European unification has been mediated through racial management

Evidence

European unification thus has been mediated through racial management. The explicit ceiling on national budgets and deficits has placed downward restrictions on welfare support. An aging demographic and low birth rates have exacerbated the need for a more youthful imported labor pool (“work force,” racially presumed, exactly primes the paranoia) to sustain expected levels of pension possibilities. The apparent ambivalence among some recent immigrant cultures regarding human rights commitments has enabled some European polities to deflect criticism of their own curtailment of civil liberties. And the fear of rising levels of foreign cultural – especially Islamic – presence and assertiveness has fueled louder assertions of “authentic” European identity articulated in terms of cultural Christianity, racial whiteness, and behavioral civilities. Contemporary Europe reinscribes itself as European precisely through re-cognizing and silently, implicitly re-narrating its racial contours in the face of these potentially fracturing challenges. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 951

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘On Sacrifice’ and the ‘immodesty panics’ piece: the Islamic-presence fear and ‘cultural Christianity’ identity discourse parallels the cross-cultural moral-panic framing.
• XREF: Echoes the welfare/immigration tradeoff argument familiar from right-populist analyses and from Coates on demographic anxiety.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 951