‘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’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.
Only that isn’t what happens. Radicalized Muslims are not moving to Europe, it is they or usually their children who join radicalized groups as a response to European bigotry.