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SHORTLY after September 11, 2001, as the eyes of the world turned on Afghanistan and the nearby region, arm-chair critics queried the geographic constitution of these countries. They also questioned their historic origin as sovereign states as we now known them. TV pictures showed Afghanistan to consist of land patches made up of veritable dustbowls with mud-houses surging out of a sandstone terrain. It was depicted as a country with apparently no organizational administrative structure as currently known to the west. Its male folk wore a special kind of stuffed-up turban which gave them a flattened round-bunned head making them look more virile than their female partners with their plain veiled heads, crouching and feeding a multitude of children.

After Kabul fell, attention soon hovered to the west over the Tora Bora mountains which hid natural caves carved out like Swiss-cheese holes bordering on Pakistan. This was another stan country in a region where the word either meant a specific ‘country’ or ‘one-of-those-Asian-lands’, depending on whether the view was taken from a position east or west of Iran. As chodars gave way to baton-wielding Pakistani police, talk shifted like the region’s sand to more solid areas of thought. Religious and moral fundamentalism, tribes and languages, ethnic origins and the consequential divides were hot curry on the menu.

A few months later, as war loomed on the horizon between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, the agenda was arms and war-lords who, none the less, still hold their feudal sway over much of the region. Further east, inasmuch as stark black is the colour of female attire in Pakistan, a motley of light-hued silk saris embroiders the scenery of heavily populated towns across the border in Hindustan. There, by sheer military might and lots of diplomacy, the British had meshed out a massive sub-continent from feuding patches of territory led by baronets eager to retain their fiefdoms into an All India Union.

Talk about the divide between Pakistan and India dates back to the time when the sub-continent was carved into two sovereign states. In 1947, the British had flapped out a Muslim state formed on a pair of wings geographically sinewed to a Hindu back-bone. Pakistan faced up to an identity crisis from its very birth when its founder had hoped that partition would give him the whole of Punjab and Bengal. These were, however, divided and he was left only with what he later described as "a moth-eaten Pakistan". After sending Pathan tribesmen into the kingdom of Kashmir, all that Pakistan managed to hold to was a narrow strip of land bordering on Punjab and the remote mountains of the north. No wonder the land strip was called "the chicken-neck", while India gloated on the jewel in the crown, the Kashmir Valley.

Kashmir to the north had always been a bone of contention between Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan, mainly due to a subliminal link to its huge reserves of melting snow from the Himalaya range. Although very often the blame for the rift in Jammu and Kashmir has been put on the prevailing division based on religion on either side of the line of control, the issue of water has only been rarely mentioned and has very little, if at all, made its way through the flood-gates of international political reasoning. Yet an issue it is, which has always thirst for serious consideration because of the region’s aridity. As experts say, water may be a major cause of contention leading to war this century.

Further east, Pakistani Bengal with an 83% Moslem and 16% Hindu population, had long felt forlorn by the central government in Karachi. After the southern Ganges delta was devastated by a cyclonic tidal wave in 1971, with floods killing at least 220,000 persons and destroying or damaging 350,000 dwellings, civil war broke out in Dhaka. As the Indian army unfailingly gave a helping hand, Pakistan soon lost its weaker flap. The Pakistani army surrendered its eastern Venice to an Indian general and eastern Bengal spliced away to freedom as Bangladesh.

Elsewhere to the south of the sub-continent, Ceylon, with a mainly Buddhist population of 70% as against only 15% Hindus and 7% Muslims, had constituted a separate colony since 1802. Constantly increasing its share in self-government under its British occupiers, it gained absolute independence in 1948. Meanwhile in India, where a plethora of tribes, languages and cults had ever since formed the vertebrae of the Union, the most plausible solution to their individuality lay in the country’s division into several regional governments run by State Legislatures. While in India some 81% of the population are Hindus, in Pakistan Moslems pass the 97% mark.

The raison d’etre for the existence of these states as separate entitities lies in their majority religions and recent historical ontology. So does their keeping together in a cohesive nation notwithstanding there might be ethnic or political influences which at times threaten their break-up. Nowadays, as in the case of western Bengal, economic and social gaps between one region and another may be more of a major cause for concern than ever before. If fired by accidental events of historical magnitude, these differences might lead to a rift between regions and to their eventual separation. A case in point in recent history is less economically developed Slovakia which peacefully opted out of its union with Bohemia and Moravia with which it had formed Czechoslovakia since 1918. Otherwise, given the economic might needed for a country to fend for itself, no other region in the Indian sub-continent has to date mustered enough strength to force a break-out into a separate identity for any reason hinged on ethnic, linguistic or tribal causes.

The concept of a common religion is evinced in Afghanistan where some 84% of the population belongs to the Sunni sect of Islam, like 77% of Pakistanis who are also Sunnis. Sunna, or tradition, is distinct from what the actual text of the Koran says, even if Sunni Moslems recognize both tradition and the writings of the Prophet. There is, however, in Afghanistan, a minority of one million persons or 15% of the population who, like 96% of the population of bordering Iran, are Shiah Moslems and only believe in the written text of the Koran. In Pakistan, the Shiahs are only 20%.

A very similar parallel to the orthodoxy practised by Shiahs and Sunnis may be found in the west between Catholics, who recognize the Bible and apostolic tradition, and Protestants, who mainly abide by the written Word. The situation shows up in the geographic division of Ireland in 1921, which was sectored into six northern counties forming part within the United Kingdom as Northern Ireleand, and another 26 counties with an area of 26,600 square miles constituting Eire, or the Irish Republic. There, some 92% of the population are Catholic.

Yet in considering the division of states, religion is not the only factor to be taken into consideration. As in the case of the Indian sub-continent, it was mainly a matter of expediency, very much like that of Britain wanting to depart from a major problem area while still finding its feet after having fought a bloody world war, or that of a Soviet occupying force whose main concern was to carve out an independent Baluchistan which could harbour Red Navy ships in the Indian Ocean. Many a time, international or regional political expediency has given way to a weird geo-architecture to which religion, ethnicity or other plausible factors only play second fiddle on the altar of self-interest.

Even so, expediency may take several shapes and forms. Small states like Andorra, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco and the Vatican City have appeared on the European scene centuries ago and they still plod along as independent states. On an opposite scale, large unions of countries and territories spreading over several time-zones and showing up north of the Tropic of Cancer, have only tied the knot among their separate regions in relatively recent epochs. The United States of America came into being, even if in kernel form, with the Declaration of Independence of the 13 states of the then American Union in 1776. The former Russian Soviet Republic was a successor to Czarist Russia, and it existed as such from 1918 to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989, while China was established in its present cross-channel set-up since 1949. Add-ons but no divisions in a communist system invariably followed suit at a regular pace.

The emerging profile of the five smallest European states is that of a naturally delimited geographic entity studded with ancestry, history and religion. With a territorial area of 108.7 acres (less than a quarter of a square mile) and a population of about 1,000 persons the Vatican City is the smallest state wielding spiritual power over a billion Catholics worldwide. Andorra, in the eastern Pyrenees, is some ten times larger, 190 square miles with a population of 68,000 inhabitants, while Malta, in the southernmost tip of Europe, has for its 122 sq. miles of space a population of 340,000 inhabitants.

The islands of Malta, Gozo and Comino, forming the Maltese archipelago to the south of Sicily, though held by various powers and nations, today owe their statehood mainly due to their insularity, their position as a cross-road between Europe and Africa, and their distance of a mere 60 miles from the Italian littoral. With a a predominant Catholic religion and a language verging as to some 60% on the Semitic and 40% on the Romance, and an ethnicity in quasi-inverse proportion, if still recognizable, of Caucasian and Arab origins, Malta was immediately granted United Nations membership a few weeks after obtaining independence from the United Kingdom in 1964.

The underlying reason for the Vatican City State is to provide an extra-territorial and independent territory for the Holy See which governs the Roman Catholic Church spread throughout the world. From a historical and religious viewpoint, the Pope had held control over a stretch of land in central Italy ranging for 17,000 square miles from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic seas with a population of over 3 million and a sizeable army to go with it, until 1870 when the Papal States were incorporated with the Kingdom of Italy.

Although the three other enclaves have a historical origin dating back centuries, they also today embrace an economic existence founded on this reality. The co-principality of Andorra has been under the joint sovereignty of France and the Bishop of Urgel, Spain, since 1278. The tourist industry during the summer months has long been recognized as the mainstay of the territory, generating considerable prosperity. Besides, many immigrants have also been attracted to the principality’s thriving economy with its lack of income taxes. Catalan is mainly spoken in the six villages on the high-lying territory in the Pyrenees.

Monaco, on the French riviera, is another principality belonging since 1297 to the House of Grimaldi. With a population of some 30,000 and an area of 8 sq. miles, its economy is also based on tourism and its renowned casinò. Liechtenstein, also a principality riding astride Austria and Switzerland with a population of 25,000 and a land area of 62 sq. miles, has a bountiful tourist industry and is also famed as a tax-haven.

So the key-words here are history (including language and religion), geography (insularity and other specifics) and the economy, which includes finance and tourism. The prevailing idea is that "small is beautiful" yet for how long can a relatively simple economy be kept going the way it is, no matter what prince or government might say, if the local population is bent on raising its standard of living? Although industry would promptly present itself as an obvious solution, even light industry at that would harm the pristine nature of a territory, the environment, and consequently tourism. It is either French croissant or Swiss roll, but not both in the same voracious gulp. That has to be left for countries with land to spare.

If small is really beautiful but not a country to be strongly desired, then medium-sized or extra-large would surely fit the modern-day state. Medium-sized like the individual States of Africa or of Latin America, or extra-large like the growing European Union, the United States or Canada. Granted that a people can muster enough political clout to form itself into a race of convenience, it is only the availability of territory and a well-oiled economy that can turn such an aggregation into a respectable nation.

America was still uncharted territory when Columbus set foot on its southern lowlands in 1498. The ethnic and historical evolution that followed gave rise to a series of geographic entities which, some 300 years later, were divided into a predominantly Hispanic south and a British-French north. Even if in those days the fate of the local indigenous tribes, their cultural treatment and geographic displacement were a matter of dubious, if any, consequent importance to the refined colonizers, the Union has evolved into a motley of nationalities which have taken up home in the 13 original states and 37 other territories. Now made up of 50 states in all, Alaska and Hawaii were the last two territories to be granted statehood in 1959.

The Federal Constitution of 1787 establishes a government composed of three co-ordinate branches. The Executive branch is run by the Presidency and the Cabinet, while all Legislative power is vested in a Congress consisting of a Senate and a House of Representatives. The Judicial branch is the third, though in actual fact the tripod has long been given a fourth wobbly leg called the press and media. Each State is guaranteed its own republican constitution deriving its authority from the people of that state, providing for a two-House legislature, a governor and other executive officials, and a judicial system of its own. In any federal or state set-up, democracy is the word.

The land area of the USA is of 3.5 million square miles, with 61 square miles for the District of Columbia, 1,049 for Rhode Island and 566,432 for Alaska. Further up to the north, Canada is made up of 12 provincial and territorial units having an amazingly equal total land spread, with provinces ranging from 2,184 square miles for Prince Edward Island and 20,402 for Nova Scotia to 1.25 million for the Northwest Territories. On average the size of each of the 62 geographic units fitting in northern America territory is 113,000 square miles.

The economic success of this massive land area may be attributed to various factors, each bearing a multiplier effect on the other. Contrary to European countries which had sustained bloody wars fighting each other for several centuries within their own land mass, northern America did not suffer any recent internecine warfare. Moreover state-craft, in both its Presidential and Westminster forms, has always had a high degree of organizational level, and the economy has been liberally geared and managed on a fast-moving production line which is symptomatic of the whole American system. The vastness of land and the distribution of the population have also contributed to the accumulation of forces making up the accidence of this geographic and historical "mega" or huge reality.

Adopting the northern American criterion of landmass proportion (113,000 square miles), the former Soviet Union with an area of 8.65 million square miles would have been homeland to some 77 geographical units. In actual fact, it was a mixed union one-half as much more than that amount, comprising 126 territories and regions. These were in turn sub-divided into districts, towns, urban settlements and rural districts, with lee-way for a number of smaller nationalities, forming their own self-governing units as autonomous republics, regions and national areas. Constitutionally, however, the Union was divided into 15 major Republics, each of which was inhabited by a major nationality after which the Republic was called.

Again, the number of units which would fit in 3.6 million square mile China (in terms of the northern American landmass reasoning) would be of some 32 units. In effect, there are 21 provinces, five autonomous regions largely inhabited by national minorities, like Inner Mongolia and Tibet, and three centrally controlled municipalities, being Peking, Shangai and Tientsin. At local government level, the country is further divided into chou, counties and municipalities, and into towns and rural communes. Some 6% of the billion or so population are non-Han, or non-racial Chinese.

Calculating landmasses and population figures may be an interesting exercise in its own right, yet the real task boils down to achieving a decently manageable geographic and political unit, which may vary in each continent, where the proportion of land, population and economic resources would fit into as much a fairly equal distribution pattern as possible. Such geo-political unit is today known by the name of the Nation State, evolving as it were from a co-incidence of historical accidence, statesmanship, ethnicity, language and religion. Shedding away any of these components and adopting new political and legislative criteria, or in a few words remodelling the Nation State, is a gruesome and painful task.

If the reasoning behind the Nation State’s existence is Jeremy Bentham’s "greatest happiness of the greatest number", the dying masses of unfed peoples in Africa and Asia does certainly cast a definitive blow to such premise. The 1996 World Food Summit had pledged to cut the number of hungry around the world from more than 800 million people to 400 million by 2015. Six years later, the United Nations estimated that only 25 million had come off the hungry list since then. Meanwhile, millions of tons of agricultural produce are dumped in Europe and northern America each year in a safety-valve exercise to keep market prices up. Transport to needy countries, it is argued, is highly expensive and regretably most of the goods are perishable.

Transport and communications go hand in hand in the global village we now live in, and the key-word which encompasses both concepts is energy and the means for its distribution. Energy which is distributed by oil tankers that carry the oil which drives more ships and aircraft for the transport of goods and persons and to keep the electricity turbines going, and energy in the form of packets of electric waves making their way to households and industry through grid systems, telecommunication radio-waves and telephone lines fixed to complementary apparata receiving coded data at the other end.

In making inroads into the nature of the Nation State we cannot but see that the essential formative elements of an ideal state are a well defined geophysical location within which one or more population groups sharing a common language, culture and religion, find a common home which is able to sustain their independent economic growth based on an adequate supply of energy. Whenever in the course of history these circles of interest rub a bit too much against each other, friction ensues and the state may implode. Where the fragments go and what becomes of the individual formative elements in the system which is likely to emerge phoenix-like out of the rubble, is only a matter of high conjecture.

EXPERIENCE is currently showing us the failure of the fairly large nation-state and the ever growing support for the smaller, neighbourhood political structure such as the kibbutz and, at local government level, the city-state. As I see it, future democracy will be based on world government made up of several tiny city-states evolving into larger non-political complexes over decades.

This, I opine, would be the blue-print for a world government.

One thing to consider is that there is to be enough land for persons. We would also need a considerable amount of terraforming, both environmental, especially insofar as water and energy go, and the engineering of democratic-economic units able to sustain small, but growing, neighbourhoods. The big nation-state, or worse still confederation of large states, is slowly being done away with as history shows.

Countries have till now been formed through history, according to the experiences of each era, by the evolution of smaller regions and princely governments, besides other similar factors. Yet if we were to conduct a study by DNA classification, we would find that ethnic realities are much more different and inconsistent than we believe.

We need also develop a reliable system of conflict resolution. A place where to experiment all this and hopefully put it into practice is Africa, a veritable geographical mass of sub-saharan, tribes, religions and languages which have been joined together and split up according to the exigencies of colonial powers. Now they are getting to confederate, which will be a long-term process, I suppose. It is to be remembered that most of the existing African nations are full fledged members of the Commonwealth, which institution is very symptomatic of the shape of worldwide political things to come.

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THERE are two questions which have vexed me absolutely since my coming of technological age at the time of the moon swivels and landings of the late sixties. Since then, and notwithstanding the advance of the electronic age, I have visualised a threesome of philospher-mathematicians perpetually revolving round a drawing-table, wearing wizard hats and specs delicately hinged between ears and forehead or handled as sucking implements, meticulously calculating with compasses, square and slide rules the intricacies of my queries.

That was the time I was reading Bertrand Russell’s An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, so I had to be inquisitive and trouble myself with questions perhaps to achieve in philosophy that which I could not, out of the paucity of my technological resources, accomplish in science. So I asked, we are getting to the moon, we got there alright, then to the planets and after that to the stars, out to the farthest galaxy and farther still. But beyond that, will there be a final knock-off point, like a cul-de-sac, where we crash against a wall of nothingness and bounce back along exactly the same route or shall we get going along, creating space before us as long as we have the energy to proceed? This, at the time, I called the Knock-on Theory, like getting your spaceship stopped suddenly and putting your hand out to knock against a hard edge.

I was also reading René Descartes at the time, the famous French philosopher, mathematician and author who thought out the maxim cogito, ergo sum – I think, so I am, and since I never took anything lying down I had of necessity to develop my corollary to his principle. I think, or at least that is what I believe I do. So does my neighbour and all people in the world and animals too, even if with less cognitive abilities than those which humans enjoy. Moreover, we are all made of the same elements the world is made of. Ergo, if me, neighbour, people and animals can think, and we are made of the same stuff as the universe, then the universe can think about itself. This I today call the Self-aware Cosmos Theory.

Allow me some splitting and slicing of the two theories. Man, ever wanting to be at the centre of the universe, is rushing towards nowhere, thinking and hoping in the process there will be an edge to contain him. This is also the paradox of the universe which like man, ever thinking so hard but disjointedly about himself, introspects beneath its cosmic navel and considers itself, like a throbbing heart, either on the verge of a big crunch into the singularity of an intrafinite critical mass or else bursting ever farther at its seams in a hyperfinite big-bang.

The next inference would be that for the universe, alias nature, the mathematical propositions of space and time are of no consequence. Yesterday’s erupting Mount St Helen’s belching dark ashes miles up and today’s burning bush threatening Australian cities and the human stock inside them are no more than tiny specks of grit as viewed against our sun from half an astronomical unit away a few million years from now. But today they look like catastrophe when, in terms of human dimensions, the distance between the two event points spans over half the global surface and the time count turns a sand-glass round and round for half a generation. To our cyber-human space traveller heading towards the edge of nothingness, his saga is calculated in giga-trillion unit-years in a universe where space and time splice into an extravagant "mast-piece" very much resembling a mathematical cosmic pole around which our hypothetical universal sphere revolves.

Trimming down the cosmos to its grass-root building blocks, time and extravagance seem to have entwined in nature in the multi-million year genetic strand of the Y chromosome. This strand, which gives man his masculinity has, like the three-times larger X chromosome for women, evolved from a very ancient pair of non-sex autosomes which 300 million years ago decided to go their separate way. While the Y chromosome shrivelled in size by losing most of its genes, it developed a mode of repairing itself and kept those genes which currently give male determination. On its part X was less instable and retained its original quasi-hermaphroditic endowment largely intact, outdoing our evaluations about a weaker sex which is actually a strong replica of the unique original template. It also shows that life is full of surprises in that 300 million years can make the difference between not having or having sexuality in humans and invertedly demonstrating that there is more disposable life force in presumed weakness than in a puffed up withered strand of genes.

Another surprise which favours the thinking-universe theory lies in that while Einstein was all in favour of matter expending its energy by travelling at the squared speed of light, it is now perceived that human motion equally reflects the same theory. That makes a point against my having any energy left to put my hand out of the spaceship when I knock against nothingness, but I can still figure out fat, thin, young and old straddlers walking up a garden path with different energy packs inside their bodies. I shall take you along the same path expounding a scientific survey which was made in Einstein’s century when people still thought in order to justify their Ph.Ds.

In a park with two entry points used by commuters during the rush hour, not all people walk directly from point to point in the shortest time possible. Most do, creating an average direct line between the two gates, but coming from opposite directions they keep bumping into each other, which makes their walking tedious, tiresome and a jiffy longer than had they been alone on the same path. Others prefer enjoying a stroll in the park, or a deviant bit of it, for some recreation, while another few cunningly arch along the median line from point to point to achieve mobility, non-agglomeration and some enjoyment in treading the green, green grass of nature under their feet. That’s it, for them it’s like walking over nature in real time and creating new foot-grazed pathways by the age they would not need to commute to work any longer. Fact is that the sprightly thin and young deviate from the middle line much more frequently than the fat who find exerting pressure a very hefty incubus and the old who lack energy.

Now transpose your conceptualization to view the park as a terrestrial graph scale, the commuters as individual nations and mega-corporations including the U.N. on the base-line of the drawing, the two gate-ways as the entry and exit points of the measured time-space vertical axis, and the direct line as the median of problems cropping up with the cross-bumping of commuters (and the individual and social problems they create) along nature’s pathway. Other than the commuters’ physical classifications which make for further consideration, the pathway is rough and dusty, creating a veritable dust-bowl which leaves a distinctive aura on your corporate shoes in dry weather and a Picasso-tainted tale-telling splash when the path is general mud and slippy.

One day a sophomore thinks there is more to watching real life than jotting down notes on the transient bubbling out of event cosmology. So he strolls out a few yards away from the pathway up a hillock and lies down wrists crossed between nape and lush grassland, watching and thinking. This land has to be preserved, so the thinking goes, used and enjoyed in its pristine beauty, still walked on by commuters but also intermittently looked at sideways by them. It still has to serve as a recreational parkland for strollers who have to perceive a continuity between both sides of the pathway and an organized mass of packets of humanity walking along it like a chopped up electronic message travelling across the world-wide web of telephone lines. No bumping, no dust, no strait gate-way queuing or visible notices which have to be read and digested to make you feel that the eye of the law is constantly watching you, even in the parkland. How to do?

Green rubber covering for the pathway with plastic grass blades shooting out in abundance to make both walking and looking at more plausible. A track with a somewhat flattened out crown of the road, through which winds a darker green centre-strip, for the hither and thither moving on either side of heavier and older generations of commuters as opposed to the more brisk and adventurous fast voyagers to whom it would be prompted, by a single semiotic sign indicating fastness hung up at the gate-way, to take to the curved-down edge of the path from where, knowing their actions, they would not hesitate to trespass onto the real herbage in short cut bids. When all’s said and done, the gardener would smile pleasantly to himself and wonder how much a scarcity of words and an efficient use of gray matter power can keep legs going without cracking into each other.

So you see, even in nature, the day is for the non-interventionist, for the parallel kerb walker who can milch situations and reap benefits without essentially overdoing or ruining the essence of any element. Take water, made of two abundant elements, but also finite if used in schemes where no feasible projections are made. We might wish to save the planet from the extinction of carbon-based resources or from pollution, so we might think hydrogen to be the best solution. Hydrogen from solar fed electrolysis giving us twice as much of the element as oxygen. Alright, that means purer air too, better breathing and cleaner lungs: it all translates to better living, perhaps more smiles around. But what if we overdo it, or something goes wrong up the graph and the water supply decreases and the production curve folds haywire in a crisis which pushes the heat up, parches earth and seas, and produces a Venus-like atmosphere where a returning spaceman would be unable to find his way back optically or infometrically to home-base?

Synoptically, the key-words are constant thinking and monitoring. Thinking, the same way the universe thinks about itself so that no cosmic rider, himself as much part of the universal thinker as the whole, would ride over a critical edge about whose actual existence he is still very much in doubt. So he has to collect lots of information and mathematically monitor the cosmos around him throughout his journey, travelling through paradox forces which mingle time and space inextricably together and in such manner that philosphical vision is often obfuscated while politics produces a myopia as dumb as a darkened sun. Nature is not a fast runner by our reckoning, but it might well be the winner in the last analysis in its infinitesimal minute order of time. So our perspectives have to change. If we perspire and rush about to decide without having time to think and monitor events, nature can trudge along like a tortoise knowing it will finally win the day against the mindless sprightly rabbit.

We have perforce to engineer situations, extrapolating Einstein’s theory in letting mental energy expend itself with a force, feeding on the product of knowledge and capability, to affect nature. Quick solutions to resolve partial problems, for which scientists only get honourable mention in specious military or commercial circles, must give way to clustered thinking directed towards achievement in ever more integrated spans of action. The writing on the wall is simple and clear. Survival, not of the fittest but of humanity, where every mind counts and contributes to the universal thinker. So the thinking would also have to come from the simplest element, man, in his everyday activities where one has to decide about one’s behaviour connected to living. Can I hear you say an Everyman’s Decalogue for Nature? I fully agree.

VAST as the Baltic Sea might seem to be, with an expanse of 386 thousand square kilometers, its 33 billion cubic meters of brackish water cannot take any more chemical effluent into it with impunity. Seen from an elevated position this inner lake of the North Sea, which looks like a cross between a sea-horse and a bison, is a closed sea on average barely 85 meters deep and by rule of thumb some 1,400 km long and 320 km wide. With little if any drain, its waters are only renewed about every thirty years.

Although many rivers flow into it giving it the freshness of inland lakes and mountain waters, there is also the acidity of chemicals coming from industrial compounds and the distinctive pungency of human waste effluent so that as a result of this unholy mixture, an ever dwindling amount of contaminated fish is now caught. Even so, fish like the cod which is caught in the southern warmer waters of the Baltic are smaller to the eye when measured against the cod taken along the shores of Norway, these cod having seemingly developed an internal nano biotechnology to cope with the environment.

The reproduction of certain species of fish, such as cod, sprat and herring, are now very much affected by pollution from the effluents of industries and urban areas other than agricultural fertilizers seeping through the water table into the sea. So that today, 80 million people who live in the nine surrounding states along the Baltic coast and within its catchment area, who view the sea as an important source for their fishing and tourist industries, are thinking twice as to the dependence of their states’ livelihood to such a great proportion on the well being of this enclosed sea.

History books recall the glory of the Hanseatic League which at the peak of its power in the fourteenth century extended from modern Belgium to Poland. Its fleet of tall masted ships ruled the northern waters until the free association of nordic nations came to ruins when business lost its fishy touch. It came with the loss of the herring trade when these fish abandoned their haunts off the Swedish coasts and opted to spawn close to the shores of Holland.

Another economic league, the European Union, is now intent on improving the lot of cetaceans. Thousands of dolphins and porpoises die each year after being accidentally trapped in fishing nets when their sophisticated use of sonar navigation fails. Now the fishermen will fit audible warnings to their nets and the Atlantic driftnet ban will include the taking of salmon in the Baltic. Real progress in respect of fish rights!

There is a motley of unplanned economic circumstances bringing the brine to the boil. The Baltic is brackish because it consists of a peculiar mix of salt water, which flows in from the North Sea, and fresh water from the lakes and rivers of Europe. The untreated materials flowing into the sea are mostly human waste, metal and toxic substances.

The pollutants deposit themselves on a bed of troughs and ridges where they mix with freshwater and saltwater stratification layers to deplete available oxygen supplies and kill the growth of algae and plankton. In the nefarious process, they starve fish and plant life of their essential nutrients. No wonder pregnant women are being warned to keep off their staple diet, herring, due to a high presence of dioxins. No wonder either, some half of the fish species in the Baltic swim their lives out in critical levels below their biological sustainable limit.

As only 60% of the water flowing in from the river Neva would have been sufficiently filtered, the guilty residue highly offsets any cool seawater intake seeping through the Danish Sound. A soup of some 350 cubic metres of untreated sewage water a day emanates from an unholy union between companies dumping illegal spillage and human effluent issuing from surrounding habitations. This begets an offspring very much like a cross between anaerobic bacteria and seaweed, both lethal terminators of marine life.

There had been no serious problem since the 1960s but then industrialization started catching up fast with the west.

Much as we talk of banned chemical weapons and WMDs today, there lies in the eastern Atlantic and in the Baltic a huge rich debris of corroding bombs and canisters of poisonous gases, some 300,000 tons of ammunition by the latest count, which were sunk by Allied and Soviet forces after the war. Most of the scuttled ships were captured from Germany, and off the Swedish and Norwegian coasts there lie some forty ships filled with bombs and chemical weapons.

The same situation prevails near the Danish island of Bornholm off the Swedish coast and Gotland, midway and very low in the Baltic between Latvia and Sweden. There, in the late 1940s, the order was for 23,600 ton Soviet battleships to bulge out their swaying bows into the cold swell and dump explosive rounds and chemical barrels into the sea. This they did, over large areas, without a thought for currents or spawning grounds, spilling some 14 different chemicals in the process and contributing to about 60,000 tons of toxic agents now lying to rest on the seabed.

The cocktail served is made of a highly dangerous brew of poisons which, of their very name, recall a very uneven pattern of old lace much like a DNA strand all jumbled up to produce a killing monster. Simply told, they are arsenic (found at levels which are a hundred times higher than normal), geranium smelling lewisite, mustard gas and the ubiquitious sarin of modern fame. Sulphur mustard gas, which is highly toxic, has shown up as yellowish brown clumps of gel washed on shore while arsenic builds into the food chain of fish and man-made fast cooking frozen packs of nordic fish.

Nothing better for the fishermen after the canister casings have started to corrode. They now load chemical clumps and damaged canisters and bombs in their nets and fall sick when they come in touch with poisoned waters gushing out of brittle shells which have gone leaking. The Danish government has found a solution for fishermen who fear, if they report hauling a dangerous object, losing their catch. Other than having apposite medical kits and safety equipment on board, when fishermen nowadays report a suspect taking, the navy sends a fast boat to disinfect the crew and destroy both taking and catch. The fishermen are then also paid back the income they would have lost from their catch.

International organizations, under a variety of auspices, are aware of the gathering storm in the Baltic where winds and the underflow of currents change suddenly. With a growing realization of the pollution problem, there is now a plan to clean up the sea. The Baltic Sea Joint Comprehensive Environment Action Program is the result of a study made by the Helsinki Commission. This is an international high level task force including the IMF, EBRD, the Nordic Investment Bank and the World Bank, which looks after the health of the Baltic.

In April 1992, the six component Program included, among others, "a program for infrastructure investment in specific measures to control point and nonpoint sources of pollution… aid in the management of coastal lagoons and wetlands… support applied research to build the knowledge base needed to develop solutions, transfer technology, and broaden understanding of critical problems". In its 1996 assesment the Helsinki Commision reported there was no appreciable harm to the Baltic environment being caused by chemical weapons.

Given the large amount of river pollution and WWII toxic spillage in the Baltic Sea, where its brackish waters are renewed only every 30 years, the nine countries around it have agreed to halve polluting emissions by 2005. As a stage has been reached where pregnant women and children avoid eating fish caught in the Baltic, the EU is pressing for the application of the polluter pays principle to save any further damage being done to marine life.

The issue is how to tackle the worldwide problem of using the seas as a "convenient" chemical dumping ground. According to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, there are also large arsenals which have been abandoned in seas off Britain, America, Canada, Russia, Australia and Japan. Brittle mustard gas barrel casings have been detected off Belgium, endangering oyster catches in the area.

What’s to be done to save the Baltic? In adopting a plan in terms of the Joint Action Program, there has to be plenty of imaginative thinking. The river waters have to be plugged before reaching the sea, cleaned and reverted to their pristine purity when they left their lake and mountain source. Then comes the herculean task of cleaning the surface waters, most likely sweeping them with a flotilla of "lung ships" powered with a mix of wind and solar energy, moving around in strategic drift zones, breathing the murky brackish sea in and distilled water out.

How to treat the undersea wrecks and toxic grounds around them? The Tricolor salvage experience has taught us wonders. Huge encompassing structures could be lowered to the offending area causing as little disturbance to the water mass as possible.

In choosing how to deal with each wreck, the average 85 meter depth of the Baltic makes it a very shallow sea and operations in that depth could be undertaken with little difficulty. A wreck could either first be inflated with a non-inflammable gas, like helium, and floated through a cylindrical structure to the surface where it would be dealt with in an environmentally convenient manner.

Alternatively, a cupola structure could be lowered onto the wreck as cautiously as possible so as not to hit any turbulent current at the bottom. It also has to be flexibly engineered to seal itself along any ruffled up terrain. The wreck will be entombed by cement pumped from the surface while an outlet pipe would drain the poisoned waters to a lung ship lying around.

As for funding, a tiny percentage cut from the military budget, a polluter pays tax or waste disposal fees on ships whether they carry waste or not, would help greatly to this end.

War’s toxic legacy in Baltic Sea, by Marlise Simons. International Herald Tribune, European edition, June 20, 2003.

Trade and Environment Database website, TED Case Studies, Baltic Sea Pollution.

by Anabela Franqueira, University of Coimbra, Centre for Migration Studies

An overview of research and examples of good practice in the EU Member States, 1995-2000, on behalf of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, Vienna (EUMC) by the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER) - edited by Jessika ter Wal, Vienna, February 2002.

In the last 25 years, Portugal, like the other countries of the southern Mediterranean, has witnessed a new phenomenon: beyond the condition of being a country of emigration, it became at the same time a country of immigration. There was a very large flow of African immigrants, particularly coming from the former Portuguese colonies. Since the 1980s Portugal has seen a steady increase in foreign residents, from 29,000 in 1975 to 191,000 in 1999. In the same period immigration started to exceed emigration. Since 1980, there was also a high proportion of immigrants from African countries, as compared with those from Europe and Southern America. As of the 31st December, 1999, the percentage of foreign residents in a total population of 10 million inhabitants was 1.9%. (Instituto Nacional de Estatística, 2000).

Immigration to Portugal before 1980 involved different groups, mainly Europeans and South Americans, but in particular Brazilian immigrants, and a different socio-economic integration than that of the immigrants who came to Portugal after that date and who were predominantly Africans.

Until the mid-1980s the population of non-European origin, either of Portuguese or foreign nationality, did not present particular problems of integration into the Portuguese society. This revealed a great capacity of adaptation, thanks to their high professional qualifications, a strong entrepreneurial capacity and privileged links with their ethnic communities of origin. After the mid 1980s, the same situation is no longer visible. To this contributes the increase of foreigners in Portugal with minor job qualifications and less economic resources, while with the progressive integration into the European Union there started a great phase of economic growth started and the demand for labour increased.

This means that the occupational structure of the foreign population, when compared to that of the domestic population, was biased both both towards the top rung of Brazilian and European immigrants and towards the bottom rung of immigrants from former Portuguese colonies in Africa, of the occupational ladder. Immigrants of African origin mainly arrive in Portugal to work in public constructions, occupying the places left available by the Portuguese emigration to Europe. They also work in domestic labour and in restoration, mostly in degrading working conditions. Therefore, immigrants of African origin do not really occupy labour vacancies needed for the Portuguese, and the identification of foreigners as a cause of problems, such as unemployment, is thus not justified and indicates that their vital importance for the national economy is not recognised.

The most recent immigration to Portugal comes from Eastern Europe. From January to March 2001, some 24,125 immigrants have legalised their position, most of them of Eastern European origin, after the law to regulate the conditions of entry, stay, leaving and withdrawal of foreigners from the national territory was amended.

The significant changes regarded the introduction of a new article which states that foreign citizens without a work visa are able to apply for a work permit as long as they have a labour contract (autorização de permanência), which is issued for the period of one year and renewed for a maximum of five years.

The action of the Government in matters of immigration and ethnic minorities is subject to the constitutional principles of equality and non-discrimination of citizens, as regards race (Art. 13 of the Constitution) and to the principle of equalisation of rights between nationals and foreigners (Art. 15) with the exceptions foreseen in the Constitution and in the law.

During the 1990s two procedures to legalise immigrants were enacted in Portugal. The first one was in 1992, when approximately 39,000 immigrants obtained legal status, and the second was in 1996 when some 35,000 individuals were granted a residence permit. Until 8 March 2001, 7,210 foreigners from Ukraine, 1,040 from Russia, 1,543 from Romania and 2,055 from Moldavia have legalised their status.

Nevertheless, one cannot ignore the difficulties in the practical implementation of these principles. These problems are due to the late recognition of the need to introduce measures for the integration of immigrants and the aggravation of the effects of processes of social exclusion, such as in the labour market, housing and healthcare, that are now more difficult to revert.

In 1995, the programme of the Socialist Party referred for the first time to the integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities. In the same year, the government appointed a High Commissioner for Immigration and Ethnic Minorities (HCIEM), which forms part of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. The creation of this organisation was due to the recognition of the "new challenges faced by Portugal as a country of immigration, which requires social integration measures for migrant families and ethnic minorities in general, in order to avoid situations of social exclusion that generate racism and xenophobia."

The High Commissioner's mandate is to accompany and support at interministerial level the integration of immigrants. With the creation of the High Commissioner for Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in 1995, the public powers have recognised what until then had been banished to the category of "virtual reality".

The HCIEM collaborates with associations of immigrants and ethnic minorities, social partners, government departments and the public administration, with the aim of contributing to:

• improve the living conditions of immigrants in Portugal, in such a way as to ensure their integration into society while respecting their original identity and culture;

• ensure that all citizens who legally reside in Portugal enjoy an identical degree of dignity and opportunities, in such a way as to eliminate discrimination and fight racism and xenophobia;

• supervise the action of the various sections of the civil service with responsibility for the entry of foreign citizens to Portugal, their stay and departure, while respecting the competencies of those departments and of the members of the government who are specifically charged with such matters;

• collaborate in defining and ensuring the supervision and stimulation of policies intended to actively combat exclusion;

• propose measures, particularly those of a normative nature, designed to assist immigrants and ethnic minorities.

Integration is a process in which both immigrants and ethnic minorities aim at a full participation as citizens in the society in which they live. Even when the logic of the politics of integration, as in Portugal, is to promote the integration as an individual citizen, it is always possible to the immigrant or the ethnic minority to adopt a more individualistic or more communitarian strategy of integration.

Communities may also be more open or closed to inter-ethnic marriages; in this respect, we have seen that African immigrants coming from countries of official Portuguese language, the so called "Palop" countries, are more open than for example the Portuguese Roma.

The concepts of immigrant and ethnic minorities are not synonymous. That is, immigrants can be, but need not be, part of an ethnic minority and some ethnic minorities, like the Roma, can be national citizens. When we designate the Roma Community as an ethnic minority, one cannot forget the multiple meanings produced by the undifferentiation of the concept of ethnic minority on the one hand, and that of immigrant on the other, which imply necessarily rights of a different nature to each of them. This confusion does not allow an adequate analysis of the migratory phenomenon and at the same time prevents the independent consideration of specific problems of the ethnic minorities.

The Roma community has been in Portugal since the 15^th century and they are considered as Portuguese citizens, at least since the Portuguese Constitution of 1822 and the Constitutional Charter of 1826. This legal status eliminated the inequalities regarding race and has recognised the Portuguese citizenship to those born in Portuguese territory. In this sense, the nearly 40,000 thousand Portuguese Roma citizens living in Portugal have the same social dignity and are equal before the law (Art. 13 of the Constitution).

The Roma community has nine associations. In addition, an association for Roma women was constituted in 2000. The Roma associations are not all exclusively constituted of members of Roma origin, as they also have non-Roma members. Two NGOs that work exclusively with this population are the Obra Nacional da Pastoral dos Ciganos (belonging to the Catholic Church) and the Igreja Evangélica de Filadélfia dos Ciganos de Portugal (Protestant Church).

A large number of non-governmental organisations are working in the area of immigration. These organisations are located primarily within the more problematic areas and neighbourhoods, where the percentage of immigrants is particularly high, and they thus concentrate on the specific problems felt by those communities. In general, all the local NGOs have as their main goal to promote the integration of immigrants into Portuguese society, such as Associação Unidos de Cabo Verde (Cape Verdian United Association). Other NGOs operate at the national level and function as pressure groups, promoting immigrants' rights and combating racial discrimination. Three different types of associations exist at the national level: the first dedicates its work to immigrants’ rights in general (such as Obra Católica das Migrações, a Catholic charity institution, and trade unions which target immigrants’ labour rights); the second includes organisations that deal with the rights of the main ethnic communities living in Portugal (Cape Verde Association, Guinea Association, and the Casa do Brasil); and the third aims to promote equality and combat discrimination against certain groups of individuals (SOS Racism and Olho Vivo).

Since 1995, several legislative initiatives have been taken in order to promote the integration of immigrants and to fight discrimination and racism. First, the Reciprocity Law of 1996 allows citizens coming from the European Union, and also from Cape Verde, Brazil, Peru and Uruguay to vote and present themselves as candidates in local elections. Also citizens from Argentina, Norway and Israel are now allowed to vote in local elections.

Secondly, a Law of 1996 established for the first time in Portugal a contribution within the non-contributory scheme of social security and a programme of social integration to guarantee to individuals (with legal residence) and their families resources that contribute to the satisfaction of their minimum needs, in order to contribute to a positive and progressive social and professional integration.

Thirdly, another Law of 1996 created legal support for the acquisition or the renovation of family housing (legal immigrants included) that are covered by the PER (Special Plans of Relocation) programme. The aim was to eradicate slum neighbourhoods, in those areas where they proliferate most: in the metropolitan areas of Oporto and Lisbon.

Fourthly, the new Foreigners' Labour Law of 1998 has eliminated quantitative restrictions (being discriminatory restrictions in the access to the labour market) in the recruitment of workers, with the aim to fight employment in the informal economy. The principle of equality in recruitment and in working conditions independently from national origin, that was thus applied is in line with the Florence Declaration defended by the European partners in October 1995.

According to recent studies on racism, Portugal may constitute an example of a society that is formally anti-racist but in which racist attitudes persist. This paradox is explained through the different concepts of racism that stem from the position one assumes towards the anti-racist social norm that has progressively developed in western societies since the 1940s and which condemns expressions of traditional racism. A concept of prejudice or flagrant racism is shown as different from subtle racism, which means that those who are subtly racist accept the anti-racist norm as a way of being socially correct and not being punished for their actions in public life. The authors conceive the non-racist as one who internalises the norm as part of a value system based on equality. He also rejects all forms of racism, including those that are socially accepted. The studies mentioned before point to the conclusion that in Portugal, as in the rest of Europe, the anti-racist social norm exists only for flagrant racism, but not for subtle racism. One could also say that in Portugal, not only is racism an unassumed attitude, but also that militant racism is extremely rare.

Recently, however, criticism has been made that when considering the scale used to measure the concept of subtle racism, there are some items that, only by adopting a highly inflated concept of racism can be considered as indicators of racial prejudice. That is, respondents were asked to value the factual similarities or differences in the religion, language or even values taught to children in the "black" minority culture, as opposed to the transmission of these values in the majority population. But it is argued that the given answers cannot be taken as synonymous of prejudice, but only as indicators of the knowledge or ignorance about objective facts. To ask, on the other hand, if frequently one feels sympathy or admiration for this same minority does not seem to be a good way to measure prejudice, either. If the expression of antipathy towards a minority group is considered as a sign of racism, then it is not acceptable to claim that racism does not exist only on the basis of the expression of general attitudes of sympathy and admiration.

The production of scientific research on racism and cultural diversity in the Portuguese media is extremely limited. The information reproduced in this part of the report is the result of a factual analysis done to existing research projects concerning the role of the media in public opinion. The existing projects are found in two publications, which cover the period as of the mid 1980s until 1989, and the years 1993-1995 respectively, and one research on the 1997 coverage on anti-racism, which is reported in the following section. In this section we will also discuss the results of a workshop on Media and Racism organised in the framework of the first National Round Table held in April 2000.

The first study was based on a press analysis of two newspapers: the daily Diário de Noticias, and the weekly Expresso. The author justifies the selection of these periodicals because of their dominant reference in the social arena: they both have a large readership and circulation and they produce general information. Also, their political and public positioning, more central, may stand as a pattern in opinion making. The time frame of this research goes from January 1983 to July 1989, for Diário de Noticias and from January 1987 to July 1989 for Expresso. Although the study is published prior to 1995, is not addressing precisely the issue of racism and the Mass Media, and provides a very partial view of the issue, it nevertheless reveals some important insights into the perception that the Portuguese have of foreigners.

The author starts by making three preliminary observations. First, reports on issues concerning Africans were not frequent. Secondly, in all cases the reports adopted a "social report" approach, whereas no editorials were dedicated to the theme. Thirdly, in comparison with other countries of the European Union, news on Africans always appeared as isolated texts. That is, the newspapers did not publish special issues or files on issue concerning them, such as the ones that can be found in other European newspapers.

Furthermore, the analysis showed that while certain nationalities were designated, on the other hand foreigners tended to be associated with specific occupations or traits, such as students, the Islamic community, and others. One of the categories that appeared frequently in the news (either by the frequency of the theme or by the permanence of the qualification) is that of Africans. Within this category, the nationality that is mentioned most frequently is that of the Cape Verdians, who appear almost as synonymous with the former. Regarding the attitude of the Portuguese towards this category, the information given by the analysed material expresses, on the one hand, the attitudes of the journalists and on the other the attitudes observed by them in the population. These attitudes are related to criminality and racism.

Regarding criminality, a certain fear is expressed by the Portuguese population, which is criticised by the journalists as an irrational fear that they, and the part of the population they consider themselves to be part of, do not share.

Regarding the problem of racism, no text was found in which this concept appears to be part of the Portuguese attitude. The information gathered results mainly from statements made by Africans that are not univocal: in some news texts, the opinions of these individuals show that there is no racism, whereas others contain statements about the existence of subtle racism in Portugal.

The attitudes clearly expressed by the journalists in the analysed texts range from curiosity in the ethnographic style adopted in the news relating with the Cape Verdian community, and sympathy in their own choice to dedicate a text to the problems of the Africans, to the complicity shown in the parallel established between the destiny and the mood of the Portuguese and that of the Africans, on the other.

This study does not allow to the conclusion that the general label of foreign residents does not exist as a consistent category in public opinion, nor do any clear attitudes or expectations exist regarding such a category. Moreover, social representations of African citizens who live in the periphery of the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Oporto in very precarious material conditions and, many times, in irregular situations are well developed and have a considerable impact on public opinion. In this context, the Cape Verdian community is represented most visibly, but it is not the only one. The attitudes portrayed in the newspapers represent a mixture of fascination and of repulsion, of sympathy and of what the press defines or classifies as racism. Regarding the other foreign communities, the representations are much more diffuse, what may be interpreted as a certain indifference, related probably to the low number of people that make up these communities.

This research project was published in November 1996 and was the result of an analysis on a sample of eight different newspapers (four dailies, namely, Público, Diário de Noticias, Jornal de Notícias and Diário Económico, and four weeklies, namely, Expresso, O Diabo, O Independente and Semanário), from the period 1993-1995. The project also included a few newspapers of limited circulation that focussed on the issue of Africans in Portugal.

Here, each year of the analysis matched a central problem that was thematised by the media, independently from other constant themes with the same or more importance. Thematisations depended either on extraordinary events, which made minorities object to reporting, or on the formulation of a theme by the political power and the media together. During three years of analysis, three large themes were identified in the press agenda: the case of the dislodged people in Camarate (a housing theme), the Vuvu case (legal entrance to Portuguese territory theme) and the Bairro Alto case (racist murder / physical violence theme).

The analysis of the news reports started by showing two important characteristics. First, it showed that there was a constant reference to people and institutions in power, in particular political and government institutions. In general, limited space and little continuous attention was dedicated to the citizen, the immigrant, and the lay people; so that news which concentrated on their positions appears less prominently, less extensively and was dropped sooner than news on political decision-making and institutional processes. The second characteristic observed was the use of headlines and leads with a sensationalist language, which could easily arouse alarm and even fear.

In addition, the press reports revealed an almost absence of images of Africans. In almost all images, the African, as citizen or immigrant appeared as a complement of the "Portuguese self". To this image were added stereotypes of marginality, poverty and exoticism. As stated in the preface to the book, this research recalled to those newsmakers who proclaim themselves as independent and objective in newsmaking, that they also manipulate the reproduction of information, even though unconsciously.

On the other hand, the study also showed that the journalist is, as any other professional, a product of formal and informal socialisation. Moreover, the production of news responds to mechanisms of unconscious manipulation, which are naturalised in the journalistic practice. The discourses produced by the mass media as well as by the opinion leaders reflect the interests, stereotypes and prejudice of the majority group.

Journalists and politicians are therefore leaders in forming public opinion, according to this study. Their privileged access to the media allows them to produce a discourse which reinforces the value order, the worries, the conception of the world and the beliefs of the elite. However, it seems that the representatives of associations of the civil society start having a privileged role in forming public opinion too.

The First Portuguese Round Table on Racism and Xenophobia, organised in April 2000 in Lisbon, had a workshop dedicated to the theme of Media and Racism. Although the discussion and the plenary section were quite emotive, the written conclusions do not embrace all the information that was entailed in this workshop. It was concluded that 'subtle racism' exits in Portugal and the Portuguese society is shying at the phenomenon of racism since it is not "politically correct" to be racist. The mass media treatment has tended towards sensationalism, thus ending up by favouring racism, either directly or indirectly. In fact, according to one of the speakers, Bruno Gonçalves, a representative of a Roma association, press articles having positive reference regarding minority groups are quite few. He furthermore observed the link established in the news between Roma and criminality. The Roma community is accused, in generalised terms, of drug trafficking. This portrayal has occasionally produced conflict in local communities.

This observation can be corroborated by a previous research project, which, on the basis of an analysis of a set of press surveys, concluded that the mass media often establish a clear relationship between immigrants or ethnic minorities, or both, and crime, one of the most obvious manifestations of xenophobia. As an example is the alarm built around riots by a group of "black" young people that occurred in Alhos Vedros, a village near Lisbon, in 1993. In the news on this event, political leaders were reported to have accused foreigners, in public meetings, of invading Portugal and stealing jobs from the Portuguese. In the same period, the Internal Security Services produced reports on the existence of "black" gangs, classifying them as the "main threat to the tranquillity of people, the integrity of personal belongings and the keeping of public order." Hence the stereotype of crime exists both for Roma people and "black" immigrants.

It has also beem found that the large majority of press articles that regard Roma individuals, the only Portuguese ethnic minority, report on negative social aspects that do not favour the community at all, whereas only a small proportion is dedicated to cultural aspects. Furthermore, it is claimed that the media, in Portugal, far from respect and show sensitivity towards the minorities. A great part of the journalists are responsible for building up the walls of intolerance with sensationalist and quite biased news that underline more and more the stigma and the negative stereotypes attached to this minority group.

An advertiser responsible for the production of anti-racist campaigns declared that advertising can also play an important role in the transmission of positive messages: it has sometimes played an important role in blocking negative values, and has used its techniques to "sell" positive images, like in the European Campaign "All Different, All Equal" or in the National Campaign of the Project "In Each Face...Equality", as strong images enhanced in advertising can be used to favour positive racial and inter-ethnic relations.

The conference Education for Tolerance was promoted by the Secretariado Coordenador dos Programas de Educação Multicultural of the Ministry of Education, in 1995. One of the papers presented in a workshop on the concrete and innovative attitudes towards tolerance dealt with The Role of the Mass Media in the Promotion of Tolerance, which can be mainly read as a critique of the situation in Portuguese media, with recommendations for improvement.

The media has as its main task to inform, to expose and to inquire on the existing reality. When considering the issue of promotion of tolerance one must face those who see the mass media from an utilitarian point of view, as a way to "straighten" or condition the world, to domesticate people and wills. To these people, the best is to not show, not to speak, not to write, but to hide and to ignore. This is a means of collective illusion, half way between censorship and self-censorship, and a totalitarian society. When regarding prohibition, we always know where it starts, but we never know where it ends. This is obviously a solution for intolerance. Simultaneously there are also those who see the mass media as a simple mirror of the society expecting it to be the transmitter of its values and qualities as well as its defaults and non-values. In a regime of disloyal competition where everything is a product of the laws of audience's shares, this perspective ends, like the Portuguese television experience reveals, in a show format for information.

The public interest is subverted, being reduced, in a primary way, to the audience's interests. In this model the space and the call for tolerance is more and more restricted. It is important that the reporter does not mix up nonsense with the right of opinion; he cannot forget the circumstances of tension, the emotion and the passion when people express themselves. The journalist must always take into account present the deontological rules of his work. If the journalist fulfilled strictly the Deontological Code it would solve, byitself, most part of the mistakes, the misuse, the deviation and perversity of the information. The author goes on exemplifying with the reporting of an international football match between a Portuguese and an Italian team (in a very well known news radio channel in Portugal- TSF), where the journalist covering the game ended up insulting lively the referee with several epithets and hysterically calling him "Turk, Turk, Turk".

With the almost exclusive interest of the political forces involved in power games and media control, with bodies of counter-power almost manipulated, with mass media companies fighting for audience rates, with a public opinion either disorganised or organised but powerless or just surrendered to the magic of TV, it would be the role of the journalist to expose this. However, the author states that he is not sure that the journalist wants, or is willing to assume such an attitude, or that he just may be able to do so. It seems like the future will not be very promising in this area.

In the framework of the European Year Against Racism, celebrated in 1997, many initiatives were organised in Portugal. Among them, the Seminar organised by the National Co-ordination Committee about The Role of the Mass Media to Fight Racism in October 1997, had the goal to analyse the mediatization of racism and, or racist incidents, the impact of information in prejudice and the role played by the media in influencing behaviours. In the framework of the European Year, the exhibition "Anne Frank - a Story for the Present" was organised, and it started being circulated throughout the country in November 1997. This has resulted from a protocol signed with Anne Frank House, in the Netherlands, with the aim to disseminate information and promote, among students and teachers, the values of tolerance and sensitivity regarding matters of racism, diversity and anti-Semitism.

The European Year Against Racism was also the basis for the development of a doctoral dissertation on the written press in Portugal, by a student of the University of Lisbon. He made an analysis of two daily newspapers regarding the coverage on the issue of racism and its social representation. In this research it is assumed that in the complex information society the mass media play a central role in the reproduction of racism ant antiiracism, due to its relation with other institutions and due to the structural influence in shaping and changing social cognitions.

The information produced in the two newspapers shows an absence of an alarmist and sensationalist news treatment. The research attributes to the Jornal de Notícias has a more conservative speech, showing some apprehension in the approach to the phenomenon, which is more centralised at the regional level. The other newspaper, the Público, has a more modern and heterogeneous discourse. Racism is a theme that deserves being commented by specialists in the area, either to explain it, or to focus on a more concrete subject, like the position of the Roma community.

According to the author, the analysis of the opinions and values expressed by the two newspapers shows that both disapprove of racist behaviour and represents the Roma community and "black" people as the main victims of intolerance and racial discrimination. On the basis of the reports in the Jornal de Notícias it was possible to conclude that, in general, the Portuguese do not have racist behaviour and that when they show such behaviour, this is not a reason for concern. On the other hand, the analysis of the Público reports reveals the existence of racist behaviour in the country, acknowledged as a reason for concern and reflection on the issue. The results produced by the analysis show that the two newspapers produce similar discourses, when the repulsion of racism and the need to fight it are concerned. In general, it is possible to conclude that the written press produces an anti-racist speech, but the Portuguese society is represented as being a vehicle of certain racist behaviour. Nevertheless, on the basis of the press analysis it was possible to conclude that, in general, there is no attitude of rejection towards immigrant communities, despite some concern regarding the future of Portuguese society. In this sense, it is legitimate to conclude that in the two newspapers analysed, racism in Portuguese society is of a rather dissimulated and implicit form. However, it can be said that the media tended to emphasise anti-racist discourses, and that this anti-racist orientation characterised the period under analysis.

In February 1998, the High Authority for Mass Media organised a Forum for the Mass Media, with nine different workshops. One of the workshops discussed the issue of The Role of the Mass Media and the Rights of Minority Groups. This workshop called attention to negative media practices. Indeed, it was found that the mass media frequently follow the uniformity of the globalisation process, with a discourse that tends to reflect many of the social doubts and ambiguities regarding minorities. The media were also criticised of transmitting and magnifying dominant stereotypes and prejudice.

Furthermore, behind a claim of objectivity may be hidden indifference, marginalisation or even intolerance towards these groups. It is difficult to find reports on the problems and points of view of the minority groups as well as their evaluation regarding important issues. Finally, it was found that the negative exploitation and offensive and discriminatory representation of isolated cases, or the mere exhibition of exotic or uncommon aspects regarding the minority group, are not uncommon in both entertainment and information programmes.

According to the organisations represented in the workshop, the mass media have to respect the constitutional and legal principles of the democratic state: the respect for the dignity of the human person, the respect for the rights, liberties and guaranties of the citizens and the equality of all persons independently of their ethnicity, belief or social origin. Therefore, it should not be accepted when the mass media, in order to increase their audiences, compromise on quality of information, and on the general principles set out by the law. Finally, the High Authority pointed out that the mass media have special responsibility in the field of education and in the promotion and incentive of values that allow and motivate the full exercise of citizenship. The High Authority for the Mass Media has not has received any specific cases of negative, prejudiced or biased reporting in the area of racism.

A Law of 1999 introduced the legal recognition of immigrant associations as well as the technical and financial State support for the development of their activities. The High Commissioner gives this recognition for immigrants and ethnic minorities to those associations that wish to be recognised as such, as long as they fulfil the appropriate conditions foreseen in the law. These recognised associations may have the following rights: to participate in the definition of the immigrants policies; to participate in the legislative processes concerning immigration; to participate in the consultative bodies in the terms defined by the law; to benefit from the right to public speech on the radio and television. Since the introduction of the law, 25 immigrant associations have already been legally recognised. The associations can be of national, regional or local scope, according to the number of members each association claims to have: that is, the number of associated members will determine if an association can be considered as being of local, regional or national range.

An anti-discrimination Law of August 1999 prohibits discriminatory practices based on "race", colour, nationality and ethnic origin. Article I states that the objective of this law is to prevent and prohibit racial discrimination in all its forms and sanction all acts that violate a person's basic rights or impede the exercise of economic, social or cultural rights for reasons such as nationality, colour, 'race' or ethnic origin. This Law also provides for an Advisory Committee for Equality and Against Racial Discrimination. Presided by the High Commissioner for Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities, the Committee is responsible for promoting studies on equality and racial discrimination, supervising enforcement of the law, and making legislative proposals considered suitable for the prevention of all forms of discrimination.

The law of 1996, introduced the possibility for immigrants, anti-racist and human rights associations to assist in a legal action against discrimination, together with the victim and the Prosecution, i.e. to formulate an accusation and to introduce evidence into the penal process. The individuals or organisations may constitute themselves as a civil party in a penal process except in the cases of clear opposition of the victim, whether such victim has requested his constitution as assistant, or not. This applies to crimes motivated by discriminatory attitudes based on 'race' or nationality, and especially to crimes foreseen in the Penal Code. The constitution of assistant, as proposed in the law, is free from payment to the court. The changes in the Penal Code included the reference to national or religious origin as well as the denial of crimes of war or against peace and humanity such as the denial of the holocaust and Nazi crimes.

On Portuguese Television there are no specific programmes aiming at immigrants and, or ethnic minorities. Nevertheless, a recent programme in 2000 had as a resident guest a Roma origin young university student for an approximate period of six months. This programme has a talk show format (formato de conversa de café) and is weekly transmitted, in the second channel of the Portuguese Public Television Service. The programme is called "Travessa do Cotovelo" and its objective is to discuss in an informal way, actually around a coffee-shop table, certain pertinent and actual themes. In two of the programmes two specific themes were discussed regarding immigration and the Portuguese Roma community. These programmes discussed the issue of integration and the problems that these communities face.

The High Authority for Mass Media (Alta Autoridade para a Comunicação Social) is a regulatory body that aims to safeguard the right to information, the freedom of the press, the independence of the mass media, the fair and balanced reporting of information, freedom of speech, and a guarantee as to the exercise of the right to public speech and political response.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities disposes of a large archive of empirical documentation available for public consultation. This includes a collection of press clippings from 1996, namely a database of the news published in the written press regarding immigrants and ethnic minorities in Portugal. Simultaneously, the HCIEM Office also disposes of a video archive on relevant programmes regarding the issue of immigration and racism from 1996 onwards.

In the last ten years, Portugal, as a new country of immigration, has been witnessing the growing importance of all the issues related to the phenomena of racism and xenophobia. Although more scientific research is now being produced, the area of immigration and the mass media still lacks information and research.

The existing research indicates that Portuguese media are not free from stereotypical representations. An interesting and typical feature is the positive complicity expressed and the accepted similarities between Africans and Portuguese as well as the absence of assumed and declared racist attitudes.

The reported studies found that the press articles seldom refer and identify the anonymous citizen, the Africans, the immigrants and the ethnic minorities, particularly when reporting on positive references. The pictures also prime for the absence of these groups, while journalists mainly follow the dictates of reaching audience rates, and the temptation of the most popular discourses often stand as a barrier to the implementation of ethical and deontological codes on the part of the journalists. They often tend to sensationalism, emphasising the negative aspects of these communities, resorting to routine reporting which requires least time and effort. This behaviour leads the journalist to misuse and distort information.

Nevertheless, existing research has also made visible the role played by the mass media in the reproduction of discourses of anti-racism, particularly when the press is dominated by some specific thematization, such is the case regarding the European Year against Racism. In this case, the issue of racism even deserved being commented by specialists in the different analysed newspapers. This positive role can also be transmitted through advertisement campaigns aiming the fight against racism and the promotion of tolerance.

After having discussed the existing research, it can be concluded that it would be extremely important to develop new research in this area. The data and information available at the HCIEM may prove to be very useful in a future possible research project regarding the role of the mass media in the social construction of behaviour, attitudes and values towards immigrants and ethnic minorities in the Portuguese society.

by Ylva Brune, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication (JMG), Göteborg University

An overview of research and examples of good practice in the EU Member States, 1995-2000, on behalf of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, Vienna (EUMC) by the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER) - edited by Jessika ter Wal, Vienna, February 2002.

General trends in news reporting on questions related to immigration, racism and cultural diversity seem to pull in two different directions. In recent years, the news has focused more on conflicts and problems than previously. Further, ‘immigrants’ are more often singled out as criminals and are the subjects of aggressive stereo-typing in some of the news media. On the other hand, there are pronounced goals in large media enterprises to integrate persons with immigrant backgrounds within news on different social matters and to adapt publications to a multicultural society. It is too early to measure the results of these efforts with any precision. News reporting in mainstream media is mostly indifferent to the widespread problems of discrimination and racist harassment, although activities from neo-Nazi groups have been covered more regularly during 1999-2000.

Over the last five years there has been little quantitative research in Sweden concerning the ways in which themes related to refugees, immigrants, racism and xenophobia have been presented in the media. The more reports on immigration issues, the more negative and problematizing the news. Over 50 % of the total news output [on TV] related to immigrants and racism in 1979-1998, covered news on refugees.

The amount of news items related to immigrants and immigration had a peak during the first years of the 1990s. In the three years 1990-1992, analysis shows that news on ethnic issues, immigrant and refugee questions doubled, due to an increase in the amount of news on racism. During three winter months 1991/1992, the number of news items on racismand anti-racism formed an almost dominant theme in the news broadcasts. [It is suggested] that it would seem as if there was a co-ordinated and inten-tional prioritising of the news, with a degree of restraint with regard to negative reporting on immigrants during a period when immigrants and refugees were the target for racial violence.

There may be several different explanations why problematising and conflict-laden news became more common during the 1990s than in earlier years. One explanation concerns a general development in news journalism towards fixed schemata for news stories, where stories that centre on a distinct and simple conflict are preferred.

A comparative study of journalistic news texts from 1976 and 1993 respectively shows a tendency towards purity and simplicity in the way journalistic texts about refugee and migration matters are constructed. This means that news about the arrival of refugees, (or ‘asylum-seekers’ as they were usually called in the last decade) is associated exclusively with technical concerns and worries expressed by the police, the immigration authorities and the government.

Members of the general public, who wish to learn about the experiences of refugees from the media, have this opportunity only when individual immigrants, usually young women, face deportation. The news texts about the girl or ‘plagued’ woman operate in a genre that is especially popular in the tabloids and lighter television newscasts, a genre where solidarity and pity are provoked in a routinised way. The strict division between news genres, however, does not allow for a critical in-depth investigation into immigration politics and policies in general. Rather, the media construct the issue in terms of a foreign ‘invasion’ by undesirables, while simultaneously pushing for the humanitarian treatment of a randomly selected few.

Another explanation for the more problematising and conflict oriented bent of news journalism rests upon the interplay between the media and a presumed or real public opinion. The media are supposed to be both influenced by negative opinions against immigration and immigrants, and be influential in shaping those opinions. It is assumed that the media are especially aware of messages from politicians and other representatives of the power elite, and that those messages in mediated and popularised forms are likely to affect the public.

A correlation [is indicated] between the amount of news items referring to refugees [on TV], and the willingness on the part of the population to admit asylum-seekers into the country. When issues surrounding refugee immigration are intensely scrutinised in the news, public opinion tends to support stronger restrictions; but in periods when the issues receive less news attention a larger proportion of the population is willing to receive more refugees.

A third explanation refers to societal problems experienced over the last decade, including higher unemployment rates among immigrants, an expensive apparatus for receiving and integrating refugees, different signs of ethnic conflicts, and growing racist violence. This explanation could be considered incomplete, since it ignores the active roles that the news media and authorities play in defining immigration and refugees as ‘problematic’, and in shaping peoples’ apprehensions and perceptions of those ‘problems’.

A quantitative study limited to the output of news in mainstream media during one week in 1997 (1,510 news items), confirms that ‘ethnic Swedes’, or, more accurately, persons with common Swedish surnames, are over-represented among those who give their opinions in the news media. Merely 8 % of those interviewed in the media during the period had names suggesting that they might be immigrants. Only in subject fields directly related to immigration, racism and xenophobia – slightly more than 1 % of the news items during the period – were persons with non-Swedish sounding surnames represented as sources to the extent that corresponds to their proportion of the population (15-20 %). However, there are serious methodological problems connected with this overview. Exactly how does one decide whether the person featured in an article or news broadcast on television is an immigrant or not? In this case the researcher used the surnames of the persons who appeared in the news as indicators of their origin, a criterion that leaves room for many mistakes. Persons who have recently immigrated may for different reasons have ‘Swedish-sound-ing’ surnames. On the other hand, persons whose ancestors settled in the country generations ago may have ‘foreign-sounding’ names.

Despite these shortcomings, the study confirms findings in earlier studies and what is known about ‘media logic’ in Western Europe. Moreover, reporters’ proclivity to depend upon sources representing the power elite - which primarily consists of people with a ‘Swedish’ style or Swedish-sounding names - seems to be as strong as ever.

One more overview, which concerns the representation of immigrants, should be mentioned. Although the issue of this study is Swedish news coverage concerning Islam in international as well as national news, the way the news media depict Islam and Muslim countries is relevant in this context. The international news probably has an impact both on the focus in national news on immigrants from Muslim countries and on the opinions in the general public regarding Muslim immigrants and the presence of Islam in the country.

A study on the Swedish news coverage about Islam broadcast by the three top news programmes from 1991-1995 shows that Islam was frequently portrayed as an extremely violent religion, with 85 % of all related news items focusing (either partially or fully), on violence. The most common theme during that period was war (39 % of the news items), and especially the wars in former Yugoslavia, where Muslims were also depicted as victims. The second most frequent motif was terrorism; every fourth news item was about extremist violence, which was associated with Islam or Muslim groups. The characterisation of Islam as a fanatic religion was further buttressed by the fact that the third most recurring theme was [the] ‘persecution of infidels’, where the agents of the persecution were often portrayed as representatives of Islam, rather than as members of extremist minority groups.

Islam is a religion about which most Swedes have little knowledge and no personal experience. The general attitudes towards Islam can be expected to result from traditional conceptions conveyed in school, church, popular culture, and above all, in the mass media’s coverage of events connected with Islam. According to opinion polls taken in 1993 and 1997, Swedish attitudes towards Islam are negative, to say the least. While only 2 % of those surveyed were portrayed either fairly or very positive towards Islam, 65 % were either fairly or very negative. Although a vast majority of the Swedes support freedom of religion, nearly half the population in 1997 held the opinion that Muslims should not be allowed to build mosques in Sweden.

[A study was also made about] how non-Muslim Swedes [accepted] central Islamic symbols. Partly as a result of TV news portrayal of Islam, Islamic symbols have acquired a distinctly negative connotation also capable of arousing aggressive reactions in the general public. These ‘spontaneous’ negative reactions to Islamic symbols from the public are also an obstacle to the possible impact of impartial news reporting, as the content of positive or neutral news might be over-shadowed by, or filtered through, the audiences’ strongly negative preconceptions. [The study] concludes that these prevalent attitudes towards Islam and, probably, Muslims result from xenophobia that is fuelled and legitimised by a constant stream of negative media pictures.

The word ‘invandrare’, (which is both the singular and plural form for immigrant/s), was introduced in public life at the end of the 1960s and originally denoted persons who were themselves immigrants, as well as individuals with one or two immigrant parents. Over time the term has come to connote ‘otherness’ in everyday language, whereby ‘invandrare’ are contrasted negatively to ‘Swedes’. This is also the case in the news media. ‘Invandrare’ are usually presented as problemised collectives in news texts where Swedish authorities define the problems and how they are going to solve them. The concept ‘invandrare’ fluctuates between its statistical meaning, where ‘invandrare’ make up about 11 % of the population (if the Swedish-born children of immigrants are not included) and its connotative meaning, where ‘ invandrare’ equals ‘different’ and, ultimately, ‘problem’. In other words, when immi-grants are presented in the media, they are referred to as ‘invandrare’ mainly when they are considered [as either] problematic or different, [or both].

An analysis of the ways immigrant children were portrayed between 1993 and 1998 in the largest morning-paper, Dagens Nyheter, and the largest tabloid, Expressen, at that time, reveals a fixed pattern of reporting. ‘Immigrant girls’ were often depicted as victims of tradition and of ‘clashes’ between incompatible cultures, whereas boys were seen as victims of social exclusion and as potential, or actual, criminals.

These findings are partly confirmed in a systematic study of the news on ‘immigrant youth’ in four daily newspapers during six months of 1998. The researchers found that young persons with immigrant backgrounds rarely appeared in the media, but when they did, it was usually in a negative context. A recurrent theme was crime; the press either focused on crime committed by young men or on the position of young women as victims of crime. The study also shows that Swedish authorities are the main actors in articles about public life (crime, education, and so on) while the described young persons were usually allowed only to speak about their private lives.

The ‘immigrant woman’ is also a common stereotype in Swedish news media, aptly demonstrated in an investigation of the output of three large nation-wide newspapers during 1997-1998. Again, violence against women figured largely in the stories, usually perpetrated by male family members: fathers, brothers, or husbands. The ‘immigrant woman’ is likewise cast frequently as a victim of her own cultural tradition or religion, or of discrimination within the wider society. Paradoxically, the ‘victim’ is only one of two competing stereotypes regarding these women; the other is the ‘strong, active’ woman. The latter is portrayed enthusiastically as an exceptional person, who, against all odds, has succeeded in creating her own life and identity (i.e. she has overcome the burdens of her background in order to become ‘modern’). However, the underlying assumption of both portraits is the ‘immigrant woman’ as a victim.

In addition, the study points out that the victimised woman is often described as a Muslim and as a person with a static ethnic and culturalidentity. She is defined as an immigrant as well as in terms of her tradition, religion, gender, etc. In an analysis of news texts about immigrants from the Middle East area it is asserted that media portrayals of ‘immigrant women’ as victims is a fixed genre at least since the 1970s. Moreover, the construction of the texts does not allow the women to interpret and define their own situation. Their bodies and clothes are described in detail and thereafter the women are characterised by their lack of rights, freedom, pleasures and knowledge. In other words, they are defined negatively from what they are assumed to lack in contrast to an idealised conception of Swedish women as free, equal, and sexually emancipated. The women are further described, not as agents of their own destiny, but as passive dupes of their culture or of the men in their community.

On different occasions during the last five years, the news media have likewise been active in constructing an analogous stereotype of the ‘Middle East’ or ‘Muslim’ man, evoked mainly in connection with violence against women. The ‘Middle East’ or ‘Muslim’ man, like his female counterpart, is described as a dupe of tradition and religion, but in his case the latter is blamed for encouraging and legitimating violence against women. Furthermore, he is portrayed as unable to control his sexual as well as his violent impulses towards women, especially if he finds them provocative or defiant. Accordingly, he purportedly despises Swedish women and resorts to raping them, while his honour ‘forces’ him to batter his wife, sister or daughter as a means of social or domestic control. And all this is excused by his religion, the news texts explain.

This is actually a very damaging stereotype, which has become prevalent only in the last five years. It makes a mystifying and strongly degrading connection between personality, culture, religion and ethnicity, and functions as a model for explanation when men with some earlier connection to the Middle East are associated with crime. When men of Swedish origin commit the same kind of crimes, their actions are explained in terms of social or personal factors.

At this point it is extremely difficult to gauge the extent to which Swedish news journalism about immigration over the past five years has become more or less biased. In some areas it is clear that journalistic ideals have changed in a direction which might be harmful. For example, in crime reports, the mainstream press used to be quite strict about excluding details regarding an offender’s ethnic or national origin unless it was relevant to the story. During the last ten years, however, this practice has changed. Now this information is often included, without any explanation regarding the pertinence of such details, except to underline distinctions of ‘culture’ or ‘religion’ in the ways mentioned earlier. Moreover, editors and journalists defend the practice in public debates, arguing that it is based upon attempts to be more ‘European’ and ‘open’ as well as less ‘politically correct’. They also suggest that it reflects the expectations of their audience.

It is claimed that there also exists a positive tendency, often referred to by editors and journalists, to ‘integrate’ people with a foreign background in news reporting on different social matters. To judge from some earlier mentioned reports, a strong effort will be needed to create a breakthrough for this alleged ‘tendency’.

How much attention do the news media pay to racist and anti-racist attitudes and activities in Sweden? According to various researches covering the 1990s, the news media have paid a lot of attention to racism and anti-racism, especially to violent actions by neo-Nazi groups. But the attention is temporary and inconsequent.

A 1997 survey of news regarding racism garnered 500-600 press cuttings for each month, drawn from about 150 daily news media (nation-wide broadcast news, nation-wide daily newspapers and local daily newspapers), which averages four items per medium per month. [The survey] therefore concluded that there was hardly any continuous or systematic news coverage on xenophobic activities, racism, and discrimination in the daily news media.

Interestingly, the media’s attention to some events and not to others cannot be explained in relation to the seriousness of the events, as defined by experts on racist violence. Rather, it seems to be a function of routine news telling, where news media cover events that other news media have covered. This is typical for standard news journalism, but also signals that the matters are not significant enough to require further investigation.

The single event to which media assigned highest news value during the studied period concerned a young man associated with a Nazi-inspired group who had been invited to give a lecture at Umeå University. This sparked a public discussion about the role of the universities and the limits of free speech, yet the media’s interest was also fuelled by an alleged romance between the researcher who extended the invitation and the guest speaker.

[The survey] maintains that media may neglect larger neo-Nazi manifestations if they expect that conflicts will be absent. Furthermore, it seems important that the event takes place close to one of the three major cities, if it is to be reported by the national media. In 1997, a demonstration with a few hundred neo-Nazis in Stockholm marking the anniversary of the Crystal Night in 1938 Germany, resulted in relatively large media attention, probably because of the anti-Semitic position of the demonstrators. A more violent episode (celebrating the same anniversary) took place in a smaller city, and received hardly attention in local media.

[The survey] also points out that the news coverage of racist harassment and violence seems to be quite accidental. Serious instances of racism may escape the notice of the national media, while less serious events, which happen to have become medialised, may be covered for some period. The kind of racist or xenophobic crime, which gets the least attention in the news media is discrimination in its different forms.

The number of news reports on racism and anti-racism is in general limited. But time and again there are periods with extensive reporting. In a 1997 study covering the period 1990-1993, news on racism and anti-racism more than doubled for some months, partly, but not mainly, as a consequence of an increase of acts of racial violence directed towards immigrants and refugees. [The study] observed that the news media totally marginalized the relatively large number of appalling attacks on immigrants and on refugee camps in Sweden, carried out by non-organized men with no previous convictions. At the same time the news media reported heavily on more spectacular cases of racist violence and neo-Nazi organisations. A rise of the reporting on racial violence in the news is normally accompanied by an increase in the reporting on anti-racism. [The study] discusses this phenomenon in the context of the media’s role to restore the national self-portrait of a tolerant and stable nation.

[The study’s] main conclusion is that, for the news to be effective and credible, the news media follow, relatively uncritically, the conventions that they themselves have created. In the news reporting, racism is mainly understood as racial violence and anti-racism is reduced to protest against racial violence. Immigrants are assigned the role of victims of racial violence. The broadcasters are silent with regard to the relationship between racial hatred and refugee policy. And the whole field of research that in recent decades has debated the complexity of racism remains invisible.

Also for the period 1995-96, studies revealed how journalists and authorities recognised and handled news on racist violence. At the centre of these investigations was a violent incident targetted at a family in a village outside Karlstad, a medium-sized city in the heart of Sweden in 1995. This event seized extraordinarily high media interest, although, as an incidence of racist violence during the period it was far from exceptional.

The local and ‘popular’media portrayed the victims as an immaculate, assimilated, model family (the parents had immigrated to Sweden from Jordan some decades ago) living in a typical Swedish villa in an ordinary Swedish village. They were suddenly attacked by a racist mob comprised of about fifty young ‘skinheads and others’ who struck on Easter 1995. Armed with sticks and splitter bombs and shouting racist slogans, the mob injured both parents who had struggled to protect their children and property. Local and ‘popular’ media spontaneously sided with the family and described the events as an unexpected outburst of racism. The ‘serious/quality’ national media were more reluctant to define the matter as racism. They relied heavily on the police and other local authorities that soon stated that there were more complex causes to the ‘trouble’.

The tabloid papers and popular news channels soon left the scene, after having constructed a fictitious peace between the perpetrators and the family. After a few weeks the local media had adopted the local authorities’ assessment of the situation, one that was also backed by the Minister of Integration. In a personal article in Sweden’s largest newspaper at the time, he urged the media not to provoke racism by defining personal conflicts as racist in nature. Six weeks later, the public prosecutor held a press conference where he stated that the attack upon the family had been neither planned nor motivated by racism. The media embraced this interpretation uncritically. By that time the attacked family’s summer cottage had been burnt down. Two months later their Swedish model villa was set on fire and they finally had to leave the village. Rumours in the area, fuelled by insinuations in the news media, blamed the family for the ‘trouble’, and, more importantly, for the burning of their property.

In an ironic twist of events Mr. Hassan Labadi, the father of the family, was convicted of battery and fined in the aftermath of the Easter 1995 incident (incidently, the only witnesses to testify in the case were either ‘skinheads and others’ involved in the attack or their friends). Mr. Labadi consequently had to sue his attackers for damages. Again, the local media reported the story at face value, without investigating further. In fact, the media’s actions in this case were paradigmatic in several ways. Popular/tabloid and local media were the first to react to the family’s persecution and to define it as racist. They expressed perplexity: how could this happen in our enlightened and tolerant society in the little idyllic village?

[Actually there was a wide range of explanations for the events that transpired, even by those who believed that the Labadi family were the victims of unprovoked aggression: ‘racist harrassment’, ‘violent racial antagonism’, ‘lynching’, and ‘mobbing’ were all used to describe what happened. This terminological confusion indicates that contemporary racism in Sweden has hardly been analysed and debated. A little beside the confusion in common usage, it is not clear whether and how the discursive struggle on definitions of racism in the elite part of society affects the popular press and local news media. Quality media seem to adapt more keenly to official views.]

This reaction has been typical for news reporting on racist violence for some decades. The event was contrasted to an idealised conception of the nation, and the violence was represented as an incomprehensible outbreak of evil and primitive forces. To create a basis for identification with the victims, the family was described as an ideal average Swedish family (which might imply that the harassment and persecution would otherwise have been acceptable). The perpetrators, on the contrary, were initially demonised in the popular media and portrayed as thoroughly deviant, evil and frightening.

This construction was almost immediately attacked and criticised by representatives of the police and other local authorities, and soon after by the public prosecutor. These authorities pointed out that the perpetrators were common boys and that the family was ‘different’. They also questioned the motive of racism because one of the leading young men had an ‘immigrant background’ insisting those involved lacked both the intellectual capacity and education necessary for initiation into racist ideology. The instigators were described as ‘lost’, looking for any affiliation that could give meaning to their lives. According to this reading, their racist attitudes should be interpreted as simply a passing whim. The boys were not racist by definition since they were ordinary, weak-willed and uneducated. The media, in its emotive condemnation of the village inhabitants, was then accused of exacerbating the situation, making it worse for the young kids in the village and paving the way for ‘real’ racism in the area. Interestingly, the news media to counter the accusations had no means, other than to discontinue coverage or echoing the view of the authorities.

Almost two years after the dramatic Easter events, an exhaustive report by three social researchers was published. Their findings clearly proved that the family suffered persecution and harassment for several years leading up to the Easter attack, and that it had been systematic, planned and racist in character. They also discovered that at least 12 other immigrant families had been harassed by the same gang and were driven out of the village. The report also demonstrated that the possibility of racist motivations connected with the Easter attack was never investigated by the police. Moreover, the statements made by the judicial representatives, that no racism was involved, lacked empirical foundation, and could be interpreted as an effort to restore the reputation of the area.

The reason why these events are discussed in such a detail here, is that the reporting about them was thoroughly investigated and exemplified some typical deficiencies of news journalism in relation to racism and racist violence. The shortcomings might be listed as:

• A narrative urge to portray the victim as absolutely ‘normal’, which means that neo-Nazi inspired violence against homo-sexuals, for example, has had little news value.

• An apparent lack of intellectual or personal understanding of how racism is expressed and formulated today.

During 1999 and 2000, the news coverage about neo-Nazi-inspired activities in Sweden intensified after the murders of two police officers and an anti-racist trade-unionist and two car bomb attacks against policemen and journalists respectively. On 30 November 1999, four leading newspapers jointly published an article about the neo-Nazi threat against democracy and the names and photos of the alleged most dangerous Nazi partisans in Sweden. Afterwards there was more continuous coverage on extreme right-wing political activities. However, news coverage on discrimination and xenophobic activities that cannot be linked directly to political groups continues to remain accidental and unassuming.

There have probably been more initiatives taken during the period 1995-2000 than ever before in order to promote cultural diversity in the media and to improve the standard of news journalism in matters related to a multi-ethnic society.

During 1997-1998 the Swedish Committee for the European Year.Against Racism contributed to special courses in the journalism programmes at high schools and universities and to further training for practising journalists. The Committee also initiated a scholarship fund for journalists who wished to improve their knowledge and deepen their understanding regarding the conditions of immigrants and minorities and of racism and xenophobia generally. An anthology of essays published with a grant from the Committee critically discusses news journalism and media practices in the field. Finally, the Committee proposed that the Government, the Department for Integration and the research councils should henceforth give priority to the improvement of education and research in the field.

The informational project Quick Response started in 1998 by an initiative from the National Committee for the European Year against Racism and is a unit in the Swedish Red Cross Youth. Quick Response monitors the news media and responds, by consulting a number of experts, to erroneous or biased media reports in questions involving immigration, integration, racism and xenophobia. The organisation also provides journalists, students and individuals with facts and background information on questions regarding multiculturalism in Sweden. The information is conveyed partly through lectures and conferences but primarily via its website. Articles and critical reactions to media coverage made by Quick Response reaches news agencies, news media and concerned members of the Parliament and the Government through a newsletter disseminated via e-mail.

During 1997-1998, the Swedish Union of Journalists (SJF) prepared an action plan for ‘Minority issues and the media’ that was adopted in 1998. The plan stated that ‘We must break off the traditional way to describe reality, where people are ranked after social and ethnic lines. Journalists have a responsibility not to create an "us and them-perspective" which heightens conflicts between people of different ethnic background’. Measures to improve knowledge and awareness among practising journalists were proposed, as well as measures to improve the recruitment of journalists with foreign backgrounds into the media industries. However, codes of conduct adopted earlier were judged appropriate by SJF and no special codes for reporting on ‘racial’ issues have been suggested. The rule deemed sufficient is: ‘Do not bring out ethnicity, gender, nationality, profession, political affiliation or religion of the persons concerned, if it is unimportant to the situation and is disrespectful’. In reality, this rule was originally designed to protect the integrity of the individual, and not groups of people, from being singled out in disrespectful ways. The Pressens Opinionsnämnd, which has the responsibility to ensure that the ethical codes of conduct are applied, has only objected to practises that have been harmful to individual integrity. SJF has also initiated the publishing of an anthology on journalism and minority issues.

Several initiatives and projects have been launched in media organisations to promote cultural diversity at the work place. Most of the projects have started recently and it is too early to evaluate their impact. A number of examples are here given about what is happening at the present time.

First, some companies, for example the Swedish Broadcasting Company (SR) and the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, have recruited previously unemployed persons with immigrant or journalist backgrounds, or both, to give them an opportunity to work and further their education. These projects are for a limited time, however, and partly financed by the state as vocational training courses.

Secondly, a few large circulation newspapers are attempting to attract new audiences with special editions free of charge in specific areas. As a matter of fact, these issues seem to have achieved some popularity and credence among the settlers in those areas.

A third attempt is to make the ordinary publication of news and programmes more adaptable to a pluri-ethnic, multicultural society. In the Swedish Broadcasting Company, for example, reporters with a foreign accent are not only allowed but also encouraged nowadays. At Göteborgs-Postenthis this aim has resulted in a consultancy group made up of representatives from the largest minority groups, who are invited to discuss the contents of the paper with the editors once a month.

Finally, within the Swedis Broadcasting Corporation, the Swedish Radio (SR) has adopted an active policy for increasing cultural diversity in programming and at work (recruitment plans), as well as anti-discrimination measures. It herewith follows the assignment stated in the Swedish government bill for ‘A Radio and Television Serving the Public 1997-2001’, to ensure that ‘public service shall contribute to the process of integrating new migrants and members of minorities into the Swedish society and increase their possibilities to take part in the social and cultural debate’.

There are still no regular courses in schools of journalism and media training institutes with a view to developing a professionalism that is attentive to the involvement of the media in a pluri-ethnic and multicultural society. Such courses are only given sporadically, and with economic support from the State. The same conditions apply to further training possibilities for journalists. For immigrant journalists with earlier professional experience, there has been one vocational training course given at the Department for Journalism and Mass Communication at Göteborg University (JMG) during 1999, financed by the state.

The initiatives taken to create more multi-ethnic newsrooms and to recast Swedish journalism into an institution more attuned to the needs and perspectives of immigrants and minorities are either limited in time or are still in their infancy. Moreover, social structures that promote continued segregation in the hiring of journalists and traditional practices and values in Swedish newsrooms may be more intransigent than first imagined. While an assessment is necessarily impressionistic at this point, given the dearth of research on this topic, it appears that many of the positive initiatives taken thus far are not part of a long-term plan to challenge existing structures, and consequently may result in disappointment and passivity among those concerned.

It appears that a huge obstacle to overcome is a prevalent assumption that ‘we’ will learn certain things from ‘them’ that can enrich our already, almost perfect, way of interpreting and representing reality. At times the end result reduces the goal of ‘diversity’ to superficial changes, such as hiring beautiful, exotic women to present the news in exactly the same ways as the established male Swedish news anchors. Likewise, the same assumption results in exoticising and condescending portrayals of immigrants in news making.

However, there also exists an interesting ideological counter strain, more observable in talk shows, show biz, movies and serials on television, than in mainstream media news output. It could be described as a vein of conscious global thinking, feeling, acting, which is critical to alleged Western supremacy and to many of the representations in mainstream media. Persons born in the 1970s and 1980s mainly promote this cosmopolitan attitude, and their different ethnic origins play well together with their anti-racist ideology. If their influence in the media increases, and there is reason to believe it will, [this] means that issues concerning immigration, a multi-cultural society, racism and so forth will be discussed in a more explicitly ideological and polarised way, and [that] this discursive struggle might also be able to challenge traditional news values.