Posted on 03/02/2003 10:20:06 AM PST by nickcarraway
When Europe imported the American concept of affirmative action, it made sure that no bureaucrat was left behind.
Ever since Sept. 11, Europeans have been encouraged to believe that the big new problem for their continent is discrimination. Particularly Islamophobia. In other words, prejudice against the European Union's estimated 15 million Muslims.
Europe's antibias bureaucracies, the main brooders on this new menace, are a wonder to behold. There is a European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. Also a European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance. And, of course, there are antibias agencies in each of the EU's 15 member countries. On top of everything else, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights keeps involving itself in European bias issues and recently demanded "that measures taken in the struggle against terrorism do not discriminate in purpose or effect on grounds of race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin." The European Council said it agreed with the High Commissioner.
Affirmative action in Europe has a strange look to it. For openers, it's not called affirmative action. For reasons never logically explicated, but possibly in an effort to de-emphasize the copycat aspect--affirmative action is, after all, an American invention--the European Union calls it "positive discrimination."
Second, and much stranger, it's generally noncontroversial. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon gave affirmative action to the U.S. back in the 1960s, and in the ensuing 40 years Americans have regularly torn passions to tatters in arguing about race and sex preferences. In the U.S., affirmative action means boundless litigation and statewide referendums. Nothing like this happens in Europe. Positive discrimination is growing prodigiously on the continent, and hardly anybody's complaining. The most high-profile critic of ethnic preferences in Europe would appear to be Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, whose fascist and anti-Semitic views do not exactly make him a credible opponent of the positive discrimination trend. Serious mainstream politicians and intellectuals have been no-shows in the loyal opposition to this dogma.
In the 1990s the French government was vowing never to get into discrimination positive. This position had collapsed by 2000, when the French Labor Code was modified not only to bar discrimination on many different grounds (one was "physical appearance") but also to comply with a European Council directive promoting "full equality in practice," exemplified in special measures to help individuals who had suffered discrimination on the grounds of religion, disability, age or sexual orientation. Muslims were the group principally involved, and they are not scarce. They may outnumber practicing Catholics in France.
The U.K. did not previously have laws on sexual orientation, but it will get them this year, thanks to an "employment directive" issued by the EU. The directive bars workplace harassment of homosexuals, including indirect discrimination caused by policies that are not enacted with homosexuals in mind. Also triggering strains in the U.K. is the EU's pressure for something called "age diversity." It goes beyond traditional age-discrimination laws and involves building up your labor force so that it mirrors the age structure of the area. Among those currently signing on to the program in Britain is Domino's Pizza.
The Netherlands has what appears to be the most ambitious affirmative action regime in the EU and generally gets rave reviews from the European Union. On center stage is the country's Act on the Stimulation of Participation of Minorities in the Labor Market, which requires companies and public agencies to build their labor forces so that they reflect the ethnic composition of the areas. (To be sure, there are no sanctions and a lot of companies cheat.) The Netherlands also has an Equal Treatment Commission that monitors a 1994 law barring employment discrimination based on race, sex, marital status and, would you believe, a worker's political ideas.
The EU is in the process of adding ten more countries, mostly from eastern Europe, and these entrants will have to meet EU discrimination standards before they are allowed in. All very positive for one segment of the population--bureaucrats.
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