The state as an "option" in a multi-ethnical society : 105 ways to address the problem of Western legal ethnocentrism without adopting cultural relativism

Abstract

European legal systems and the multi-ethnical society

The "love of difference" as an arche of Europe is as old as Europe itself. Among its recent and well-known definitions one finds that of Chabod (1961a) but the first ones were written by the Greek tragic playwrights and Aristotle.

However, nowadays the same critical expectations and the same craving for power that have brought Western culture to dominate the planet, to make the world "round" as the language of Hegel and Marx would put it, have produced an epoch-making crisis. On the one hand a complex political and constitutional transition phase is going on in the advanced democracies, within the general crisis of the national State, and particularly in the "Euro-continental" type of state (Held 1999), on the other hand a deep change is coming over, on a global scale, in the identity mechanisms and in community membership as a result of de-territorialization processes and economic integration (Papastergiadis 2000).