‘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 the bulk of the anti foreigner sentiment has to do with islam not with melanin.
Religion poses an existential threat to life on earth. Islam is especially toxic, but we don’t even have to single it out to deploy simple tests for citizenship. Free speech? Check. Democracy? Check. Women’s rights? Etc. Prove that you’re in favor of these things or fuck right off.
Yeah, and what could be less European than Islam? I’m going to go ask my Albanian friends and see what they think about this because I’m sure they’ll agree.
Yeah people like to ignore Albanians, and also forget that Turks could be argued to be culturally closer to Greeks than they are to Arabs. Albanians are also not really religiously Muslim, but rather culturally. Not so much because of enforced atheism under communist rule but because the whole experience left people with a sour taste for taking religious ideologies (too) seriously. There’s some fun polls for Muslim countries which I can’t find right now asking things such as “is there a god”, “does heaven exist” etc. and it figures that Albania, alongside with Iran of all places, is one of the countries where people who call themselves Muslim aren’t doctrinally Muslim because they don’t accept the full set of core tenets but some eclectic mish-mash. To have a comparison: That’s like Christians who believe in reincarnation.
The main issue I think is that there’s no established European Islam: Albanians aside, which generally aren’t even noticeable among the immigrant population in other European nations, Islam in Europe is dominated by non-European interpretations. Other states are sending Imams here which often have no idea about life in the countries they’re preaching in, and that’s before we get to Salafis, Iranian operatives, and like ilk, who are causing havoc deliberately. Suppose you’re Indonesian and live in Hamburg and want to go to the Mosque, where do you go? To Turks? Arabs? Persians? Neither speak your language, neither are culturally or theologically anywhere close to what you’re used to. A German mosque? You might not be fluent in the language (yet), it might not be anywhere close to what you’re used to, but you’re learning the language anyway and trying to integrate so yeah that’s an obvious choice. The community is headed by a learned Imam who definitely knows better Arabic than you so it can’t be all heresy. The alternative is some Salafist noticing you being lost and trying to radicalise you.
Germany had quite a long discussion about the whole topic, more than a decade at least, and by now there’s the first Imams educated in Germany. I kinda doubt such a thing is easy or even possible in, say, France, which is way too secular for politics to even touch religion with a ten-foot pole (the Muslim communities wanting to build that Imam training centre got state aid to establish it), or on the other end of the spectrum the Nordic countries, which have a single instead of a multitude of state churches.
Also the Serbs were good in committing genocide in Bosnia to wipe out the Muslims from Europe!!! We should have kept supporting them!!!, like some politicians back then, alleged and some people now try to revise the history of the genocide…
Islamophobia is genocidal like Antisemitism and other bigoted ideologies.
It is crazy how now a lot of the same sentiments are nurtured and normalized now against Muslims, that grew into the Holocaust against Jews 80 years ago.
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.
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Because it offends your sensibilities doesn’t make it any less true. It is the same reason why disenfranchised white youths are prone to join white supremacist groups.
The latter also do not agree with the concept of “equal rights”. It isn’t ‘racist’ to recognize what drives disaffected youth towards antisocial behaviour in all its guises.
Secularism as a European value already excludes anything Islam-related from the picture. As it should be, fuck Islam.
Yeah, fuck the religion of 2 billion people in the world… Also look at our great secularism, that is forbidding women what to wear in places like France and Germany and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians who have the wrong religion or skin colour in the past decades and millions in the past century. What a great civilatory achievement!
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You just called a quarter of the world population “dogs”. Fascism is truly alive and well in Europe.
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Removed, civility.
A very naive or horribly dishonest take.
There’s plenty of racism in Europe that has nothing to do with Islam or Muslims.
How convenient after 25 years of hate propaganda and radicalizing people through constant racist exclusion. People whose great grandparents and grandparents moved to countries like Germany or France in the 50s-70s are still considered “the Turks”, “the North Africans”, etc. Now add to that increased racism and systematic discrimination and accusation of being criminals, radicals, terrorists…
Also it doesn’t matter if you have Turkish, Pakistani, Indian, Arab, Persian, Viet, Thai, Chinese or any other ancestry with “melanin”. People are facing racism both directly or there is the trope of thinking them to be Muslims, based on their “melanin”.
At the core remains a white supremacist idea, that is just expressed differently but remains to target everyone outside of it.
If the situation is anything like on this side of the Atlantic, the distinction in popular imagination is ever-fluid.