‘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.
I too think that the best possible situation would be a World were it would be absolutely normal for everybody to move around as they saw fit and one’s place of birth was irrelevant.
The problem is how to realistically go from were we are now to that utopia.
Simplistic approaches of the “lets just one-sidedly act as if we lived in that utopia and hope we’ll get it” aren’t going to do it and neither will prejudices about people because of the genetics they were born with or the geographical area they were born in.
Unfortunately, I have no solution. And while I don’t, the only thing I can do is vote for those that most align with solutions I consider feasible and try and convince others to do the same.
Sadly, propaganda is working frighteningly efficient.