EU expansion exposed liberal Europeans’ failure to uphold equal-treatment values

Evidence

Social norms against prejudice are perhaps more fl uid than we allow. What Europe has witnessed from the fi rst wave of admissions in 2004 to the most recent inclusion of Romania and Bulgaria into the European project is how citizens of Western liberal democracies (societies with strong norms against prejudice) are showing marked uneasiness in upholding the values of equal treatment and justice for all. Faced with (seemingly ‘uncontrolled’) movements of people, European citizens, and nation-states, rewrite the collective defi nitions of prejudice. They invent new rhetorical tropes and justifi cations for thinking about the ‘new’ immigrants, including the moral status of the Roma. They reinvent the rhetorical grounds for holding both prejudiced and tolerant attitudes. — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 549

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Naqvi’s and Hamid’s portraits of Western liberal ambivalence toward incomers — the rhetoric of tolerance strained by migration.

Related

• Europe’s tolerance image coexists with internally enacted exclusionary policies (similarity 0.81)
• Progressively-framed European institutions can still reproduce the racism they disavow. (similarity 0.79)
• Even tolerant people express revulsion-themed hostility toward Roma (similarity 0.78)
• European freedom of movement is only conditionally extended to Roma (similarity 0.78)