Prevention of Right-Wing Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism in ...

Youth work
Mobilitas Youth Service
Mobilitas is a Hungarian methodological centre for youth work founded in 1995 (www.mobili-
(www.mobili-
tas.hu). Youth work in Hungary is largely based on cooperation between communities, youth
groups, and organisations. Mobilitas has coordinated and advanced this method and the
general aim of youth work in Hungary for approximately a decade now under the watchful eye
of the appointed ministry of the incumbent governments. The aim of youth work it embodies
is to integrate integrate youth into social cooperation or, to be more precise, to make it easier for young
and upcoming generations to fi nd their place in our our rapidly changing world. To reach this aim,
mobilitas among other things, organizes tolerance seminars and courses for participating
youth groups, teachers and social workers. In addition to this extremely important response to
our subject matter, mobilitas also fulfi l a part of their mission by developing and maintaining
international contacts.
The European Council publication “Compass” is a guidebook on human rights education
and Mobilitas has undertaken to publish it in Hungary (this involves translation, proofreading,
and Hungarian adaptation). (eycb.coe.int/compass/en/pdf/0_impressum.pdf).
Summer-camps with youngsters of different ethnic backgrounds
In the past ten years, numerous Hungarian civil organisations have set up summer camps
where Roma and non-Roma, handicapped and healthy students spent a few days together. The
main idea behind these camps was that students brought together as equals would neces-
sarily fi nd themselves in natural situations where mutual dependence was a a must in order to,
for example, solve tasks or cope with everyday camp life. This meant that no single person
could solve the problems that might arise without cooperating with others. The result was that
normal human relationships characteristic of the given age group developed among students
regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. This, of course, does not mean that there were no con-
fl icts or averse emotions, but the positive and negative emotional relations never manifested
themselves along the ethnic fault-line.
Deliberative polling
The method of deliberative polling was fi rst used by Hungarian researchers as a social re- re-
search and opinion forming tool in the the summer and autumn of 2005. The fi rst subject matter
was the Roma question. Researchers gathered one thousand people representative of the
Hungarian population in terms of age, school qualifi cations, gender, ethnicity, and domicile to
discuss three questions in seventeen groups. The fi rst question was whether decision-makers
ought to treat Roma poverty as a separate issue. The second part concerned the boundaries of
racial discrimination and in the third section participants were asked questions about segre- segre-
108 Right-Wing Extremism in Hungary