‘Whiteness’, low youth engagement and lukewarm pro-Europeanism in some states risks eroding bloc’s founding values, expert says
Voting patterns and polling data from the past year suggest the EU is moving towards a more ethnic, closed-minded and xenophobic understanding of “Europeanness” that could ultimately challenge the European project, according to a major report.
The report, by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF), identifies three key “blind spots” across the bloc and argues their intersection risks eroding or radically altering EU sentiment.
The report, shared exclusively with the Guardian, argues that the obvious “whiteness” of the EU’s politics, low engagement by young people and limited pro-Europeanism in central and eastern Europe could mould a European sentiment at odds with the bloc’s original core values.
No shit. I see and hear so much pathetic racist bullshit in Europe I want to vomit more than I could possibly eat. Pathetic little racist shitstains thinking they are somehow superior to “brown people”. /a “white” person with common sense and no inferiority complexes
Hehe peanness
I’d say the bulk of the anti foreigner sentiment has to do with islam not with melanin.
Religion poses an existential threat to life on earth. Islam is especially toxic, but we don’t even have to single it out to deploy simple tests for citizenship. Free speech? Check. Democracy? Check. Women’s rights? Etc. Prove that you’re in favor of these things or fuck right off.
I’d say it has more to do with mismanagement of economies and how that impacted fertility, the consequences of which the population is facing right now rather than islam or melanin, pressed further by climate change, the Ukrainian invasion and covid.
It’s just easier to say it’s the migrants, rather than the mismanagement of economies to privilege the old and wealthy, all the while migrants are being exploited to support an economic status quo that is unsustainable, since young people are difficult to exploit even further, what with the supporting of an aging population and all. We structured an economy that expected an unending baby boom and since that’s impossible, now we have social instability.
Why not both?
Low birth rates —> neoliberals need workers so they increase immigration —> influx of religious zealotry fuels cultural friction.
Secularism as a European value already excludes anything Islam-related from the picture. As it should be, fuck Islam.
Yeah, and what could be less European than Islam? I’m going to go ask my Albanian friends and see what they think about this because I’m sure they’ll agree.
Yeah people like to ignore Albanians, and also forget that Turks could be argued to be culturally closer to Greeks than they are to Arabs. Albanians are also not really religiously Muslim, but rather culturally. Not so much because of enforced atheism under communist rule but because the whole experience left people with a sour taste for taking religious ideologies (too) seriously. There’s some fun polls for Muslim countries which I can’t find right now asking things such as “is there a god”, “does heaven exist” etc. and it figures that Albania, alongside with Iran of all places, is one of the countries where people who call themselves Muslim aren’t doctrinally Muslim because they don’t accept the full set of core tenets but some eclectic mish-mash. To have a comparison: That’s like Christians who believe in reincarnation.
The main issue I think is that there’s no established European Islam: Albanians aside, which generally aren’t even noticeable among the immigrant population in other European nations, Islam in Europe is dominated by non-European interpretations. Other states are sending Imams here which often have no idea about life in the countries they’re preaching in, and that’s before we get to Salafis, Iranian operatives, and like ilk, who are causing havoc deliberately. Suppose you’re Indonesian and live in Hamburg and want to go to the Mosque, where do you go? To Turks? Arabs? Persians? Neither speak your language, neither are culturally or theologically anywhere close to what you’re used to. A German mosque? You might not be fluent in the language (yet), it might not be anywhere close to what you’re used to, but you’re learning the language anyway and trying to integrate so yeah that’s an obvious choice. The community is headed by a learned Imam who definitely knows better Arabic than you so it can’t be all heresy. The alternative is some Salafist noticing you being lost and trying to radicalise you.
Germany had quite a long discussion about the whole topic, more than a decade at least, and by now there’s the first Imams educated in Germany. I kinda doubt such a thing is easy or even possible in, say, France, which is way too secular for politics to even touch religion with a ten-foot pole (the Muslim communities wanting to build that Imam training centre got state aid to establish it), or on the other end of the spectrum the Nordic countries, which have a single instead of a multitude of state churches.
Seems bad, however: europenus
Yeah, Europe is about pure European whiteness. Just ask half the population of Iberia. Or most of the population of Hungary. Or pretty much anywhere previously ruled by the Ottomans.
“White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin. Ask any black soccer player who’s ever missed an easy shot whether there’s a problem with racism in Europe. Or anyone of Roma descent.
Most of their countries do not have the same issues of structural racism that the US does (largely because there weren’t enough people with recent non-European origins to make a viable political constituency to target), and they don’t have the legacy of dealing with a country that was involuntarily multicultural from the beginning, but in some sense that has allowed casual and personal racism to fester in a way that most Americans would find disconcerting.
As a European, this article confuses me.
There wouldn’t be any problems if the idiots in charge required some integration for civic purposes. Can’t speak French? Alas, you can’t be a French citizen. Duh. Religious zealotry? No thanks, we’ll pass. You don’t agree with democracy and free speech? Then go away.
Yeah it’s them immigrants causing problems with their “whiteness”!
Your solution to a lack of diversity and tolerance of other cultures is to further squash them?
France is already abhorrently racist as fuck, not being worse isn’t the cause here.
What do you do if - let’s assume- integration is proven to require a generation? If you have large migrations, they will lead to ethnic enclaves, which means the strongest point of integration will be when the children of the migrants enter the education system.
What do you do if - let’s assume- integration is proven to require a generation?
It doesn’t. Provably, so I really don’t get where you’re trying to go with this.
It’s actually often the opposite under certain conditions (which right now aren’t that uncommon): Kids of immigrants are less integrated than their parents. Which btw isn’t a Europe vs. non-Europe thing it also happens with inner-European migration. Heck the basic mechanism also applies to e.g. inner-German migration, kid of a Bavarian couple in Lower Saxony sticks out enough to be “The Bavarian” in class.
Heck the basic mechanism also applies to e.g. inner-German migration, kid of a Bavarian couple in Lower Saxony sticks out enough to be “The Bavarian” in class.
sounds like your society’s got a ton of racism that’s precluding the second generation from gaining acceptance
What’s your alternative? Enforce a common culture across the whole world so that noone ever sticks out when abroad?
Una in diversitate, not e pluribus unum.
No… the alternative already exists, which is to put up with people who “stick out.”
And what makes you assume that we don’t put up with Bavarians? We’re a stem family society it would be deeply suspicious to us when people from abroad suddenly discarded all of their roots. Come here from Japan? Prove you’re an actual human being by missing Nattō and prove you’ve become German by complaining about it being so hard to get here.
yeah, that seems like a society with diversity but no inclusivity
You’re seeing the results of that experiment in real time
I am - it doesn’t seem all that apocalyptic. If you take the Syrian population, it’s a huge improvement. Besides the typical issues associated with taking a big refugee population like that, I’d say the biggest issue was that ISIS was still highly active.
Good.
While skin hue may be a visual clue, I’m wondering if the underlying problem is global warming and global conflict driven by colonialism/capitalism.
I’m generally of the opinion that most people, even stupid people, are fairly chill when there’s only a one visible minority in their town, even if clueless and rude. Where things get dicey is when you combine economic insecurity from any source whatsoever with whatever number of visible minorities is enough to make a particular stupid person think, “hmm, that’s a lot of visible minorities.” Bonus racism/xenophobia points if any significant percentage of the minorities are gainfully employed. Double bonus points if any of them has ever committed a street crime.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR):
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - Germany
Wikipedia about this sourceThe Guardian - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for The Guardian:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: Medium - Factual Reporting: Mixed - United Kingdom
Wikipedia about this source
