I found this article at Foreign Policy on Germany’s upcoming elections interesting. It highlights the struggle that I think most European countries have. Will they continue to be ethnic states or not?
The AfD is eager to show that Merkel and the CDU will not dare to fight for what it has always claimed to value: the conservation of a Christian Germany and Europe. And in doing so, they are exposing the tension inherent in the CDU’s program: the repressed assumption that the maintenance of a certain type of ethnic majority is necessary for that project. The AfD claims it is no more deserving of the “white nationalist†label than the historic CDU upon which it is modeled.
Those are the tensions in many European countries today. Is being European synonymous with being culturally Christian even if you’ve abandoned Christianity? Is there Hungarian, Czech, or Finnish culture separate from Hungarian, Czech, or Finnish ethnicity?
I think the analogy they paint between what’s going on in Europe today and what’s going on in the United States is a stretch but Europeans are indeed in the position of deciding the future fates of their countries and the continent.
