I'm still surprised by Macron’s recent xenophobic remarks on Bulgarians & Ukrainians which together with his veto on the EU accession talks with Albanians & Macedonians, his earlier tirades about various nations in “Eastern Europe” and👇report inspired me to #thread some thoughts
2) The problem is not about a given personality. Macron is a talented politician who represents a peculiar school of thinking about Eastern Europeans (more accurately Central Europe). So there's something deeper here, more systemic and definitely not limited to France, only.
3) The said school of thinking has its roots in the old way of seeing the entirety of Central & Eastern Europe as 'a distant land we know so little' but even more importantly 'we don't want to know'.
4) Thus the 'Eastern Europeans' have always been different and excluded from 'our' political correctness. We can hear from the Élysée or 🇸🇪 Minister or 🇩🇪 journo on “gangs” of Bulgarians, Ukrainians or Poles & never on money laundering schemes in Copenhagen, Frankfurt or London.
5) This attitude has been accompanied by the formation of a mental map of Europe, where east of Berlin there was only Russia and east of Vienna was only Istanbul, ugly, despotic, brutal, non-civilised, ultimately non-European lands.
6) Consequently, Europe belongs to ‘us’, ‘they’ can only follow or shut up (good old Chirac!). You can call it ‘Western-Eurocentricity’, or 'Western supremacism' but there is an enormous amount of exhibited racism directed towards those people from the European quick sands.
7) Allow me to explain from where it comes from…. In Europe we hear that Ukraine cannot be granted EU membership perspective because of Russia, that is that Kremlin may again wage a war to prevent EU enlargement.
8) Then we have Trump allegedly asserting that “Ukraine is not a real country” and refers to it as having always been part of Russia..Denying people their right to live freely/choose their path of development because they live close to Russia is…simply and unequivocally racist.
9) Thus, both aforementioned views incline one to acceptance of a thesis that these two are but part of a continuous chain of racist opinions, which unfortunately are still prevalent in the West.
10) Let me be clear, the Central Europeans – Ostjuden, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Serbs have been often treated as cheap labor, both in Europe and in America.
11) Those Eastern Europeans, often significantly more impoverished than the peoples of Western Europe (because they come from the quick sands), were willing to take the ‘black man’s’ jobs in those countries, which the ‘elites’ in those countries no longer wish to undertake.
12) Thus, Central Europeans become comingled into one amorphous mass – ‘your languages all sound alike’ – names become simplified in their spelling and pronunciation – and young people are not presented with any positive images of Central Europeans in their universe.
13) The vision of a unified Europe, as it is so often presented, is purportedly a vision where all Europe nations are conjoined – and that union – of a Europe whole and free is not solely a geopolitical or strategic problem, but primarily a mental one, a psychological one.
14) Until Europe, that Europe which sees itself as the decision maker, renounces it racism, not the racial but the national and ethnic one, reflected in its attitude to the nations of Central Europe, the constituent members of those nations may soon say Enough! #END
