rise of minorities with claims to self-determination. Scotland is number one, Catalonia number two and so on. But absent from this discussion of self-determination is what I will call the presence of subminorities, by which I mean those inhabitants of Europe whose connection to Europe are, at best, at least in the political sense, tenuous, indeterminate and extremely fragile. And so Mr President, my question is this: in this moment of what I would call intense proximity, proximity between different constructs, between citizens and inhabitants, how do we deal with subminorities, and not with the minorities encompassed by the New Narrative for Europe?
José Manuel Durão Barroso Thank you. First of all, your pig soup story is really very powerful, and [it is] repugnant that it happened at all. Did it? This is the first time I’ve heard of pig soup. We don’t have it in Portugal, but there you are: we don’t have the same kind of soup everywhere in Europe! [The events are factual, and led to a ban on its distribution in France in 2007 (eds).] The problems you raise about
citizens and inhabitants are very much to the point. It is indeed one of the issues that concerns me the most today. I alluded earlier to anti-European parties. Well, surveys show that the reason people give for voting for them is not that they are against Europeans or the EU, but because they don’t want more foreigners, say, in Britain, whether from Europe or elsewhere. One of the most important challenges we have today is, to use your own words, how we can deal with this intense proximity with communities that we refer to as minorities or, as you have said, subminorities. How can we deal with it? I think, from that point of view we — Europe, the European Union and European citizens — have one of the most advanced programmes in the world. We have legislation on non-discrimination, and when there were problems, as for example in France with the Roma people, it was the European Commission that stepped in and was very firm with the French authorities about the fact that this sort of discrimination is unacceptable. I’m proud of that. There are xenophobic movements now in Europe — indeed, the world over. You see it anywhere you look. And sometimes