Umeå University's logo

Ethnicized and racialized social exclusion constitutes, to a more or less poignant degree, a common problem for all member states of the European Union. Accordingly, considerable official and academic attention has, during the 1980s and 1990s, been devoted to matters of poverty and social exclusion in the European Union. Among the early local-level studies on social exclusion of new ethnic minorities are those conducted by John Rex and associates in British cities. The idea of ‘exclusion’ from social rights of citizenship, in the Marshallian sense, became a guiding thread for defining and analysing ‘poverty’ within the framework of the Poverty Programme of the European Commission. All the emergent forms of ethnicized new poverty and processes of racialized exclusion inhibit salient features of a profound structural nature, which by far exceed the domain of a residual ‘social problem’ and the capacities for reform of national welfare regimes in crisis.