E/CN.4/2005/18 page 7 discriminatory and xenophobic practices. Not only do these incidents provide evidence of a general increase in racism, discrimination and xenophobia, they also raise the central question of the relationship between identity constructions and racism, discrimination and xenophobia. Indeed, these recent incidents all have three characteristics in common: • The conflation of questions of race, religion and culture; • The way that individual acts lead to clashes between communities or religious groups; • The ideological spin which politicians and the media give to the acts of individuals, portraying them as manifestations of a clash of cultures. In the Netherlands, for example, a Liberal Party politician described the murder of Theo Van Gogh as evidence of the arrival of “Jihad in the Netherlands”. 10. The Special Rapporteur takes the view that the concept which is common to the rhetoric that surrounds these incidents is that of identity construction. The way that these incidents were taken as evidence of a clash of religions, cultures or civilizations can be seen in analyses of the type “an attack upon our values and our civilization”, “a threat to our identity”, etc. As a result, these incidents were perceived or portrayed as threatening or calling into question a national identity which is “in peril”. The crisis in the Netherlands following the murder of Theo Van Gogh demonstrates the dual mechanism by which discrimination is created: denial of the particular, the individual or the personal, leading to a systematic interpretation of private, individual or personal acts as collective behaviour and, thus, the stigmatization of a community or group. 11. Similarly, the debate over Turkey’s accession to the European Union and the inclusion of a reference to Europe’s Christian heritage in the European Constitution showed the same intellectual and political processes at work; either rejection, owing to an “insuperable” difference of values or religion, or the retreat of a country, group or continent into an identity forged around values which are allegedly immutable and fixed for all eternity. In that regard, the Special Rapporteur wishes to draw attention to the forgotten question of the identity construction of the new Europe. The identity of the new Europe at the dawn of the twenty-first century can no longer be what it was in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The construction of Europe’s present identity takes no account of two movements which have transformed European identity: the movement of non-European peoples in the post-colonial era, and more recent immigration, particularly from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, together with a new wave of immigration of non-European origin. These identity-changing processes have not been paid sufficient attention. Moreover, the role of nationalism, a major cause of the inter-European wars which battered the continent over the centuries, does not appear to have been analysed properly in terms of its impact on the new Europe. 12. It is therefore vital, for the deconstruction of racism and xenophobia, to recall the point which the Special Rapporteur made in his first report to the Commission, namely that the construction of an identity results in the creation of an enemy, the tendency of a people to focus on its ethnic, religious or cultural identity to the exclusion of others, and the rejection and denigration of the other, the odd man out, and, in its contemporary form, of non-nationals, refugees, immigrants.