The outbreak of rioting in Paris in late October has brought into question some of the key underpinnings of the French Republic in a way that has embarrassed the French elite.The riots also underlined the hollowness of claims that France presents a model of integration that should be emulated across Europe. Interior minister and presidential hopeful Nicholas Sarkozy, himself had to admit that exclusion and discrimination had played their role in the outpouring of rage, stating in an interview that, “I challenge the idea that we all start life on the same line. Some people start further back because they have a handicap - colour, culture or the district they come from.We have to help them.”

Immigration is a matter of serious concern for many people in Europe. In some European nations immigrants get the blame - arguably unfairly - for many of societies ills. Although immigration could help many European countries with their problems of ageing populations and the need to compete with new Asian economies, the fear of foreigners seems to be always be present amongst their publics. In this regard Europe can learn several lessons from the treatment given to immigrants by the Islamic civilisation when it existed

Up until the end of the Cold War it was true to say the nation-state was unchallenged as the primary actor in international affairs. Ever since the boundaries of political activity extended from town level to the borders of the ‘nation’ in the 18th Century the nation-state stood as the dominant body politic. The Cold War itself was testament to this and stood as a high watermark in the sovereignty of the nation-state but we now live in the late-modern, global age and the ‘realist’ view, where the nation is pre-eminent, is being challenged directly by the processes of globalisation.

Some of the discussions of civil society, especially the orientalist ones, tend to focus on the structures of civil society to the detriment of its actual functions. In so doing the existence of civil society in hitherto underestimated forms can be overlooked. The family, for example, has a much more extended and interconnected character in Muslim societies than in the west. Dr Abdullah Robin examines a new Islamic paradigm for citizenship and civil society. 

Just three approaches have traditionally dominated U.K. minority and race-relations; the racist assimilation policies of the far right, the melting pot integrationist policies of the secular liberals and the ‘politically correct’ morally-relative multiculturalist policies of the left. Since the events of September 11, 2001, multiculturalism, the trend that had formed the core of race-relation thinking in the U.K. and many other secular societies for at least two decades suffered a critical mauling. This directly resulted in the theory being marginalised, if not thoroughly discredited.