EU Official: Islam Is Part of Our History, Present, and Future

 Frans Timmermans First EU Vice President

Recently , European Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans ( a Dutch European Citizen) hosted a roundtable with imams from Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, and The Netherlands. He had a message for them that they doubtlessy welcomed: “The Commission is strongly committed to promoting diversity in Europe. Islam is part of our history, Islam is part of our present and Islam will be part of our future.”

There is no doubt that Timmermans’ statement is true, but not quite in the way he meant.

Timmermans did hint that he was aware Europe might not travel a smooth and placid path to the glorious multicultural future: “The way we help our citizens -- whatever their background may be -- to embrace the diversity that is a reality in European societies is going to determine much of our collective future.”

In 2015, Timmermans noted: “[D]iversity is now in some parts of Europe seen as a threat. Diversity comes with challenges. But diversity is humanity’s destiny. There is not going to be, even in the remotest places of this planet, a nation that will not see diversity in its future.”

Read more: EU Official: Islam Is Part of Our History, Present, and Future | Homeland Security

Euroskepticism’s empty promises - not able to spell out their alternatives to European integration

With so much effort aimed at dismantling the European project, it is time to ask the Euroskeptics to spell out their alternatives to European integration. Of course, many conservative and libertarian Euroskeptics, such as Daniel Hannan, stress that their goal is not to destroy political cooperation on the continent, or even to return to protectionism.

What they want is to return to a Europe made up of sovereign, democratic and self-governing nation states that are cosmopolitan and open to trade, investment, and, to a large degree, to immigration.

Boris Johnson, for example, famously identified himself as being “about the only politician … who is actually willing to stand up and say that he’s pro-immigration.” The EU, argue the skeptics, is neither a necessary nor sufficient guarantee of such openness. The EU, they say, is a distortion that opens market and migrant flows within Europe, while jealously guarding itself against competition from overseas.

Born out of the ashes of World War II, the aim of the European integration project was to make war between Europe’s leading nations impossible. It would do this by tying them together economically and politically, in what should have become a European federal state.

The EU’s critics like to emphasize that the premise is outdated, and that the animated policy debates in the 1940s and 1950s are now obsolete. As L.P. Hartley’s proverbial quote goes, the past is a foreign country — they do things differently there.

In reality, any alternative to being strong and united as one in Europe, is doomed to eventualy  backfire, 

Unfortunately many shortsighted Euroskeptics seem to believe that "charity starts at home".

Read more: Euroskepticism’s empty promise – POLITICO