EIRP Proceedings, Vol 6 (2011)

Abstract

The last financial and economic crisis, whose effects are fully felt, has disrupted the social relations domain as well, with unpredictable consequences on the relations between people. The poor balance, obtained by official and public recognition of cultural differences is increasingly questioned not only by politicians but also by philosophers and sociologists. Otherness has taken precedence over the ego. The identity markers which form the European cultural mosaic through increased quantity and dominance in public development generate unpredictable risks in the preservation of national identity. The countries receiving the flows of migrants, older or newer, confront a strange phenomena namely the otherness of their own cultural identity, the newcomers are usually of the kind who prefer to live in ethnic enclaves and marginal which decline the opportunities for cultural integration. What is natural, somehow, at the level of the adults is that it reverberates negatively at the level of the children, who cannot follow the same educational route as their natives and thus they cancel their chances of integration in the receiving societies. The effects of multiculturalism dissolution are observed at each step and therefore public policies are increasingly restrictive, preferring the ethnocentric solution of  conservation / preservation of their own cultural identity.