Conclusions: Cultural Diversity and Core Principles and Values in Social Work

While the choice in this volume of country experiences in social work since 1989 might seem arbitrary, there is a continuous thread running through them. Examples from Eastern and Western Europe show that social work was and remains an essential part of the democratic nation state project. But the examples show also that thereby social work inherited the conflicts inherent in those European histories. Neither the overthrow of communism nor the European unification project has resolved those conflicts sufficiently, and social work has a considerable task in bringing about and consolidating a non-exclusive sense of social belonging of people threatened with exclusion. In study programmes and in practice, this means that social work needs to be critically related to political and historical contexts. The contributions demonstrate in particular that only a specifically European version of social work can address adequately the interconnected, interdisciplinary nature of social problems in a transformative way.