‘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.
While I believe that this is a very good point, I also believe we have a duty to do our best to ensure that people all over the world have a chance to live a life worth living. Especially in those countries whose natural resources we use to attain our lifestyle. And IMO the best counter-measures vs. mass migration are
Both of these measures face the strongest opposition from the most racist people (climate deniers are strong among right-wing people which I correlate with less brain cells in active use), so in effect the political rightwing is very much causing the problems that they want to be racist about.
The kindness of that feeling if not tempered by hard-nosed pragmatism directly collides with the reality of what is actually achievable.
There are 8 billion people in this World, most of which have a lower or much lower “chance to live a life worth living” than the even the average Western.
If everybody outside the West that could have a better life in the West was allowed to come over what would happen is that the place would end up with lots of people with a far lower level of formal education (so less capable of doing the high value jobs that produce more wealth in the West), with different customs (causing lots of friction) and who do not know the language (again a problem for them to be productive alongside the natives), and its capacity to create wealth would most certainly collapse on a per-capita basis - essentially too many people coming over from places with very different quality of life and education system would kill the very golden eggs goose that justified them coming over in the first place.
There are limits to how much we can help without endangering the very thing that allows us to help, which means we have to look at it from a hard nosed pragmatic perspective. As I see it, it breaks down into 3 things:
A genuine will to “ensure that people all over the world have a chance to live a life worth living” means we have to find solutions that actually work in the context of objective reality, not high-moral-horse-ridding simplistic takes on things.
As I said in my other comment(s): We need to build up infrastructure and help to stabilize political systems and combat climate change in order to avoid ever increasing refugee streams that will overstrain any system. And our mortal enemy and traitors to humanity in this are the right-wing conservatives slash populists and racist dipshits, because they create and worsen every single reason for migrants to flee their home countries. People who further social inequality need to be put in jail and put on mandatory empathy training until they stop being sociopaths.
I strongly disagree with but this one point from you
There are no “high value jobs” in the West that are responsible for producing more wealth. As society, we are thieves and parasites stealing from poorer countries simply because we industrialized first and gained a technological, educational and military advantage.
Western society by and large is a parasitic life-form. And I am disgusted that the choice in this world is “benefit from exploitation or be exploited”.
I am ashamed of and disgusted by my fellow Europeans who believe that we somehow “did better” at anything, and that thereby our economical well-being is somehow well-deserved. It is not, it is founded on exploitation of the third world and it continues to thrive on cheap labor & resources and lack of regulations from around the globe.
Things like for example being able to operate certain kinds of computerized industrial machinery does mean that a single individual can produce more than one who is not able to do so.
I agree with your point that such advantages for the West were for the most down to luck rather than any kind of deserving it. Some countries did use their luck more wisely than others, but that’s about it.
I also agree that quite a lot of the “extra” value being “produced” in the West is nothing more than pillaging of somebody else’s resources. My point #3 on my previous comment is anchored on that view - I might have given just a handful of the most obviously bad concrete examples, but there is a lot more than that at more levels, especially around mineral resources.
I don’t at all think that Europeans (or any other Westerners) are any more (or less) deserving or capable than the rest - my statement on the capability to do higher value added jobs was purely of the “things are as things are hence certain actions will have certain consequences” kind and not at all a value judgement, and in another comment here responding to somebody else I actually suggested that we should be investing in Adult Education, including for immigrants, and should provide Education for the children of immigrants the same as for the children of the locals.
I honestly ran a bit out of energy to respond at length - but also, since we’re mostly agreeing, I guess our energy is better invested in trying to talk some common sense into those who are not (although that feels like a Sisyphus task these days)…
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.