An attempt to foist an EU-approved history curriculum on students Europe-wide has been heavily influenced by hard-left factions within the European Parliament, The European Conservative can reveal. Last week, MEPs backed a report wishing to define “European historical awareness” at a plenary session in Strasbourg.
The report, which originates from the Parliament’s education committee, aims to set the ideological tone of a prospective EU history curriculum and—in a demonstrably left-leaning text—describes “chauvinism, gender-stereotypes, power-asymmetries and structural inequalities to be deeply rooted in European history.”
It treats “ethnicity-based injustices” as embedded within the European historical experience and was passed by 19 votes to 7 last week with the support of MEPs from the EPP, S&D, and Renew groups.
German EPP MEP Sabine Verheyen (EPP) was ostensibly the primary rapporteur for the report. However, according to parliamentary insiders, the text itself was initiated and heavily influenced by Turkish-Cypriot MEP Niyazi Kızılyürek from the socialist Left group.
A member of the Marxist-Leninist AKEL party, Kızılyürek withdrew his name from the report and subsequently voted against it at committee the stage due to amendments to include communism as a totalitarian system, albeit after he’d set the general ideological tone of the document.
At the time of publication, Kızılyürek did not respond to requests from The European Conservative to explain his overall influence on the report.
The text was rejected by all MEPs from the ECR and ID groups but was partially carried by six votes from the centrist EPP group, despite attempted amendments by French centrist François-Xavier Bellamy to water down the left-wing thrust of the report, such as by removing references to European history as being “dark.”
In a statement to The European Conservative, Rassemblement National MEP Catherine Griset—who voted against the report—decried the overt “revisionism” of the text as laying the groundwork for a common EU history curriculum to the detriment of nation-state-oriented worldviews.
According to Griset,
States are called to forget national stories and to teach in schools a European fable which does not consider “Europe as a civilization” but as a group of peoples having only a series of crimes in common.
She squarely blames the EPP for endorsing the Left-influenced text that intrudes on the national competencies of member states.
While the EU has limited competency in setting national curricula, there has been a decades-long drive by federalists to weaponise education in a bid to lay the ideological foundations for a single European state.
This attempt to denationalise European education and the promotion of left-wing ideology within the history curriculum was the subject of a report by the British academic Dr. Joanna Williams for the research institute MCC Brussels last year. It warned that EU-influenced educational policies were emphasising “sins rather than achievements” in what students were learning, as part of an ideological crusade against the nation-state.
