The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) has published a report warning of the danger that “whiteness” and “Europeanness” pose to the European Union.
Titled Welcome to Barbieland: European sentiment in the year of wars and elections, the September 25 report discussed how many people have become “visibly disillusioned with the European project” in a way that has surprised those supportive of the bloc.
Rather than citing economic or energy issues faced by the EU, the report blamed, among other things, how “white” the MEPs elected by EU citizens are following the 2024 European Parliament elections in June.
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Today’s EU resembles a Barbieland: a place prone to regard itself as more perfect than it is. Our 3rd edition of the “European Sentiment Compass” examines Europeans' sense of shared space, future & values. @ECF_tweets
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“In most countries, non-white and Muslim people were underrepresented in candidate lists … no more than 20 non-white MEPs were elected this year – less than 3 per cent of the total, and well below the 10 per cent share that racial and ethnic minorities are estimated to account for in the EU population,” the report stated.
One might also wonder whether the EU’s normalised xenophobia may not put some young people off the European project altogether while habituating other young people to an ‘ethnic’ conception of Europeanness, and thus allowing them to feel able to vote for the far-right
Such “whiteness”, it continued, served to leave Muslims and other individuals with migrant backgrounds feeling “alienated”.
The report went on to say that the decision of many Europeans to vote for more right-leaning parties had exacerbated such feelings of alienation, arguing that some parties in Europe ran on the platform of deporting large swathes of the non-white population.
“Far-right parties appeared to be on the rise in almost every member state, usually issuing promises to stop immigration or even planning (as the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, did) to expel large swathes of the population,” it claimed.
“Worse still, parts of the European political mainstream (especially among centre-right and liberal parties) certainly appeared to embrace elements of a xenophobic view of the world – as reflected in the EU’s new migration and asylum pact, adopted in April, or in political proposals to send refugees to third countries, both of which raised major human-rights questions.”
Overall, the ECFR warned that there was a public “drift” towards understanding “Europeanness” in ethnic terms, rather than in a “civic” way it viewed as more constructive.
Such a drift, it added, was becoming more common amongst the EU’s youngest voters, further arguing that this same drift may stop more liberal-leaning young people from supporting Brussels in the future.
“One might also wonder whether the EU’s normalised xenophobia may not put some young people off the European project altogether while habituating other young people to an ‘ethnic’ conception of Europeanness, and thus allowing them to feel able to vote for the far-right,” it said in the report.
Some of the claims used by the ECFR to argue that “whiteness” and “Europeanness” posed a danger to the EU could be deemed suspect, with some of the citations in the report open to question.
One such cited example is an article by French daily Le Monde, included to support the report’s claim that the AfD were at some point “planning … to expel large swathes of the population” of Germany. The Le Monde article itself relied heavily on an investigative piece by Correctiv, which has been questioned.
Court cases aimed at challenging the accuracy of the Correctiv report have since proven successful, with the publication having had to backtrack on several elements included in the initial story.
It is unclear why the ECFR did not cite the original Correctiv article.
When the Right starts talking about white privilege we are in trouble: Conservatives aren’t going to win by using Left-wing talking points, writes @njhochman. https://t.co/FschGMvHS7
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) January 17, 2024
