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.
The entire EU idea is based on the base contention that Europe’s different. There’s us in here and them out there. We should be protected from them. “White” isn’t wholly and exactly the same thing as that Europeanness but it’s damn close.
That’s why I voted for Brexit. The EU will die, sooner or later, and it may become bloody. Better to watch from the sidelines.
Europeans of colour have been exposed to a huge surge in xenophobic narratives…
Lol, he means Africans and Asians.
Even guardian readers must know that this means that no other outlet was interested.
’…moving towards a more ethnic, closed-minded and xenophobic understanding of “Europeanness”…’
No, merely sticking to the original one, that was made up of actual Europeans, not the hordes of illegal Africans and Pakistanis.
Europeans of colour have been exposed to a huge surge in xenophobic narratives…
Like the ‘xenophobic narrative’ from the OBR here, showing that low-wage immigrants (ie almost all of them) are a massive net cost to the state or the xenophobic narrative of incidences of gang rape and child rape across the continent. Hate facts every one of ’em.
JuliaM, please don’t use such old-fashioned, forbidden words to describe certain people. People who arrive as our diversity contributors uninvited are no longer “illegal” which implies a criminal activity. On advice from that famed American lawyer who has great experience of dealing first hand (she said) of uninvited diversity contributors that they are more correctly called “irregular immigrants”. This ensures their self esteem is left intact enabling them to cope better with the vile racism and xenophobia they face.
“Zerka defines “European sentiment” as the sense of belonging to a common space, sharing a common future and subscribing to common values which he identifies as universalism, equality and secularism – and argues that these are being increasingly challenged.”
The ideological changes wrought by machete brawls, groping jihads and African gang-rape are remarkable, aren’t they!
TMB
Even guardian readers must know that this means that no other outlet was interested.
/applause!
Europeans of colour have been exposed to a huge surge in xenophobic narratives since the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel
What terrifies me is if ISIS were to launch a full scale attack on Europe and murdered thousands of people and took hundreds of hostages.
Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?
(Rest in Peace, Norm)
Europeans of where? Adjectives go before the noun in English.
Maybe they shouldn’t have called it the EU but Christendom Restored.
Why would an atheist suggest such a thing? Wotcha fink?
Speaking of which I thought Humza Yousaf and Sadiq Khan were looking to respond to the ‘Far Right’ riots by buggering off?
No planes to the Middle East or Pakistan been running in the months since? There’s plenty of people willing to chip in for the fares.
The solution they are after is obvious – it is always more European Union and a vast new gravy train to tackle unsuccessfully whatever this weeks problem is.
Gosh, nobody could possibly have seen that coming decades ago.
The more you try to squish diverse national cultures into one homogenous “European” identity, and the more you try to make out that any Tom, Dick, or Abdul can be a “European”, the more resistance you’ll face from actual Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, etc., etc. This was obvious to me even back in the days when I was as gung-ho about the idea of “a country called Europe” as any Brussels bureaucrat. In fact, it was largely the difficulty in squaring that circle that planted the first seed of scepticism.
On similar lines, on the lunchtime news there was one of the usual suspects demanding Israel “get out of” Palestine and give it back. Surely then I can expect him to support kicking the Poles out of occupied Germany, kicking the Turks out of occupied Greece, kicking the Romanians out of occupied Hungry, kicking the Italians out of occupied Austria, kicking the Germans out of occupied Denmark….
Expelling foreigners is normal.
I see the board and leadership of Germany’s Greens have resigned on mass after their dismal failure in the EU and recent Lände elections. It seems people don’t want to be made poorer by a party that supports unlimited immigration even when there’s been stabbings and switches off nuclear power plants when there’s an energy crisis.
There’s also a lot of angst over why so may young people voted AfD, the whole point of giving votes to 16-year-olds was that they’d vote for greens or lefties, to the extent there’s any difference.
“The Europe that Gay Porn Built”
Well thank goodness we’re not in Europe now….
oops! It’s a study by Birmingham City University funded with 841,830 smackeroos of our (UK taxpayer) money.
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FX004686%2F1
BiND – all Green parties should be banned, and their leaders jailed.
Normal, healthy societies don’t permit people to agitate for their physical destruction.
pssst, BiND: Länder (only being a pendant because you rightly care about such stuff)