The European Commission’s new anti-racism strategy arrives at a moment of deep contradiction, rooted in Europe’s unresolved colonial past — and avoids asking difficult questions.
On paper, the EU is renewing its commitment to equality. In practice, EU policies are accelerating border militarisation, increasing defence spending, and dismantling social protections, with marginalised and racialised communities bearing the brunt.
This is not a coincidence, it is the logical outcome of a system that has never fully reckoned with its past, nor with the deeply unequal systems it has contributed to developing over the centuries.
The real question is not whether Europe has an anti-racism strategy, but whether it is willing to let the strategy shape its core political actions, narrative, and leadership.
As far-right parties and ideas seize control of parliaments, Black people face deadly policing, Muslim communities are targeted by state surveillance, Roma families are still denied basic needs, Jewish communities are facing rising violence, and indigenous people are still facing the exploitation of their territories.
We need these issues on the EU agenda to dismantle racism and achieve racial justice now.
Abandoning this idea would mean ceding ground to fascist narratives that scapegoat migrants, refugees, LGBTQI+ and economically deprived people.
But we should not confuse adopting a strategy with mainstreaming anti-racism across the policies that most affect people’s lives to tackle it at its roots. We should not let terminology be emptied of its meaning and history.
Built on the legitimacy of the EU anti-racism action plan adopted following the mass mobilisation of the Black Lives Matter movement, the new strategy blindly overlooks the importance of addressing and prohibiting discriminatory, violent policing disproportionally affecting racialised people, especially migrants.
It largely ignores how state practices of control, surveillance, and securitisation actively threaten and silence lives.
Racism is not an aberration confined to isolated areas or behaviours – it is operating through Europe’s economic model that has historically normalised inequality through migration systems built on deterrence and exclusion, and through defence and security infrastructures that rely on surveillance, racial profiling and violence at Europe’s borders, but also through external action in failing to recognise atrocities that it has contributed to outside Europe.
In the open consultation conducted by the European Union in 2025, 56 percent respondents asked for mainstreaming anti-racism in migration policies, while 71 percent emphasised the need to acknowledge the historical roots of racism.
While the strategy speaks the language of “inclusion and equality”, it avoids confronting the structural, institutional, and intersectional violence. An anti-racism strategy that does not meaningfully confront these realities is not just weak – it is performative and complicit.
At the same time, civic space is rapidly shrinking. Across Europe, organisations led by racialised people and those supporting migrants have been increasingly defunded, threatened, and criminalised for their work.
While other sectors may find these shifts new, they represent a long-standing situation for the anti-racist movement, mirroring a political climate where solidarity is increasingly met with suspicion and human rights advocacy is dismissed as an obstacle.
Even we, the largest pan-European anti-racism network, ENAR, are under threat for demanding accountability. The increased scrutiny and instrumentalisation of EU values to exclude growing organisations are not addressed in the strategy.
The question here is: how can the EU claim leadership on anti-racism while silencing and marginalising people experiencing racism daily? Defending the strategy does not mean being naive about the context in which it operates, but being vocal and firm about the realities it seeks to address.
Mainstreaming anti-racism means asking difficult questions: How does it apply to overall budgets? To border and technological infrastructure? Whose lives are safeguarded, and whose are treated as expendable and left unprotected?
Europe cannot fight racism while structurally retreating from solidarity, social and climate protection and civic freedoms. If the EU wants this strategy to matter, racial justice must be allowed to shape its hardest policy areas, and it must actively protect the civil society actors who preserve democratic principles.
Anything less risks confirming what many already voice: that equality is celebrated in speeches, while exclusion is enforced on the ground.
The future of the EU is at stake; we will do all that we can to not allow more exclusion to happen and ensure that Europe leads the way towards safety, protection and care for all, instead of security and repression.
Because another decade of performative anti-racism while the far-right grows stronger, it is not an option. Europe's anti-racism strategy must be a reckoning with the past and a blueprint for more justice.
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Julie Pascoet is the policy and advocacy manager at the European Network Against Racism (ENAR)
Julie Pascoet is the policy and advocacy manager at the European Network Against Racism (ENAR)