‘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’m in Portugal were the single biggest immigrant group by far are Brasilians and the biggest discrimination is against Brasilians, even though they generally look like the Portuguese and speak the same language (though have a different accent) and there are also immigrants from Africa who are much less likely to be looked down on.
The whole thing is far from just plain Racism and is more broader.
Keep in mind that there are real problems associated with immigration, mainly that at least at first they put downwards pressure on salaries because of increasing the Supply of workers (it takes a while for the increase in consumption from immigrants to feed through into a higher Demand for workers), lower levels of formal education (some societal problems that the increase in formal education in Portugal since the end of Fascism in 74 had naturally corrected - such as religiosity, conservatism and illiberalism - are being imported again with immigrants) and due to different cultural expectations and behaviours so if they’re a large enough number and come from a heavilly nationalist country, that can be a problem (for example, over 60% of Brasilians resident in Portugal voted Bolsonaro, whose politics are far more Fascist than even the most Far-Right party in Portugal).
I think we need to separate Immigrants from Immigration: it’s absolutelly possible to be against “inviting more people over” (Immigration) and still think that we should to treat those who came at our invitation (Immigrants) with the respect that guests deserve - there really is no inherent right for people outside to be invited in (though I would say those who can do have a duty of within their possibilities help those in so bad conditions they qualify as Refugees, who are but a tiny minority of Immigration).
And yeah, I absolutelly agree with you that the anti-immigrant demagogy is a play from the rich to deviate the rightous anger of the locals who feel their lives are getting worse away from those who are trully to blame for it (the rich and their very much local wilful servants in the major political parties) and towards the people who have the least power over here of all people (immigrants can’t even vote). In some countries (such as the UK and US) you see the very same kind of group demonisation and scapegoating deployed against Immigrants also deployed against the Poor (anybody who lived in the UK should be abundately familiar with the “Lazy Poor” rethoric) which IMHO reinforces the point that this kind of demonising of the weakest in society is a propaganda technique rather than a natural phenomenon.
I would even go further and say that the conflation or anti-immigration with anti-immigrant is purposeful and leverages the liberalist takes that the “modern” Leftwing in Europe has copied from the Anglo-Saxons world to get them to end up taking pro-immigration postures thinking they’re defending an oppressed group (immigrants) and that puts them against an ever increasing fraction of the population who do have fair concerns (though they too have been swindled into being anti-immigrant when the source of their problems is high rate of increase in people competing for the jobs, with lower average education levels and different cultural norms and even political preferences - i.e. the immigration)
I think the “thinking” Left needs to separate immigration (inviting people over), from immigrants (people who came because we invited them over in the past, so our guests) and refugees (people who we are helping or should help due to their dire need and we being able to help them) and treat those things differently since there is really only a moral and ethical duty for the last 2, not for the first one.
While I support a differentiated perspective like you demonstrate, I believe that maybe it can be summarized a little briefer:
The typical racist thought process goes: Oh - an immigrant did crime X. How dare “they” while guests. Immigrants (from X / of ethnicity X) are more likely to be criminals. Let’s get rid of them.
Addressing those issues requires targeted solutions for complex problems. And some of those are very similar to the solutions required for children from families with a low social status: Sometimes, we have to sadly accept that adults beyond a certain stage of brain development are “beyond help” (sadly, that also means most racists have crossed a line that they can mentally not recover from), and focus on the children being given all chances to learn normal and unprejudiced social interactions. This being: give even the worst parents an incentive (typically that means money) to send their kids to public kindergardens / daycare from an early age. And provide enough spots for children / enough caretakers, and pay those caretakers a decent salary and ensure that they have a very good education.
Yes, that’s very much my point of view, only much more succinctly and well put than I managed :)
Immigration is a numbers problem: it’s the interplay of rate of arrival, rate of integration, how fast do the locals get used to immigrants and how wide are the educational and cultural differences between those already in a place and those arriving.
Immigration is also a racism problem because racism lowers the rate of “locals getting used to immigrants” and makes cultural differences seem worse than they actually are: for a racist there are no “low enough cultural differences” to make the targets of their racism feel like “one of us”, as can be seen in the US with racism against Afro-Americans who are fellow citizens with a shared culture.
All those things benefit from more Education, both adult education for the immigrants to help with flattening the educational differences (which is a good idea overall, not just for immigrants), education for their children to help integration and education for the children of the racists to stop the racism from crossing to the next generation.
This is, however a far more pragmatic take than the extremes of “we should help everybody that needs help in the World by inviting them to move over whenever they feel like” on the side of the Liberals and of “foreigners are bandits and eat other people’s pets” on the side of the Far-Right.
How about “everyone should be able to move freely in the world and live in the place they desire” but in order to sustainably achieve that goal, we need to make most of the world a place worth living in?
I am absolutely disgusted that I can move freely about but my Turkish friends have to ask for a Visa to come visit me.
I too think that the best possible situation would be a World were it would be absolutely normal for everybody to move around as they saw fit and one’s place of birth was irrelevant.
The problem is how to realistically go from were we are now to that utopia.
Simplistic approaches of the “lets just one-sidedly act as if we lived in that utopia and hope we’ll get it” aren’t going to do it and neither will prejudices about people because of the genetics they were born with or the geographical area they were born in.
Unfortunately, I have no solution. And while I don’t, the only thing I can do is vote for those that most align with solutions I consider feasible and try and convince others to do the same.
Sadly, propaganda is working frighteningly efficient.
Do you have anything to verify your claim that the biggest discrimination in Portugal is against Brazilians?
I already know that your claim about anti-African discrimination in Portugal is untrue…
Me living in the place and having talked to Brazilians about it and hearing what people around me say, including my aged parents as they start saying more and more racist shit.
I mean, if you can get me access to that peer-reviewed scientific study that made you conclude that my “claim about anti-African discrimination in Portugal is untrue” I’ll be happy to have a look at the section in it about the single biggest minority in Portugal by quite a distance - Brazilians - as any study made in the last 20 years not covering them would be highly unrepresentative.
I have no data but anecdotally, based on the people I know who have lived there the idea that Africans are less likely to be looked down upon that Brazilians of European descent is farcical.
So it’s your certainties used to dismiss as “untrue” and now again as “farcical” what I wrote based on my experience of actually living in the place NOW, knowing the language and having talked to the actual immigrants here, come for “hearing about it from somebody who lived there”.
The very racists you claim to detest have such absolute hard certainties about entire peoples based on 2nd or 3rd hand accounts of who knows who, and lots of presumptions, as the ones you have just displayed about a whole country and the people living there without even having visited, to the point that you even claim to know better than an actual native living there who knows the language.
I have literally seen that formula you just used of “I know how a people are and behave better than an actual person from that group” used by outright racists, most commonly against people of Asian origin or ancestry.
The irony of a loud anti-racist displaying that very same kind of prejudice is truly extraordinary.
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.
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.
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)…