A conference on combating racism in Europe has been warned that the US model of affirmative action may not be applicable here.
Prof Nathan Glazer of Harvard University told the conference, "Affirmative Action as a Model for Europe?", that caution was needed in applying the US experience to the EU. The conference, supported by the European Commission, took place in Innsbruck, Austria, last Thursday and Friday.
While the US had a clear category of a black lower class, in Europe the problem of race was much more complex and diverse, Prof Glazer said. The US also had a constitution and a Supreme Court which were "authoritative and respected ways of dealing with problems".
Third, the attitude to immigration was different in the US, Canada and Australia from that in Europe. "They are immigration countries with a historical attitude towards incorporation. As yet there is no deep emotional commitment to this in Europe."
Prof Earl Lewis of the University of Michigan said that in the 1960s affirmative action was "fairly conservative state action. Democrats and Republicans alike feared what they saw on their TV screens - riots, the open questioning of authority . . . [President] Johnson understood that individuals with a stake in society made better - and perhaps quieter - citizens."
Affirmative action was now under scrutiny after a number of referendums and lawsuits which had profound implications for higher education, he said.
"The particular racial, ethnic, gender mix that universities have has broader and deeper implications than the quality of the student's educational experience." It would determine the make-up of the academic staffs and the higher professions of tomorrow, he said. But diversity also enriched the educational experience.
Prof Anita LaFrance Allen of the University of Pennsylvania said that, as a black woman born to southern parents while segregation was legally enforced, "I owe a great deal to the affirmative action policies that pervaded American education and employment in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The finest public and private schools were open to me only because of progressive civil rights law and affirmative action policies."
Now, she said, affirmative action in the US was being "wrongfully, categorically denigrated and prematurely aborted by old-fashioned racism, misplaced envy and political expediency".
Prof Erna Appelt of the University of Innsbruck said the Canadian experience was likely to prove more relevant to Europe. The US racial conflict was stamped with the history of slavery. Canada, like Europe, was only recently developing from a "white" bicultural society into a multicultural one. There affirmative action policies had proved much less contentious than in the US.