The Encounter with the Strange brightens

Right-wing parties provide an outdated picture and false narrative of Europe. They transfigure the nation and the warlike past and declare everything foreign to be an enemy. “The idea of ​​a united Europe, in which different cultures live together peacefully, therefore has to be retold again and again, and many do not understand what the project Europe is about,” explains Bulgarian writer Dimitré Dinev, who attends the European Tolerance Talks in Fresach.For Dinev, Europe is a home for all, and thus an essential prerequisite, with its identity not to be in conflict. “I feel like a European, not a Bulgarian, not an Austrian, I live in Austria, but many would not accept me as an Austrian, but Europe offers immigrants like me, despite all cultural and linguistic differences, the opportunity to be part of a whole.”Not the differences between people or language barriers are a problem for living together, but laws that separate people from each other. Likewise, the problem is not the poor and the persecuted, but poverty itself. However, images of the enemy are constructed that portray immigrants as the occupants of the social system. “One believes these enemy images only when one does not meet the ‘enemies.’ In places where there is the least strangeness, strangers are most hated because they have never seen them,” the writer says. More on pressetext.