‘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.
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.