‘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.
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)…