The last events, happened in Lampedusa and Melilla, show again that Europe tends to become an enclosed fortress. The South of the world, colonized and oppressed by the “developed” world, presses to pull down the boundaries; thousand of men and women escape from wars, violence and famine and try to enter in Europe.

It is a real emergency concerning the limits toward the South of the world. Our limit is the Mediterranean Sea, a real war theatre since ancient times, now a migrants’ cemetery and a zone garrisoned with numerous military bases of NATO.

In the same time there is the problem of the European “enlargement” to the East. The East-States have been considered zones of 2^nd division, to which goods and ... democracy have to be exported.

It is very urgent to consider the problem of the universal social citizenship, a citizenship for everyone - male and female - a residence citizenship, which is not linked to the rights of blood or of ground and to more or less regular flows.

A man/woman is a citizen where he/she goes ashore, studies, works, lives. It is necessary to fight for the formal and substantial equality between natives and migrants.

And now there is the problem of the relationship between equality and difference: the male citizenship has been always linked or to the warrior condition (the citizen and the military service) or to the worker’s condition. Women would be the first excluded, not necessary linked to the productive works, but always engaged in the reproduction and care works. When we say “universal citizenship”, therefore, we have to add the word “sexual”, i.e. a citizenship, which takes into account that equality becomes homologation, when it does not include the sexual difference but the difference without equality becomes inequality and inferiority. Therefore, it is necessary a strict theoretical and practical connexion between the two words.

Here you are the problem of the rights’ universalism. The sexual difference plays a role here, and also the religious and cultural differences and those of traditions and of sexual orientation. Then there is also the problem of identities, that have not to be considered as closures and defence of traditions, that often are marked by the patriarchate (i.e. genitals’ mutilations); identities are like cages, they give security but enclose; to come out from them means to perform a meeting/dispute with those who are different from us.

And in this connection we have to remember the insistence of the catholic church to insert the Christian roots in the preface of the European Constitutional Treaty; this demonstrates the Vatican’s attempt to enter in the politics of the European States, as Benedict 16^th is doing in the Italian politics. It deals with the reaffirmation with strength of the State secularism and to rebuild a public democratic ethics in a public space, where religions, atheism, agnosticism would have a full right of citizenship. But the problem regards also the Islamic communities, which run the risk - because of defensive reasons, too - to be closed in an identity vision and practice, which are more or less ruled by patriarchal laws. Therefore, we think to the problem of the communities in Europe, but also to the rights in the communities, a problem that has to be faces not (only) through the States’ laws (i.e. the veil in France) but also through a way of interaction, of exchange, of social, cultural, political relationships.

In short

– residence citizenship linked not only to the job but to life

§ Rights = job, home, health, education

§ Right to existence = income, common goods.

– Demolition of material, cultural, symbolic, linguistic boundaries,

– Exchange and comparison among differences: neither colonization, or annexing, nor community or identity closures: rights of communities and rights in the communities and associations to ensure the principle of the individual freedom in the groups and associations

§ public schools, that consider the languages of the places of origin: national language, English or French or Spanish, Arabian

– Common fight of women against the patriarchate in social and political field (from East to West, from North to South)

– Fight against trade of human beings and against the reduction to slavery

– Fight against the sexual violence on women and on female children: the strongest one is the bad manifestation of dominion on women, an ancient and modern form of patriarchate.

– Rights to asylum and welcoming.

(ed. by I. Barbarossa)