“Our form of government is called a democracy because its administration is in the hands, not of a few, but of the whole people […]. We are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbour if he does what he likes […].Our city is thrown open to the world, and we never expel a foreigner […]”.
(Pericles Funeral Oration, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.36-2.42).‘I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible.
But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.’
Mahatma Gandhi (YI, 1-6-1921, p. 170)
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The ACCEPT PLURALISM project has just published a HANDBOOK on TOLERANCE AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN EUROPE addressed to young people aged 17-23, i.e. in their late high school years or undergraduate University students. The Handbook explains the relevant terms and concepts to describe and explain cultural and ethnic diversity. It prodives for examples of challenges that ethnic and cultural diversity raise in schools, at the workplace, at hospitals and in the public space and of how these are accommodated in different European countries.
The Handbook seeks to clarify the terms we use in everyday life to speak about diversity, to disentangle the challenges that different religious beliefs, ethnic traditions and ways of life pose to liberal democratic European societies and to appreciate how these can be solved within different local and national contexts. Examples cited in the Handbook include different European countries (Britain, France, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, and Sweden among others) with a view to appreciating the different political and institutional frameworks of each country and their different traditions in dealing with minorities and immigrant populations. The Handbook is an easy and pleasant reading also for the interested citizen who simply wants to know more about this important subject.