ABSTRACT
In 1994 the American scholar Patrick Ireland claimed that ‘European politics is in many respects becoming the politics of ethnicity’. 1 The arrival of a large number of immigrants from outside Europe is certainly a new phenomenon in European history. Traditionally, Europe exported people as well as revolutionary ideas and new technologies. From the beginning of the European diaspora in the early sixteenth century up to 1915, some 52 million Europeans emigrated, about 34 million of them to the United States. 2
The fact that immigrants from outside Europe may nowadays make up as much as five per cent of the total population of the fifteen countries of the European Union is thus a considerable novelty, the largest addition to the gene pool of Western Europe since the barbarian invasions of the fifth century. Insofar as it is part of the aftermath of empire, it is primarily the result of the attraction which the higher standard of living enjoyed by Europeans has for the inhabitants of the countries which they formerly conquered and occupied. And to the extent that this higher standard of living is partly the outcome of the way the Europeans exploited their former colonies, there is perhaps a certain historical justice in the problems said to be created by the immigrants’ presence in Western Europe. The objection to this argument is that the price is not being paid by the section of society which most benefited from the European colonisation of Africa and Asia, the upper and upper middle classes. It is being paid by the poorest members of the urban proletariat.
