‘Whiteness’, low youth engagement and lukewarm pro-Europeanism in some states risks eroding bloc’s founding values, expert says

‘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.

  • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
    102·
    2 months ago

    What do you do if - let’s assume- integration is proven to require a generation?

    It doesn’t. Provably, so I really don’t get where you’re trying to go with this.

    It’s actually often the opposite under certain conditions (which right now aren’t that uncommon): Kids of immigrants are less integrated than their parents. Which btw isn’t a Europe vs. non-Europe thing it also happens with inner-European migration. Heck the basic mechanism also applies to e.g. inner-German migration, kid of a Bavarian couple in Lower Saxony sticks out enough to be “The Bavarian” in class.

    • Match!!@pawb.socialEnglish
      42·
      2 months ago

      Heck the basic mechanism also applies to e.g. inner-German migration, kid of a Bavarian couple in Lower Saxony sticks out enough to be “The Bavarian” in class.

      sounds like your society’s got a ton of racism that’s precluding the second generation from gaining acceptance

      • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
        41·
        2 months ago

        What’s your alternative? Enforce a common culture across the whole world so that noone ever sticks out when abroad?

        Una in diversitate, not e pluribus unum.

        • BMTea@lemmy.worldEnglish
          61·
          2 months ago

          No… the alternative already exists, which is to put up with people who “stick out.”

          • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            2 months ago

            And what makes you assume that we don’t put up with Bavarians? We’re a stem family society it would be deeply suspicious to us when people from abroad suddenly discarded all of their roots. Come here from Japan? Prove you’re an actual human being by missing Nattō and prove you’ve become German by complaining about it being so hard to get here.