PART I: Introduction

If nothing else, it is perhaps a signal of our times that we start with a group of essays devoted not to unity and cohesion, but to margins and forms of exclusion. In our own uncertain times, migratory movements provide the single most compelling evidence of European unity and centrality. The massive migrations of the postwar decades – from the countryside of Europe’s south and east to the factories of its north and west, and then from the lands of Africa and Asia to Europe – have generated overlapping discourses about Europe’s identity and about its margins. Central points of