ABSTRACT

Although the EU treaties now provide a common framework for fighting racial discrimination (through Art.13 of the Amsterdam treaty and the subsequent anti-racist directives) this new common framework masks a variety of national contexts in terms of official anti-racist policies and legislation, the degree of success, character and level of development of anti-racist movements, and the political, socio-economic and cultural contexts in which policies and movements emerge. The aim of this chapter is to provide an understanding of the impact of the new EU legislation on these differing national contexts. The impact in two countries are compared, the UK and Italy. Thus a country of new immigration where an anti-racist policy framework has only recently been developed by governing institutions and reflects EU treaty and legislative obligations (that is Italy), is compared with a country with a long-standing anti-racist policy framework, reflecting a deeper experience of dealing with the social effects of long-standing mass immigration (UK). The chapter will explore the effects of Europeanisation (represented by a common European legislative framework and policy exchange among policy-makers and anti-racist movements). In particular, the degree to which a Europeanised anti-racist policy-making sphere – in which policy actors share the EU level of decision-making as a common reference – has emerged or is emerging will be assessed. The chapter will draw on interviews with civil society and institutional actors undertaken in the two countries as part of an EU-wide research project on the civil society-governance relationship.