A/50/476 English Page 17 2. Participation in the joint meeting between the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities 33. On 8 August 1995, the Special Rapporteur participated in a meeting between the two bodies in question. On that occasion, he reported on his concerns about the increasingly violent forms that the expression of racism and racial discrimination was taking on; support provided by universities to research with racist implications; the spread of racist propaganda and incitement to ethnic and racial hatred through the media in central Africa, America and Europe; the resurgence in the absolute State sovereignty, which was reflected in the use of law, and hence legislation, to slow and significantly reduce immigration and freedom of movement, which were subtle indications of the xenophobia that was rampant in many parts of the world; and the attempts to dismantle affirmative action measures in the United States. On his own personal initiative and on the basis of his experience in his own country, he particularly stressed the need for human rights education in everyday life and teaching about those rights at all educational levels, including literacy and post-literacy courses, and through the mass media. III. A. CONTEMPORARY MANIFESTATIONS OF RACISM AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION Persistence and spread of racism and racial discrimination 34. The manifestations of racism and the theories underlying them have emerged from the lethargy into which they had been plunged by international condemnation after the horrors of the Second World War. This preliminary section is intended to serve as a brief supplement to the analysis, begun in the previous report, of the ideological mutations which are the source of what can be described as "contemporary racism"; this is intended to demonstrate the need for arguments and methods to combat the phenomenon. 1. Races and ethnic groups - are they psychologically necessary? 35. It might be asked whether races, ethnic groups, and even nations, are allembracing sociological and anthropological categories which fulfil psychological necessities, meeting a need for a reassuring sense of belonging and recognition. An affirmative answer to that question might perhaps give rise, without any justification, to the beginnings of an explanation for the resurgence of confrontations based on racial, ethnic and national origin, in a world which is already partially, if not entirely, internationalized. Globalization, the intensification of migratory flows, and homogenization, by wearing down the most marked characteristics, increase the scope for competition among different groups (while at the same time producing identity-defence reactions) and strengthen and harden racist phenomena of various kinds. This tendency has been seen lately in Western Europe, where progress towards European unification, accompanied by the virtual dismantling of historical frontiers, gives rise to a feeling of being invaded by "hordes of immigrants"; variations also exist in Africa, where in recent years there have been mass expulsions from several /...