Cross-cultural Co-operation among Displaced Persons: a democratic potential for self-reliant integration in the host society

Abstract

In the Western European setting, a serious reflection is needed to analyze whether there is any effective insider way to intervene on behalf of the protection of human rights and dignity of displaced people, without banging our heads against a brick wall of locally defined national interests. While academics and international human rights and humanitarian organizations may afford to exercise criticism against governments, this is certainly not the with most refugees. Without a reassuring legal status and economic background, and without a social community which they would belong to, these people hardly dare criticize those institutions' policies, upon which they are completely dependant. Refugees are individual cases with individual files at immigration offices and various ministerial bodies, and they have daily fears of individual expulsion. So, criticism may be an instrument of established local citizens and their organizations sympathetic to the case of displaced people, but it is by no means the adequate instrument of displaced people themselves. There certainly is an individual escape route for the guys. They show complete loyalty, learn the local language rapidly and successfully, and are absorbed in the host society by finding a job. These nice guys are mostly of high education, of white skin, of European appearance and, overwhelmingly, of the male sex. What about the rest? Our point of departure when drafting the Displaced Citizenship Programme was that the huge human potential of displaced persons, which is largely wasted today, should be turned directly into a driving instrument of refugee integration at both the local and the international level. This primarily means communication between displaced individuals, and between these individuals and ethnic or multicultural refugee or migrant groups. This insiders' communication is probably the most responsible and most sensitive way to identify common needs and interests. Such an identification is the very basis for future formulation, expression and representation of these needs and interests. Communication creates the chance for these identified common interests also to draw on the skills and capacities of displaced people, particularly of the more talented and highly educated in supporting the less educated and the newcomers. Both local and world-wide insiders' communication makes possible a feeling of community, of a new, multicultural identity, which does not ignore in any way the ethnic identity of these people, nor their integration process in the recipient (host) society.