The Many Faces of Europe

(6 of 6)

Think Locally, Act Locally
It was just over 10 years ago when the first sign appeared: From now on we will be here every Thursday, always at 4 p.m. — whether there is sun, rain or snow. We want to start a children's group and would like you to participate! The meeting spot was a playground in Cologne's Chorweiler district, whose high-rise blocks became home to many of the migrants that the Ford Motor Co. recruited into Germany in the '70s. Of Chorweiler's 80,000 residents, 60% have immigrant backgrounds and a third are on welfare. Lale Akgün, a psychotherapist and M.P., knew that the best way to keep the peace in such a culturally diverse area was to start with the kids. So, in 1995, she founded Kindernöte (Children's Needs) with a group of family counselors, and they put up that sign.

Today, Kindernöte runs a dozen different groups for several hundred children. Every week, they play soccer, go on field trips together, help each other with homework or just throw a party. "Many of the children see that their prejudices do not bear up against reality," Akgün says. "They see that they can get on with children from other nationalities." When it's time to start up a new group, Kindernöte employees sometimes visit a playground with just a skipping rope and some chalk (since 1995, they've gone through 352 kg of chalk). "A lot can develop from these simple means," says manager Nicole Hansen. "The children can add their own ideas and creativity right away."

A similar program in Bradford, England, is all about the kids, too. In a three-day riot in 2001, hundreds of young Asian men destroyed dozens of white-owned businesses, straining relations between the city's 15% Pakistani population and its white residents. Working for Education Bradford, the private company that runs Bradford's schools, Angie Kotler noticed that the inner-city students, who are over 90% nonwhite, had little contact with the students attending the majority-white schools on the periphery. So she set up the Schools Linking Project, twinning schools and having their students meet up regularly to play sports, put on an opera or plant an allotment. "The younger kids ask about things like Eid and Christmas, how they are similar, how they are different," says Kotler. "The older kids will show their frustrations with the tensions around them. They ask, 'Why did we ever get to this point?'"

The beauty of both ideas is that they are simple and local. "You can't tailor integration measures from the top down," says Steve Vertovec, director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at Oxford University. "Integration means building common ground rules on civility, and this happens on the local level. Cohesion is all about everyday interactions, in the supermarket or on the playground." Successful, long-lasting integration takes place in community clubs and children's play groups, bake sales and block parties. Programs don't have to be big or expensive; Kotler says Education Bradford runs its twinning scheme "on a shoestring." "This isn't woolly liberal multiculturalism," she says. "Yes, it's about respecting difference, but it's also about discovering what it means to live together and feeling O.K. with a sense of multiple identity." Because the only way for Europe to get over its identity crisis is to get used to the idea that there isn't just one.