‘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.
Which if you take a holistic view also includes things like not brain-draining developing economies. That’s going to become an even bigger issue in the future as source countries complete their demographic transition and themselves start to shrink.
In an ideal world, immigration for economical reasons just shouldn’t be a thing, and immigration for opportunity reasons rare, like joining a specific research institute as a scientist. Immigration should happen for curiosity, for love, such kinds of things.
That is so much easier said than done. Without sane politics in place over there investing in infrastructure means the local grifters pocket everything. Stability alone is not sufficient, plenty of kleptocracies are plenty stable. Many are even democracies. It’s always easy to blame colonialism but colonialism didn’t destroy South Africa’s electricity grid: The ANC did, and the ANC alone. What do you suppose we do against that kind of thing? Send cannon boats up rivers, like in the good ole days?
Definitely important, but also not sufficient on its own. It’s just the crisis of the day, plenty of other sources of trouble in the world.
Let’s not wash the hands of the left clean by missing that in practice, it’s not addressing the issues either. The left is usually right in its material analysis, the right is generally (and frighteningly) right in its emotional analysis – that’s their thing, they slavishly resonate with people’s worries – neither is any good at actually fixing shit. If the left was, then the right wouldn’t have anything to resonate with, or it would occupy itself with makeup trends or whatever. I agree, painted on eyebrows are a danger to what is good and proper, to civilisation itself.