists, mayors, social workers, writers, teachers, and business people with a liberal public stance on immigration and refugees and an active resistance to the rightist violence in German towns and cities. Their plan, through threats, harassment and violence, was "the final liquidation of all the destructive, anti-German, and anti-nationalist forces in Germany."

According to Italy's Violence Observatory, a volunteer group in Rome, an average of at least one assault was carried out against foreigners each day in 1993, and the number rose in 1994. About 70% of the violence occurred in Rome, which is home to a large portion of the country's immigrants. Immigration officials estimate that about 1.5 million foreigners are working in Italy legally or illegally, mainly in farming, fishing, and hotel and restaurant businesses. And, marry of the locals don't like it.

In a general election in March 1994, the far-right Italian Social Movement (MSI) was the key component of the National Alliance that won 13.5% of the vote. According to opinion polls, the MSI's leader, Gianfranco Fini, was more popular than Italy's Prime Minister.

It was also in 1994 that more than a fifth of votes cast for the 225 seats in the State Duma (the lower house of the Russian Parliament) went to Vladimir Zhirinovsky's misnamed Liberal Democratic Party. This was ten times more than expected. Mr. Zhirinovsky and his party are openly anti-Semitic, militaristic, and anti-foreigner. According to an article in England's Sunday Telegraph the new Russian right includes respectable and highly placed members of the establishment, government officials, writers, scientists, and painters. "Patriotic" clubs were springing up as well, to which people of "different persuasion or ethnic origin have no access."

In 1995, a human rights group in Moscow said dozens of cases were reported in which minorities were rounded up on the street or arrested in their homes, herded into police buses, shocked with electric cattle prods, beaten, robbed, and released without charges. Human Rights Watch said the raids, which often were led by heavily armed and masked officers, be came more common after the Moscow government publicly urged the city's residents to call the police if they spotted any dark-skinned people in neighbouring apartments. The crackdown was directed almost exclusively at people known to Russians as cherniye (blacks) who migrated from Russia's southern border regions. The report says they became scapegoats for Russia's economic and political troubles in its post-Soviet turmoil. Among the victims of this "state-sponsored racial abuse" were diplomats, foreign students, refugees, business-people, asylum-seekers, and even members of minorities who were born and raised in Moscow.

While many may be alarmed at the success of right-wing political parties, it doesn't necessarily mean that fascism is creeping up on Europe, according to an article in The Economist in December 1994. "But it may mean that parties of the mainstream right will have to pay more attention to the mood of sourness and suspicion that is helping the far right. It may mean that mainstream parties will pander more to xenophrobia and other ugly emotions. And that, in turn, may mean that the postwar consensus [liberalism] could give way to a narrower and less tolerant Europe of prickly nation-states."

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. While a lot of things such as family background and economic conditions influence racist thinking, is there some illogical human need for groups of people to establish themselves as superior? Invite a sociologist or psychologist to your class to talk about what makes people racist.

2. See if you can find someplace where people of different colour or beliefs live together peacefully. Is there such a place on earth?Report on your findings.