‘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.
What do you do if - let’s assume- integration is proven to require a generation? If you have large migrations, they will lead to ethnic enclaves, which means the strongest point of integration will be when the children of the migrants enter the education system.
If the first gen of migrants doesn’t integrate properly. Like be able to speak the languages at a decent level so they can get a job. It will have cascading negative effects to the next generations. It will affect the next generation because they are more likely to grow up in a household that is poor, where they don’t speak the language of the host country which will negatively affect their school performance and where they don’t teach their kids the culture of the host country so these kids will always feel like outsiders.
This basically happened with the wave of migrants from North Africa and Turkey that were brought over to Western Europe as labor after WWII. The first gen didn’t cause much trouble, they just did their job and went home everyday, even though they didn’t integrate well. Since everyone thought including the migrants that they would return home after a few years. But it was the generations after where we see the negative effects of this failed integration. High school dropout , illiteracy, jobless and poverty rates are much higher than other groups including other migrant groups. And as a result crime rates including organized crime are also disproportionately higher among the descendants of those migrants from North Africa and Turkey. And also there is a lower sense of belonging among these migrants.
We basically have to make sure the first gen understands what it takes for their kids to thrive in their new homeland. And that means integrating, learn the language, understand the culture. And the government must prevent enclaves.
I’m a 3rd gen Asian migrant in Europe and went to school with many 2nd gen migrants from Morocco. I’ve seen this first hand. Many of these kids were basically behind in school and mostly because they didn’t speak the language well. And even as adults they still don’t speak it properly. I only know a few of them who went to uni. And the parents of those few spoke the host language at a decent level.
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.
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.
sounds like your society’s got a ton of racism that’s precluding the second generation from gaining acceptance
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.
No… the alternative already exists, which is to put up with people who “stick out.”
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.
yeah, that seems like a society with diversity but no inclusivity
You’re seeing the results of that experiment in real time
I am - it doesn’t seem all that apocalyptic. If you take the Syrian population, it’s a huge improvement. Besides the typical issues associated with taking a big refugee population like that, I’d say the biggest issue was that ISIS was still highly active.