‘Limbo Generation’ Suffering Identity Crisis

Although he has lived in Britain since he was 4, St. Lucia-born Bruce Gill still considers the Caribbean island of his birth a kind of spiritual home, a place perhaps to go back to one day.

But for his younger, British-born brothers and sisters, there is no question of “going back” anywhere.

“They were born and raised here, but when asked if they are British, they always pause,” said Gill, 35, who works as a school inspector for the Inner London Education Authority. “If pressed, they say yes, because it’s all they know.”

For them and millions of young people of non-European heritage born in Western Europe during the last 10 years, such simple questions of identity are troublesome to answer. Their problem is often aggravated by far tougher citizenship requirements than exist in the United States.

Most European countries do not automatically confer nationality on children of foreigners born on their soil.

As right-wing political activists in several countries talk of repatriation as a means of resolving what they call Europe’s “foreigners problem,” more realistic policy makers worry about a quietly ticking sociological time bomb: a generation of European-born children of foreign workers and immigrants, less than fully accepted in the land of their birth, but with little in common with the land of their origin.

It is a generation floating in limbo.

The absence of any strong European melting-pot effect, accentuated by stringent official barriers to citizenship, affects this generation especially.

“These kids are not European, they’re not North African, they are nothing,” said Guy Cudell, mayor of the St. Josse district of Brussels, where mosques today outnumber churches on the list of places of worship.

No Exact Figures

There are no figures to quantify the size of Europe’s limbo generation, but what official information does exist indicates that it is sizable and growing.

The choice for these young people is frequently cruel: loyalty to family and cultural tradition or acceptance by their peers. Often, they end up with neither.

“I have (foreign) students who say they can’t go back because they don’t even speak the language, but it’s hard for them to assimilate here too,” said Jo van Cauwenberghe, who teaches high school in a heavily Muslim neighborhood of Antwerp. “They can’t go out late, they can’t drink and don’t have money for the ‘right’ clothes.”

So far, European governments have exhibited little enthusiasm for assisting this generation, either directly or indirectly, via cultural awareness programs for the general population.

Over four decades after the first nonwhite immigrant workers were recruited to work in Britain, only 35 of the country’s 104 education authorities have even addressed the issue of race or the consequences of a multicultural society in a formal way.

“Thirty-five percent is sad,” said school inspector Gill. “It shows how far as a nation we have to go to address race as a national problem.”

Added Mohammed Ajeeb, who, as mayor of the north English city of Bradford in 1985-86, became the first nonwhite to head a major British city government: “If this deprivation continues for another decade, it will lead to a generation growing up in an atmosphere of hopelessness, despair and despondency. In the end, this leads either to apathy and defeat or to radicalism and hostility.”

Even those eligible for citizenship are frequently isolated and find that it is no panacea. For in Europe, to be ethnically different is to be considered foreign.

“If you’ve got black eyes and black hair, you’ll always be foreign,” said Turkish-born West Berlin resident Serdar Yilmaz. “A German passport doesn’t help change that.”