ABSTRACT
British research in the area of ethnic relations has been profoundly affected by the fundamental changes which have been taking place in the world over the past 20 years and which have created a climate of great uncertainty. While the impact of membership of the European Union has generated considerable debate, wider issues have also been salient. We have seen how the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe has given rise to new foci of conflict. The war in the Balkans shows that we can no longer make comfortable assumptions about economic, political and social structures or their capacity to contain conflict or integrate newcomers. Governments throughout the world have been introducing new restrictions on immigration and asylum policy at the same time as a disturbing rise of ethnic nationalism, racial violence and the extreme right (Ford 1992). These developments have had an impact on the lives of settled ethnic minority populations. Proponents of the theory of ‘globalisation’ stress that national governments can make little impact on their own on this state of affairs although closed formulations of this idea are strongly contested by writers who dispute the novelty of these developments and argue that there are new ways in which democratic influence can be brought to bear (Hirst and Thompson 1996). Others point to the way in which the cultural arena is increasingly characterised by syncretism and global influences, so that youth culture is both international and profoundly local/tribal (Back 1995; G. Bauman 1997; Hall and du Gay 1996).
