ABSTRACT
The post-Second World War era has witnessed massive changes in the social composition of Western Europe with the influx of millions of migrants from Africa, the Arab world, and South Asia (Castles and Miller 1993; S.Smith 1993; Kofman 1995). Newcomers have encountered host societies reluctant to embrace the heterogeneity that increasingly characterized their societies-reluctance manifesting itself in both violent attacks and in more subtle, everyday practices of exclusion and discrimination. Marginalized socially, politically, and economically in their host societies, “foreigners”—many invited in to re-build Europe’s postwar economy-have mobilized to contest such notions of nationhood and the impediments to full participation that circumstances presented to them.
