The European Union's Racist and Unintentionally Revealing TV Ad

By Dilip -
By now, the viral disaster of a European Union TV ad, wherein various non-Western martial artists confront a white brunette, who symbolizes Europe, has made its way around the internet a few times. The European commission recalled the ad Tuesday and apologized for any offense. Here it is, above, an ugly masterpiece of stereotypical dualities. Male to female. Armed to unarmed. Barbaric to civilized. Brute force to intelligence (the men menace with sword and muscle; the woman thinksherself into a circle).

This ad isn't just racist. It's also totally incoherent. What is a lady in a yellow and blue jumpsuit (the colors in the EU) being threatened by foreigners, beating them back by multiplying herself in a ring around them, supposed to mean? Stand unified so we can keep the evil immigrants in? Don't hang out in abandoned train stations? Thank God we shelled out for the Kill Bill costumes? The European commission's explanation was as follows: "The clip featured typical characters for the martial arts genre: kung fu, capoeira and kalaripayattu masters; it started with demonstration of their skills and ended with all characters showing their mutual respect, concluding in a position of peace and harmony."  A position of "peace and harmony" where the identical white brunettes seal off all the dangerous non-white men, apparently.

Idiocy and breathtaking racism aside, this ad highlights two real and pretty serious problems in the European Union right now. The first is one of identity. With the proposed entrance of Turkey and now the possible exit of Greece from the euro, the E.U. is having to decide what it's actually about. The traditional narrative, the one politicians are eager to promote, is that it's all about politics and prosperity -- state-based, in other words, rather than nation-based.

This ad is, whether intentionally or not, part of a certain identity-based trend. Opposition to Turkish entrance and thenasty north-south rhetoric in the sovereign debt crisis both suggest, in fact, that it's about ethnicity, or at the very least a common culture. It's normal, if not particularly pretty, for ethnic tension to surface in times of economic hardship, as I've pointed out before, but eventually the E.U. is going to have to resolve the politics-versus-ethnicity question..

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