Europe’s Descent into Wokeness

“In Austria, for example, police have shot a dozen people since 2008; none of them were black.”

“I see certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States, with their problems, which I respect and which exist, but which are just added to ours.”

— French President Emmanuel Macron in October, 2020

The woke movement originated in the United States, and it has now spread all across other parts of the Western world. However, despite its intellectual roots in French postmodern philosophy and Frankfurt School Critical Theory, it is poorly adapted to the European context. When it comes to the issue of race, for example, the tenets of wokeness mostly relate to American history and society. Yet efforts to promote this imported ideology—and the jargon associated with it—in European nations such as my home country of Austria have been surprisingly successful—to the detriment of nuanced thought, open inquiry, and rational discourse.

The Black Lives Matter demonstration in Vienna on June 4, 2020, drew 50,000 people, which, according to one media outlet, indicated that “the message and cause behind the movement’s heightened cry for change is also painfully relevant here.” However, the underlying narrative of systemic and institutional racism, manifest in the systematic killing of black people by white police officers, does not hold up to scrutiny—not in America, where white victims of lethal police force far outnumber their black counterparts (even though young African-American men commit a vastly disproportionate amount of violent crime), and certainly not in Europe, where such fatalities are extremely rare. In Austria, for example, police have shot a dozen people since 2008; none of them were black.