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A EUROPEAN DILEMMA: MYRDAL, THE AMERICAN CREED AND EU EUROPE

`America has a negro problem', the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal stated in the introduction to his modern classic, An American Dilemma, first published in 1944. Half a century later, the so-called `immigrant problem' is moving to the top of the political agenda of EU Europe. To speak about a European dilemma in this context means to relate established European values of social solidarity and social responsibility to an increasingly ethnicised and racialised social inequality in European cities. How can the dilemma be made transparent? How can we transcend the disjunctures between `creed' and reality? Along these lines, the paper debates potentialities for transethnic alignment in the US and EU Europe exposed to a common condition of globalisation.

These ideals differ in no respect from the ideals of that European civilization of which we all today form a part. And therefore our watch word today must be Social Solidarity, Social Responsibility. W.E.B. Du Bois (1900)

... in modernity only those institutions can be stabilized that allow for accumulating political experience as well as for continuous appeals to greater social and political justice... But apart from the technological version there is no longer a future-oriented social fantasy in the lands of Europe. Grand narratives of another, better future in politics, social questions, or anything else, are no longer forged there. Redemption is deemed undesirable, and sociopolitical progress ridiculed... The old Europe resembles a corpse whose hair and nails, wealth, and cumulative knowledge are still growing, but the rest is dead. Agnes Heller (1992)

International Sociology, Vol. 10, No. 4, 347-367 (1995)
DOI: 10.1177/026858095010004001


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