Lucia

de Vernai

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July 14, 2008

Europe As a Civil Rights Model? After a Closer Look, Maybe Not

Southerners have never been known for tolerance or progressive diversity measures. Some of the country’s most pivotal historical moments and controversial court decisions concern local authorities violating civil rights.

If you just rolled your eyes thinking, “What did the Texans do now?” I’m sorry to disappoint you. The setting for this particular incident is thousands of miles to the east, in the south of Italy, where Sicilian authorities forced a man to retake a driving test or have his license suspended because he is gay.

The man’s license was renewed for a year, rather than the standard 10 years, because he is a homosexual. A court ruled that the authorities’ actions, that of considering homosexuality a mental illness, were unconstitutional. The man deemed the decision a victory for civil rights. Apparently Italians have some low standards for what constitutes civil rights progress, but these days, open-mindedness is hard to find in Italian politics.

The Vatican has been relentlessly criticizing the attempts to give common-law marriages and other unions in Italy rights, especially after Spain, a traditionally Catholic country, and Great Britain legalized them. But even the Church was opposed to the government’s recent proposal to fingerprint all ethnic Roma people in the country, a move political proponents say will help curb illegal immigration and keep track of the traditionally nomad population.

While most Roma people are from Italy and Romania (and hence either Italian or EU citizens), Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi’s conservative government refers to them as an “emergency” and blames them for crime. But wait – didn’t the Italians try that keeping-track-of-an-ethnic-group thing back in the day? Except with Jews and that guy who made trains run on time? Hmm.

All this is really starting to suck the fun out of flaunting my red EU passport in front of liberal friends green with envy that I can live places they only visit. The sultry call of freethinking, cultured, sophisticated Europe of Ernest Hemingway – well OK, of Johnny Depp – is growing faint.

Instead of the ideals of the old – like multi-party systems, working universal health care and paid monthly vacations – today, the mention of Europe increasingly brings to mind conservative (even nationalistic) laws, frisky leaders with model girlfriends and sketchy trade agreements between the Russian industrial giant GASPROM and whatever Eastern European country is at its mercy.   

Dammit people, can you please get with the program? We have an election coming up here and if we can’t point across the ocean at you to show how welfare-state, populist, open-border policies work out to everyone’s benefit, then we’ll have to focus on coming up with our own solutions. And that would cut into our fundraising time.

Europe’s struggle to protect civil rights is not that different from our own. The concept of a united European community is only a few decades old, and internal and external pressures create political situations that resemble ours in many ways. While respecting our necessary differences, maybe for a change Europe can take a few lessons from American civil rights history to solve their problems.

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