Migrants as the real Europeans

Abstract

The article focuses on the mutual constitutive relations between immigrants and European identities. Brighenti criticises the ideological construction of European identity under de different European Union treaties, from Roma to Schengen, arguing that instead of using what is traditional inclusive notion -citizenship- to recognize the extant population -demos-, the current process focuses on national identity - ethnos- to define the political corpus of the emerging European community. The long standing issue of Western identity, the dialectic and challenging relation between European identity and the "other" embodied in the Islamic immigrant, is recovered by Brighenti to show us that far from abandoning colonial strategies such as creating the other as Criminal or Barbaric, nowadays this is precisely the path through which European identity is being defined into a process that he calls negative supravisibiity. Despite the current processes of transnationalism and blurred frontiers, Brighenti argues, the European space is not ready to fulfill the aspirations of a more multicultural and delocalised society.