‘Whiteness’, low youth engagement and lukewarm pro-Europeanism in some states risks eroding bloc’s founding values, expert says
‘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.
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.
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.
Also the Serbs were good in committing genocide in Bosnia to wipe out the Muslims from Europe!!!!!! We should have kept supporting them!!!!, like some politicians back then, alleged and some people now try to revise the history of the genocide...
Islamophobia is genocidal like Antisemitism and other bigoted ideologies.
It is crazy how now a lot of the same sentiments are nurtured and normalized now against Muslims, that grew into the Holocaust against Jews 80 years ago.
How convenient after 25 years of hate propaganda and radicalizing people through constant racist exclusion. People whose great grandparents and grandparents moved to countries like Germany or France in the 50s-70s are still considered "the Turks", "the North Africans", etc. Now add to that increased racism and systematic discrimination and accusation of being criminals, radicals, terrorists...
Also it doesn't matter if you have Turkish, Pakistani, Indian, Arab, Persian, Viet, Thai, Chinese or any other ancestry with "melanin". People are facing racism both directly or there is the trope of thinking them to be Muslims, based on their "melanin".
At the core remains a white supremacist idea, that is just expressed differently but remains to target everyone outside of it.
Yeah, fuck the religion of 2 billion people in the world... Also look at our great secularism, that is forbidding women what to wear in places like France and Germany and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians who have the wrong religion or skin colour in the past decades and millions in the past century. What a great civilatory achievement!
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
Really? Literally noone I've talked to believe themselves to be superior, they instead usually talk about migrant crime, low migrant employment and "we don't have enough for ourselves". The first two are based on official, government provided statistics, the latter is based on feelings derived from our stagnating economy. People don't see any benefit from the european migrant crisis, only downsides.
I personally don't see/experience any of that either, but ask some "native brown" (adopted/2nd,3th generation fully integrated/...) whether they have the same experience and you'll likely get a different answer.
they instead usually talk about migrant crime, low migrant employment and “we don’t have enough for ourselves”.
This is exactly the kind of racist bullshit I am talking about. As if any of these had anything to do with where people come from, and not everything to do with how they are taken care of (or rather not), and how corporations fuck you over.
No population in this world has more or less assholes because of their color of skin, country or origin or religion. Talking about "migrant crime" as a problem, instead of seeing it as a consequence of giving people no chance to live a decent life, and working on the actual fucking problem, that's a deeply racist talking point.
The whole point of racism is to direct anger of the masses away from those assholes actually responsible for their misery - the megacorps, banks, rich people and establishment politicians - at a convenient out-group, so that the masses do not get any ideas that would indeed change something for the better. And people who think migrants or migration are/is the problem are lacking the education to see through this bullshit and gobble up the lies and end up serving as useful idiots to the powerful.
People who believe this bullshit and regurgitate racist talking points are one of the most powerful tools of the wealthy to prevent the sensible people from driving politics that would actually change things for the better.
Exact same thing happening in Canada. Our systems are all strained to the breaking point, no housing, no jobs, no doctors, degrading infrastructure and nobody with the skills to maintain it. Nobody is even developing these skills thanks to a stagnant education system that rewards mediocrity.
And our population continues to skyrocket due to unrestrained immigration, depressing wages and pushing unemployment to historic highs.
Canada was built by immigrants. But I don't care what colour someone's skin is, they will not find Canada very welcoming right now. If this country can't even offer a future to those who were born here, how can it welcome others?
Eastern and Central Europe didn’t join the EU because they loved the western liberal ideals so much. It was a way for them to get out of poverty and to stop any aspirations of Russia to march into their countries. And now their economies have grown the basic needs of the people are met and now they have time to think about the other things the EU brings and turns out many don’t like many of those things.
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.
Not the best example if you want to argue that it's not about skin color, tbh.
“White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin.
Replace "White" with "Racism" and you're on the money.
Whiteness has always been more important in the US that in Europe. People here have always been surrounded by other "white" nationalities and cultures that they could still be racist against.
Of all the things people say about Roma, them not being classified as white is one I have never heard.
An institution like the EU is always going to be vulnerable to bigots and idiots in large numbers. The EU is also often viewed as an impediment to big business. Their values are not the same and I'm glad about that.
Yep, this is my best guess for the EU, sadly. It will keep being democratic and united, but adopt a more East Asian-style attitude to the rest of the world in the process. Oh well, hopefully we can pick up the internationalist slack in Canada.
Meanwhile, the US is probably going to explode one way or the other.
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.
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.
More dishonesty. Plenty of racism is directed towards those with a better grasp of the native vernacular than the natives. It’s why those people are aware of the racism directed towards them in the first place.
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.
Integration requires a choice, not a generation. If what you mean to say is that hyperconservative religious zealots are unable to wrap their minds around women’s rights and democracy, then that’s their problem. Plenty of people around the world would give their left nut to live in a free democracy. Remember, that’s just 8% of the countries on this planet and basically the only ones with any upward mobility for the masses. The fact that religious fucks can’t be bothered to learn a new language or use basic reasoning to come to the conclusion that democracy is good is their problem.
If the first gen of migrants doesn’t integrate properly. Like be able to speak the languages at a decent level so they can get a job. It will have cascading negative effects to the next generations. It will affect the next generation because they are more likely to grow up in a household that is poor, where they don’t speak the language of the host country which will negatively affect their school performance and where they don’t teach their kids the culture of the host country so these kids will always feel like outsiders.
This basically happened with the wave of migrants from North Africa and Turkey that were brought over to Western Europe as labor after WWII. The first gen didn’t cause much trouble, they just did their job and went home everyday, even though they didn’t integrate well. Since everyone thought including the migrants that they would return home after a few years. But it was the generations after where we see the negative effects of this failed integration. High school dropout , illiteracy, jobless and poverty rates are much higher than other groups including other migrant groups. And as a result crime rates including organized crime are also disproportionately higher among the descendants of those migrants from North Africa and Turkey. And also there is a lower sense of belonging among these migrants.
We basically have to make sure the first gen understands what it takes for their kids to thrive in their new homeland. And that means integrating, learn the language, understand the culture. And the government must prevent enclaves.
I’m a 3rd gen Asian migrant in Europe and went to school with many 2nd gen migrants from Morocco. I’ve seen this first hand. Many of these kids were basically behind in school and mostly because they didn’t speak the language well. And even as adults they still don’t speak it properly. I only know a few of them who went to uni. And the parents of those few spoke the host language at a decent level.
What does anti-democratic religious fundamentalism have to do with skin color? Have you met American Christians?
Also, the only diversity I care about is intellectual. Why would we base our immigration policy on “race” quotas, which is what you seem to be suggesting, instead of merit? Especially when the bar is so so low. Don’t be a religious shitbag. Easy.