‘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.
“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.