‘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.
Integration requires a choice, not a generation. If what you mean to say is that hyperconservative religious zealots are unable to wrap their minds around women’s rights and democracy, then that’s their problem. Plenty of people around the world would give their left nut to live in a free democracy. Remember, that’s just 8% of the countries on this planet and basically the only ones with any upward mobility for the masses. The fact that religious fucks can’t be bothered to learn a new language or use basic reasoning to come to the conclusion that democracy is good is their problem.
Hyperconservative religious zealots of the kind who refuse to learn a new language aren’t even a majority in the nations these people come from. The “religious fucks who don’t learn the language” are small population which detracts from the millions who already have. Go look up the statistics on Syrians in Germany. The only people not learning the language are those who were already old when they got there.
Language is only a tiny part of integration. Authoritarian and conservative ideology is a much bigger issue.
Daily reminder that religion is a monstrous evil.