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Using some concrete examples, in my study I try to analyze the political challenges which derive from the presence of immigrant (mostly Muslim)communities in European countries. My aim is not primarily to understand the specific religious identity of those communities, but to analyze our own political identity, in other words, the political identity of European societies. I seek an answer to the following question: which are the unquestionable political values or principles we have to insist upon during our dialogues with immigrant communities, and which are the ones which we could bargain about. The second and final part of my study is critical, and examines the causes of the failure of European multiculturalism. My point of view is that the success of the dialogue between European societies and immigrant communities is threatened, among other factors, by our unconditioned attachment to some values and principles which are seen to be inseparable elements of our democratic political culture(for example, the doctrine of human rights), but which deprive the dialogue between cultures not only of legitimacy,but also of any reason and meaning.
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The term stranger simultaneously relates to certain cultural (ethnic) and to some other social history components of modern European societies. Common in them has been that they both are evidences of the distant proximity, the defining characteristic of the peculiar status of a stranger in his or her relation to the members of an in-group. That is what seems to be responsible for the categorial classification shaping the relationship between any stranger and the members of the ingroup. From this formal sociological perspective, the phenomenon of strangeness cannot be eliminated once and for all. This,however, also means that it is an“objective” social fact. Therefore, one has to refuse the views holding that political anti-Semitism is no more than the product of a prejudice. The truly modern attribute of the stranger comes both from the maelstrom of metropolitan public life and from the predominance of the modern nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries.The former corresponds to the state of moving and living as a stranger among strangers. The latter, however, produces outward and internal aliens (sometimes enemies), who are held to be uprooted as not having been born into the territorially bound national community. The construct of a national identity is thus always produced by inclusion and exclusion,with the result of permanently creating newly born strangers.
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Rousseau’s Social Contract is the theoretical foundation of the citizen-state: the free consent of the citizens is the basis of the political community, the spirit of our moral autonomy lies within our obedience to the laws, and the religion of the state is a pure political construction and has no connection with mystical dogmas or miracles. But in the works of Rousseau we can find an opposite orientation too: as the implication of the historisation of anthropology in the Second Discourse, the idealization of the tribal society, the non-reflective, emotive community of men becomes the moral ideal. In the Constitution for Corsica or in the Government of Poland the historical isolation of nations, the “natural”xenophobia of popular customs are normative both politically and morally.With his glorification of historical habits and popular prejudices, Rousseau has become completely isolated among the philosophers of the Enlightenment – and the theoretical forerunner of populist cultural criticism and ethnocentric nationalism.
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